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Biden running again then
at 12:45 25 Apr 2023

Not automatically, as there is still the formal primary process to go through. But there is unlikely to be any serious challenges, as Democrats are worried about a repeat of the Carter re-election campaign (where a failed primary challenge by Ted Kennedy was widely seen a contributor to the disastrous general election defeat).

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You all laughed when I suggested the sun could be conscious
at 09:04 17 Feb 2022

This is brilliant to see on TWTD.

I'm currently a philosophy student at LSE completing a dissertation on this topic (funnily enough, my supervisor himself studied under Phillip Goff, who has been kind enough to help me with my work).

There's recently been an explosion of interest in panpsychism in both the philosophical and scientific (particularly neuroscientific) communities. In philosophy, it's beginning to be seen as perhaps the most promising way to overcome the problems associated with the two other main metaphysical positions in the field, physicalism and dualism. It's also seen as one way of addressing the so-called "hard problem" of consciousness, which is the need to explain how conscious mental states can emerge out of seemingly inert, physical matter. There is a great deal of debate about whether science can ever do this successfully, or whether we need recourse to a metaphysical theory such as panpsychism.

In neuroscience, there has been a resurgence of interest in panpsychism partly because it is tightly connected with the integrated information theory of consciousness (IIT). IIT is probably the leading contemporary theory of consciousness, and implies we should ascribe consciousness to a wide variety of physical systems that have some capacity for integrating information.

If anyone's interested, I think the most interesting form of panpsychism is Russellian panpsychism. It basically says that classical physics characterises matter purely in terms of its structural and relation properties. This tells us what entities like mass and charge do. The description of the entities themselves, however, are ultimately circular: for an object to have mass is simply for it to resist acceleration, and to attract other objects with mass. Russellian panpsychism says that the intrinsic nature of these entities, which is never described to us by science, is a certain kind of consciousness.

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