The prospect of panpsychism excites me. The first of the "Seven Natural Laws" is "All is mind." If experience is had by everything and obvious to humans only when it produces what we view as "coherent behavior", then there are a lot of "things" having experience which we don't perceive. You may be aware of your own subconscious, perhaps because it has done things for you which you soon recognized. Perhaps you have never noticed it. I have noticed my own quite often, from dreams which helped me become a better person or understand things better, as well as giving up on trying to recall something and remembering it a few seconds or minutes or hours later.
If everything has experience, then why are we unable to be conscious of the things our subconscious minds do? As I think of it now, I don't think "the subconscious mind" does anything. I think the brain does stuff that doesn't carry experiential value, and so we don't experience it. This theory of mine (and mind, my spellchecker pointed out) suggests that we can describe a difference between processes which have "experiential value" and those that don't. So I thought of a bee.
Bees dance in order to share the location of food. They find the food and then return to the hive and tell their hivemates where it was. We don't know if they also share interesting details like "Watch out for animals" or "It smells kind of bad about halfway there." The prospect of being swatted or trampled or disliking what you smell is less important than finding something to eat, but it still has meaning. We attribute meaning to certain combinations of sensory input. The intersections and angles and line segments in A mean the letter A to you, and that causes some auditory neurons to play a sound in your head. It could be a meaningless sound, but it isn't, and that's because your brain learned how useful A is a long time ago. Your parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and others taught you about A (and B, C, etc.).
When you emerged from your mom's womb, you had a compulsion to suck if you felt something between your lips, and then swallow, and so you nourished yourself, but that was largely "subconscious", or, since I'm defending that there is no such thing, an automatic response created by thousands of years of trial and error by evolution to get mammals to nourish their young. But the recreation of the self (or something like the self) has experiential value.
My current level of rigor in defining the distinction between what has experiential value and what doesn't is quite low, but here it is: If a process is materially (macroscopically) affected by quantum effects, then it has experiential value. The thing that experiences has some say in how quantum wavefunctions collapse, and this is the essence of "free will". Can the bee choose whether or not to bother with the waggle dance? The further away the food, the longer the dance will take. Do bees ever make choices, or are they deterministic?
One of the practices which help me reduce my level of stress is mindfulness, and I enhance my ability to engage in mindfulness by meditating. I'll do that soon, but I want to give this little essay a good ending first. You can join me! Mindfulness and meditation can both be part of your life by simply being present. In the context of reading (or writing, for me) this essay, imagine you are a bee, tired of flying, knowing there's a little food a ways away, landing at the entrance to the hive. It's warm in there, energizing even, and maybe, your little bee mind feels, energizing enough to help you waggle dance as you recall and imagine the trip you just flew so that your waggle dance lines up properly. Sit with it for a few minutes, pondering, wondering whether resting this way for too long might fade the memory too much to be effective.
Recognizing that memory fades might require more neurons than bees have. Certain things that AI (or blue whales, or groups of humans) can do might require more neurons than humans have. I need to go meditate. Thanks for reading!
