The point is that that in one hypothesis you have two conditions and you must determine the boundary between them. In the other you have only one. You have no evidence to prove that there are two conditions that need to be distinguished; some boundary between them needs to be defined. The emergent phenomenon hypothesis requires this. Panpsychism doesn't.

Panpsychism only superficially looks as if it does not have boundaries because it literally says next to nothing about consciousness. Once one gets into the combination problem, or even the difference between how consciousness presents itself a living brain and the same brain dead, we can confidently expect there will be boundaries.

This is entirely moot, however, until you have a hypothesis that offers something in the way of an explanation. Panpsychism does not offer anything in the way of an explanation; it merely takes as axiomatic that all is consciousness, much like Thales' assertion that all is water.

I doubt Occam's razor has ever been relevant in choosing between worked-out hypotheses about natural phenomena, as it would require them to be indistinguishable except in the number of premises. If you can think of an exception, I would be happy to discuss it.

I am not a philosopher of consciousness. I am simply a consciousness. I have a stake, but I have not made a study of this. Nevertheless, I will address your points.

> Panpsychism only superficially looks as if it does not have boundaries because it literally says next to nothing about consciousness.

But what does the theory of emergent consciousness say? It is a theory about how consciousness comes to be presupposing there is an opposite state. But we have no evidence of the opposite state. We have evidence of consciousness. We posit the existence of unconsciousness (not the state of anesthesia or immobility, but the state of existing absent qualia).

The whole problem is that we can't get grips on what it is we are explaining. We can't even start. How do other theories improve on this? They posit a difference to explain without having observed this difference.

> I doubt Occam's razor has ever been relevant in choosing between worked-out hypotheses about natural phenomena, as it would require them to be indistinguishable except in the number of premises. If you can think of an exception, I would be happy to discuss it.

Occam's Razor says this: only seek an explanation for things for which have evidence. Does this rock exist, or does this rock and a ghost exist? I have evidence for the rock. I have no evidence for the ghost. The ghost is unnecessary. I will assume it does not exist. The simpler model is one which contains only the rock. In the absence of evidence otherwise we prefer the simpler model.

Here is a point completely separate from anything I said before, but which I wish I had said before.

In olden times -- the 19th century, say -- we didn't speak of consciousness; we spoke of souls. Some things had souls. Other things lacked souls. You could do what you wished with things that lacked souls. They were zombies. They could not suffer, however much they simulated suffering. This was like how a poster of someone being tortured simulating suffering, or a splat of mud which by some mad, impossible chance looked like a depiction of someone being tortured. There was no actual suffering. No soul: no suffering.

Then we became scientists. This talk of souls was religious dogma! What evidence is there for souls? Science requires evidence! But we recreated this scenario by positing the opposite of a soul: unconsciousness. This is scientific! Instead of asking why some things have souls and others don't we ask why some things have consciousness and others don't. We recreate exactly the same ethical results, but now we sound scientific!

We have no evidence for souls. By the same logic, we have no evidence for the absence of souls. We do have evidence for consciousness. We have no evidence for unconsciousness.

On re-reading your post several hours after my first response, there are a couple of things that now seem clearer to me.

The first is the question of "existing absent qualia": is this a reference to the p-zombie argument, which claims to show the metaphysical possibility of entities that are physically identical to us but which do not have qualia? I (and many others) reject this argument by rejecting the inference from conceivability to possibility, on account of it depending on a question-begging definition of conceivability.

If you do accept the zombie argument, then you are, ipso facto, accepting the metaphysical possibility of some things having qualia and other, otherwise identical things not having them - which would introduce a boundary into your panpsychic hypothesis that mirrors the one you are trying to use to reject emergent physicalism.

Secondly, you are misconstruing Occam's razor here: it is not a claim that constrains what sort of conclusion it is acceptable to argue for; it is, instead, an argument about what constitutes an acceptable set of premises. Both Occam's razor and logic in general accept that one can validly argue for a conclusion for which there is no other evidence than the evidence for your premises in conjunction with the argument you are making. To reject this would be to reject deductive and inductive reasoning!

Nevertheless, your argument does attempt to show that emergent physicalism would be predicated on a premise for which you say there is no evidence: the assumption that there are some things that are not conscious. This is mistaken, however: it simply does not take a position on that question, as its universe of discourse is limited to things with consciousness. Its conclusion almost certainly would have the corollary that many things are not conscious, but, as we have seen in the previous paragraph, there is nothing wrong in that, and an emergent-physicalist hypothesis would not be refuted even if there were no independent evidence for non-conscious entities (which is a claim that I have already disputed, in the final section of my previous reply.) To falsify the hypothesis on this basis, you would have to rule out there being anything without consciousness.

> But what does the theory of emergent consciousness say?

In my first reply to you, I wrote that at this point we don't have any candidate explanations for consciousness. Instead, we have various beliefs about what form such an explanation might take (panpsychism and emergent physicalism are both of this type), plus the beliefs that no such explanation is possible, or that consciousness is some sort of illusion or delusion, or even that it simply does not exist. None of them have reached the point where one can apply Occam's razor to pick a winner.

> We posit the existence of... the state of existing absent qualia.

What do you mean here? In general, what would the state of existing absent X mean?

> The whole problem is that we can't get to grips on what it is we are explaining. We can't even start.

Given that you believe this, it seems inconsistent for you to consider panpsychism to be an idea that could lead to an explanation, let alone the only one that could succeed...

> Occam's Razor says this: only seek an explanation for things for which [we?] have evidence.

...and as this is what you think Occam's razor says, it seems inconsistent for you to pick panpsychism on the basis of Occam's razor, given that you have just said we can't even start to get to grips on what it is we are explaining.

Turning now to your new points, I'm not sure what you are saying here, but your primary concern seems to be an ethical one. The impression I get is this: firstly, you deprecate the way a presumed absence of a soul in some things has been used to justify treating them in ways that should be regarded as an unethical way to treat humans. Secondly, you see science's presumption that not all things have consciousness as being used to substitute for the presumption that not all things have a soul in an equally-deplorable version of the above ethical argument, which, if anything, is worse, on account of it being notionally a scientific argument.

If I am close to understanding your position, then this is not really anything to do with Occam's razor - it seems that you are reaching for it because you want a reason for everyone to believe in a proposal that you feel has better ethical implications than the alternatives. If that is so, then I think we should just agree to disagree over whether this is an effective way to approach either consciousness or ethics.

There is, however, something still to be said about the specific arguments presented in your final paragraph:

> We have no evidence for souls. By the same logic, we have no evidence for the absence of souls.

We have no evidence for the existence of a highest prime number, yet we have evidence for the absence of a highest prime number. I have no evidence for there being a tiger in the room I currently occupy, yet I do have evidence for the absence of one.

> We do have evidence for consciousness. We have no evidence for unconsciousness.

The evidence for consciousness has only been found in certain animals with well-developed neural systems. As these comprise only a small fraction of everything we know to be on Earth, there is evidence for some of the things we know of being without consciousness.