[HN Gopher] The Consciousness of Invertebrates
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The Consciousness of Invertebrates
Author : quercusa
Score : 49 points
Date : 2021-06-08 17:00 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lithub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lithub.com)
| ilikecode wrote:
| > I had just seen with a common assumption that flies are nothing
| more than robotic automatons, with no experience, no awareness.
|
| Think very long and hard and you might agree _you_ fall into that
| (minus the "no awareness"). Cannabis is a trigger for me to
| think about this stuff as I can just relax and get stuck in my
| head and deeply think about things. At least for me through extra
| free time during Covid lockdowns I've come to believe I have no
| free will. Through daily interaction with my family I've come to
| believe we are automatons too. People you know very well are very
| predictable because their "code" doesn't change very fast,
| especially with the lack of new experiences. Which made me
| remember that's how I used to view all other animals and
| creatures. It's given me a new appreciation for other
| animals/life.
|
| Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said
| or did something? You aren't going to choose to think of that
| time in 4th grade you did something stupid unless something
| prompts you to think of it. Cause and effect. We are trained by
| all of our experiences to behave and respond in certain ways when
| certain events happen. When someone says "hello" you might say
| "hello" back because you've been trained to do it. This goes all
| the way down to everything we do. It's the reason learning
| involves so much repetition. Everything is conditioning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight are fascinating reads
| about people not being _aware_ of something they obviously should
| be aware of.
|
| What is awareness but simply processing of our inputs/senses?
|
| What even is consciousnesses then?
|
| And yeah our brains are far more intelligent than other life
| forms giving us far more abilities and abstract thought, etc. As
| another comment mentioned though that's not a consciousness
| thing. We give ourselves far too much credit.
| geophile wrote:
| This is all fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from this
| article, but it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness
| repeatedly. It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies
| the latter.
| quercusa wrote:
| The novel _Blindsight_ , by Peter Watts, explores exactly your
| quandary. Highly recommended.
| ilikecode wrote:
| Thanks for that. It's exactly what I've been looking for. My
| mind has been on this whole topic for the last year. Even the
| name is a big hint I'll like it as blindsight is fascinating.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Strongly seconding the recommendation. You'll probably also
| like the references to scientific studies included at the
| end of the book.
|
| The book has a sequel, Echopraxia, which I also recommend.
| It's a novel based around the argument that consciousness
| is not only unnecessary, it's actually an evolutionary
| disadvantage.
| gerbilly wrote:
| The only reason we think animals are stupid automatons is
| because in our culture we don't observe them very closely.
|
| Like the article says, every time we bother to look we are
| _surrpised_ to find abilities in all sorts of animals.
|
| Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious,
| that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious
| (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and
| intelligent.
|
| My opinion: Intelligence is not rare, we are surrounded by it.
| Animals communicate with each other all day in say a forest,
| but we just hear it as random noises because we've stopped
| listening hundreds of years ago.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| I do a lot of spearfishing. It's very obvious when hunting
| that creatures like fish are a lot more intelligent than one
| would expect without those experiences. Until you are in
| their environment trying to carry out similar tasks their
| behaviors are just not _legible_ to our understanding.
|
| I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see
| consciousness since I can't really come up with a good
| definition. The best I can think of makes a lot of
| assumptions about how much of our own behavior we actually
| control and perceive... which isn't exactly an objective
| truth.
| taneq wrote:
| > I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see
| consciousness since I can't really come up with a good
| definition.
|
| Don't feel too bad about it, Dennett argues that
| consciousness doesn't even exist and I'm not sure he's
| wrong.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort
| studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly
| contradicts what you believe.
|
| With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans,
| animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be
| automatons.
|
| Usually when observing and experimenting animals closely,
| especially insects, they are just state machines. Very
| complex sequences are often executed from start to finish
| blindly. You can reveal how ants, bees or flies are
| automatons by making little changes to their environment.
| They do the sequence from start to finish. If you interrupt
| them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the
| sequence from the start.
| gerbilly wrote:
| > by making little changes to their environment. [...] If
| you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended.
| They start the sequence from the start.
|
| Who says we do any different?
|
| Also there's a huge difference between proving something
| scientifically, and 'knowing' something. It is a hugely
| useful distinction, but science operates in it's own
| domain.
|
| To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge
| is a form of solipsism.
|
| Scientifically, even if we met face to face, you couldn't
| 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious. It's just a
| bias that we consider ourselves to be these things and not
| other animals.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > Who says we do any different
|
| Experiments. You are taking this too philosophically.
|
| >To insist that only scientific knowledge is true
| knowledge is a form of solipsism.
|
| I don't insist. It's just that there has not been
| demonstrated any other form of knowledge that could be
| accepted as evidence that things are different.
|
| > you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or
| conscious.
|
| Proving is *never* natural science. Science never proves
| outside "formal sciences" like mathematics. Science can
| only show that hypothesis is wrong conditionally. In
| science you can only say you have evidence supporting
| hypothesis and evidence falsifying it.
| monocasa wrote:
| There's plenty of science being done showing animals
| exceeding the bounds you're setting.
|
| For instance even ants have been seen to pass the mirror
| test. http://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxN
| Dc4NTIz...
| nabla9 wrote:
| Good find. And the writers are very skeptical about what
| the mirror test indicates.
| tr352 wrote:
| This study was discussed in the article.
| wcarss wrote:
| This is interesting but it is not in the least bit
| philosophically satisfying as an attempt to answer the
| question of whether beings are "automatons" or "conscious".
|
| To begin with, it is not at all clear that those form a
| valid dichotomy, as is evidenced by the debate over free
| will. If we have no free will, we too are automatons, but
| we still can assert that we are conscious. Can we be both?
