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It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming

It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming that consciousness is unique to humans seems like quite a high-horse proposition for us to make about our species. The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes all the way down, i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with. Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I think that you probably cut pretty close to the crux of the matter right there at the end. It's a popular viewpoint because, from an ethical perspective, it's extremely convenient to hold. It limits your exposure to the sorts of tricky and uncomfortable questions that got me kicked out of Sunday school at a young age.
- mercer 8y ago
  I mean, really, if we contemporary humans are still very capable of considering other humans less-than, it's no surprise that we're capable of much worse concerning animals.
  - jdironman 8y ago
    But, it does seem that as a whole we are getting better.
hirundo 8y ago
> It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? It's known as motivated reasoning. Specimens of our species are not known for disinterested rationality. We have deep interests in doing things to animals that animal cognition could make more unpleasant or expensive. An ancestor without this talent would have been less likely to become an ancestor. Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother. You'd still do it if you were hungry enough but would pay a greater price.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  Though, interestingly, animism seems to be more popular among cultures that live closer to the "I need to put this spear into this boar" end of the lifestyle spectrum. Meanwhile Rene Descartes, who probably wouldn't have had much trouble surviving as a vegetarian, was the one who was doing. . . interesting. . . things to dogs in order to prove a point. Not sure exactly what that implies, but it would seem to suggest that it's hard to wrap these sorts things up with a bow.
  - hirundo 8y ago
    True, in a hunter-gatherer recognition of animal cognition would improve their chances of success. "I'm getting thirsty, maybe the boar is too, let's lay for it near the water hole." Maybe labeling it "other" is enough without labeling it "inferior".
    - ddingus 8y ago
      Bingo. There is also the simple, brutal reality of the food chain. Being most aware and capable, also means seeing all of that, where the lesser beings are, and treating the world with respect. Should anyway. Our nature easily demonstrates otherwise. Animals are a lot like us. Simpler mostly.
      - henriquemaia 8y ago
mannykannot 8y ago
'Consciousness', as a word denoting a concept, has at least two problems: firstly, it means different things to different people and in different circumstances; secondly, it is often assumed to be a binary attribute, rather than a continuum.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  These two issues can, and do, apply to a raft of words. This hasn’t stopped anyone, on the whole, from investigating and debating the problems and concepts of the fields.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    That is true, but it also often leads to an increase in unproductive noise and diversion, such as the suggestion that there is a definition of consciousness that rocks can meet.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cs02rm0 8y ago
  I once read something about flies exhibiting signs of consciousness. It made some sense to me; you try and swat them, they fly off in a direction of their choosing. It crossed my mind recently in respect to AI consciousness, that all animals appear to be conscious at least to an extent - there aren't any that appear to be zombies I can think of, maybe they all got killed off. It made me wonder if consciousness as we know it, rather than requiring some step change for AI, is simply an inevitable outcome of sufficient processing, information storage, evolution and maybe some other factors. And therefore very much a continuum. IDK.
  - mannykannot 8y ago
    Indeed - you only have to watch infants grow up to see them moving through the continuum, and something analogous probably happened in the evolution of our various hominin ancestors. In the former case, and probably the latter, there is a definite acceleration when they begin to appreciate the power of language.
leftyted 8y ago
The main reason we have often assumed that animals lack consciousness is that animals appear to lack language. And language is an integral part of how humans think. How would you "think" without language? It's not clear. Perhaps animals think without language and experience a state that could be termed consciousness despite not having language. Sure, why not? But my point is that there is at least some grounds for this "high-horse proposition" because there is at least one important dimension along which humans differ from all other known animals.
- ianai 8y ago
  So, in music there’s the concept of vocalization. Literally conveying emotion without formed words or formal specifics. Anecdotally, I definitely am thinking first and later applying words to the underlying concept. It takes practice, but it is possible to introduce a lag, of sorts. Further, the best hunters, I’ve heard, are the most empathic. All the better to manipulate prey. Even more, my cat is very expressive despite not having English. I can even identify patterns in his speech that clearly repeat for similar reasons. I spook him, there’s a meow for that. He’s hungry, there’s a meow for that. He’s tried and I’ve ignored 2 attempts of his to ask me for something and he’s pathetically resigned to his fate, there’s a meow for that. (Gets me every time)
- panic 8y ago
  Say you're drawing a picture, paying attention to what looks good or not and making small corrections. You're thinking in terms of the picture, not in terms of a language. Say you're playing basketball. You're thinking in terms of the ball, the net, the other players, and so on, not thinking in terms of a language. I can imagine that (for example) a bird building its nest finds itself in a similar situation. It's thinking in terms of the nest -- what shaped sticks to gather and where to place them -- even though it doesn't have any capacity for language.
  - goldenkey 8y ago
    Birds have a pretty large capacity for language. It may even be more complex than ours especially in corvids. We don't know enough.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
> since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain Only if approached from a materialist perspective. The thing about consciousness -- which is to say the experience of being that people believe separates them from, say, a brick -- is that it can only be verified subjectively. I have consciousness because I experience it, I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.
- door5 8y ago
