[HN Gopher] Are animals conscious? New research
___________________________________________________________________
Are animals conscious? New research
Author : boto3
Score : 77 points
Date : 2024-06-16 02:36 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| ilaksh wrote:
| This doesn't add up to me. The majority of scientists really
| thought that animals didn't feel or experience things? That can't
| be true for scientists that actually observed animals.
|
| I can see how there might some type of conflict with a dualist or
| religious view of the soul though. But not a scientific conflict.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Decartes, for example, did actually believe that animals don't
| feel or experience things, that they're purely mechanism-like
| entities, with simplistic (I'd even say, "behaviouralistic" but
| that'd be a bit anachronic) stimulus-response built-in
| reactions -- they were not able to geniunely experience pain or
| distress, they could merely exhibit outwards signs of it,
| that's all.
|
| Fortunately, with computer-based AIs we _know for sure_ that
| the analogical beliefs are actually true, and there are no
| future developments that could possibly change that.
| sedan_baklazhan wrote:
| Yes. It is considered normal to make a statement that all
| animals don't have self-awareness. Because, well, you can't ask
| them and prove they do, right? Scientist are even afraid to
| make those statements as they would be ostracized by the
| scientific community. (I've read an actual elephant-studying
| scientist's book which told exactly that).
| npteljes wrote:
| >The majority of scientists really thought that animals didn't
| feel or experience things?
|
| I can buy it.
|
| "As recently as 1999, it was widely believed by medical
| professionals that babies could not feel pain until they were a
| year old, but today it is believed newborns and likely even
| fetuses beyond a certain age can experience pain"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
| dorongrinstein wrote:
| Do people not have dogs? They have more emotional intelligence
| than most humans and love, fear, play, plan, think, reason and
| communicate well. This is true for many animals. I'd say that
| most animals are just like human in terms of consciousness but
| less advanced in thinking and communicating (without debating
| about whales, dolphins, octopuses etc.)
| jbotz wrote:
| Less advanced in _symbolic_ thinking and communicating. There
| are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some
| predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and
| communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify
| that I would bet on elephants).
| mvid wrote:
| Orcas are better at communicating than humans are, their
| languages more directly resembles telepathy than the "encode
| thoughts into grunts that then need to be decoded" that we
| have. They are essentially beaming waveform pictures to each
| other
| kbrkbr wrote:
| That is a very narrow definition of better it seems.
| ben_w wrote:
| As all the discussion about AI has shown, what we even mean by
| intelligence _in humans_ is a huge and ongoing debate.
|
| IIRC, canine emotional intelligence has been tested, and dogs
| have the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old human.
|
| Just don't take my word for it as I've not been able to find an
| actual citation.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| 92 Billion animals are killed each year for food.[1] That doesn't
| include the 110 million that are killed each year for science.
| [2]
|
| These animals must not be conscious, or we would never do such a
| thing, right?
|
| Oh, and we keep over a billion pets in our homes and call them
| our friends. But they can't be conscious.
|
| The science must be flawed. /s
|
| [1] https://www.humanesociety.org/blog/more-animals-
| ever-922-bil...
|
| [2] https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-
| blog/killing-...
|
| [3]
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Why is killing conscious stuff bad?
|
| I see absolutely no reason for that. And if you do, that won't
| be normative, because you're a fallible person just like me and
| there's no reason for why I should live my life according to
| your reasoning instead of mine.
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| With conscious stuff I'm assuming you mean conscious beings.
|
| It is against the law to murder another human. In many
| countries it is also against the law to kill or torture your
| pet. Are you not living your life according to those agreed
| upon 'reasoning'?
|
| As humanity evolves, the circle of compassion and common
| sense will expand to also include those conscious beings that
| we currently don't deem worthy of compassion, since having a
| factory farmed burger on our plate is currently more
| important than reducing our carbon footprint, pollution,
| habitat destruction, deforestation or simply not inflicting
| pain and suffering on sentient beings.
| guilhas wrote:
| So our evolved consciousness will be superior to other
| animals that still eat other animals
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| Other animals don't raise billions of other animals to
| cram them into factory farms, deprive them of natural
| surroundings, pump them full of hormones and antibiotics
| and then send them off to slaughterhouses to turn them
| into burgers and other meat products.
|
| Animals live with nature. We don't. We created our own
| world on top of the natural world, which we are slowly
| destroying.
|
| We have the brains, skills and resources to maintain and
| improve our living standards without destroying the
| natural world. But we choose not to vote with our wallet.
|
| We in the Western world don't need to kill and eat
| animals anymore to survive. It's purely out of taste
| pleasure, habit and because 'we have always done it'.
|
| EDIT: watch this video to see the reality of industrial
| animal farming:
|
| http://www.nationearth.com/
| phito wrote:
| All conscioussness eventually die off.
| camel-cdr wrote:
| What's that supposed to tell us?
| salesynerd wrote:
| I sometimes think that animistic belief - objects, places, and
| creatures all possess a distinct spiritual essence - is more
| respectful of the ecosystem than some of the modern ones. Lots of
| ancient cultures, across the globe, tried to live in harmony with
| their natural environments. I wish that we can go back to that
| stage.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| I agree. You should check out "Becoming Animal" and "The Spell
| of the Sensuous", both by David Abram
| salesynerd wrote:
| Thanks for your suggestion; I'll read the two books.
| goatlover wrote:
| To what extent did they really, or was it more low impact for
| smaller tribal groups? There's plenty of examples of
| civilization with roads, waterways and larger buildings in the
| Americas prior to the Europeans. Same for most of the rest of
| the world. Humans cleared areas with fire, they damned rivers,
| and built cities.
| gen220 wrote:
| I also often think about this. "Animism" was a super efficient
| way to program a culture for respect towards nature. From that
| perspective it's a shame that it's gone.
|
| I'm hopeful that with all this research, we're sort of
| traversing a longer cultural arc that terminates at the same
| "symptoms" of animism (respect for nature, good stewardship of
| natural resources, following the precautionary principle).
| Those symptoms would now be supported by different load-bearing
| pillars, called "Environmental Science" and "Biology".
|
| I don't think we can go "back", but I think we can go
| "forwards" and still end up in a good (albeit, ironically, more
| or less the same) spot, where capital-S Science basically
| endorses most native land management practices. We've already
| made pretty good progress in the last generation or two.
| poikroequ wrote:
| 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?
| jbotz wrote:
| 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.
| squigz wrote:
| I think we're going to realize soon that consciousness isn't
| really all that complex
| poikroequ wrote:
| I believe consciousness started off simple but evolved to
| become much more complex. Like how eyesight began with
| simple photosensitive cells.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| 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
| fjfaase wrote:
| 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.)
| andrepd wrote:
| 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.
| ben_w wrote:
| > 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
| phito wrote:
| What if the subconscious is also conscious
| doodaddy wrote:
| 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."
| ilaksh wrote:
| 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.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| consciousness is a spectrum. Humans are more conscious than
| animals.
