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Is this distinction necessary or strictly proven? They seem pretty linked in my personal experience. (All the times I'm not conscious, like when I'm sleeping, I

Is this distinction necessary or strictly proven? They seem pretty linked in my personal experience. (All the times I'm not conscious, like when I'm sleeping, I'm not self-aware, and vice-versa. Intuitively it seems like anything that might put me into a semi-conscious state would be considered as also putting me into a semi-self-aware state and vice-versa.) The page lists several disorders related to self-awareness, but I don't think any of them represent anything like "0% self-awareness yet 100% consciousness" which would have more strongly implied that they may be different things. The page lists several types of self-awareness, including "introspective self-awareness". Maybe what we call consciousness is just the internal experience of something with introspective self-awareness. This does raise the question of what "internal experience" is though. I think "internal experience" is what some people mean by "consciousness", especially when they say things like "maybe everything has consciousness including rocks or random grids of transistors". I think there exists some sense of "what it is like to be a rock", but it's an utterly empty experience without memory, perception, personality, emotions, or the feeling of weighing choices; something very close to the "null experience", that is an experience in the same sense that zero or a number utterly close to zero is still a number. The internal experience of a random grid of transistors only just barely starts to touch a sliver of what a human's internal experience consists of. The internal experience of a worm starts to have a few recognizable qualities (proprioception, the drive to maintain personal needs), but it still lacks many large aspects of a human's internal experience. (Maybe a thermostat with sufficiently rich inputs, output control, world model, and juggled priorities has an internal experience similar to a worm.) Large animals tend to have more elements of awareness (including memory, social awareness, and some introspective awareness) that bring their internal experience closer to having what feels like the necessary elements to human consciousness.

hoseja 6y ago
I'd say you're off. I'd describe the experience of the worm much in the same way you're describing the experience of a rock, just a couple biochemical circuits. And the experience of the rock would be even more atomically null to compensate.
- AgentME 6y ago
  I'm not sure we're in disagreement: I agree that a rock's experience is practically null (maybe the fact that its atoms are connected and may be pushed and pulled together makes up the tiniest grain of internal experience), and that a worm's experience is still a world apart from ours and probably much closer to a rock than us. If we were to score an experience on how human-like it is, I'd expect the various elements I named to each refer to exponential or greater increases in score. Comparing the depth of a worm's experience to a human's would be like comparing the volume of a nearly 1-dimensional line segment to the volume of a many-dimensional hyperobject. Our brains are just tons of biochemical circuits working very mechanistically, with many interesting feedback loops going on that make up our internal experience. A worm's brain has a small and probably countable number of feedback loops going on that I assume make up its tiny internal experience.

hoseja 6y ago

I'd say you're off. I'd describe the experience of the worm much in the same way you're describing the experience of a rock, just a couple biochemical circuits. And the experience of the rock would be even more atomically null to compensate.

AgentME 6y ago
I'm not sure we're in disagreement: I agree that a rock's experience is practically null (maybe the fact that its atoms are connected and may be pushed and pulled together makes up the tiniest grain of internal experience), and that a worm's experience is still a world apart from ours and probably much closer to a rock than us. If we were to score an experience on how human-like it is, I'd expect the various elements I named to each refer to exponential or greater increases in score. Comparing the depth of a worm's experience to a human's would be like comparing the volume of a nearly 1-dimensional line segment to the volume of a many-dimensional hyperobject. Our brains are just tons of biochemical circuits working very mechanistically, with many interesting feedback loops going on that make up our internal experience. A worm's brain has a small and probably countable number of feedback loops going on that I assume make up its tiny internal experience.