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Comment by poikroequ | Hacker News Reader

The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could train a robot AI to recognize itself in the mirror.

I'm in the camp that believes animals are conscious, I'm not arguing against that. But what I'm arguing is that the current body of evidence doesn't conclude anything. Until we have a better fundamental understanding of consciousness, I don't think we can make such conclusions merely from observing animal behavior. Who's to say that one behavior is evidence of consciousness and another behavior is not? What do we base that upon?

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I don't think it's really the case that "much of this discussion assumes" certain behaviors as being indicative of consciousness. Rather, it has been the case until recently that behaviorists pointed to various behaviors as being unique to humans, and jumped to the conclusion that this indicates that humans are conscious and other animals aren't. What has been happening recently is that one by one these behaviors have been show as not being truly unique to humans. It is becoming more and more undeniable that even when humans are fairly unique in the quantity of some of these characteristics, none of them are completely absent in all other animals, and many can be found to some degree even in very simple animals.

I think we're going to realize soon that consciousness isn't really all that complex

I believe consciousness started off simple but evolved to become much more complex. Like how eyesight began with simple photosensitive cells.

Even if I agree, I still have trouble seeing how simple photosensitive cells evolved into even a simplified view[0]. If you see what I mean.

0. https://www.aao.org/eye-health/anatomy/parts-of-eye

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye

I don't think the word "conscious" is generally used in a way that is the least bit scientific. So that's the first problem.

Here you combine "self-aware" with "awake" or "stream of experience" and possibly intelligence.

While what you say about drawing conclusions is maybe true, it does not seem to have started with modern scientists. Rather, my takeaway from the article was that everyone is still playing by Descartes’ rules: that is to conflate intelligence, language, and consciousness. So instead of trying to redefine that basis, researchers are simply going with it (however flawed it may be) and saying, “well, if language and intelligence are the only sure ways to detect consciousness, then here are a whole bunch of animals that exhibit intelligence, language, or both.”

It is indeed a hard question that one could also apply to humans. There is no way to know if someone else is conscious. It might be obvious for all people, but what about babies or people with advanced stages with dementia or certain types of brain damage? What about people with mental disabilities? (I have experienced some of these in family members.)

Even for "normal" humans, the point is that consciousness is by definition unobservable from the outside, so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling. It's the p-zombies thought experiment.

> so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling

Indeed, though* all of us should be confident that there is at least a second conscious being besides ourselves, the one who coined the term.

* ignoring A J Ayer for a moment, even though "there is a thought now" would be the only form of consciousness that a current LLM could possibly have if it had any at all

What if the subconscious is also conscious

I think a lot of people are conflating illusion of free will with consciousness.

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