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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

The tragedy (depending on how you look at it) with discussions about consciousness is that any possible consciousness we envision is inevitably human-like. We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals); a consciousness that is really different may look to us like any natural process.

A question of “is X conscious?” has no meaning if you remove that constraint of “human-like”. Like with any question we ask, we cannot remove ourselves from this one.

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Human consciousness is an important thing that we do not understand, and therefore well worth studying in itself.

Anyone who can get some sort of handle on other forms of consciousness is encouraged to investigate further, but that might not be possible until we have a better understanding of human consciousness.

One of the overlooked features of the so-called scientific revolution is that it shifted focus from "big" questions to questions of a more constrained scope, but that are amenable to investigation. This turned out to be much more effective than those preoccupied with the "big" questions might have imagined.

I think you can envision “non-human-like”. Eg we already imagine animals can be conscious.

Conscious just means an intelligence that is self-aware and has subjective experience. If you define that as human-like then your point stands tautologically. But I think there is a very wide space of conscious possible-minds.

Simple examples would be hive-minds, faster minds, slower minds, distributed minds, quantum minds, it’s really quite easy to imagine conscious non-human minds.

An animal’s consciousness is not exactly human-like, but close enough. Envision something on completely foreign time & space scales and it might be indistinguishable from, say, a weather system.

> We wouldn’t see it as “consciousness” even if it was only somewhat different from ours (animals);

Most humans see animals as having a consciousness with feelings and dreams like us. Why would you think otherwise? Why else would it be illegal to torture animals? That we even call it "torture" means we think the animals suffers from it, we don't say we torture a rock when we crack it, that means we see them as having a consciousness.

The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to support it. You can't argue from it to support something else. It's already a weak position that we just go along with because of feels.

> The human anxiety about animal suffering needs arguments to support it

You want arguments supporting that humans dislike seeing animals suffer? To most people that would be obvious, I'm not sure what to say.

No, that's not what I meant. I'm saying that reasoning from anxiety is not valid.

It is valid, we are talking about what humans thinks, not what is true. If humans thinks animals are conscious then they think animals are conscious, doesn't mean animals actually are conscious.

And the fact that I don't get downvoted here is evidence people here also think that animals are conscious, which supports my argument that people think animals are conscious.

Oh, OK. I think that the "because animals are conscious" part is only retro-fitted to the "don't make animals suffer (because I don't like it)" argument. I think it's a somewhat disingenuous post-hoc justification, but people convince themselves of it. So in a sense, yes, they think animals are conscious: most people will readily take this argument out, parade it around, and sometimes they do science that's supposed to relate to it, or refer to that science and think and worry about the argument ... but I still think it arises from mere justification of a feeling and is essentially hollow and therefore (breathe) although people say they see animals as conscious, they aren't really meaningfully looking because they already decided in advance, and it's not really sincere thought that they put into it. But this is just, like, my opinion.

I think animals having conscious experience seems a reasonable opinion. Many animals display a lot of behaviours we have in common with them, they have similar senses, similar emotional responses, similar social behaviours, even similar reasoning abilities in a lot of contexts. Tye brain regions with activity associated with these behaviours correspond to equivalent regions in our brains.

Its true we have additional brain structures responsible for higher reasoning and linguistic abilities that other animals don’t share, but it seems likely that these features are layered on top of those other capabilities we inherited from our common ancestors with other mammals.

In support of this, there are some behaviours we share with other animals that are not conscious, or at least that are so automatic that we are essentially mere observers of our own behaviour. This includes many instinctive behaviours, and these are often shared with lower order animals that do not display sophisticated awareness of their own existence and that of others. It seems reasonable that we inherited those behaviours from common ancestors with such animals (lizards, frogs, etc) before self consciousness evolved.

(Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.

Most animals don't have self-awareness, though some even have that, like great apes, certain cetaceans, elephants, and possibly even some birds.

The only things that seem to be uniquely human are complex language, cultural evolution and prolonged neuroplasticity during childhood and early adulthood.

I think the main issue is that far too many people think of consciousness in terms of a binary state (i.e. consciousness is present or not) instead of a spectrum.

Even in humans the state of being animals that possess consciousness varies over the course of time: new-born infants are in a different state of consciousness than 4 year old children, for example. Not to mention our regular fading in- and out and transitioning between various states of consciousness during our sleep cycle.

The first important step towards a better understanding that would allow proper assessment would be to develop a sound metric to allow qualifying consciousness. Doesn't have to be precise, but a scale from say 0 (non-conscious) to 100 (awake neuro-typical sober human adult) would be a great step forward IMHO.

> (Many, but not all) Animals do in fact have consciousness, emotions, and dreams(the kind that happens during sleep that is). It's not just human projection.

Maybe we are defining consciousness differently but how do you know? how do you prove that? Don't get me wrong I too believe that animals have consciousness, but I think humans other than me have consciousness too and I can't prove that either. That's a big part of the whole issue particularly in regards to whether the current ai of the week is conscious or not.

You can demonstrate that animal and human brains achieve similar brain states given similar stimuli but how do you demonstrate that those brain states are sufficient for/require consciousness? for all we know every animal is a philosophical zombie and we can't prove otherwise.

Most humans eat animals and indirectly participate in animal torture by eating meat of animals who spend their lives from birth to death in conditions indistinguishable from torture. There may be a stated belief in animal consciousness, but revealed preferences show otherwise.

I am not so sure about it. The question is, whether consciousness also leads to changing behavior. Say we try to communicate with method X and the sun answers with a flare, would probably be proof.

But it could also be, it has consciousness, but simply would not care much about and ignore us.

“Answers” is a word that hints that you are still thinking of it as human-like consciousness.

A valid point could be that our consciousness is social (“answering” is a thing), and by extension any alien consciousness we expect would also have to be social as one of the constraints that make it sufficiently human-like.

That is a good point. I need to clarify my consciousness about it.

In general I don't think a consciousness needs to be social to react to other consciousness. They might pose a threat or benefit. Say we want to build a dyson sphere and that would disrupt the suns ability to communicate with other suns (also social I know). I try to find better examples ..

Is there any other definition of consciousness than one of a subjective experience that observes and reacts to its environment?

What is a subjective experience? To me, this seems like an infinite regress problem.

Subjective experience is the awareness of an internal representation.

What is awareness then? Do you see my point? Either you end up with a circle of references or an infinite regress of definitions to describe the ineffable.

It’s the problem of qualia [1]. They can’t really be defined, only pointed at. My experience of seeing the colour red is non-universalizable. Thus the word red can only point at it, it can’t describe or define it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

I would say there is no working definition of consciousness at all—and potentially there can’t be a complete and provably correct one, if we assume Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is true. The reason is that our arguments about consciousness originate from consciousness itself, we are building a model of the system while being inside of it. The only definitive statement that can be made, I guess, is that consciousness exists.

As far as consciousness that doesn’t react, there are materialist/behaviourist/illusionist views that hold that only observed behaviour matters and anything else may well not exist, but I personally am not convinced by them.

Even that wouldn't indicate the sun is conscious. Your computer responds when you press a key, is that proof it's conscious?

(I don't think it's impossible that computers are conscious, but I cannot even proof that humans other than me possess a consciousness)

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