  I think this is a good point. It's not popular in the ultra-secular tech world, but materialism is not necessarily the only explanation of consciousness, there is very serious non-materialist philosophy. Personally I think Materialism is incoherent -- Daniel Dennett is sort of its logical extension: he argues that consciousness is a myth, a "folk psychology" that doesn't exist, since only material things exist. So we falsely believe that we are conscious. This seems patently absurd to me, but I'm not sure what the right answer is.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human. The materialist(?) view that consciousness is entirely contained within the "material things" seems pretty clean and consistent. If you're experiencing consciousness, and I seem to be experiencing consciousness, and our brains - to the best we can tell - are essentially the same "sufficiently complicated automatons", then you can assume I'm experiencing consciousness too.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    The problem with that view is that it assumes consciousness is correlated with mind. It may seem reasonable that, since I have consciousness and a mind, and you have a mind, I can assume you have consciousness, but there is no way to prove this. Does someone with Down Syndrome, who has a less functional mind than you or I, correspondingly have less consciousness? Perhaps, but we have no way of knowing.
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
> responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli I still think I'm conscious, but this “Diagram of All Space and Time” by Carl Sagan suggests the stimuli available to us is small, alarmingly small, and perhaps nothing to boast about really. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357) One comment says, "What humans can directly experience is of course small compared to the “all time” and “all space” and it would be invisible without the logaritmic scales used." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841)
xamuel 8y ago
One should err on the side of caution and assume consciousness for sake of ethical decision-making, whenever possible. That said, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume everything has consciousness just because you do. We are not all alike. You might have had a fever when you were young, and your consciousness emerged because of that fever. And people who didn't have that fever, don't have consciousness. A pretty silly possibility, but no sillier than "consciousness emerges from sufficiently many interacting neurons". Right now we basically have no clue, and it's arrogant to pretend otherwise. To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children.
- leetcrew 8y ago
  > To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children. this is not necessarily as hard of a moral conundrum as it seems. some people draw a distinction between deliberately killing a being that can survive on its own and withdrawing support that a being requires to live. this is somewhat analogous to the trolley problem: is it worse to kill than to allow to die?
  - xamuel 8y ago
    Thanks, when you put it that way, it's not as clear-cut as I thought.
    - get_off_my_lawn 8y ago
      Isn't it, though? By that same logic, I can walk into a hospital, go to someone on life support who can't currently "survive on their own", and unplug their systems, thus "withdrawing the support they require to live". If they die, is it really any different from killing them any other way? To make the analogy even more accurate, let's say you are in a coma and will come out of it in 9 months. You can't survive without support now, but we know for a fact that you will come out of the coma after the 9 months have passed and will then be able to do so. Is it fine for me to shut down your life support half way through?
hannasanarion 8y ago
Panpsychism is pretty clearly not true even in animals. Many insect minds seem to act like finite state machines, and some can even be forced into an infinite loop, like the golden digger wasp, which will repeat the same three actions forever if you move its prey as it checks its nest for invaders: https://youtu.be/YNvi_j2z96w https://youtu.be/YNvi_j2z96w
- nikkwong 8y ago
  Haha this is so interesting. Is this a phenomenology that has been studied or has been classified? I assume the wasp will continue infinitely, at least, until some other stimuli takes greater precedence, like getting tired for example. I don't know if I personally believe this is a good argument against panpsychism. The wasp may have a fractionally sized working memory in comparison to ours, yet still be conscious. I find it unlikely that panpsychism is realistic; rocks don't have nervous systems, for example, so the likelihood of them having the sensory peripherals necessary for creating experiences is unlikely in my perspective. As far as the wasp goes, I'm probably agnostic as to the answer to that.
- ZeroFries 8y ago
  This doesn't prove that there's nothing that it's like to be an insect. Consciousness doesn't guarantee any kind of external behavior.
- __MatrixMan__ 8y ago
  If the panpsychist believes that a rock experiences consciousness, then I doubt a particularly predictable insect would be especially persuasive against his position.
nicoburns 8y ago
A lot of it might be Christianity and related religions. The bible teaches that people have spirits that are part of God, which animals do not have. Other cultures with different spiritual beliefs often much more commonly attribute more complex thoughts and feelings to non-human animals...
skookumchuck 8y ago
My cat is clearly conscious. Dumb, but conscious.
fouc 8y ago
>our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain I'd loosen up that and say 'neuron-like structures' instead of brain.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I'd ignore the neurons and focus on the information processing aspect. There's nothing we know so far suggesting that it's not possible to replicate all the computations the brain is doing in a non-neural, or even "non-material" structure. (Non-material in the sense where water flowing downhill vs. CPU computing gradient descent is material vs. non-material computation.)
gammateam 8y ago
There is also the need to understand the underlying goal of cells. Like is it simply "throw enough neurons in a substance and they start questioning the universe", or what?
cgriswald 8y ago
I’m not sure emergent phenomena and “rocks are conscious” are the only two options. You can imagine, for instance, an underlying and fundamental “ether” or force of consciousness which, by chance and evolution, animal brains are somehow able to exploit. Distinguishing it from an emergent phenomena would be difficult but I don’t think impossible.
visarga 8y ago
> The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. I don't think it goes 'all the way down'. In order to have consciousness we need a few ingredients: one of them is learning, another is having a task to accomplish - like finding food and fending predators. Another important characteristic is evolution and its requirement, self replication - without evolution there is no way to get to consciousness. That would restrict the places where it can apply, but notably it can apply to AI agents living in virtual worlds just as well as it applies to humans and animals. In my view consciousness is that which protects the genes and the body (life and procreation). In the case of AI agents, genes could be related to architecture and hyper-parameters, and procreation could be an evolutionary algorithm. It's a simple and concrete definition which also asserts a purpose - the purpose of consciousness is to exist and to multiply.

