Seth's invocation of entropy is nowhere near as egregious as it is in the case of those creationists who claim that evolution would be a violation of the 2nd. law of thermodynamics, but I feel it is, ultimately, an argument that goes nowhere.
His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of consciousness.
This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly, have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of consciousness we are most interested in, and are most challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating, theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully developed in our own species (and probably in some of our extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of consciousness.
For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see Scott Aaronson:
Humans define order. Entropy increasing is just like a falling water fall. If you zoom in on some region of chaos and say look at this pattern (like in cellular automata), you have defined that to be meaningful order. Every state in the statistical ensemble has equal likelihood of occurring, there just happen to be a small subset of interest to human minds.
His point is that living organisms are, temporarily, islands of relative order in a universe that is generally less so, which is both a fact and consonant with the 2nd. law. As all living organisms, not just conscious ones, share this feature, it is hardly a distinguishing feature, let alone an explanation, of consciousness.
This has led some people to redefine consciousness to encompass all such systems, whether living or not - they all, supposedly, have a certain amount of of it, according to the proponents of panpsychism and its more quantitative offspring such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT).
To me (and I am a materialist in matters of the mind), this seems to be an attempt to force consciousness into the woefully inadequate explanations we currently have on hand. The sort of consciousness we are most interested in, and are most challenged by, is the sort of self-aware, language-creating, theory-of-mind holding consciousness that is most fully developed in our own species (and probably in some of our extinct predecessors), not the sort of consciousness that might be attributed to a paramecium or a thermostatically controlled building. It is not useful to lump together such a diverse range of phenomena, and we are only fooling ourselves if we claim that anodyne statements about preserving order against a chaotic universe are, in any useful sense, an explanation of consciousness.
For a much more thorough critique of IIT specifically, see Scott Aaronson:
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1799