Comment by solveiga
7 days ago
I don’t think consciousness exists, at least not in the way people talk about it. First, there’s no clear definition that everyone agrees on. Second, there’s no way to test whether something has it. Does a cow have it? A dog? A spider? If you can't test for it and even define it, how can you claim its real?
I think people focus a lot on the dangers of erasing consciousness as a moral entity, but it strikes me that something which is so loosely defined and for all intents and purposes unfalsifiable carries its own dangers too. Especially given so many of us are happy to kill and eat many creatures that pass many proposed tests of consciousness.
It's probably sensible to use more strongly defined terms like humanity, self-awareness, cognitive capability, empathy and so on. And to treat them somewhat separately rather than trying to bundle it all together.
But people want there to be something special about us which can be defined as something separate from us, in a neutral, universalist sounding way which also happens to be relatively exclusive - I think because there's this desire to make the concept of a soul have an equivalent in scientific realism for the purposes of discussing philosophy in a secular way.
It’s possible that you’re not conscious. So your subjective view may be correct for you. To those who are conscious, this argument doesn’t really matter, and the proof is simply in the pudding.
If we accept subjective feeling as definitive proof that something exists, that opens a Pandora’s box of entities. People have deeply held subjective beliefs about things like God, afterlife experiences, out-of-body experiences, and many others. It seems unfair to me to dismiss this kind of subjective evidence in these cases, while accepting it without question for experience of consciousness.
This is a religious argument. If you want to go down that path, then sure; but I suspect that's not what you actually believe.
It’s not a religious argument.
It’s a subjective experience argument. As a conscious person, if someone tells me they don’t believe in consciousness, then I’m inclined to believe they have a reason for saying that. They must not be experiencing consciousness the same way I am.
Interestingly, a non-trivial number of people have no internal monologue (https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...). It would be reasonable to assume the experiential side of consciousness is on a spectrum, with extreme edge cases on both ends. It’s not unreasonable to assume that some people are barely experiencing it, and some not at all. It would certainly explain to me (someone who experiences it quite intensely) why some would claim it doesn’t exist. Because for them, it might not.
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No conscious person can know if another person is conscious. There is no 'sensation' of experiencing another conscious. Given how many people can and have been fooled by AI, this lack of ability to sense another consciousness is clear.
That's the basis of the p-zombies thought experiment discussed (and dismissed without any real arguments) in the article.
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It certainly doesn't seem like consciousness exists. Although to disprove that hypothesis all we need is to find a single counter-example, which coincidentally all of us can provide via our personal experience of self.
It would be fine for an unconsciouss intelligence to maintain that hypothesis lacking any evidence to the contrary, but for us it seems we are just all gaslighting ourselves to ignore the one counter example we all have.
I agree about definition confusion. I like to define consciousness as "capability to suffer".
Can cow/dog/spider suffer? - very important question, even if not answerable.
At least mammals do show recognizable signs of pain and suffering. That is good enough for me; I don't know for sure other people can suffer, but I assume they do based on their behavior I see.
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