| jbotz wrote:
| I agree but would word that as "...more conscious than _most_
| _other_ animals. "
|
| Humans are animals, and we don't have an agreed upon definition
| of consciousness that would allow us to quantify it so
| precisely that we can be sure of the way you worded it. Many of
| the smarter animals may have just as much (but somewhat
| different) consciousness as humans, and you we can definitely
| come up with a reasonable definition of consciousness under
| which some animals may have more of it. For example, if one of
| the major measurable dimensions of consciousness involves
| spacial awareness (and it might, as it helps delimiting self
| from other) then cetaceans could easily have more of it.
| jerrygoyal wrote:
| Some animals have better senses than humans (as you pointed
| out) but that doesn't make them more conscious than us. Maybe
| 2 aspects to measure degree of consciousness is intelligence
| and metacognition.
| kbrkbr wrote:
| Speaking about this topic is already hard. It's not like the
| words needed can be learned in observing the world. There is a
| lot of reflection going on to sharpen their meaning to the nuance
| that's needed for serious discussion.
|
| Conscious, self-aware, sentient, thinking, to name just a few,
| mean quite different things - not only in themselves, but also
| per philosophical school of thinking their connections and
| subdivisions are different.
|
| Plenty of room for misunderstanding...
|
| I think it was Augustinus who said about time "when no one asks
| me I know what it means". And then went on a journey to try to
| understand what it is that he knows.
| erelong wrote:
| I think this ultimately becomes a religious discussion; even the
| article (wrongly in our view) calls Darwin "god-like" and
| suggests that belief in animals having consciousness is "heresy"
| (this perhaps borders on theological error, rather than heresy?)
|
| It is a long-standing religious belief that animals do not
| possess a rational immortal soul and neither do they possess the
| ability to choose good or evil but are instead governed by
| instinct, which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes
| as it is presumed they have no consciousness of what is right and
| wrong like humans do
|
| It might be worth reviewing many of the characteristics unique to
| humans to by way of contrast appreciate how different humans are
| from other creatures
|
| Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is unique
| to humans which is why most people are comfortable even killing
| animals and eating them as food, while "cannibalism" is thought
| to be a barbaric immoral practice contrary to unique human
| dignity
|
| Articles like these in our view are being pushed possibly to
| degrade humans to the level of animals so as to justify animal-
| like immoral behavior
| defrost wrote:
| Just for reference:
|
| > the article (wrongly in our view) calls Darwin "god-like"
|
| It does not. The exact quote is: Charles
| Darwin enjoys a near god-like status among scientists for his
| theory of evolution.
|
| It's an idiom that does NOT claim Darwin is like an actual god,
| it's also a statement that I disagree with as not all
| scientists consider Darwin to hold that status, a good number
| credit Wallace with the theory, with holding it first, for
| having better evidence, and Darwin holding the home court
| advantage being in England and able to present in person to the
| Royal Society.
|
| > which is why we don't put animals on trial for crimes
|
| You may not but many animals have been put on trial for crimes
| throughout history.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_trial
|
| > Animals lack the "moral consciousness" and dignity that is
| unique to humans
|
| Your _opinion_ is noted .. although appears to have been
| eronously made as if a statement of _fact_ which is debated, as
| discussed in the article.
| dekhn wrote:
| If there is a holy temple of science, Darwin (along with quite
| a few others) would be worshipped.
|
| (if you walk into an old physics building where experiments of
| import have been done, there is often a vestibule filled with
| the old hardware. In some ways it feels like a holy temple of
| science containing relics....)
| guilhas wrote:
| Should we stop eating chicken, fish, and other small animals, in
| favour of bigger ones like cow? That would reduce farm animal
| suffering by more than 80%
|
| What about the meat alternative insects? Are they conscious? If
| so there are people investing millions. to kill gazillion lives a
| year
|
| Or are they definitely "inferior"?
|
| Do we even know what suffering and consciousness is?
|
| Why did nature evolved for animals to eat each other?
| 39896880 wrote:
| > Should we stop eating chicken, fish, and other small animals,
| in favour of bigger ones like cow? That would reduce farm
| animal suffering by more than 80%
|
| We should stop eating all animals.
|
| > Why did nature evolve for animals to eat each other?
|
| Because evolution "cares" only about gene propagation. The
| nourishment obtained from eating animals allows that.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Regardless of whether you agree with the proposition, this seems
| to be the conclusion society is trending toward.
|
| Personally, I fear that instead of treating animals and machines
| more like humans, we will end up treating humans more like we
| currently treat animals and machines.
| jraph wrote:
| It doesn't take a genius to notice animals are conscious. Only to
| prove it and convince their human peers that this is the case. I
| guess.
| epgui wrote:
| To prove this would require being able to very clearly define
| consciousness, but we know that consciousness is not "a
| thing"-- it's rather "a collection of things", and it's not
| either there or not; rather it's largely a question of degree.
| And I don't just mean this as inter-species variation either:
| even if we only look at humans, humans exhibit the whole
| spectrum and/or patchwork of states of consciousness, both
| developmentally and pathologically. And to some extent,
| physiologically too.
|
| I find it annoying how we're even entertaining the idea that
| animals wouldn't be conscious. Like what does that even mean?
|
| All these people who aren't convinced that animals are
| conscious... I'd really like to know what specific behaviour
| would convince them one way or another. Pick pretty much any
| behaviour, and you'll find animals (and even insects)
| displaying it.
| delecti wrote:
| I can't help but believe that people who think animals aren't
| conscious are starting from that assumption. If you start
| from the belief that there's some inherent "human-ness"
| (soul, etc), then nothing you see will convince you that
| animals have it too.
| panarky wrote:
| Could you prove that another person is conscious? Could you
| prove that you are conscious?
| delecti wrote:
| I can prove that I am conscious, at least to my
| satisfaction, because I can think the thought "I am
| conscious". Outward behavior of other humans also proves
| to my satisfaction that they're conscious. And when
| interacting with animals, I see many of the same
| qualities that lead me to believe other people are
| conscious, with the difference largely being a matter of
| degree.
| ang_cire wrote:
| People out there with so little to feel good about they got
| to pretend animals don't think to feel better about
| themselves.
|
| Anthropocentrism is a hell of a drug.
| klyrs wrote:
| My understanding of the history here is that scientific
| understanding of the nature of animals was based on
| folklore, attributing supernatural properties to animals
| and their behavior. Scientists agreed to throw all that
| out, and rightfully so, in preference for an evidence-based
| approach. And what we're seeing today, is that despite a
| couple centuries of assuming that animals are pure
| instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence that
| they are individuals with intelligence, memory, feelings,
| preferences and even language. Where "they" spans the range
| from bees to whales.
|
| The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much
| anthropocentric, but a rejection of folklore as literal
| truth. While some are still attached to an anthropocentric
| worldview, that perspective seems dead among people who
| study animal behavior.
