Non-materialist physicalism

Open draft. This project is being developed in the open. The text is incomplete and the code uses the planned GaiaBasic API, so it will change. Comments and collaboration are welcome on GitHub.

The question

Some theories of sentience can be tested, at least in part. One of them is David Pearce's non-materialist physicalism: the idea that the physical world is exactly what physics describes, but that its intrinsic nature is experiential. Physics describes the structure; experience is what that structure is made of.

This project asks a first, simpler question: is the theory internally consistent once every part of it has to be written down as a rule?

Design in GaiaBasic

In GaiaBasic, the theory is a monism in which the single substance is experience, and "matter" is the name for its structure as seen from outside.

import gaiabasic as gb

w = gb.World("non-materialist physicalism", seed=8)
w.ontology  = gb.Monism(base="experience")          # matter is derived
w.sentience = gb.Panpsychism(binding=gb.binding.QuantumCoherence())
w.identity  = gb.ClosedIndividualism()

w.populate(gb.species.Neuron, n=10_000)
r = w.run(steps=5_000)
print(r.coherence, r.contradictions)
print(r.binding_events)    # when do micro-experiences form one subject?

Open problems

The binding problem: how many micro-experiences become one unified subject. The theory needs a precise rule here, and writing it down is where inconsistencies are most likely to appear.
Which predictions, if any, differ from those of ordinary materialism.

Status

Concept and simulation design. Next step: implement the required GaiaBasic components and publish the code and results here.

Related: Concepts · Documentation.