Comment by AlbertCory
3 years ago
I've read this before. That's why I think the question "do animals have consciousness?" is meaningless, because "consciousness" usually implies "like ours."
They have something that probably bears some relationship to ours. Some birds have a "theory of mind" where they know what you know, e.g. whether you saw them hide the food.
It would be possible (maybe someone's already done it?) to enumerate the N tests of "consciousness," where if an organism has all those N, then it's "conscious." Someone would object "oh, but humans can do so much more than those!" and that's true. So if you increase N enough, only humans are "conscious."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
This is the problem of describing if a gradient has something. Quite often the 'N tests' we make up end up excluding entire classes of humans (You're blind, oops!) by poor premise in our classifications.
People love black and white/binary classification systems, the problem with reality is it rarely gives a damn about giving us simple systems to classify that way.
Consciousness is only defined in the philosophy of mind as "phenomenological experience", full stop, i.e., "experiencing the color yellow" as something beyond just a certain wavelength incident upon and mechanistic reaction within the organism.
"Consciousness" as defined in colloquial settings, such as the one we inhabit now, is usually substantially more elaborate than thae one used by philosophers and includes things like capacity to develop cognitive models of the outside world and the capacity to reason about their environment having placed themselves within it. I usually reserve the words "awareness" and "sentience" for these two latter concepts to distinguish between the bare experiential aspects which are typically the subject of this kind of discussion and the more familiar everyday (though extremely high-level) experiences we have as intelligent beings.
It's important to maintain the distinction or else discussions very quickly devolve into people talking past each other with differing definitions. It's no surprise people don't know the basics of this when they're not philosophers, and it's only a slight surprise that people on HN will deviate so greatly from these conventions while nonetheless projecting an air of competency.
> while nonetheless projecting an air of competency
(Puts nose up in the air and sniffs contemptuously)
There's wading in water, there's treading in water, there's snorkeling, there's diving, there's standing on a boat, there's drifting aimlessly. They are all different ways of interacting with depth.
If you have a problem with the extent to which I've represented my knowledge and how my representation of those specific things I discuss differs from how experts deal with them, you are always free to provide something beyond snark and contempt.
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Consciousness means there is "something it's like" to have an experience. It need not be human. That would be needlessly anthropocentric. Animals have a range of sensory organs and body plans which differer from humans. Why wouldn't they also have a range of differing conscious experiences? It could be seeing the world in more than three primary colors, hearing frequencies we cannot, detecting the Earth's magnetic field or numerous other things.
We can also imaging making an even wider range of conscious machines someday, if somehow we figured out how to do that, or it was an emergent property of the right sort of architecture. There could be all sorts of conscious experiences we have absolutely no idea about.
You're begging the question here, which is:
What defines 'consciousness'?
In philosophy it literally means "subjective, qualitative experience". It's almost certain that all animals have it, but of course the qualities they experience will be different.
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A disturbing extension of that is if there's some M>N such that only some humans possess M (and others N). I think this must be so (I have a Down's-syndrome relative), the disturbing question is if there's a distribution of humans on gradients from N to M (probably M close to N imo).
Yes. Inevitably, the legal definition would turn out to be "whatever a person not legally brain-dead can experience, maybe" just so we couldn't say any human in a coma is "not possessing consciousness." After all, some comas last for years.
In other words, it's just not ever going to be a scientific concept. There are components of it that are.