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> An octopus, with its richly complex behavior and its large eyes filled with focused attention, is a far more compelling inkblot test, so to speak, triggering

• nessunodoro 7y ago
  I came here to quote the ink blot metaphor as well. It raises a great question, and earns it thoroughly I think: Consciousness may be sensed before proven. What is the basis of that feeling, and is it worthy of scie tific consideration? Personally I think it's a brilliant metaphor. What do we see in an ink blot? What do we see in any symmetries?
• missosoup 7y ago
  Relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie The answer seems to lie in qualia. But by definition that is something that one cannot authentically communicate. And the notion of qualia itself is increasingly convergent with DNN latent space. Is the redness of red or the warmth of sunlight just a vector in n-dimensional latent space somewhere in our brain computers? Maybe we're not really conscious.
  • gbjw 7y ago
    What does this even mean? How can we not be 'really' conscious? How can I deny my own 'qualia'? I think you cannot explain subjective experience as a vector in latent space because it transcends any space in which you 'project' it in. My subjective experience is that which experiences that latent space, not identical to it.
• plutonorm 7y ago
  I believe it's fundamentally impossible to test for consciousness. You can't know if it feels like something to be any other thing but yourself. The domain of scientific knowledge is completely cut off from subjective experience. Even if the octopus could speak and told us in English "I feel therefore I am" we could not know for certain that it produced those words having a conscious understanding of what something feels like. Feeling is fundamentally in a different class of thing from those things which the scientific world can explore. And that to me, is absolutely bizarre. What does that mean? How can that possibly be true? Is it definitely true? What on earth is "feeling"?! What is qualia. It's the deepest question and I think probably holds the key to really understanding why the univers exists.
  • the8472 7y ago
    I would argue it's moot to discuss consciousness unless someone prefaces the discussion with a specific definition, preferably a scientific one and not some woo. Philosophical consciousness suffers from too many issues for day to day discussion, some previous arguments I made in this direction before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20501688
    • plutonorm 7y ago
      Yup I agree, the hard problem of consciousness should be deliberately excluded from discussions on various topics, particularly AI. It's not useful, its fascinating, but it's irrelevant and distracting for most purposes.
  • blotter_paper 7y ago
    It's not even clear to me that consciousness is "real" at the level of base reality, but I do have a proposed test: link yourself up to an octopus using the same BMI setups that are used to allow two rats to share experiences and memories. If you start experiencing/remembering the life of an octopus, the brain on the other side of those wires is almost certainly conscious. The inverse is not true, of course; we could simply fail to grasp the differences between the brains of cephalopods and mammals, resulting in a bad connection to a perfectly fine brain. (I'm more than 99% sure that octopuses experience the world, but I think this test can be generalised to simpler life forms in principle.)
• throwaway_law 7y ago
  >There really isn't a good "line on the sand" to distinguish who/what is conscious and who isn't for anything from humans to octopuses to microwaves to computer programs. I agree, but one step further I don't think we even have a base line definition for what consciousness really is, so how could we start defining what is and what isn't?
  • shrimp_emoji 7y ago
    We can't. Ever. Even with each other, we only assume. I can only see one ultimate conclusion: consciousness is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. (Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter.) :D
    • throwaway_law 7y ago
      >Then, a corollary: personhood is a silly meme and doesn't really matter. The Supreme Court beat you to it and extended personhood to corporations. No one ever accused a corporation of being conscious.
• guest2143 7y ago
  my line in the sand is play. Does this creature play?
• coldtea 7y ago
  >The experts who study octopuses risk becoming the least reliable observers on this point, because they are the ones most likely to be entranced by these wonderful creatures. That sounds like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" line of reasoning though... I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. They might not have abstract concepts and higher reasoning, but they could very well have "subjective awareness"... >Conciousness debates are so fundamental yet so moot: One can only attribute conciousness based on observing behavior. Well, that's for now. If we find the exact mechanism and complexity threshold required for consciousness (e.g. by experiment with simulations and artificial brains and brain modeling), we might be able to test and measure for it directly (e.g. with brain activity scanning).
  • likpok 7y ago
    > I'd inverse the usual advice about not anthropomorphizing and ask "why not anthropomorphize"? Most creatures, especially the more advanced ones, are pretty close to us. Some, we literally descended from not very long ago, evolution-wise. This is very much not true of octopuses, who diverged from us somewhere just after the development of bilateralism.
