I totally agree about middling and “dim” states of consciousness but I don’t agree that experience or consciousness takes place at the lowest limit of the scale, where there would be zero temporality or awareness thereof.

In this sense, I think of the “scale” of consciousness more like a dimmable light switch: you can bring it very very close to the bottom and still have some light, but when you finally push it all the way down, the light goes out.

Are computers aware (however dimly) of their processing happening in time, or does it just happen? That, to me, is the fundamental question.

> timeless, thoughtless void

I would argue that time is absolutely essential to anything we call experience and consciousness—these only take place in time. Dreamless sleep is neither experience nor consciousness, but really the absence thereof. We don’t really know what it’s like to be in this “inanimate” state because we always reconstruct it after the fact through metaphors and negations (timeless, thoughtless, dreamless).

In other words, I don’t think this is evidence for panpsychism but rather demonstrates that humans consciousness shuts down completely at times. So saying that it is akin to the consciousness of, say, a stone would be to say that a stone doesn’t have consciousness at all.