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This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all th

This article, like most discussions on "consciousness" I encounter reads like little more than word games to me. We could similarly write articles about all the qualities and properties of phlogiston, and we'd have learned just as much. What thing are we actually trying to explain here? What is the extensive meaning of the word "consciousness"? How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? At this point it mostly just seems like we define ourselves to have this "conscious" property and then circularly use that as a distinguishing characteristic of humans. How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff?

monktastic1 9y ago
Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."
- xelxebar 9y ago
  I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". It also doen't seem like this is a discussion of pure qualia on the level of "Is the red you see the same as the one I see?" For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human". On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such? For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked. Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    > I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". If I close my eyes and ask myself "doesn't something seem to be happening?" (setting aside, for a moment, whether anything is actually happening -- since that requires a whole slew of interpretations), the answer is an unequivocal "yes." That (to me) is consciousness. There is a particular certainty (whether right or wrong) that applies only to that question. Whether you have a functioning pancreas is something that, in principle, we each have access to. Whether or not "something seems to be happening" for you is inaccessible to me, even in principle. At least, as far as I can see.
- red75prime 9y ago
  While it is a curious question about why my consciousness exists instead of not existing (maybe not in the same way as my brain exists), I find it is worth pursuing as much as a question "Why anything exists at all?" Other questions about human consciousness can be formulated in terms of observables.
- jonathanstrange 9y ago
  But that's the problem with the philosophy of mind. They have all these subjective notions like consciousness, self-consciousness, analytic and synthetic I, the accompanying such-and-such feeling (e.g. I-feeling), self-awareness, awareness, attention, qualia, qualitative experience vs. content of qualitative experience vs. phenomenal experience vs. sense data vs. innr experience, cognition, embodied cognition, stream of consciousness, and so forth. Each of them comes with many fine-grained additional distinctions, but they are all subjective and cannot be measured easily and every author promotes his own vocabulary. Then they wonder why they can't agree on a common theory, quibble endlessly about the adequacy of their various subjective definitions, and most if not all of their arguments are based on 'intuition-pumping'.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    The topics you mention are mostly arguments against physicalism, rather than being for something. There seems to be a lot more effort expended (on both sides of the physicalism-dualism divide) in trying to disprove the other side, rather than on explaining consciousness, though perhaps that's just what the general-interest coverage focuses on.
    - monktastic1 9y ago
      If "consciousness" is taken to refer to this "thing" I can be certain I have but cannot be certain you do, then it doesn't refer to any objective property that can be proven or explained, right?
      - mannykannot 9y ago
        Looking for proof in these matters is probably a fool's errand (though many seem to undertake it...) As for explanations, that doesn't seem to be out of the question up to some assumptions, as is usually the case with explanations. Anyone choosing to go down the rabbit-hole of solipsism is literally alone with his thoughts.
        9y ago
jddjdbdbd3 9y ago
Can you recall what it feels like to splash cold water on your face? What is that feeling? What is it to feel something? How does it emerge from the interaction of matter? What is the dividing line between something that does and does not feel? I dont think you can hand wave them away.
DanielBMarkham 9y ago
To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models of the world based on new incoming data. Sentience is the ability to do this in the abstract. I realize that this just shifts the discussion to "What, exactly is 'our existing models of the world'?", but I think that question can have much more traction, especially to an engineer, than the current state of the language over on the philosophy side. It also implies that there is a spectrum: the complexity of the model(s), the speed at which we can re-engineer them, our ability to hold multiple models in mind at once, and the degree of abstract indirection we're able to employ are all variable. I'd suggest that future work with questions such as "What defines a sentient being?" proceed along those lines, and using these definitions would be much more valuable than trying to stratify consciousnesses into various semantic tiers that still remain quite abstract.
visarga 9y ago
No, I think consciousness has the role of protecting the life of the organism and reproduction. It's not a "soul" thing, it's a "body" thing, or more exactly, it's a "world+agent+game" thing.
- pixl97 9y ago