bunderbunder 8y ago

I think that you probably cut pretty close to the crux of the matter right there at the end. It's a popular viewpoint because, from an ethical perspective, it's extremely convenient to hold. It limits your exposure to the sorts of tricky and uncomfortable questions that got me kicked out of Sunday school at a young age.

mercer 8y ago
I mean, really, if we contemporary humans are still very capable of considering other humans less-than, it's no surprise that we're capable of much worse concerning animals.
- jdironman 8y ago
  But, it does seem that as a whole we are getting better.

hirundo 8y ago

> It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? It's known as motivated reasoning. Specimens of our species are not known for disinterested rationality. We have deep interests in doing things to animals that animal cognition could make more unpleasant or expensive. An ancestor without this talent would have been less likely to become an ancestor. Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother. You'd still do it if you were hungry enough but would pay a greater price.

bunderbunder 8y ago
Though, interestingly, animism seems to be more popular among cultures that live closer to the "I need to put this spear into this boar" end of the lifestyle spectrum. Meanwhile Rene Descartes, who probably wouldn't have had much trouble surviving as a vegetarian, was the one who was doing. . . interesting. . . things to dogs in order to prove a point. Not sure exactly what that implies, but it would seem to suggest that it's hard to wrap these sorts things up with a bow.
- hirundo 8y ago
  True, in a hunter-gatherer recognition of animal cognition would improve their chances of success. "I'm getting thirsty, maybe the boar is too, let's lay for it near the water hole." Maybe labeling it "other" is enough without labeling it "inferior".
  - ddingus 8y ago
    Bingo. There is also the simple, brutal reality of the food chain. Being most aware and capable, also means seeing all of that, where the lesser beings are, and treating the world with respect. Should anyway. Our nature easily demonstrates otherwise. Animals are a lot like us. Simpler mostly.
    - henriquemaia 8y ago