  • olooney 7y ago
    > why not anthropomorphize? It would be easy to be flippant about this suggestion and reply something like "Because we're doing science, not making Disney cartoons?" But the issue is not so black and white. I once saw a lecture by Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow) where he described why he talks about "System 1" and "System 2" as if they were real things (when of course there is no part of the brain you could point to and label as either) and his argument was that he was intentionally making use of a feature of the human mind which allows it to think quickly and reliably about "agents," (to use his exact word.) In other words, he is intentionally anthropomorphizing abstract systems to make it easier to attribute certain characteristics to it. There's some evidence this works in multiple contexts. First, we have the Wason selection task where performance improves remarkably when a problem is translated from an abstract logic question to a question about checking IDs at a bar. Humans are good at thinking about rule enforcement in a social context, and terrible about thinking about abstract logic. Second, we have various mnemonic techniques which associate the things to be memorized (cards, digits of pi, whatever) with people (often celebrities) and then encode information (say, a hundred people each representing two digits) by telling stories about the people. "Einstein and Mr. Rogers baked pies for Lady Gaga" is much easier to remember than "314159". If the human brain is wired to be good at thinking about other humans, if we can therefore co-opt more of our brain matter to work on a problem, why isn't that a good thing? After all, Popper would say that as long as the theories make falsifiable predictions, who cares where they come from? And shouldn't we be as open minded and creative as possible during the hypothesis generation phase of science, as Feyerabend argued in Against Method? If Kepler's mystic beliefs about numbers could lead him to groundbreaking work in astronomy, who are we to deny any scientist any aspect of their full mental powers? And yet reliance on intuitive models often lead to bias, blind spots, and unwarranted assumptions. We have to remember that these specialized aspects of our brains evolved to solve very specialized problems in a particular environment, and the further we get from those traditional environments the worse they perform. Geometric intuition, developed by apes for a 3D world on the scale of meters was extremely useful aid when bootstrapping mathematics when it first allowed us to grasp plane geometry intuitively, but it became a hindrance as we investigated very small, very large, very fast, or very massive objects. Anthropomorphic models may allow to quickly generate new ideas, but we must always be willing to cast aside such intuitions as our theories develop. So, I would say that if we currently are at a loss for theories that fit the available data on octopuses, we should place no restrictions on what theories we consider; and if anthropomorphic thinking is one way of generating new hypotheses, than so much the better: toss them on the pile with the others and test them all. But if lessons from the history of science hold true, it is likely that we shall soon have to abandon these early theories (despite the siren call of their intuitive appeal) in favor of more objective, more abstract, and less intuitive concepts that nevertheless explain the facts more thoroughly and more deeply.
• clairity 7y ago
  you seem to be biased toward human exceptionalism, probably as a way to take the skeptical position. but the proper skeptical position would be to assume consciousness in the absence of definitive proof, since animals are observably much more similar than different (compared to a microwave or even a plant).
• efa 7y ago
  Experts who spend tons of time with animals (like in zoos) also assume animals feel affection for their handlers. This may be the case for some animals but I've seen it said for animals like snakes. A snake doesn't have any concept of love/affection (especially for a human).
  • z3phyr 7y ago
    I dont know about snakes, but affection is absolutely visible among the elephants, as I saw them often during my childhood. Baby elephants act a lot like toddlers; curios, playful, affectionate towards things they like, not caring about other things, needing their mother (or any female adult in case of elephants) They can't read and write but they do react "emotionally"
    • ufmace 7y ago
      I have read that all mammals seem to share some of the same emotional patterns and ability to relate to each other. Snakes and other reptiles, I have heard, don't have any of these traits and have no capability to feel any emotions at all. Supposedly, your pet snake that you care for every day, will never see you as a friend, just a warm thing in its environment, and bigger ones will happily try to eat you anytime they feel hungry. You're supposed to feed them often enough that they don't feel hungry and so aren't a threat to any humans, including children or other household pets.
      • jacobush 7y ago
        But maybe even a snake could experience a rudimentary kind of “joy” based in a conditioning - the handler always bringing food, warmth and other attention. Maybe it on some very primitive level “appreciates” the thing in it’s environment?
        • ufmace 7y ago
          Maybe? I'm not an animal behavior expert or anything. But I do know that: Reptiles are not social/herding animals Many handlers report that a hungry snake will be happy to eat anything that looks edible, including you, your kid, your dog, etc. Humans do have a tendency to anthropomorphize, or attribute human emotions to things that absolutely cannot feel them, including machines, insects, plants, rocks, etc. Knowing that, I wouldn't trust the assumption that it must feel something. Animals, especially non-mammals, are near-alien in how their behavior may differ from what we're used to. Ignoring the advice of experts on how they actually behave is a good way to get killed.
• soulofmischief 7y ago
  I've owned a lot of very moody animals of all kinds in my past which make a strong case for subjective experience in advanced lifeforms. If you disregard those external phenomena as a simple cause-and-effect relationship without subjective experience, you could easily do the same for human beings. Most of my goals in life can be traced back to the need for food, shelter, reproduction, and lack of stress. IMO emotional capacitance is one of the leading contributors to the kind of consciousness that we feel, but is not a prerequisite for consciousness in general. It just depends on what you consider consciousness. Some people think that all orchestrated matter has a proportional level of "consciousness" related to its thermodynamic complexity arising from quantum phenomena, but without the ability to "feel" (emotional circuitry) and "think" (logical circuitry) you're hard pressed to tell me a rock is alive in any sense of the word. But an octopus? C'mon, they're contenders for #2 intelligence on the planet. If anyone has subjective experience, it's them.
• deleted 7y ago
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