| epgui wrote:
| I have a few nits to pick here...
|
| > scientific understanding of the nature of animals was
| based on folklore
|
| Popular, pre- or proto- scientific understanding perhaps,
| but not scientific understanding per se.
|
| > despite a couple centuries of assuming that animals are
| pure instinct-driven automatons, we have tons of evidence
| that they are individuals with intelligence, memory,
| feelings, preferences and even language
|
| These things are not mutually exclusive. The words
| "intelligence", "memory", "feelings", "preferences" and
| "language" can refer to purely automatic/mechanical
| processes, even when we're speaking in reference to
| humans. There's no real reason why we need non-
| mechanistic magic to explain the human experience. The
| two ideas are compatible: animals are conscious, and
| humans are "just" really complex machines. It's all the
| same stuff, viewed from different lenses.
|
| > The assumptions of the recent centuries weren't so much
| anthropocentric
|
| They were, and they still are. Folklore itself is for the
| most part very anthropocentric.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The human attitude towards our relationship with animals
| cannot be described as anything other than
| anthropocentric for the vast majority of people. Whether
| the origin of that attitude is due to the rejection of
| certain traditions assuming animals to be sacred or the
| adoption of traditions treating humans as sacred, it
| exists, and causes horrific mistreatment of animals on a
| global scale.
| epgui wrote:
| > the origin of that attitude
|
| I suspect the attitude is the default / most primitive
| one, because any other attitude requires higher-order
| cognitive processes that can abstract one's own
| experiences (which is the only real input one has) with
| the behaviours of entities that appear to be very
| different from oneself. In other words, the capacity for
| empathy is a "positive feature", in the sense that it is
| absent by default.
|
| The ability to make this kind of abstraction is a pretty
| sophisticated thing, and either requires time to evolve
| (as an instinct), and/or requires socialization/learning
| (as a partly or totally-intentional practice).
| DangitBobby wrote:
| True. It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to
| believe you should inherently have dominion over the
| entire planet and all animals on it. I don't think it's
| an idea most people would have adopted themselves without
| being born into a society formed by religions that
| perpetuate such a belief and it's consequences [1].
|
| As an aside, it's not clear to me how "having dominion"
| should justify such mistreatment, anyway.
|
| 1. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%2
| 01:25-...
| epgui wrote:
| > It's also sophisticated to have the ego required to
| believe you should inherently have dominion over the
| entire planet and all animals on it.
|
| Is that really "sophisticated", or is that just what
| happens when an entity outcompetes all others for
| resource utilization by chance (ie.: in the context of
| ecology / evolutionary pressure)? This is basically how
| cancer happens, and yet I wouldn't call cancer cells more
| sophisticated than healthy ones. I call it dys-regulated.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's sophisticated. Our brains are
| hardwired for empathy, and people are able to mostly
| ignore their social/emotional programming through a
| system of beliefs that would be difficult to propagate
| without language.
| epgui wrote:
| You seem to think we're somehow "empathetic by default",
| but that's something I'd disagree with.
|
| Our primal instinct is one of tribalism and auto-
| centrism, but over long periods of time we've developed a
| (fragile) capacity to empathize with 1) other people that
| look like us, and 2) other people that don't look like
| us, and 3) perhaps animals. But we didn't always have
| this capacity, and we see it break down all the time.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| What makes you think we "didn't always have this
| capacity"? Or that other animals don't have it? We have
| it from a very young age, children like animals, want
| them as pets, and cry when they see them hurt or killed.
| We've had at the very least a desire to commune with
| animals for 100,000 years or we wouldn't have dogs in
| their current form.
| epgui wrote:
| I haven't claimed that animals don't have it.
|
| In general, empathy can be either an evolved behaviour, a
| learned behaviour, or both.
|
| In humans this is largely-but-probably-not-exclusively
| socialized behaviour. Most cases of (human and non-
| abused) feral children exhibit behaviour that is not
| particularly compatible with empathy.
|
| I shared my rationale for why we "haven't always had this
| capacity" a few comments up this thread, and you seemed
| to agree with it before immediately making the
| contradicting statement.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| If you think I'm contradicting myself, then I didn't know
| what "abstraction" was referring to in "sophisticated
| abstraction". (FWIW, it's pretty difficult to review the
| conversation and formulate good responses on mobile,
| since all I can see easily without switching back and
| forth is the comment I am replying to). I think it's
| "sophisticated" to have the language and philosophy
| required to follow a moral system that you prioritize
| over your own instincts--in this case, the prioritization
| of members of your species. I don't think it's
| "sophisticated" to not attempt to maximally exploit
| everything around me for even the most modest benefit to
| the deteriment of all else. Maybe I have too high an
| opinion of people. Maybe it's just a consequence of
| scale.
|
| I see empathy alone as being much more basic, requiring
| only a very low-level "theory of mind", likely arising
| from the type of evolutionary pressure that leads to
| social species. I would be surprised to learn that was a
| recent adaptation in our evolutionary line. Maybe most
| species have it "off by default", if you consider the
| "default" to be a constant state of duress and resource
| scarcity.
| Jensson wrote:
| > children like animals, want them as pets
|
| It was very recently evolution wise that humans started
| to keep animals as pets, before then we just hunted and
| ate animals. We would empathize as much with those
| animals as cats did with mice.
| ang_cire wrote:
| This is not true.
|
| We literally discovered a 32,000 year old burial site
| where a hunter _put a mammoth bone in their deceased dogs
| mouth when they buried him_.
|
| https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/animal-health/our-
| respo...
|
| That's not utilitarian, to give funerary care.
|
| Another grave site in Germany from 14,000 years ago had a
| dog buried with a man and a woman, treating it as a
| family member.
|
| We literally have had fur babies since before we had
| civilization.
|
| Once you get there, there's far more evidence: ancient
| Greeks burying pets and writing inscriptions about how
| they loved them, dogs and baboons were kept as pets in
| ancient Egypt, and given names, which was a big deal in
| Egyptian religion, and wasn't done for utility animals at
| all.
| epgui wrote:
| Yes, and in the evolutionary time scale of primates,
| that's all very recent.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Now you're backtracking. Those other primates weren't
| humans. In human history, pets are not recent by any
| measure.
|
| We have no evidence of a specific period of homo sapiens
| in which we know they did _not_ keep pets.
|
| Also, other animals have been observed keeping pets.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Eh, plants too. Many plants react to the environments,
| recognize kin, seem to communicate with each other, etc
|
| People don't like it, just like many people don't like
| animals being aware.
|
| I had a fascinating theological discussion with a guy
| once. He was a farmer and he believed strongly that
| animals lack souls. I, on the other hand, believe that
| even amoeba have souls. I feel it's just a condition of
| being a living thing while he felt that this was unique
| to humankind. Obviously, he has an interest emotionally
| in viewing animals as soulless. Easier to slaughter them
| that way.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > I find it annoying how we're even entertaining the idea
| that animals wouldn't be conscious. Like what does that even
| mean?
|
| it means that "science" has been infiltrated with grifters
| living off research grant gravy trains producing conjectures
| entirely obvious for hundreds of thousands of years...and
| reproduced by the previous round of grifters a handful of
| years earlier. i say that as someone who sees these faux
| revelations recur every few years. it's ridiculous...as if
| we're as a species not conscious of the pattern, ironically.
| epgui wrote:
| That's for the most part nonsense / a distorted perspective
| on what happens in science... and I say this as someone who
| used to be a biochemist.
| dheerajvs wrote:
| Especially when you consider humans are animals too.
