Comment by goatlover
3 years ago
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.
Almost certain that all animals have it? The conjecture that, say, a coral polyp or an earthworm (not to mention something like a trichoplax) might have a subjective qualitative experience of existence seems to be an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary proof. I don't know exactly how similar a brain has to be to a human brain for us to say with reasonable confidence the owner likely has such an experience but I'd be very surprised if included even half of all known animal species. It's possibly not even all (adult) mammals, and indeed not even all humans if you include infants and possibly those with severe brain damage etc.
Still begging the question, i.e. assuming that which you need to prove.
How would you prove an animal has a "subjective, qualitative experience"?
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