Saying rocks are conscious is a poor summary. It's more like adult human > human child > dolphin > dog > human infant > bird > snake > spider > ant > dust mite etc.
The whole thing is a continuum and everything is made of matter, so there's a little bit of potential consciousness in all matter.
> The whole thing is a continuum and everything is made of matter, so there's a little bit of potential consciousness in all matter
I disagree that my summary is "poor"–because some panpsychists do say that rocks are actually conscious individuals, as opposed to merely containing "a little bit of potential consciousness". The IEP article I linked contains this quote from the early 20th century Anglo-German philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (not to be confused with the much more famous 18th century German philosopher Schiller): "A stone, no doubt, does not apprehend us as spiritual beings… But does this amount to saying that it does not apprehend us at all, and takes no note whatever of our existence? Not at all; it is aware of us and affected by us on the plane on which its own existence is passed… It faithfully exercises all the physical functions, and influences us by so doing. It gravitates and resists pressure, and obstructs…vibrations, and so forth, and makes itself respected as such a body. And it treats us as if of a like nature with itself, on the level of its understanding…"
Of course, panpsychism has never been a single theory, it is a family of related theories, and so not every panpsychist would agree with that quote from Schiller–but I don't believe his view on rocks is unique to him either.
I think it would be more fitting to say a rock, a grain of sand, or an atom is the least conscious thing. Pansychism isn't trying to claim it can think or anything like that. If that's your takeaway I think you are misunderstanding the analogy.
A rock exists in the world and exerts it's "will" granted to it by the laws of physics. So rolling falling etc is how it "interacts" with its world. You can think of our brains as a bunch of tiny rocks (atoms) rolling around and banging into each other in the same way a macro rock does in the world.
> I think it would be more fitting to say a rock, a grain of sand, or an atom is the least conscious thing. Pansychism isn't trying to claim it can think or anything like that. If that's your takeaway I think you are misunderstanding the analogy.
No, I don't think I've misunderstood anything; on the contrary, I think you are mixing up thought and consciousness. Thought is just one type of consciousness among many; to say something is conscious doesn't necessarily imply it can think–possibly, many things are conscious yet unable to think thoughts (whether verbal thoughts, or thoughts composed of mental images, or whatever). I'd say that to be conscious is to be an entity for which Thomas Nagel's famous question "What is it like to be a bat?" has an answer; it is possible that the question has an answer for an entity, yet it is incapable of thought. A being could be completely conscious yet also completely incapable of thinking anything.
I'm trying to think of a civil and constructive way to say "bullshit".
I guess an obvious objection is "why?". Then something about Russell's teapot. There could be consciousness hidden in every atom, in some physics-defying way that we can't yet comprehend: there could also be garden furniture hidden up my nose, or a teapot hidden far out in the solar system, which is the most likely of the three since it's at least physically possible. Why think any of these things?
Because coming up with criteria for determining what is and isn't conscious, and justifying the particular criterion you choose (as opposed to all the alternatives) is hard. Faced with the difficulty of that problem, the two simplest solutions are the extremes of panpsychism (everything is conscious) and eliminativism (nothing is conscious)–since for both the "criterion of consciousness" is maximally simple. One might even argue that, by the principle of parsimony, that ceteris paribus we ought to prefer the simpler theory, we should prefer the simpler theories of panpsychism and eliminativism to the more complex theories of "some things are conscious but other things aren't", unless some good reason can be identified for us doing so.
> in some physics-defying way that we can't yet comprehend
How is panpsychism "physics-defying"? Mainstream physics doesn't deal in "consciousness", so theories such as "leptons and quarks are conscious individuals" doesn't contradict mainstream physics. Well, it quite possibly would contradict the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of QM, but I don't think many would consider that "mainstream"
Parsimony leads to wrangling about which is the simplest explanation, yes.
Consciousness is ill-defined, also.
It does however seem to stop when the brain is destroyed, which makes it unlikely to be present in fundamental particles, or in parts of a disintegrated brain.
> It does however seem to stop when the brain is destroyed, which makes it unlikely to be present in fundamental particles, or in parts of a disintegrated brain
Does consciousness really "seem to stop" when the brain is destroyed? We can't directly observe anyone's consciousness other than our own. It is true that, when people die, we cease to have access to the outward signs we use to infer they are conscious – but we don't know whether that's because their consciousness has ceased, or whether that is because it has "gone somewhere else" to which we don't currently have access. We never have direct access to the inner reality of consciousness for anyone other than ourselves, and we can only know the temporary cessation of our own consciousness, its permanent cessation (if that is possible) is in principle unknowable to us.
Speaking of our consciousness "going somewhere else" at death (an afterlife) doesn't have to be a religious claim – there are heaps of "naturalistic" ways in which consciousness might survive death (e.g. Boltzmann brains, computer simulations, quantum immortality). Since we don't know whether any of those ways actually happen, we don't know whether or not consciousness actually stops at death.
But I also have other organs, such as my stomach, and arbitrary lumps of matter such as my elbow and my bicycle, none of which are sufficient to maintain the outward signs of consciousness after the brain is destroyed (or merely dosed with gin). So consciousness, which apparently resided in the brain and then went away when the brain was disrupted, didn't go to any of those places. Similarly, when my stomach ceases to digest or my bicycle ceases to roll forward, the digestive function doesn't migrate to the brain and the rolling function isn't taken over by the elbow. So we can choose in each case between the hypothesis "physically stopped working" or "metaphysically sent its function to another mysterious place", and again I'll appeal to parsimony on this one: why should the function be transferred somewhere mysterious by a means outside of our experience and ability to explain? And why make this claim about consciousness alone, out of all the functions that things in the world have? There's a kind of fallacy going on here along the lines of "I can't fully explain what this thing is, therefore every kind of mysterious and magical supposition can be roped into its service and claim plausibility."
> And why make this claim about consciousness alone, out of all the functions that things in the world have?
Because consciousness is fundamental in a way none of those things in the world are. It is only through our own consciousness that we can know those other things exist, indeed that we can ever know anything at all. Treating consciousness as just a thing among things ignores that it is essential, foundational, to all other things as we know them, as we can know them.
The whole thing is a continuum and everything is made of matter, so there's a little bit of potential consciousness in all matter.