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| How do you "prove" that other people are conscious?
|
| This isn't a gotcha question: to me they're both obviously
| true. The question is what kind of evidence do you require, and
| why do people require different evidence for people vs other
| animals.
| npteljes wrote:
| I mean, same with gravity, right? In ascending order of
| complexity, noticing gravity, using gravity for benefit, and
| explaining gravity are orders of magnitude different.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| For a while, science didn't admit to a female orgasm, either.
| There was "no evidence" in the sense that no one had bothered
| to perform scientific observation and collect data. There was
| common sense, and reasonable assumption, but no studies. Then
| there were studies.
|
| Common sense tells you and I that animals are conscious to some
| degree. But as there is no current scientific definition of
| what the system of consciousness actually is (and I'm
| speculatively calling it a system) it's difficult to say
| animals have it through observation. We know they respond to
| anesthetics just like we do. We know anesthesia can shut off
| consciousness, so there's some physicality to whatever
| consciousness is. We just don't have a classification for it
| yet.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Apparently someone in the NIH disagrees since they actually
| performed the sandfly experiment on beagles.
| klyrs wrote:
| > Prof Chittka's experiments showed that bees ... seemed to be
| able to play, rolling small wooden balls, which he says they
| appeared to enjoy as an activity.
|
| But can they understand the offside rule?
| kaycey2022 wrote:
| Neither do most people. Which implies ...
| klyrs wrote:
| ... we won't need to understand the rules, we'll just yell at
| the referees whether it's bees or humans handling the ball?
| unclenoriega wrote:
| They said "intelligent", not "superintelligent".
| dumbo-octopus wrote:
| Call me when they not only understand the offside rule and the
| reasons for its introduction, but can provide a comprehensive
| summary of the ways it has contributed to the perception of
| soccer as a slow paced & uninteresting sport, and go on to
| advocate for its removal in favor of a more tactical
| distribution of players on the court and higher points per
| game, along with the various benefits those entail.
|
| Now that'd be intelligence.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I heard a rumor from a guy on Twitter that GPT5 can explain
| it...
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> We now know that bees can count, recognise human faces and
| learn how to use tools._
|
| I was curious what that means in this context and found this
| research (co-authored by Prof Chittka mentioned in the article):
| https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...
|
| Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out
| how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees
| adopt the behavior by mimicry. IMO I think we're doomed to move
| the goalposts on intelligence for a while, like with the
| statistical abilities of LLMs to manipulate language and insects'
| ability to use tools. Moravec's paradox keeps rearing it's ugly
| head as more and more complex systems turn out to be relatively
| easy compared to basic cognition (the system that keeps them
| flying and identifies threats, flowers, etc.).
|
| It'd take a lot more to convince me that bumble bees are
| conscious just because of the their brains' simplicity compared
| to humans or other animals that appear more intelligent like
| pigs, corvids, octopuses, etc. I'm not categorically against such
| a possibility, but I think the bar for recognizing intelligence
| in general has been set too low.
|
| This sidesteps the main problem anyway: What is consciousness? I
| don't think we're any closer to rigorously defining that anymore
| than intelligence.
| albertopv wrote:
| "Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out
| how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees
| adopt the behavior by mimicry."
|
| Replace bumble bees with human beigns and "pull a string" with
| an engineering task and you'll find we are not so different.
| /sarcasm, but not too much, average human being is quite dumb,
| tbh.
| Jensson wrote:
| > average human being is quite dumb
|
| Compared to what? Average human beings are geniuses compared
| to animals.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Well, I think that depends upon what is being measured. Is
| this general intelligence, or is this mastery of a single
| thing?
| lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote:
| That's ok. Moving the goalposts (in good faith) is part of the
| proceed of understanding the question we're trying to answer.
| Some times you don't realize you don't understand the question
| until you start thinking about it.
| illuminant wrote:
| Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of
| existential being. Literally life technology animating the
| quantum sieve within our neurons. Consciousness isn't a complex
| deck of cards, it is the singularity inside the quantum sieve.
|
| Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not
| mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence. All that other
| stuff about more or faster or sophisticated is something else.
| obviously we're describing a scalar domain. Your expectations
| overload and out leverage the simple truths.
|
| This may be the moment to evaluate our questions.
| apantel wrote:
| Even an LLM couldn't generate this.
| illuminant wrote:
| Information is the removal of uncertainty, if it does not
| remove uncertainty it is not information.
|
| Uncertainty is the soft synonym for entropy.
|
| Entropy is the distribution of potential over negative
| potential.
|
| It is not that Truth is impossible to find, it is that
| undeceiving the self is difficult.
|
| Undeceive yourself of your own words if you will find
| something you have not anticipated.
| qarl wrote:
| > IMO I think we're doomed to move the goalposts on
| intelligence for a while
|
| I'm old enough to remember back when we thought language was
| the defining element of intelligence. Dogs can't talk - dogs
| aren't intelligent.
|
| Now LLMs can talk, and we've shifted intelligence to mean
| animal intelligence - being able to predict the motion of a
| falling ball, wanting to protect your children, etc.
|
| Some people truly cannot tolerate the idea that our
| intelligence/existence isn't magical, so they'll desperately
| move it again and again and again... forever. Watch.
| goatlover wrote:
| There is some conflation between consciousness and
| intelligence going on. Consciousness is subjective
| experiences. Intelligence is cognitive ability. There isn't a
| necessary link between the two. We can say LLMs are
| intelligent but not conscious. We could say a lizard is
| conscious but not that intelligent.
| andoando wrote:
| I still feel like animal intelligence is completely
| downplayed.
|
| Dog's can learn new environments and tasks. The simple act of
| recognizing what a door is and how they work takes quite a
| bit of intelligence.
|
| As far as I can see, AI still can't make a robotic dog.
| self_awareness wrote:
| Once I had a dog and I watched him as he slept. One minute, he
| suddenly started moving the tips of his paws as if he were
| running somewhere. A moment later, he began to move his jaw as if
| he started to eat something. Right after that, a bit more paw
| movement, and he began to smack his tongue as if he were drinking
| something. Then again, he started moving his paws as if he ran
| off somewhere. So: he ran to the bowl of food, ate, went over to
| the bowl of water, drank some water, and ran off again. A little
| while later, he woke up. That's when I invited him to eat. Since
| that time, I have never doubted either that animals have some
| kind of consciousness or that animals can dream.