  My belief is that consciousness is the ability of an organism to model the world and predict the future. Any organism that doesn't just react is on the consciousness spectrum. When a creature is presented with two or more choices and has to decide which will have the best outcome, it is making a conscious choice. The problem with starting at human consciousness is our consciousness is to advanced to easily grasp. We can not only internally model our real world very well and make predictions years in advance, we can make up completely coherent 'fake' worlds. The problem with animal consciousness is we have no means of a coherent model of what is occurring in their minds.
  - visarga 9y ago
    We also have AI agents. By creating robots we gain a lot of insight into the difficulties solved by the brain. With AI agents we can experiment much more freely than with animals or humans, we can peek into their workings and try variations.
stepik777 9y ago
> How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? There is currently no way. We don't even know if all humans possess it and what animals do. Maybe people who deny its existence just don't have it. > How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff? It's not modern vs old, it is more scientific vs religious. I agree that most articles about consciousness feel like word games though.
mannykannot 9y ago
Calling 'consciousness' 'soul without an afterlife' is just as much a word game as any other - which is to say that if it is offered as the starting point of a discussion, it is not simply a word game, but if it is declared to be the answer, then it is. I don't think the circularity is there, because while there do not seem to be other animals today with the same sort of consciousness as humans, we can reasonably assume that some of our now-extinct ancestors had various levels of consciousness, whatever it is. We are indeed groping around here like 18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat. I don't think that makes it pointless, but we should be suspicious of the claims of either physicalists or dualists who think that they have proven the other side is wrong (though my instincts are with the physicalists.)
- roceasta 9y ago
  Yes, as Daniel Dennett says, groping around trying to find the right questions is what philosophy is. The confusion can be upsetting for both philosophers and non-philosophers. Creating a space for questions and contradictory ideas is a must for any intellectual activity, however. >18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).
voidhorse 9y ago
> How can I empirically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? You can't, that's just the issue and that's what gives rise to behaviorism, solipsism, etc. etc. Sure, you could arbitrarily decided that some brain state Y recorded by instruments xzw in the field of neuroscience is a state of 'consciousness' but this is hardly a step up from heuristic methods we've used since the dawn of time, namely duck typing--if the thing looks like its conscious, and acts like its conscious, it is probably conscious. Consciousness is one of those problems that becomes more problematic once you harp on it but only presents itself as a problem in practice in very rare cases. Sure you could argue the issue will gain in relevancy as AI + machine learning becomes more sophisticated--but at this point there's still very much an uncanny valley that enables us to easily differentiate between biological and purely computational/mechanical systems. When it comes to consciousness I think we do well to remember Wittgenstein's advice on doubting--that a doubt is really only worthwhile when it's useful in some fashion. To doubt just for the sake of it, or just because we can is usually not productive and leads us nowhere. Doubts are useful insofar as they are precise and rub up against propositions we hold true with some degree of firmness (actually to be able to doubt at all requires we hold some confident assertions, e.g. one of them in the case of studying consciousness: "no matter what the study says, I'm confident at the very least, that I am conscious").
- xelxebar 9y ago
  > You can't, that's just the issue... Do you judge me as a conscious being? If so, then you came to that conclusion by making some empirical observations. What are those observations? I'm not trying to explain consciousness here, I'm just trying to identify it.
Chathamization 9y ago
> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff? There's actually an interesting analog with intelligent design. In both cases (evolution, the brain) it's clear that what's happening is that the emergent properties from incredibly complex systems is creating surprisingly complex results (surprisingly complex to the average observer). In both cases this bothers people because it means that humans aren't anything particularly special (just matter that happens to go through certain processes), and because it's hard for them to grasp the scale and complexity of the systems involved. So an invisible non-material explanation is theorized instead which sets humanity above the "mere" material world.
Symmetry 9y ago
If you want a rigorous account of what neuroscientists call consciousness, which isn't quite the same thing as what philosophers call consciousness, I'd recommend reading Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. Looking at a brain, the reaction to stimulus that enters consciousness and stimulus that remains subliminal are very distinct. And, for example, only the effects of conscious stimulus persist in the brain for more than a couple of seconds. Well, Pavlovian conditioning between stimuli can occur subconsciously but only if the two two stimuli are presented at the same time. If you want to condition a dog to salivate when you ring a bell you either have to ring the bell loud enough for the dog to be conscious of it or you have to ring it while the dog is eating.

