Because nobody really agrees on what it means to be concious, so depending on what that means to you, either its trivial that a lot of things are concious or its very unclear if even other people are concious.
This particular group of some specific biologists and philosophers can declare whatever they want.
But when you see how they attempt to define consciousness, it falls apart, because we don't have any objective definition of it.
The article states:
> The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness... If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.
Unfortunately, we have no method whatsoever (yet) of distinguishing between creatures who genuinely feel pain/pleasure, and creatures who act in ways to avoid bad outcomes and seek good outcomes while feeling nothing, while we merely project our own feelings onto them.
We don't even have a scientific definition of the verb "feel" at all. We have utterly no idea what distinguishes neurons that contribute to conscious feeling, from neurons that are subconscious and produce no feeling at all.
As a good example of how clueless we are, look up 'blindsight' where people are blind (i.e they cannot see anything or observe what they see), and yet they can actually see by all quantifiable metrics (ie, when asked to point to the blue ball, they correctly do so; they avoid obstacles, etc). The eyes and visual system works but they have no conscious experience of it. Why? No one knows
> The eyes and visual system works but they have no conscious experience of it. Why? No one knows
There's some parallels with epilepsy patients that have split brain surgery, essentially isolating both hemispheres. I can't remember the precise details, but in one experiment, the left (language) side of the brain is able to post-hoc rationalize picking up a glass of water, after the right side of the brain was asked to do so (presumably in the left ear). When asked in the right ear, "Why did you pick up the glass", the left brain simply replies to the researcher that they wanted to pick up the glass. This experiment implies 'dual consciousness', but why stop at two? But certainly dual consciousness could also explain blindsightedness.
It's not just you personally, there is no evidence.
And yet literally everything we know as human beings, we acquire through conscious experience. Conscious experience is the bedrock upon which we build all our sophisticated ideas of reality and, eventually, science. The very concept of "evidence" is nothing but a conscious idea. You don't need evidence of conscious experience, because conscious experience precedes the very concept of evidence.
It's one of the great paradoxes of philosophy, and specifically metaphysics. Which nobody has solved yet.
How do we reconcile the truth of idealism on the one hand -- that all we can ever be 100% sure of existing are our conscious ideas (both awake and while dreaming at night) -- with the empirical truth of realism on the other hand -- that there is a scientifically consistent "reality" out there which our ideas attempt to map onto and correlate with?
"Yes, it is true, as Albert Einstein said, you can live your life as if everything is a miracle, or as if everything is ordinary.
It is also true, as Niels Bohr said, that the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsity, but the opposite of a profound truth may also be another profound truth!
Now, recall that in Hamlet, William Shakespeare said: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
From these three quotes from three famously wise people, I have to conclude that I may choose to experience reality as very common and ordinary, or as divinely miraculous, and this choice can yield one of two profoundly different results: either the experience of misery and boredom, or joy and ecstasy!" -ER Close
"consciousness" is often an alias for soul with a scientific flavor. That's why "machines cannot be conscious" despite the fact that humans obey to the same physical rules.
Once you define consciousness it might be easy to implement. If I use the definition "perception of our own thoughts" it's already implemented with ps or activity monitor. The mystery is how this is done biologically and how evolution had led to it. But the implementation with computers is trivial.
We do not know how the universe works on a fundamental level. We don't know if the universe can be simulated by a Turing machine.
I think it's clear it can't.
1) I have subjective experience (there is something that it is like to be me).
2) My subjective experience is outside of what math can describe (perhaps math can describe the degree to which I experience each qualia, but that is different from experiencing the qualia themselves).
3) I am able to take this experience and write that I know that there is something beyond mathematical rules that exists.
4) My behaviour (what words I write) is influenced by the existence of something non-mathematical.
5) My behaviour can't be described as a mathematical function of the past.