| ang_cire wrote:
| Dreaming in animals is a well researched and proven phenomenon.
|
| https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/lifestyle/what-do-dogs-dre...
|
| > One of the most famous of these dream experiments involved
| lab rats. Rats in the experiment spent all day running in a
| maze. Scientists monitored the brain activity of the rats in
| the maze and compared it to the brain activity of the rats
| during REM sleep. What they discovered was that the same areas
| of the rats' brains lit up during REM sleep as when they were
| running the maze, suggesting that the rats were likely to be
| dreaming of the maze. By comparing the data, the researchers
| could figure out _where exactly in the maze_ the rats were
| dreaming about.
|
| There's more in that article on dogs specifically, including
| studies where they chemically disabled the pons, which is the
| part of the brain stem in vertebrate mammals (humans included)
| that stops us from acting out our dreams while asleep (and
| which is involved with disorders such as sleep walking and
| night terrors).
|
| Just like you deduced, the dogs are just literally dreaming
| about all the stuff they usually do while awake.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Studies have been done where they deactivate the sleep
| paralysis chemistry from dogs and they literally run at full
| speed while dreaming. Pretty wild.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I think few people could deny that animals can dream, or feel
| pain, or fear, or happiness, or change behavior in response to
| reward/punishment, or figure out how to use simple tools, or
| how to work together to hunt or find food, as all these things
| are trivially observable.
|
| I don't think that animals have a higher-order awareness of
| these things in other creatures. A bird will eat an insect, or
| a cat will hunt and kill a bird without troubling itself over
| whether its prey is conscious. They just see it as food.
|
| So maybe not so different from humans, after all!
| brandall10 wrote:
| When my late female pug was young she would regularly
| 'sleepwalk'. She'd stand up and start digging into the mattress
| for about 30 seconds, then collapse back to the bed and resume
| snoring. Almost every night for awhile, waking us up in the
| process.
|
| Once I coo'ed to her while doing this and she snapped awake,
| jumped backwards a few inches with this freaked out look on her
| face.
| lxgr wrote:
| > An early effort came in the 17th century, by the French
| philosopher Rene Descartes who said: "I think therefore I am." He
| added that "language is the only certain sign of thought hidden
| in a body".
|
| That line of reasoning is exactly how some people can consider
| LLMs conscious, yet seriously doubt whether any animals are.
| ajuc wrote:
| Obviously they are. If consciousness even means anything.
|
| They have theory of mind:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saRsq9pe9Hc
| workingdog wrote:
| If they weren't conscious, then their love for us would be
| meaningless.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Meaning is something you create for yourself.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Sometimes... believing is all we have.
| luxuryballs wrote:
| Does this mean self-awareness? I feel like this topic is
| sometimes mincing words, why would an animal not be conscious?
|
| My computer knows exactly how much free memory it has, which is
| more than I know about my own capacity... why is it not
| considered conscious? Isn't this ultimately all just inputs,
| outputs, and the ability to keep record of things changing over
| time?
| reso wrote:
| We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on
| what it means.
|
| That being said, its obvious to me that many animals have similar
| emotional complexity to humans, and many outperform humans on
| some cognitive tasks.
|
| Humans have complex language, and that's about it, to separate us
| from other animals.
| goatlover wrote:
| There is a philosophical definition. Our sensations which make
| up perception, dreams, imagination. Or subjective experience.
| orwin wrote:
| > We need to ban the word "conscious" until people can agree on
| what it means.
|
| In modern philosophy, it ultimately mean self-awareness, if i
| read Chalmers correctly. Which is hard to prove (we do have
| mirror tests that only some animal pass, which prove they do
| have self-awareness, but failure to understand it doesn't mean
| the animal isn't self-aware, as young children also sometime
| fail the mirror test when left alone in front of it).
| dmbche wrote:
| I had understood it was nociception as it relates to a
| physical property
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nociception
| lolinder wrote:
| > Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses
| was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting
| human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no
| scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in
| animals' minds.
|
| What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to
| animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly
| rational world the default assumption would be that animals and
| humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where
| humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0%. The
| claim that humans are categorically different than other animals
| is the extraordinary one, not the claim that we are made of
| mostly the same stuff.
|
| The only reason why animal consciousness has been controversial
| historically is a religious one--the Bible has typically been
| read as placing humanity in a category of its own. And yet we see
| countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when
| even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of
| Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
| mgh2 wrote:
| > a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of
| Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
|
| Care to elaborate/expand?
|
| PS: Being downvoted for a simple question shows how biased
| (sometimes toxic) HN can become...
| lolinder wrote:
| The evidence: animals exhibit numerous behaviors that
| resemble our emotional responses in various ways. Anyone who
| has ever had a pet dog or a cat will have countless
| anecdotes.
|
| The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our
| brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain
| and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the
| simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and
| thought patterns that resemble ours in very meaningful ways.
|
| The actual scientific explanations that people tend to put
| forward (as discussed in TFA) revolve around us projecting
| our own thoughts and emotions onto the animals. To me that
| seems substantially less rational than just believing that
| similar neurological structures produce similar neurological
| results.
| mgh2 wrote:
| Are you sure that is not just mimicry of mechanisms left by
| evolution? Is like saying ChatGPT has conscience because it
| can talk or "think" like us...are we missing something
| here?
|
| I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the
| logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...
| lolinder wrote:
| I'm not sure about the downvotes, I couldn't even
| downvote you if I wanted to because you replied to me.
|
| I'm operating on the assumption that evolution happened
| as Darwin described it. As another reply to you notes,
| darwinian evolution precludes sharp divides between
| species in favor of a gradual development of complexity
| over time. A believer in darwinian evolution should
| expect consciousness and emotions and other mental
| processes to manifest on a continuum, which means that
| the question of animal consciousness should be about as
| controversial as the question of our own consciousness
| (which is definitely an open topic of philosophical
| debate but is also impossible to solved with an
| experiment).
| jemmyw wrote:
| Not that I believe this, but there could be an
| intelligence cliff where you get to a certain level and
| suddenly consciousness and self awareness appear. That is
| a mechanism where gradual change could lead to stepped
| differences.
| lolinder wrote:
| Right, but barring evidence against the simpler model we
| should prefer it to a more complex one.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| There could, but then you would have to explain why some
| permutations of matter create a new dimension of
| sensation which previously didn't exist, which then has
| the ability to reach back into the dimension of matter
| and exert will on it (are we opening a wormhole to an
| alternate reality of the soulbots or something??).