mannykannot 8y ago

'Consciousness', as a word denoting a concept, has at least two problems: firstly, it means different things to different people and in different circumstances; secondly, it is often assumed to be a binary attribute, rather than a continuum.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
These two issues can, and do, apply to a raft of words. This hasn’t stopped anyone, on the whole, from investigating and debating the problems and concepts of the fields.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  That is true, but it also often leads to an increase in unproductive noise and diversion, such as the suggestion that there is a definition of consciousness that rocks can meet.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cs02rm0 8y ago
I once read something about flies exhibiting signs of consciousness. It made some sense to me; you try and swat them, they fly off in a direction of their choosing. It crossed my mind recently in respect to AI consciousness, that all animals appear to be conscious at least to an extent - there aren't any that appear to be zombies I can think of, maybe they all got killed off. It made me wonder if consciousness as we know it, rather than requiring some step change for AI, is simply an inevitable outcome of sufficient processing, information storage, evolution and maybe some other factors. And therefore very much a continuum. IDK.
- mannykannot 8y ago
  Indeed - you only have to watch infants grow up to see them moving through the continuum, and something analogous probably happened in the evolution of our various hominin ancestors. In the former case, and probably the latter, there is a definite acceleration when they begin to appreciate the power of language.

leftyted 8y ago

The main reason we have often assumed that animals lack consciousness is that animals appear to lack language. And language is an integral part of how humans think. How would you "think" without language? It's not clear. Perhaps animals think without language and experience a state that could be termed consciousness despite not having language. Sure, why not? But my point is that there is at least some grounds for this "high-horse proposition" because there is at least one important dimension along which humans differ from all other known animals.

ianai 8y ago
So, in music there’s the concept of vocalization. Literally conveying emotion without formed words or formal specifics. Anecdotally, I definitely am thinking first and later applying words to the underlying concept. It takes practice, but it is possible to introduce a lag, of sorts. Further, the best hunters, I’ve heard, are the most empathic. All the better to manipulate prey. Even more, my cat is very expressive despite not having English. I can even identify patterns in his speech that clearly repeat for similar reasons. I spook him, there’s a meow for that. He’s hungry, there’s a meow for that. He’s tried and I’ve ignored 2 attempts of his to ask me for something and he’s pathetically resigned to his fate, there’s a meow for that. (Gets me every time)
panic 8y ago
Say you're drawing a picture, paying attention to what looks good or not and making small corrections. You're thinking in terms of the picture, not in terms of a language. Say you're playing basketball. You're thinking in terms of the ball, the net, the other players, and so on, not thinking in terms of a language. I can imagine that (for example) a bird building its nest finds itself in a similar situation. It's thinking in terms of the nest -- what shaped sticks to gather and where to place them -- even though it doesn't have any capacity for language.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  Birds have a pretty large capacity for language. It may even be more complex than ours especially in corvids. We don't know enough.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

> since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain Only if approached from a materialist perspective. The thing about consciousness -- which is to say the experience of being that people believe separates them from, say, a brick -- is that it can only be verified subjectively. I have consciousness because I experience it, I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.

door5 8y ago
I think this is a good point. It's not popular in the ultra-secular tech world, but materialism is not necessarily the only explanation of consciousness, there is very serious non-materialist philosophy. Personally I think Materialism is incoherent -- Daniel Dennett is sort of its logical extension: he argues that consciousness is a myth, a "folk psychology" that doesn't exist, since only material things exist. So we falsely believe that we are conscious. This seems patently absurd to me, but I'm not sure what the right answer is.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human. The materialist(?) view that consciousness is entirely contained within the "material things" seems pretty clean and consistent. If you're experiencing consciousness, and I seem to be experiencing consciousness, and our brains - to the best we can tell - are essentially the same "sufficiently complicated automatons", then you can assume I'm experiencing consciousness too.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  The problem with that view is that it assumes consciousness is correlated with mind. It may seem reasonable that, since I have consciousness and a mind, and you have a mind, I can assume you have consciousness, but there is no way to prove this. Does someone with Down Syndrome, who has a less functional mind than you or I, correspondingly have less consciousness? Perhaps, but we have no way of knowing.

