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> we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious How do you differentiate a robot from a philosophical zombie, and this one from a human? We

> we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious How do you differentiate a robot from a philosophical zombie, and this one from a human? We can not be sure that other humans apart from myself (yours truly writing these lines); we only make estimated guesses that, because we share the same physical structures, our experience will also be similar. Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. It may be the case that insect structures are too simple for that (maybe, as you point out, it requires complex coordination among subsystems and not just a spacial model), but at least it provides a lower bound.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago
> Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. This is more or less the current mainstream stance. I think it's fine to do it for practical purposes, for example deciding that animals cannot be ethically subjected to certain treatments by virtue of the complexity of their nervous systems. But this is reasonable doubt + principle of precaution. I'm fine with that. What we cannot do is make this presumption and pretend that we are still within the realms of serious science or philosophy. The technical name for this presumption is emergentism, that consciousness somehow arises from the interactions of matter. I believe that the reason why this hypothesis is so popular, and even confused with scientific fact, is that it is the less weird. Avoiding weirdness is a common pitfall in the history of science, it leads to temporary dead-ends.
- hopler 8y ago
  It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang.
  - xamuel 8y ago
    Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.)
    - vinceguidry 8y ago
      All you're saying here is that science isn't philosophy.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent. I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic. The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
      - xamuel 8y ago
        Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one. If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two. Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
        simonh 8y ago
        Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do? I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
- cco 8y ago
  Maybe I'm confusing something, does your comment imply that consciousness is not the result of matter interacting with other matter?
garmaine 8y ago
You’re missing the point. Most people intuitively define consciousness to include not just self image, but the processing related to it—having wants and desires, and the self-conscious reasoning about them. Having self image is only the first, small step.
- visarga 8y ago
  Even insects have something like wants and desires - let's call them values. They are necessary in order to assure their survival. Values are derived from reward signals, which are selected by evolution. Values guide actions, and actions protect life and reproduction.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Their nervous systems are not self reflective about them, however, and they certainly don’t perform abstract meta-level reasoning about those wants and desires. Impulse-response is not consciousness, even if involves a simple reflective model of self image.
    - visarga 8y ago
      I agree they are very different and much more limited, but at the same time I think you and I might have different definitions for consciousness. I define consciousness as that process which protects the body by adapting to external conditions, and endeavours to make offspring by adapting to the mating opportunities. It's a general definition based on things that are concrete and measurable, unlike many others. Consciousness is basically protecting the genes. It's how genes found a way to exist at large scale.
digitaltrees 8y ago
There is a different way to look at it. If you accept that you meet the definition of consciousness, and can derive a definition of what characteristics you possess that would satisfy the definition for another bein to be similarly conscious to you then that definition is at least rational. True, we may not be able to apply that definition to specific humans, robots, or other beings but the definition is a rational measure of the answer. For me consciousness is an emergent property of language that possesses the concept of a self as opposed the the external world. Other things like sensory perception or a concept of a body are better described as awareness. This distinction allows us to say that a cockroach or robot are aware but not conscious because they can respond to their environment but not self reflect on that data as they have no narrative structures to use.
- andai 8y ago
  By this definition, is consciousness is a subset of awareness? If the aforementioned robot (aware but not conscious) were upgraded with symbol processing (and especially the self-symbol), would it then meet the criteria for consciousness?
  - digitaltrees 8y ago
    Not necessarily a subset. I could imagine a self reflective consciousness that doesn’t experience a lot of sensory stimulus.

TelmoMenezes 8y ago

> Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. This is more or less the current mainstream stance. I think it's fine to do it for practical purposes, for example deciding that animals cannot be ethically subjected to certain treatments by virtue of the complexity of their nervous systems. But this is reasonable doubt + principle of precaution. I'm fine with that. What we cannot do is make this presumption and pretend that we are still within the realms of serious science or philosophy. The technical name for this presumption is emergentism, that consciousness somehow arises from the interactions of matter. I believe that the reason why this hypothesis is so popular, and even confused with scientific fact, is that it is the less weird. Avoiding weirdness is a common pitfall in the history of science, it leads to temporary dead-ends.

hopler 8y ago
It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness. I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific. Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or whatever around the time of the Big Bang.
- xamuel 8y ago
  Science does not support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle, Newton and Einstein.)
  - vinceguidry 8y ago
    All you're saying here is that science isn't philosophy.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie paradoxes are logically incoherent. I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room. They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course the problem is not simplistic. The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.
    - xamuel 8y ago
      Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific one. If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic. If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall", that's science. Stop confusing the two. Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet when we run the experiment we see a different result.
      - simonh 8y ago
        Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only philosophy when I do? I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a philosophical question.
cco 8y ago
Maybe I'm confusing something, does your comment imply that consciousness is not the result of matter interacting with other matter?

garmaine 8y ago

You’re missing the point. Most people intuitively define consciousness to include not just self image, but the processing related to it—having wants and desires, and the self-conscious reasoning about them. Having self image is only the first, small step.

visarga 8y ago
Even insects have something like wants and desires - let's call them values. They are necessary in order to assure their survival. Values are derived from reward signals, which are selected by evolution. Values guide actions, and actions protect life and reproduction.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Their nervous systems are not self reflective about them, however, and they certainly don’t perform abstract meta-level reasoning about those wants and desires. Impulse-response is not consciousness, even if involves a simple reflective model of self image.
  - visarga 8y ago
    I agree they are very different and much more limited, but at the same time I think you and I might have different definitions for consciousness. I define consciousness as that process which protects the body by adapting to external conditions, and endeavours to make offspring by adapting to the mating opportunities. It's a general definition based on things that are concrete and measurable, unlike many others. Consciousness is basically protecting the genes. It's how genes found a way to exist at large scale.

digitaltrees 8y ago

There is a different way to look at it. If you accept that you meet the definition of consciousness, and can derive a definition of what characteristics you possess that would satisfy the definition for another bein to be similarly conscious to you then that definition is at least rational. True, we may not be able to apply that definition to specific humans, robots, or other beings but the definition is a rational measure of the answer. For me consciousness is an emergent property of language that possesses the concept of a self as opposed the the external world. Other things like sensory perception or a concept of a body are better described as awareness. This distinction allows us to say that a cockroach or robot are aware but not conscious because they can respond to their environment but not self reflect on that data as they have no narrative structures to use.

andai 8y ago
By this definition, is consciousness is a subset of awareness? If the aforementioned robot (aware but not conscious) were upgraded with symbol processing (and especially the self-symbol), would it then meet the criteria for consciousness?
- digitaltrees 8y ago
  Not necessarily a subset. I could imagine a self reflective consciousness that doesn’t experience a lot of sensory stimulus.