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| We have already enough evidence to assume that such cliff
| does not exist.
|
| I can recommend the book ,,How language began" by Daniel
| Everett, where he demonstrates convincingly that our path
| to language, culture and consciousness was not a single
| switch, but evolutionary process. Recent research of
| cetaceans shows that their language and culture may
| overlap in sophistication with our ancestors.
| captainclam wrote:
| "Mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution" would be a much
| less parsimonious explanation than just having those
| mechanisms, i.e. Occam's razor.
| timeon wrote:
| It is still possible that it is just mimicry. But same
| for Homo sapiens.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Ever since Darwin, the scientific view has been descent with
| modification. We're all branches of the same phylogenetic
| tree, and many of those branches are very close to us, such
| as other mammals. We have topologically similar digestive,
| immune, circulatory, respiratory, nervous, and reproductive
| systems. While there are important differences between, say,
| the foods that a cat and a human can digest, the differences
| in how the overall system works are small compared to the
| similarities.
|
| Therefore, it's a reasonable starting guess that humans and
| closely-related animals would have many structural
| similarities in their mental experience, although with some
| differences. It tilts the balance towards needing evidence
| that other animals are _not_ conscious, rather than needing
| evidence that they are.
|
| And when we look for evidence, we see intelligence even in
| branches as far away from us as crows and octopuses,
| suggesting that maybe consciousness (which we guess might
| correlate with intelligence) has deep roots in that tree, or
| else emerges independently quite easily.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Speaking of consciousness and tress:
|
| https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wcs.
| 1...
| deanCommie wrote:
| The challenge is that part of an advanced human society is
| creating black-and-white lines in structures to promote peace
| and prosperity.
|
| For example, everything we associate with the magical age of 18
| years old. "Adulthood", sexual consent, voting, drinking,
| smoking, conscription all begin on an arbitrary day and we take
| no consideration of the reality of the maturity of the person.
|
| (Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and
| contextual. A harsher world (like one that most of humanity
| existed in for our entire history) causes earlier maturity. A
| gentler one (that we are obviously all trying to create) delays
| it.
|
| So with animals, I see the spectrum, and I see that we are
| seeking to set a line...somewhere. Some set it just after
| humans. Humans are special, and everyone else is fair game.
| Vegans also have a pretty clear line.
|
| Everything else, vegetarians included, are pretty "fuzzy". I'm
| an omnivore myself, but if you asked me for a concrete logical
| reason why my personal ethics allow me to eat pig but not dog,
| I don't think I could give you a ethically consistent one other
| than "pigs are delicious, and dogs are my friends".
|
| Personally, I do believe that the same way that our generation
| asked our grandparents how they could've been ok with the
| racial discrimination & segregation that was ubiquitous in
| their youth, I think my grandchildren will ask me the same
| about my consumption of meat.
|
| The reasons will likely be a mixture of climate impact (species
| of fish going extinct), and cost (because of the energy cost
| required to create pigs and cows). Society will form an ethical
| consensus about why it's not appropriate to eat animals to help
| reduce WW energy costs the same way that early people in the
| Levant found it helpful to create rules about not consuming
| pigs or shellfish (for sanitary reasons).
|
| And there'll be "scandals" about rich people that have secret
| animal farms similar to what we have today about finding out
| about billionaires in dubai basically having secret house
| slaves. (AKA, outrage, but no meaningful change)
|
| BTW from where I stand, it seems fairly reasonable to deduce
| that all mammals are in some way conscious/sentient, and have
| intelligence comparable to our own. Mammals play, mourn their
| dead, have a common signal that generally causes us to protect
| the young of all mammal species and find them cute.
|
| I also think that there is a strong case for a very unique type
| of intelligence and conscience in Cephalopods. I have
| personally taken a stance to not eat cephalopods. Because I
| think they are in greater danger of going extinct vs. mammals
| (since their stock counts are so invisible to humanity), and I
| have decided (subjectively) that consuming a distinct type of
| intelligence from my own constitutes a form of crime. I don't
| know if I can defend that in court though.
|
| I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
| jamesmontalvo3 wrote:
| > I am not convinced about the rest of the animal kingdom.
|
| What about crows?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Not to mention that "maturity" is entirely cultural and
| contextual.
|
| I cannot agree with this. Maturity has a very clear meaning:
| it is when a human (or animal) has developed enough to be
| able to sexually reproduce. That people use the word wrongly
| in everyday conversation is something else.
|
| As for what you write about mammals, I completely agree. Just
| looking at them and interacting with them in real life and
| it's clear that they're our brothers.
| Coffeewine wrote:
| I agree completely. Anyone who spends even a cursory amount of
| time with a companion animal such as a dog or cat can see that
| they are emotional beings, and the notion that you can be
| emotional without also being conscious seems to strain
| credulity.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They
| very often not conscious but still emotional. You could
| easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously
| without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a
| neurological level as well. The more robust and
| evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem
| take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited
| almost immediately - which can be credibly argued is part of
| why many humans drink alcohol.
| timeon wrote:
| > Easy example.
|
| As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are
| impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt
| yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different
| scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated
| thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| I'm talking about being extremely drunk. I have a friend
| that "woke up" walking in a park after a night of
| drinking. If he was already walking exactly who woke up?
| My friend the human-animal was walking already. My friend
| the human-consciousness woke up. It was his consciousness
| coming back online as the ethanol was metabolized in the
| parts of his brain that afforded his consciousness.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| "Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from
| other mammals does not makes sense."
|
| Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so
| incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss
| it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| > The only reason why animal consciousness has been
| controversial historically is a religious one
|
| In your sentence I would substitute ''religious'' with other
| more specific terms like ''Judeo-Christian'' since Jainism and
| Hinduism have been talking about a continuum of consciousness
| in all living things for almost 3,000 years: specifically
| described by them as the Atman and the Jiva.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%80tman_(Hinduism)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiva
| lolinder wrote:
| Yep, I meant that to be included, that's why the sentence
| ends with a reference to how people usually read the Bible.
|
| I'm a Christian myself but I definitely think that the Indian
| religions get animals and animal rights far more correct than
| we usually do.
| slibhb wrote:
| Sure but in Hinduism and Buddhism, humans are higher than
| animals. In general, only humans are capable of escaping
| samsara.
| lolinder wrote:
| Right, but that concept is itself very compatible with
| darwinian evolution. Humans are the current pinnacle of
| evolution when it comes to intelligence, but that doesn't
| mean everything else is entirely unintelligent.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| No, it has been controversial for at least one other major
| reason discussed in the BBC article and by Anil Seth---the near
| equivalence made between language and consciousness that goes
| back to Descartes. Descartes viewed the body as machinery, the
| mind as imbued and linked in a nebulous way to the body, but
| distinct at some fundamental level.
|
| This split enabled the behaviorist tradition to dominate animal
| psychology for much of the 20th century.
| lolinder wrote:
| But that reason relies on a presupposition that human
| language is categorically different than animal language,
| which is also a claim that relies on presupposing a
| categorical distinction which must be disproven, rather than
| starting from the assumption that human and animal
| communication exists along an evolutionary spectrum.
|
| And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction
| becoming axiomatic? As you say, by way of Descartes, who was
| a devout Christian who famously tried to derive the existence
| of God from the fact of his own consciousness.