0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago

> responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli I still think I'm conscious, but this “Diagram of All Space and Time” by Carl Sagan suggests the stimuli available to us is small, alarmingly small, and perhaps nothing to boast about really. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357) One comment says, "What humans can directly experience is of course small compared to the “all time” and “all space” and it would be invisible without the logaritmic scales used." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841)

xamuel 8y ago

One should err on the side of caution and assume consciousness for sake of ethical decision-making, whenever possible. That said, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume everything has consciousness just because you do. We are not all alike. You might have had a fever when you were young, and your consciousness emerged because of that fever. And people who didn't have that fever, don't have consciousness. A pretty silly possibility, but no sillier than "consciousness emerges from sufficiently many interacting neurons". Right now we basically have no clue, and it's arrogant to pretend otherwise. To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children.

leetcrew 8y ago
> To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children. this is not necessarily as hard of a moral conundrum as it seems. some people draw a distinction between deliberately killing a being that can survive on its own and withdrawing support that a being requires to live. this is somewhat analogous to the trolley problem: is it worse to kill than to allow to die?
- xamuel 8y ago
  Thanks, when you put it that way, it's not as clear-cut as I thought.
  - get_off_my_lawn 8y ago
    Isn't it, though? By that same logic, I can walk into a hospital, go to someone on life support who can't currently "survive on their own", and unplug their systems, thus "withdrawing the support they require to live". If they die, is it really any different from killing them any other way? To make the analogy even more accurate, let's say you are in a coma and will come out of it in 9 months. You can't survive without support now, but we know for a fact that you will come out of the coma after the 9 months have passed and will then be able to do so. Is it fine for me to shut down your life support half way through?

hannasanarion 8y ago

Panpsychism is pretty clearly not true even in animals. Many insect minds seem to act like finite state machines, and some can even be forced into an infinite loop, like the golden digger wasp, which will repeat the same three actions forever if you move its prey as it checks its nest for invaders: https://youtu.be/YNvi_j2z96w https://youtu.be/YNvi_j2z96w

nikkwong 8y ago
Haha this is so interesting. Is this a phenomenology that has been studied or has been classified? I assume the wasp will continue infinitely, at least, until some other stimuli takes greater precedence, like getting tired for example. I don't know if I personally believe this is a good argument against panpsychism. The wasp may have a fractionally sized working memory in comparison to ours, yet still be conscious. I find it unlikely that panpsychism is realistic; rocks don't have nervous systems, for example, so the likelihood of them having the sensory peripherals necessary for creating experiences is unlikely in my perspective. As far as the wasp goes, I'm probably agnostic as to the answer to that.
ZeroFries 8y ago
This doesn't prove that there's nothing that it's like to be an insect. Consciousness doesn't guarantee any kind of external behavior.
__MatrixMan__ 8y ago
If the panpsychist believes that a rock experiences consciousness, then I doubt a particularly predictable insect would be especially persuasive against his position.

nicoburns 8y ago

A lot of it might be Christianity and related religions. The bible teaches that people have spirits that are part of God, which animals do not have. Other cultures with different spiritual beliefs often much more commonly attribute more complex thoughts and feelings to non-human animals...

skookumchuck 8y ago

My cat is clearly conscious. Dumb, but conscious.

fouc 8y ago

>our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain I'd loosen up that and say 'neuron-like structures' instead of brain.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I'd ignore the neurons and focus on the information processing aspect. There's nothing we know so far suggesting that it's not possible to replicate all the computations the brain is doing in a non-neural, or even "non-material" structure. (Non-material in the sense where water flowing downhill vs. CPU computing gradient descent is material vs. non-material computation.)

gammateam 8y ago

There is also the need to understand the underlying goal of cells. Like is it simply "throw enough neurons in a substance and they start questioning the universe", or what?

cgriswald 8y ago

I’m not sure emergent phenomena and “rocks are conscious” are the only two options. You can imagine, for instance, an underlying and fundamental “ether” or force of consciousness which, by chance and evolution, animal brains are somehow able to exploit. Distinguishing it from an emergent phenomena would be difficult but I don’t think impossible.

visarga 8y ago

> The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. I don't think it goes 'all the way down'. In order to have consciousness we need a few ingredients: one of them is learning, another is having a task to accomplish - like finding food and fending predators. Another important characteristic is evolution and its requirement, self replication - without evolution there is no way to get to consciousness. That would restrict the places where it can apply, but notably it can apply to AI agents living in virtual worlds just as well as it applies to humans and animals. In my view consciousness is that which protects the genes and the body (life and procreation). In the case of AI agents, genes could be related to architecture and hyper-parameters, and procreation could be an evolutionary algorithm. It's a simple and concrete definition which also asserts a purpose - the purpose of consciousness is to exist and to multiply.