If panpsychism was true then would not you expect that the lowest forms of animals with brains would share very similar abilities of MC/EC as do humans b/c they all have practically the same hardware (neurons, nerves, connectivity, etc.)? However, we already know that few animals are even self-aware (e.g., few are able recognize themselves and ID their own agency) let alone having EC. — Sir Philo Sophia

I don't want to misunderstand you. Is the argument that there are abilities that humans possess which does not appear to exist in "lower animals" such as being able to recognize themselves in a mirror, and that these abilities require a more complicated consciousness, which points towards a connection between complexity of brainprocessing and consciousness and which would place the phenomenon of conscious experience outside the realm of atoms?

I also believe there is a connection between brain-processing and the contents of consciousness. But I see it more as a matter or organising what was already there (conscious experience) into different shapes through brainprocessing rather than complicated networks of neurons producing something entirely new. For instance when we receive stimuli from the cells in our eyes about various wavelengths of photons emitted from surfaces outside of ourselves, we use the information coming from the neurons of our eyes to construct an internal representation of the world outside. We have an experience of this internal representation of the world as colors, light and shadows, but the experience of colors could have existed before there were eyes with which to receive information, and a brain with which to organize the experience of colors into the mental representation. Perhaps red and blue is a more fundamental property of matter itself and is something that the brain uses and organises to represent information rather than creating it. With that alternative of creating it presumably being also from matter but MORE matter and organised in a particular way to create some phenomenon which is also material in nature and for which we have no candidate for explanation except to simply say "information processing" which doesn't say anything about what it actually is. I'm at least unaware of any property of matter which is available at the level of neurons which could explain consciousness which does not already exist at the level of atoms or molecules. No matter which way you attempt to explain consciousness

untestable near supernatural theories of quantum/atomic source — Sir Philo Sophia

seems to be where we end up.
I think the idea of experience being fundamental seems more rediculous and "supernatural" partly because we as animals are used to identifying our experiences with what it is used to represent that we can't imagine the experience of colors, touch, warmth or sound as something fundamental. "What is the use of a stone experiencing warmth?" None and I wouldn't say that a stone as a unified entity would experience it. But maybe that too, I wouldn't rule out the possbility! Because I am also not aware of any particular force which could possibly explain the unification of the multitude of different conscious experiences into the consciousness I experience. But the stone, or the atoms of the stone would just be or experience the sensation of warmth, and just that, and not reflect on it in anyway because it can't process what it experiences.

I also think it's difficult to know what role consciousness plays in brain function. It seems to me at least -- from the personal experience of the consciousness which is aware of typing these words, that I am not aware of the brain-processing which is deciding what words to put here. They simply appear, as suggestions from some unknown, and then decisions are made on whether or not to put the words down or not, and the decisions themselves also appear from that same unknown. From my point of view, consciousness just seems to be aware of things appearing in it and leaving it. Like it was a screen with an unknown producing it, and an unknown watching it and deciding what to to put there next.

But at least it must have some effect on the world outside of itself because otherwise we wouldn't be able to talk about it in the way that we do I think. To discuss the possibility of your experience of red being different from mine. Which seems to rule out the possibility that consciousness is "just along for the ride" and seems to put experience itself into the "processing-machine".

Do you think that the atoms of a dead human body have these experiences? Such experiences probably exist on the level of neural structures, not atoms, and can be temporarily switched off by general anesthesia. — litewave

I'm not convinced that individual atoms can have those experiences, in a way it sounds wrong to isolate experiences to the inside of individual atoms (as we would isolate our consciousness to the inside of our heads), as it appears necessary that experiences on whatever level they exist to be able to be unified and communicated. At some point along the way at least from my conscious experience to me pressing the keys of my keyboard there must (I...think) have occurred a communication of sorts between conscious experience and matter, and if conscious experience is contained within atoms I don't know how this communication would occur, or how we would have this unification of different experiences which we appear to have in consciousness. But this is a larger issue I think, and I'm not sure how, but it makes me lean towards the idea that matter and experience is even more tightly linked and maybe even is the same thing. Then there's just the question of why we don't experience everything all at once then, why my consciousness doesn't stretch to include the rest of my brain, and out through my skull, into the air and across the globe and include yours as well ;D So it appears that there are some boundaries.

Either way it seems arbitrary to me to confine experiences to neural structures, which in the most general reductionist sense is just a certain configuration of atoms. I'm sorry I can't express myself in any better way, but it just "seems strange to me", that an entirely new phenomenon could arise in the universe, (suddenly blue exists), because atoms acquired a certain combination of molecules and ions in the brain. In a way it doesn't seem much different from panpsychism, it seems to be more a question of scale (how many atoms and how should they be organized for conscious experience to arise?).

I'm not denying the connection between our own brains and our conscious experience, I can't see how our conscious experience could be so reliably influenced through our brain if it wasn't tightly linked. I used to see the brain as generating the experiences of consciousness, that colors and experiences did not exist anywhere outside of our brains, but now I view it more as an organizing structure which uses already existing properties of matter to represent information. So in the example of general anesthesia I would probably view it in the same way as @bert1 expressed, as the anesthesia disrupting the unification of the experiences, and maybe pain as an example isn't a fundamental conscious property but an amalgam of different kinds. Buddhists at least with a lot of mindfulness training seem to be able to experience pain as something very different, perhaps separating the experience into its individual components.