monktastic1 9y ago

Have you heard it said that you can never know if another being is really conscious, and yet you can know that you are? Presumably you disagree? This is what, in essence, it means to be a subjective fact rather than an objective one, and why it's hard to pin it down as a "thing."

xelxebar 9y ago
I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". It also doen't seem like this is a discussion of pure qualia on the level of "Is the red you see the same as the one I see?" For one, I certainly judge you, Mr. Internet Person Monktastic1, as being conscious. And I can somewhat unpack that judgement into relatively empirical observations that can be cross-compared with someone else. This feels really similar to my judgement of you as possesing the trait "human". On a meta-discussion level, the rhetoric I usually encounter reminds me a lot of the Plato-Diogenes debate on the essence of "human". Can we really reduce the intuitive notion of consciousness to "featherless biped thougts" or some such? For those reasons, I suspect that the intuitive notion of "consciousness" is more a (fuzzy) collection expectations we have on lower level traits. Like, since you are able to engage in this conversation, I judge you as human and therefore this leads me to expect that you also have a functioning pancreas. On the surface though, language ability and pancreas possession don't have any obvious reason to be linked. Taking a bird's-eye view, I do hope that this discussion continues until the questions become sharp and precise enough to be called science instead of philosophy.
- monktastic1 9y ago
  > I don't so much disagree as am confused by what people (including myself) mean with the word "consciousness". If I close my eyes and ask myself "doesn't something seem to be happening?" (setting aside, for a moment, whether anything is actually happening -- since that requires a whole slew of interpretations), the answer is an unequivocal "yes." That (to me) is consciousness. There is a particular certainty (whether right or wrong) that applies only to that question. Whether you have a functioning pancreas is something that, in principle, we each have access to. Whether or not "something seems to be happening" for you is inaccessible to me, even in principle. At least, as far as I can see.
red75prime 9y ago
While it is a curious question about why my consciousness exists instead of not existing (maybe not in the same way as my brain exists), I find it is worth pursuing as much as a question "Why anything exists at all?" Other questions about human consciousness can be formulated in terms of observables.
jonathanstrange 9y ago
But that's the problem with the philosophy of mind. They have all these subjective notions like consciousness, self-consciousness, analytic and synthetic I, the accompanying such-and-such feeling (e.g. I-feeling), self-awareness, awareness, attention, qualia, qualitative experience vs. content of qualitative experience vs. phenomenal experience vs. sense data vs. innr experience, cognition, embodied cognition, stream of consciousness, and so forth. Each of them comes with many fine-grained additional distinctions, but they are all subjective and cannot be measured easily and every author promotes his own vocabulary. Then they wonder why they can't agree on a common theory, quibble endlessly about the adequacy of their various subjective definitions, and most if not all of their arguments are based on 'intuition-pumping'.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  The topics you mention are mostly arguments against physicalism, rather than being for something. There seems to be a lot more effort expended (on both sides of the physicalism-dualism divide) in trying to disprove the other side, rather than on explaining consciousness, though perhaps that's just what the general-interest coverage focuses on.
  - monktastic1 9y ago
    If "consciousness" is taken to refer to this "thing" I can be certain I have but cannot be certain you do, then it doesn't refer to any objective property that can be proven or explained, right?
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      Looking for proof in these matters is probably a fool's errand (though many seem to undertake it...) As for explanations, that doesn't seem to be out of the question up to some assumptions, as is usually the case with explanations. Anyone choosing to go down the rabbit-hole of solipsism is literally alone with his thoughts.
      - 9y ago

jddjdbdbd3 9y ago

Can you recall what it feels like to splash cold water on your face? What is that feeling? What is it to feel something? How does it emerge from the interaction of matter? What is the dividing line between something that does and does not feel? I dont think you can hand wave them away.

DanielBMarkham 9y ago

To me consciousness is the ability to re-engineer our existing models of the world based on new incoming data. Sentience is the ability to do this in the abstract. I realize that this just shifts the discussion to "What, exactly is 'our existing models of the world'?", but I think that question can have much more traction, especially to an engineer, than the current state of the language over on the philosophy side. It also implies that there is a spectrum: the complexity of the model(s), the speed at which we can re-engineer them, our ability to hold multiple models in mind at once, and the degree of abstract indirection we're able to employ are all variable. I'd suggest that future work with questions such as "What defines a sentient being?" proceed along those lines, and using these definitions would be much more valuable than trying to stratify consciousnesses into various semantic tiers that still remain quite abstract.

visarga 9y ago

No, I think consciousness has the role of protecting the life of the organism and reproduction. It's not a "soul" thing, it's a "body" thing, or more exactly, it's a "world+agent+game" thing.