|
| Far from being a separate and distinct reason for downplaying
| animal consciousness, my sense is that animal language is
| downplayed precisely because it would imply consciousness,
| and we're working within a system that axiomatically believes
| animals are not conscious.
| Jensson wrote:
| Animal language is obviously on the same level as human
| laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach
| language to each other like humans do.
|
| But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to
| me animal language is much closer to consciousness than
| human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not
| language, and animal language that humans also has is
| directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models
| managed to mimic human language before animal language,
| human language is more robotic.
|
| Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices
| that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just
| do the human language. So the popular view is that animal
| language is the conscious parts and human language is the
| computational/intelligence part.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| > Animal language is obviously on the same level as human
| laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach
| language to each other like humans do.
|
| Obviously? There's no reason to assume that. It is known
| that cetaceans acquire their language and dialects
| through social learning. It was very recently discovered
| that some whales even have names for each other. Their
| language may be different from ours, but it is not just
| emotions.
|
| And then of course there are primates, elephants etc...
| andoando wrote:
| I don't see how language and consciousness are equivalent in
| any sense. Does someone who never learns to speak not
| conscious?
|
| I suppose we mean the ability to learn language.
| antisthenes wrote:
| > And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that
| perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a
| basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.
|
| That's not a reason to distrust scientists, or science in
| general (although it does display that a fraction of
| "scientists" had very poor observation skills).
|
| It IS a reason to look for religious dogma, oust it whenever
| possible, and dismantle it systematically until it no longer
| exists.
| okasaki wrote:
| > The only reason why animal consciousness has been
| controversial historically is a religious one
|
| Fundamentally it's really "practical" issue. We want to use,
| abuse and kill animals and we make up justifications.
|
| It won't change until the material conditions we live under
| change.
| goatlover wrote:
| Why would material conditions matter? Hunters and gatherers
| used animals they hunted, and began domestication. And so has
| almost every society since. Even if it's to help plow their
| crops or to fend off wild animals and keep the vermin
| population in check.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| I think this is entirely it - and while we are still reliant
| on animals for meat and food production, they are no longer
| made to toil to anywhere near the degree they once were in
| the developed world, and so this has allowed a shift in our
| sensibilities.
|
| As you say, it's a practical issue. In much the same way as
| esteemed 19th century scientists argued that black people,
| brown people, Irish people, _women_ , were not truly people,
| as this made for an easier moral justification for ill-
| treatment, slavery and genocide, they argued that animals
| were also insensate simulacra, only giving the appearance of
| life - for again, it is harder to beat and enslave a living,
| feeling, thinking being than it is a dishwasher.
|
| Much of what we take as straightforward facts of reality are
| actually just old, bad ideas, and only in the cold light of
| the morning after do we start to see the error of our ways in
| the dark that came before.
| slibhb wrote:
| > The only reason why animal consciousness has been
| controversial historically is a religious one--the Bible has
| typically been read as placing humanity in a category of its
| own. And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to
| that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and
| a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the
| opposite.
|
| It's not just the Bible. It's virtually every religion and it's
| probably pre-religious. There's also no reason to assume that
| animals don't think the same way. It's probably the case that
| crows, for example, place themselves in a separate category
| than other animals. That's how they recognize each other, mate,
| etc.
|
| I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative
| distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable.
| Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum mechanics.
| Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish things like
| that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
|
| And are all animals conscious? Amoebas? Virions? Bacteria? I
| reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think there
| probably are very simple (read: small) animals that aren't
| conscious.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd guess at the continuum, too -- "going against common
| sense" is, unfortunately, a thing I have seen often enough of
| _true_ things to reach the conclusion that "common sense" as
| a phrase means only "inside the Overton window of the person
| who just said or wrote that".
|
| But it's a guess, it has to be, especially as we're not all
| agreed on what the thing even is in the first place:
|
| > About forty meanings attributed to the term consciousness
| can be identified and categorized based on functions and
| experiences. The prospects for reaching any single, agreed-
| upon, theory-independent definition of consciousness appear
| remote
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#The_problem_of_
| d...
| lolinder wrote:
| > I reject panpsychism as going against common sense; I think
| there probably are very simple (read: small) animals that
| aren't conscious.
|
| Yes, I can definitely agree with this. I'm more reacting to
| the idea that it's somehow an unresolved scientific question
| whether dogs and cats and other mammals have emotions.
|
| There isn't a sufficiently large difference in neurology
| between humans and other mammals for me to believe that
| they're entirely unconscious machines while we're not.
|
| > I think most animals are conscious but a qualitative
| distinction between humans and animals is very reasonable.
| Animals didn't land on the moon or discover quantum
| mechanics. Whatever it is that allowed humans to accomplish
| things like that is a worthy basis of a distinction.
|
| Yes, it's a worthy basis of distinction, but is it a
| qualitative one or a quantitative one? Do we possess
| intelligence that is orders of magnitude higher than the next
| smartest mammals, or do we actually possess something that
| other mammals have none of?
|
| It's not clear to me that landing on the moon and discovering
| quantum mechanics require a different _kind_ of mental
| process than building a beaver dam or discovering a use for
| medicinal herbs. That feels more to me like the same sort of
| thing multiplied a thousand fold.
|
| And if it is the same sort of thing, then we're not
| projecting emotions onto our dogs, our dogs actually do have
| emotions of the same general sort that we do.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| Dogs definitely have Theory of Mind. There was a study done
| that placed a treat in a room where the dog was instructed
| not to eat it. A handler was in the room with the dog. When
| the lights were turned out, the dogs would eat the treat,
| because they knew that the human couldn't see in the dark.
| squigz wrote:
| Wouldn't another explanation be that the dog thought the
| human literally didn't exist?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence
| nequo wrote:
| If you ever had dogs, you know that they don't think that
| you die when you step out the front door. They wait for
| you to return because they have object permanence.
| slowmovintarget wrote:
| I reject panpsychism on the grounds of the Standard Model.
|
| There are no possible fields at the energy levels we've
| explored that could have an effect such as panpsychism claims
| (and fields at any other energy levels couldn't have such an
| effect). Sean Carroll published a paper on this, and it's
| worth a read, as is his draft response to Phillip Goff. [1],
| [2]
|
| [1] The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World
| Supervenes: https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07884
|
| [2] Consciousness and the Laws of Physics:
| https://philarchive.org/archive/CARCAT-33
| timeon wrote:
| > Animals didn't land on the moon
|
| Isn't this conspiracy theory? One species of mammals actually
| did.
| throwanem wrote:
| I may consider it largely specious that
|
| > a qualitative distinction between humans and animals is
| very reasonable
|
| but for someone who considers otherwise, such as the
| commenter to whom you're replying and whom I quoted,
| "animals didn't land on the moon" qualifies as both a sound
| and a valid statement.
| mi3law wrote:
| What you explain here also explains the current problems in AGI
| research. _sigh_ Humans keep thinking that reality, like the
| sun once did, revolves around them.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| Humans seem pretty categorically different to me based on their
| behavior alone.
