If all your attention is temporarily focused on something external to yourself, an onrushing train, say, are you temporarily not conscious?
People typically distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia are something and that the imagined boundary between things that have qualia and things which don't is established only by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the boundary.
I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what philosophers say.
People typically distinguish self-awareness from consciousness. It is not clear that they should, or shouldn't, but they typically do. They say consciousness is not facts but qualia, the sensation of the facts. A spreadsheet full of information can contain facts that differentiate blue from red. We hypothesize that a spreadsheet has no sensations, hence no qualia, hence no consciousness. We cannot actually operationalize this. We say a paramecium and a stone have no qualia, but this is more a hypothesis than a fact.
I think panpsychism in its essence is accepting that qualia are something and that the imagined boundary between things that have qualia and things which don't is established only by hypothesis and tradition. In the interest of not multiplying entities beyond necessity, we dispose of the boundary.
I am not a philsopher, so I don't really know what philosophers say.