pixl97 9y ago
My belief is that consciousness is the ability of an organism to model the world and predict the future. Any organism that doesn't just react is on the consciousness spectrum. When a creature is presented with two or more choices and has to decide which will have the best outcome, it is making a conscious choice. The problem with starting at human consciousness is our consciousness is to advanced to easily grasp. We can not only internally model our real world very well and make predictions years in advance, we can make up completely coherent 'fake' worlds. The problem with animal consciousness is we have no means of a coherent model of what is occurring in their minds.
- visarga 9y ago
  We also have AI agents. By creating robots we gain a lot of insight into the difficulties solved by the brain. With AI agents we can experiment much more freely than with animals or humans, we can peek into their workings and try variations.

stepik777 9y ago

> How can I emperically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? There is currently no way. We don't even know if all humans possess it and what animals do. Maybe people who deny its existence just don't have it. > How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff? It's not modern vs old, it is more scientific vs religious. I agree that most articles about consciousness feel like word games though.

mannykannot 9y ago

Calling 'consciousness' 'soul without an afterlife' is just as much a word game as any other - which is to say that if it is offered as the starting point of a discussion, it is not simply a word game, but if it is declared to be the answer, then it is. I don't think the circularity is there, because while there do not seem to be other animals today with the same sort of consciousness as humans, we can reasonably assume that some of our now-extinct ancestors had various levels of consciousness, whatever it is. We are indeed groping around here like 18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat. I don't think that makes it pointless, but we should be suspicious of the claims of either physicalists or dualists who think that they have proven the other side is wrong (though my instincts are with the physicalists.)

roceasta 9y ago
Yes, as Daniel Dennett says, groping around trying to find the right questions is what philosophy is. The confusion can be upsetting for both philosophers and non-philosophers. Creating a space for questions and contradictory ideas is a must for any intellectual activity, however. >18th-century scientists trying to make sense of heat All that mucking about with the problems of phlogiston could have been a necessary step towards thermodynamics. Similarly, speculations about consciousness could turn out to be a necessary step towards AGI (or vice-versa).

voidhorse 9y ago

> How can I empirically determine if some object/animal/thing possesses consciousness? You can't, that's just the issue and that's what gives rise to behaviorism, solipsism, etc. etc. Sure, you could arbitrarily decided that some brain state Y recorded by instruments xzw in the field of neuroscience is a state of 'consciousness' but this is hardly a step up from heuristic methods we've used since the dawn of time, namely duck typing--if the thing looks like its conscious, and acts like its conscious, it is probably conscious. Consciousness is one of those problems that becomes more problematic once you harp on it but only presents itself as a problem in practice in very rare cases. Sure you could argue the issue will gain in relevancy as AI + machine learning becomes more sophisticated--but at this point there's still very much an uncanny valley that enables us to easily differentiate between biological and purely computational/mechanical systems. When it comes to consciousness I think we do well to remember Wittgenstein's advice on doubting--that a doubt is really only worthwhile when it's useful in some fashion. To doubt just for the sake of it, or just because we can is usually not productive and leads us nowhere. Doubts are useful insofar as they are precise and rub up against propositions we hold true with some degree of firmness (actually to be able to doubt at all requires we hold some confident assertions, e.g. one of them in the case of studying consciousness: "no matter what the study says, I'm confident at the very least, that I am conscious").

xelxebar 9y ago
> You can't, that's just the issue... Do you judge me as a conscious being? If so, then you came to that conclusion by making some empirical observations. What are those observations? I'm not trying to explain consciousness here, I'm just trying to identify it.

Chathamization 9y ago

> How is "consciousness" not just a modern word for "soul", minus the afterlife stuff? There's actually an interesting analog with intelligent design. In both cases (evolution, the brain) it's clear that what's happening is that the emergent properties from incredibly complex systems is creating surprisingly complex results (surprisingly complex to the average observer). In both cases this bothers people because it means that humans aren't anything particularly special (just matter that happens to go through certain processes), and because it's hard for them to grasp the scale and complexity of the systems involved. So an invisible non-material explanation is theorized instead which sets humanity above the "mere" material world.

Symmetry 9y ago

If you want a rigorous account of what neuroscientists call consciousness, which isn't quite the same thing as what philosophers call consciousness, I'd recommend reading Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. Looking at a brain, the reaction to stimulus that enters consciousness and stimulus that remains subliminal are very distinct. And, for example, only the effects of conscious stimulus persist in the brain for more than a couple of seconds. Well, Pavlovian conditioning between stimuli can occur subconsciously but only if the two two stimuli are presented at the same time. If you want to condition a dog to salivate when you ring a bell you either have to ring the bell loud enough for the dog to be conscious of it or you have to ring it while the dog is eating.