Comment by speak_plainly
1 day ago
“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
The only reason I care about animal welfare is because I think they're probably conscious, capable of feeling fear and pain.
While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
Yes, that is the definition of consciousness (you care about them).
> I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious
> subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds)
Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I notice certain philosophers seem completely baffled by anyone being interested in the "hard problem" of conscious and things like qualia. A good example is Daniel Dennet. He seems to understand what qualia is but can't seem to understand why there's anything unique about the phenomena. I also see similar opinions expressed here in the comments. I've often wondered if a certain portion of the population are in some sort of philosophical zombie state and they equate consciousness with simple things like being awake and able to respond to stimuli.
For someone who only cares about utility of findings, I suppose there's little value in analysing the phenomenology of consciousness. I suspect that for a similar profile of thinkers meditation started being interesting when they saw there's some downstream utility in 'emotional well-being'. So why bother analysing an uncomfortable, hard problem when there's no clear benefit to it?
I just googled 'Daniel Dennet about meditation' and, surprise-surprise: 'Daniel Dennett acknowledged that meditation had practical value for "settling and centering" the mind. While he tried and saw benefits in practices like Transcendental Meditation, he largely discarded the mystical "aura" surrounding it, viewing the practice through his strictly materialist and evolutionary framework'
Its unprovable and a meaningless concept. There is no observable evidence that can distinguish so called "p zombies" or so called "real persons". Might as well call it a "unicorn in space" or anything else meaningless.
Notice how you describe a perfectly intelligible concept like 'unicorn in space' as meaningless, even though there's a clear picture you can form in your mind about it and you can imagine the exact evidence that would convince you of their existence.
We can meaningfully talk about 'unicorns in space' since it's analytically intelligible and merely syntetically unverified.
I can live with that.
You can live without any conscious sensations? Do you never dream, never visualize, never hear your inner dialog, never experience an emotion? Being in love is as foreign to you as feeling enraged?
I'd ask what it's like, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell me.
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If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious.
Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.
If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.
Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
I think that Jimmy Carr has it right: AI is the fourth great humiliation.
Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU
Human beings sometimes get outsmarted by predators. It's certainly a strange thing to take pride in intelligence as an inviolable absolute.
>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works
We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.
This doesn’t make sense at all.
I thought it was quite clear. Religious people will whine and revolt and oppose against anything that somehow isn't phrased as consciousness requiring a soul. Humans are physical systems, there is no reason other physical systems can't be consciousness. But we know the obvious reactions of religious people to someone actually showing a "godless" means of creating consciousness.
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Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.
I think people like this are mixing up the hard and soft problems of consciousness. The soft problems are things like figuring out what causes the brain to be awake, retain memories and respond to stimuli. Those can all be all be approached in a scientific way. The hard problem, as far as I can tell, is still far out of reach of scientific understanding.
There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.
To name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
I would also add Iain McGilchrist, Donald Hoffman, Andy Clark, Jeff Hawkins and Jesse Prinz to that list.
I'm not questioning whether people have studied consciousness, I'm well aware. I'm talking specifically about moving the goal posts.
There is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).
The Turing test comes to mind. It no longer being the gold standard for thinking machines.