Comment by somenameforme
7 days ago
You say "our" consciousness, but how do you know you're not the only conscious entity alive? The problem of consciousness is that not only is it plainly absurd sounding, but it's also completely unmeasurable. There is no test or metric you can use to determine whether I, you, or anything else has a consciousness. And I think this more or less immediately precludes logical reasoning about it.
You can't tell the difference between a person and an mp3 player saying the same words, even if the words are about inner life musings.
And you can't tell the difference between a person exhibiting many behavioral actions and something I could rig up with an electric motor and a light sensor to exhibit tropism, seeking things, avoiding other things.
But if you only had a remote controlled roomba to interact with the world, you would be able to make yourself known to me.
I don't mean that you could substitute a voice with writing out words on the floor, I mean your actions, the overall totality no single act, would would expose a driving source of actions that so far nothing else exhibits.
We just anthropomorphize everything because we have so much in common with all the other animals. When a dog or a dolphin does something, we have had experiences that we recognize as being practically identical, and we know what our experience was like. It's protecting it's baby. I protect MY baby! Yes and an electric motor can turn a crank, and you can turn a crank.
Simple outward alignments like that are some kind of logical trap everyone falls for because we don't have any other conceptual vocabulary to even think with.
This is an interesting take but are you not equating intelligence with consciousness?
No, the mere capacity to do something means nothing.
In other comments I've distilled that down to "It can't be about what a thing can do, but about what a thing chooses to do." Which is a bit too distilled by itself but whatever.
The ability to solve a puzzle is just a correlation, probably a required ingredient, not significant itself.
The comment above was more focussed on it's parent about what you can deduce from outside observations. It's not true that there is nothing to go on. It's merely true that you can come up with a lot of examples of observations that don't prove anything.
Hearing something say "I think, therefor I am." doesn't prove that it thinks or is. Seeing something solve a puzzle or care for a baby doesn't prove that it is the same as you who can also solve puzzles and would care for a baby.
And yet, no matter how limited your means of expression were, if you had any means of acting at all, you could and would make yourself known. How I don't know because it's infinite and context sensitive. You would do something that only has meaning to me or other immediate observers because it would somehow refer to other immediate context.
You're nothing but a remote controlled roomba, and just to make the point we'll artificially remove the obvious easy direct possibility of writing letters out on the floor or tapping out morse code by bumping into something, etc. You can only communicate by actions. You don't know morse code and something like that simple doesn't occur to you because not everyone thinks like that or is good at thinking of things like that.
Yet... You see me looking around for something, and you push the cookie I dropped across the floor to where I see it. Then when I reach for it you move in the way because you wish to tell me I'm not supposed to have sugar & carbs, and indeed I do get that message. No single act like that says or proves much by itself, but stuff like that adds up to a pattern that exceeds the same sorts of things any dog routinely does, and none of it requires hardly any brute brainpower. Or maybe it does require brute brain power but it doesn't have to mean an ability to solve impressive puzzles. IE a dog will absolutely model that you are looking for that cookie and will absolutely desire to please you by bringing it to you, but will not joke with you by bringing a particular type of cookie that you both know you don't like. But it could be trained to do all the same outward actions. It has the brainpower to figure out even very complicated rules.