If there are only mathematical rules, then there isn't something that it's like to be me. I know that is false by experiencing the thing that it's like to be me. Perhaps there isn't anything that it's like to be you, in which case I have no hope of convincing you, because the underlying concept behind my words is ineffable.
I think the counter-argument would go - there are all sorts of unintuitive mathematical rules. What if it just seems like there is something ineffable about experiencing life but its just an illusion?
Mind you, i dont think either side of the debate has much in way of evidence, so it ends up coming down to just what feels "right" which is pretty unsatisfactory.
My subjective experience is simply in a different category from math. I can't really explain it because subjective experience is ineffable. Asking to describe it mathematically is like asking to write a poem that tastes salty. You can try using salty ink, but the flavor isn't coming from the poem.
> If there was a perfect identical copy of you, down to the quantum level, would they have nearly the exact same subjective experience or not?
The copy would likely have similar experience and behaviour. So you could say that my behaviour is a mathematical function of the past in the sense that every input maps to a unique output. But it doesn't mean that which inputs map to which outputs can be fully described by math. Maybe I should say "defined" instead of "described". In any formal system, only countably many functions can be defined, but there are an uncountable number of possible behaviour functions. I think the universe's behaviour must lie in this uncountable space for any computable formal system.
1) I'm slightly disappointed in myself that it's taken this long for me to really fully appreciate what a meaningless word salad 'there is something that it is like to be X' really is. And yet, this is the accepted 'definition' of subjective experience.
2) Prove it.
3) The fact that you're able to write this doesn't make it true.
Your criticism is all correct, in the sense that I haven't pinned down what I mean well enough to avoid it. Unfortunately, I mean by "subjective experience" is ineffable. And the reason it's ineffable is also ineffable. It's something you can only understand if you have it and introspect on it. So you're entirely correct that this sequence of words isn't a valid definition, because there isn't one.
5) It may be a function of the past, just not one that can be given a mathematical definition. I should have said "defined" rather than "described".
I think you're getting bogged down in a very popular philosophical quagmire, which I feel is not a very useful place to linger. But, I can share a few landmarks I remember from past slogs.
At a rhetorical level: Don't fixate on what math can or cannot describe. In the past, it could not describe states of matter, though they certainly existed. Now, we can describe and simulate such states pretty well. But describing, detecting, or simulating does not mean recreating. I don't think any of us currently "know" whether consciousness will be better described, detected, or simulated in the future.
At an introspective level: When pondering the "experience of being me", don't forget to question the identity concept "me" as much as the experience part... Consider altered states of consciousness through drugs, disease, or brain injury. It can really expand your view here to empathize with someone who suffers one or more of these issues, where you can consider their illusory identity and experience.
The issue is that we don't assume consciousness and try to figure out whether some animals don't exhibit it, we assume everything is a robot until we can tell otherwise.
Reading the GP post in a charitable light, maybe this was meant as "it's very unclear if, from any given person's point of view, other people are conscious".
Are there really many people that think that cows and pigs are not conscious? I would be very surprised. People eat meat despite the fact that it involves murdering animals. I don't think anyone really likes it but I don't think many people are so deluded that they think farm animals are not conscious.
Maybe religious people I guess, if they have weird ideas about souls.
Agreed. Over the past couple of years, I have stumbled across numerous indicators that a wide variety of animals have at the very least more complex inner processes and experiences than naturalists of old would have given them credit for.
Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time living with a dog or a cat will confirm that their four-legged companions behave very much as if they had emotions analogous to our own. That they remember us individually, have favorite spots to rest, individual personality traits.
Ants don't have hobbies, of course, and I doubt they spend their evenings pondering the meaning of life. But viewing them as purely mechanical automata misses a big part of their lives.
I don't follow the line of logic at all .. just because something higher up the "consciousness tree" exists, it doesn't mean that other stuff lower than it is also conscious. If that's the case, then every animal on earth is conscious because humans exist and are conscious. How much or how little a human or a dog is conscious has no bearing on how conscious an ant is.