| I'm pretty sure the jury is out on all of this.
|
| Is a bed-ridden, non-communicative human patient non-
| conscious because they follow strict patterns? We frankly
| don't know, but it is widely regarded as unsafe to assume
| they are not. Are there philosophical zombies out there?
| It's unknown. Does the universe exist beyond our own
| perception? Again, sadly, no one can be completely sure.
|
| So, your cat's behaviour might be on rails, but we know
| nothing of its true internal experience, let alone whether
| that experience meets any arbitrary bar we wish to claim is
| special or privileged, especially on the mere basis of it
| appearing to be similar to our own.
|
| (apologies for making multiple edits here)
| nabla9 wrote:
| I was not taking about consciousness, just intelligence.
|
| There is no reason to assume that intelligence and
| consciousness are strongly related. Why automaton can't
| be conscious. One may require another but I don't see why
| if one is more intelligent one has more consciousness. Or
| reflective etc.
|
| > If we have no free will, we too are automatons,
|
| In deepest philosophical sense free will not well defined
| or it's nonsensical statement. Albert Einstein said it
| well:
|
| "Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they
| talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a
| feeling, for instance, that I will something or other;
| but what relation this has with freedom I cannot
| understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe
| and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea
| of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light
| the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said:
| Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen
| was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will
| what he wills)."
| wcarss wrote:
| I don't understand at all who is downvoting you here! I
| appreciate the thoughtful and wonderful response you've
| put in, so thank you. I wish so much that people wouldn't
| use votes to express mild disagreement.
|
| I thought you were suggesting that animals are not
| conscious, and saying that you believe so because they
| are not detectably intelligent, suggesting a direct
| correspondence between the two. Instead it seems like you
| and I more or less agree on the matter: no correlation,
| and even an automaton could be conscious.
|
| Thanks also for the interesting Einstein quote. I don't
| agree that free will is nonsensical to such a degree that
| it cannot be discussed, but I do agree it is not well
| defined.
|
| I hoped to sidestep the vagueness of free will by
| discussing it in the meta sense of 'what broad
| philosophical consensus is held about it', i.e. that
| there is rather _little_ to say for certain, but even
| what most people hold to be true doesn 't seem to rule
| out the idea of an automaton being conscious.
| Sharlin wrote:
| > With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and
| cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions
| turn out to be automatons.
|
| [a lot of citations needed]
|
| Yes, _some_ invertebrates have been found to execute fairly
| rigidly preprogrammed behavior patterns, and some reptiles
| as well, IIRC. But others seem to be capable of much more
| adaptive behaviors. And mammals? Exactly what evidence do
| we have that cats and dogs and horses and elephants are
| just mindless automata? To make such a claim certainly
| requires extraordinary evidence.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive
| behaviors.
|
| Examples? I'm really interested for finding at least one
| example of complex intelligent behavior of insects (that
| is actually studied and not just conjecture).
| fossuser wrote:
| I'm not an expert, but my guess at an example would be
| bees.
|
| Complex communication via dances about food sources.
| Learned attacks against murder hornets to defend the
| hive.
|
| Probably what I would look at first.
| taneq wrote:
| Bees and jumping spiders are both acknowledged to be
| relatively intelligent.
| callesgg wrote:
| Consciousness being something like having thought processes
| that model other thought processes.
|
| Finding a hole in a piece of plastic does not require that. Or
| so it seams to me.
| kbelder wrote:
| Yeah, I think it has something to do with a brain that has
| enough complexity that it can begin to model itself and
| others' brains, allowing self reflection.
|
| A dog can think, I think, but I don't think it can think
| about its own thoughts. But this may be unknowable.
| whateveracct wrote:
| > It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the
| latter.
|
| nor the latter implying the former :D
| pdonis wrote:
| _> it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness
| repeatedly_
|
| It seems to consider them to be the same thing. Which is a
| common viewpoint. Basically, the idea appears to be that, in
| order to display all those intelligent behaviors, the animal
| must be _aware_ of them just as we are (or think we are) aware
| of what we 're doing when we display such behaviors.
|
| Of course my parenthetical qualifier there is the key point:
| actually, we humans are often _not_ aware of what we 're doing
| when we display behaviors that, to an outside observer, would
| appear to be intelligent. We perform all kinds of complex tasks
| on autopilot, while our conscious awareness is elsewhere. If we
| can do it, we should expect that other animals can do it, too.
|
| And that at once raises the question, how do we know when we
| _are_ consciously aware of intelligent things we are doing? The
| only answer we have, at least at our current level of
| understanding, is that we can _talk_ about the things we are
| consciously aware of. We can report what we did and why we did
| it, and can answer questions about it. Which, if we take this
| at face value, means that without such evidence from animals,
| the default assumption should be that they do _all_ their
| intelligent behaviors on autopilot--they are never consciously
| aware of what they are doing.
|
| I think that claim, as it stands, is too strong--for example,
| anyone who has cats or dogs as pets would probably say that
| their cats or dogs give plenty of nonverbal evidence of being
| aware of things they are doing (and I include myself in this
| category)--but it should at least make clear that intelligent
| behavior and consciousness are not the same thing and do not
| have to go together. Which in turn means that our scientific
| efforts should be focused on figuring out what kinds of
| nonverbal evidence would count as indicating, not just
| intelligent behavior, but consciousness.
| willis936 wrote:
| Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace (2004)
|
| http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
| mathewsanders wrote:
| The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. _Children of
| Time_ is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who
| evolve to become a complex technological society and it's a
| really enjoyable read :)
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