| makk wrote:
| Agree. Humans, unlike other animals, film themselves mating.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Even if there was no Bible, it is clear as crystal to anybody
| who thinks about it that humans are in a category of our own.
| Any animal that could do even a thousandth of what people are
| capable of would be the most extraordinary animal.
|
| It is also crystal clear that animals have consciousness. A
| person would have to be without much consciousness themselves
| to think otherwise, in my opinion.
| lebuffon wrote:
| Harari gave me some insights when he explained that when humans
| lived closer to nature, as hunter gatherers, we tended to see
| the continuum of life on earth. "God" was in everything. After
| the advent of agriculture and animal husbandry it became
| necessary to change our views in order to raise animals to
| slaughter and eat them.
|
| Religions after that time separated humans from the rest of the
| animal kingdom and provided the justification we needed from a
| "higher power".
| brotchie wrote:
| Consciousness and intelligence are orthogonal concepts.
|
| It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the
| more "conscious" they are.
|
| Intelligence is the ability to abstractly reason and adapt to
| novel stimulus.
|
| Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority"
| of a world model constructed in the brain.
|
| Given we're all in the same evolutionary line, there nothing to
| make me believe that a Dog doesn't have the same sharpness of
| interior experience vs. a human. Dogs have wildly different
| sensory modalities, species specific social behavior, and
| aren't as intelligent, but that wouldn't "dull" their conscious
| experience.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _It 's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is,
| the more "conscious" they are._
|
| Why not?
|
| > _Consciousness is the individual experience of the
| "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain._
|
| The more complex and detailed the model, the more conscious.
| Why not?
| sameoldtune wrote:
| I do think that in a kind of way intelligence and
| "interiority" are related. I might have the same "amount" of
| consciousness as a worm but my ability to investigate my
| experience is (I think) undoubtedly greater.
|
| "A dog can miss his master, but he can't expect him to return
| on Wednesday"
| kazinator wrote:
| Projecting human traits, feelings and behaviors onto _other
| people_ has no scientific basis, because there is no way of
| testing what 's going on in their minds (assuming they even
| have minds).
|
| The dismissal of the idea that animals could be conscious is a
| form of solipsism.
| mathgradthrow wrote:
| Based on the standard definition of consciousness, no one is
| conscious but me.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Humans have been thinking for millenia about animal consciousness
| and how to ethically treat other beings. To wit, the Jain
| principle describing animal consciousness:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahimsa_in_Jainism#Overview
| librasteve wrote:
| the article illustrates the low level of achievement in cognitive
| science (particularly in the light of the investment being poured
| into so called AGI / FSD right now) ... we clearly need a
| scientific definition of consciousness that can capture what
| (birds(cats(dogs(humans)))) have in common and the incremental
| distinctions ... literacy, spoken language, non verbal modelling,
| predictive ability, causation/reasoning, dimensions (physical,
| emotional), pain, emotions, empathy, initiation and so on. with a
| research framework that can hypothesize and test the neuronal
| services and mapping.
| aspyct wrote:
| Sorry, why is this even a research? It's uh... pretty obvious
| they are conscious.
| etrautmann wrote:
| In what way would be possible assume that animals are not
| conscious? It's such a bizarre question
| npteljes wrote:
| Everything is a research, until it's proven beyond belief.
| Obvious doesn't cut it from a scientific standpoint. Noticing
| something, and proving something are two different things. And
| mutually agreeing upon the findings is also something else.
| Consciousness is a central concept for people, and so, there
| are many ideas surrounding it - human and non-human
| consciousness alike.
| animanoir wrote:
| Are animals conscious. Yes.
| cupcakecommons wrote:
| Humans that are blackout drunk are emotional but non-conscious.
| They can carry on full conversations without a sense of being.
| Basically every animal exists in this state continuously. It's
| why human behavior is vastly different from animal behavior.
| Self-referential consciousness is as much of a curse as it is a
| blessing. It's spoken about in this way by basically every human
| religion for a reason. This article is misses the mark entirely.
| This kind of sloppy thinking about consciousness exists in part
| because it's incentivized by fiat economics that require
| replacing economization-resistant traditional human food staples
| (like meat) - with less expensive alternatives to hide economic
| mismanagement.
| timeon wrote:
| Blackout drunks are barely emotional - it is just level of how
| much they are sedated.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Isn't the real question how to rank this level? Is an elephant
| smarter than a dog? Does that mean it feels more emotions?! Is a
| cat smarter than an octopus? Does that mean it knows how to
| better manage time?
| kazinator wrote:
| Suppose a dog is unconscious. For what purpose does it sleep and
| what is the difference between its sleeping and waking state? And
| between those and human sleeping and waking states?
| abeppu wrote:
| What Ghosh chose to include and not include in this leaves some
| really weird gaps. He mentions Descartes, and the "cogito", but
| quotes Seth in attributing to Descartes an "unholy trinity, of
| language, intelligence and consciousness", and then links that
| "trinity" to behaviorism.
|
| This would make one think that until "recently", most scientists
| were in the same boat as Descartes, but I think this is really
| misleading. Descartes believed that mental stuff and physical
| stuff were categorically different ("cartesian dualism"), whereas
| almost all scientists would subscribe to some form of monism /
| physicalism. But the reason for the cogito, which has persisted
| until at least "recently" is that subjective phenomena are
| intrinsically not accessible for objective observation. At best,
| we can capture the "correlates" of consciousness, whether those
| be behaviors, fMRI BOLD signals, EEG readings, etc, none of which
| directly shows that there's an inner subjective experience.
| There's still _maybe_ the possibility of a philosophical zombie,
| who has the right objectively available signals but doesn 't have
| any internal experience.
|
| But scientists have all the while been working under the
| operational assumption that animals have something like our
| experiences. When we study aggression or stress or motivation or
| whatever else in animal models, and draw parallels between the
| brains of mice or monkeys and humans, we're assuming that their
| emotional states feel at least somewhat like ours do. A classic
| protocol for rodents, relevant in testing anti-depressants (where
| the whole point is to change some aspect of our subjective
| experience) is the "forced swim", where you drop a mouse in water
| in a vessel with smooth vertical sides, and time how long it
| takes for them to stop struggling. This is taken to be a measure
| of "despair". If scientists decades ago didn't believe animals
| experienced anything, they wouldn't do this research.
|
| Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was the minimal statement he
| could make with absolute certainty -- but we all operate with at
| least a smidge less solipsism if we assume that other humans are
| conscious. And it's of course only a small extension to guess
| that other primates, who have rich social relations and brains
| similar to ours have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that
| other mammals, like rodents, who have a bunch of stuff in their
| brains like ours, have overlapping experiences. And then suddenly
| you're open to this landscape of different kinds of creates with
| different kinds of mental experiences.
| squigz wrote:
| What's with the title on this post?
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