Nobody alive has the slightest clue what consciousness really is, including you. Your sense that it's obvious to attribute this opaque phenomena to an opaque species is just voodoo.
Maybe because we have a vested interest in denying that animals have sentience and thus deserve to be treated like organisms that feel pain and sorrow?
It is plenty for reaching conclusions, but it is not so great for reaching correct conclusions.
Is this not kind of what the point of meditation is for a lot of people, reaching higher planes of consciousness? And my understanding is that a common technique in meditation is to notice when thoughts arise (ie: truth), note them, and let them pass.
About time. I did not pursue biological sciences because I assumed and accepted other "lower species" consciousness as an obvious fact, and that got treated with ridicule and derision.
No, the spherical shape of the Earth has been apparent and acknowledged for at least two thousand years. It's the heliocentric view that has been challenged until fairly recently.
thats patently false. it was known to the educated greeks but it was far from being widespread among the masses who were uneducated and did not know how to read. education was not a thing unless for the scribes which were a super small minority of the population.
so for most people it was far from obvious that the Earth was spherical
"We all agree on the earth’s shape. For surely we always speak of the round ball of the Earth" - Pliny (Natural History, II.64). In year 77.
If the earth was commonly spoken of in day to day language as the round ball, than i would assume this meant that even commoners knew that it was round.
It depends on the frame of reference, so you can correctly say that the sun goes around the earth.
You're instead thinking of heliocentrism vs geocentrism, which is about the planets as a whole revolving around the sun.
This is a common misguided gotcha question that is hilariously so confidently gotten wrong, just like what is heavier, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers? The former is heavier and I can prove it with one word.
no, I'm not thinking of that, I'm thinking of the fact that it is quite commonly pointed out that the earth-moon 2-body system rotates around a point 1000 miles below the surface of the earth (the center of the earth being 4000 miles below the surface); and I'm pointing out that if you are going to point that out about the earth-moon, it's even more interesting to point out the more dramatic situation regarding the sun-jupiter 2-body system where the point is outside of the sun.
I have to admit that I am not good at distinguishing between the English words consciousness and awareness. I think animals are missing what we refer to when we say “I”. We embed the reality around us in a symbolic space. The necessary substrate for this is our conceptual language. The “I” is a virtual projection of this space into ourselves. If you pay close attention to young children, you will notice that they do not yet have this interior space: no self-image, no preconceived idea of who they are and what characterizes them. As they acquire language, they gradually turn into little egotistical assholes like the rest of us.
Animals and toddlers are not Decartesian automatons. They have perception and feel pain, can suffer and deserve empathy. But they are not speaking subjects and therefore not subjects at all. A deaf-mute person who can communicate conceptually is a speaking subject. A person who, under any particular circumstances, never comes to form concepts of the world, i.e. to open up the symbolic space, is not a subject.
It was probably premature of me to equate this with consciousness. It always triggers me a bit when people assume that animals are just like us, only with fur and on four legs or something like that.
This is a joke right? Even cats build custom languages for their servants, you think humans are worse then cats? Or are you talking about talkative babies? Most languages are somewhat like a type of math and pattern, similar to programming (I guess my logic class drilled that into me). If the majority of animals can count and show empathy they can certainly display consciousness without speaking. To me a better question is should plants one day be included since they "scream", some can see, hear and transform for their environment and they are quiet noisy it's just require better instruments etc. Figuring out how long to go on the list is where people struggle. If you can train worms without heads and plants to fear falling, it really becomes a question of what we want to use to define this. Which I think play is an important part.
Not only memories but also specific intentions for action are unlikely to be well retained in the mind over long periods of time without conceptual language. There is an assumption that language did not originate as a means of communication in the first place, but as a tool to enable intentional and coordinated action in the group at a higher level. Sending someone out in search of food when they are not immediately driven by hunger, without them following another impulse after five minutes, is probably hardly possible if they cannot carry the task with them in their head in a linguistically fixed form.
