Jerry Coyne is very slowly removing his theory goggles, and is showing us the process in some detail without realizing it. Breaking out of a cult or theory is like withdrawing from a narcotic. The theory fights back for a while, creating highly emotional cognitive dissonance. If you maintain abstinence, the withdrawal symptoms will recede and you'll forget that you were ever inside the bubble.
Right now he's experiencing CD on the subject of panpsychism, and he recognizes that the emotion is overwrought:
I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with panpsychism. It’s probably because I see it as scientific snake oil. It’s philosophy pretending to be science but not behaving like science, for it’s just a bunch of untestable assertions that cannot be falsified. And if a theory cannot be falsified, we cannot regard it as conveying scientific truth.
Well, panpsychism isn't really an ism or a theory, and it doesn't really claim to be science. It's just a necessary logical reflection of a minimalist assumption, which isn't a theory either.
We'll NEVER KNOW what consciousness is. We'll never have a testable theory. The ONLY THING WE KNOW FOR SURE is that I am conscious. Period. That's it.
I have no way of knowing if you are conscious, or dogs or birds or roses or squids are conscious, or my
air conditioner is conscious.
Below the level of certainty, we have plenty of
measurable evidence for you and dogs and squids.
The circumstantial evidence is dreams.
= = = = = START REPRINT:
This article considers the possibility of a Turing test for consciousness.
It's a surpassingly hard question, intrinsically impossible to answer objectively.
None of the paths proposed in the article are likely to get there. I think the best starting point is
dreams.
We're reasonably sure that mammals and birds have dreams like ours. Cuttlefish also show the same external indicators of dreaming.
Why is dreaming a good marker? Because there's NO POINT in dreaming unless the dream is happening within consciousness. A dream is an internal play on an internal stage. If nobody is
watching the show, there's no purpose in running the immensely complex mechanism of scripting and narrating the show.
= = = = = END REPRINT.
Dreaming is the only
externally measurable indication of consciousness, but there's no logical reason to assume that dreamers are the
only possessors of awareness. There are only two
logical possibilities. I'm the only conscious thing in the universe, or the entire universe is conscious. Given the large number of
measurable exceptions to the former, we're left with the latter.