9 ms·

The Consciousness of Invertebrates

96 points by quercusa 5y ago

geophile 5y ago
This is all fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from this article, but it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly. It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the latter.
- quercusa 5y ago
  The novel Blindsight, by Peter Watts, explores exactly your quandary. Highly recommended.
  - ilikecode 5y ago
    Thanks for that. It's exactly what I've been looking for. My mind has been on this whole topic for the last year. Even the name is a big hint I'll like it as blindsight is fascinating.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Strongly seconding the recommendation. You'll probably also like the references to scientific studies included at the end of the book. The book has a sequel, Echopraxia, which I also recommend. It's a novel based around the argument that consciousness is not only unnecessary, it's actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
    - kanzenryu2 5y ago
      Don't be put off by the bit about vampires.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  > It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the latter. nor the latter implying the former :D
- gerbilly 5y ago
  The only reason we think animals are stupid automatons is because in our culture we don't observe them very closely. Like the article says, every time we bother to look we are _surrpised_ to find abilities in all sorts of animals. Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious, that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and intelligent. My opinion: Intelligence is not rare, we are surrounded by it. Animals communicate with each other all day in say a forest, but we just hear it as random noises because we've stopped listening hundreds of years ago.
  - nabla9 5y ago
    Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe. With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons. Usually when observing and experimenting animals closely, especially insects, they are just state machines. Very complex sequences are often executed from start to finish blindly. You can reveal how ants, bees or flies are automatons by making little changes to their environment. They do the sequence from start to finish. If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start.
    - gerbilly 5y ago
      > by making little changes to their environment. [...] If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start. Who says we do any different? Also there's a huge difference between proving something scientifically, and 'knowing' something. It is a hugely useful distinction, but science operates in it's own domain. To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism. Scientifically, even if we met face to face, you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious. It's just a bias that we consider ourselves to be these things and not other animals.
      - nabla9 5y ago
- callesgg 5y ago
  Consciousness being something like having thought processes that model other thought processes. Finding a hole in a piece of plastic does not require that. Or so it seams to me.
  - kbelder 5y ago
    Yeah, I think it has something to do with a brain that has enough complexity that it can begin to model itself and others' brains, allowing self reflection. A dog can think, I think, but I don't think it can think about its own thoughts. But this may be unknowable.
  - incompatible 5y ago
    It seems to be possible to be in a conscious state without consciously thinking about anything at all. Presumably consciousness is created by a subconscious process. I can't say much more than that it's possible for information-processing systems (such as the human brain) to be conscious. My guess is that consciousness is a non-physical, emergent property, that only exists while a certain component of the information processing system is operating in a particular way.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly It seems to consider them to be the same thing. Which is a common viewpoint. Basically, the idea appears to be that, in order to display all those intelligent behaviors, the animal must be aware of them just as we are (or think we are) aware of what we're doing when we display such behaviors. Of course my parenthetical qualifier there is the key point: actually, we humans are often not aware of what we're doing when we display behaviors that, to an outside observer, would appear to be intelligent. We perform all kinds of complex tasks on autopilot, while our conscious awareness is elsewhere. If we can do it, we should expect that other animals can do it, too. And that at once raises the question, how do we know when we are consciously aware of intelligent things we are doing? The only answer we have, at least at our current level of understanding, is that we can talk about the things we are consciously aware of. We can report what we did and why we did it, and can answer questions about it. Which, if we take this at face value, means that without such evidence from animals, the default assumption should be that they do all their intelligent behaviors on autopilot--they are never consciously aware of what they are doing. I think that claim, as it stands, is too strong--for example, anyone who has cats or dogs as pets would probably say that their cats or dogs give plenty of nonverbal evidence of being aware of things they are doing (and I include myself in this category)--but it should at least make clear that intelligent behavior and consciousness are not the same thing and do not have to go together. Which in turn means that our scientific efforts should be focused on figuring out what kinds of nonverbal evidence would count as indicating, not just intelligent behavior, but consciousness.
willis936 5y ago
Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace (2004) http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf
mathewsanders 5y ago
The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. Children of Time is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who evolve to become a complex technological society and it’s a really enjoyable read :)
- totetsu 5y ago
  I know its not that much of a coincidence, but on reading the summary of this book on goodreads I looked up to see a jumping spider staring at me from the curtain.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    And so it begins
ilikecode 5y ago
> I had just seen with a common assumption that flies are nothing more than robotic automatons, with no experience, no awareness. Think very long and hard and you might agree you fall into that (minus the "no awareness"). Cannabis is a trigger for me to think about this stuff as I can just relax and get stuck in my head and deeply think about things. At least for me through extra free time during Covid lockdowns I've come to believe I have no free will. Through daily interaction with my family I've come to believe we are automatons too. People you know very well are very predictable because their "code" doesn't change very fast, especially with the lack of new experiences. Which made me remember that's how I used to view all other animals and creatures. It's given me a new appreciation for other animals/life. Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? You aren't going to choose to think of that time in 4th grade you did something stupid unless something prompts you to think of it. Cause and effect. We are trained by all of our experiences to behave and respond in certain ways when certain events happen. When someone says "hello" you might say "hello" back because you've been trained to do it. This goes all the way down to everything we do. It's the reason learning involves so much repetition. Everything is conditioning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight are fascinating reads about people not being aware of something they obviously should be aware of. What is awareness but simply processing of our inputs/senses? What even is consciousnesses then? And yeah our brains are far more intelligent than other life forms giving us far more abilities and abstract thought, etc. As another comment mentioned though that's not a consciousness thing. We give ourselves far too much credit.
- AnthonBerg 5y ago
  Free will is an offline rendering job.
- quercusa 5y ago
  > Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? This has me thinking of the "plate o' shrimp" scene in the movie Repo Man.
bsrhng 5y ago
I think it's a strange idea to talk about 'evolving consciousness.' As if matter somehow manufactured being out of an absence of being.
- hackinthebochs 5y ago
  What reason is there to think "being" is fundamental?
  - bsrhng 5y ago
    Is there any meaningful way for you or anyone else to claim anything exists outside of their experience?
    - hackinthebochs 5y ago
      Absolutely. Credence, i.e. degree of belief is a thing. We can have a high degree of belief in things outside of our experience.
      - bsrhng 5y ago
        No, 'things outside' are only known to us as mediated through (what we perceive as) the body. The object of which you estimate your degree of belief lies within our experience. There is no sense in which you can say that you know something outside the means of perception. You cannot have degrees of belief about whether you are experiencing something in the first place.
        hackinthebochs 5y ago
        That our perception mediates our access to the outside world does not undermine our ability to deduce the existence of the outside world. We can't have 100% certainty that the outside world exists, but we don't need 100% certainty for knowledge. The question is which model do we give higher credence to: the one where all the structure inherent in our perception that suggests an external world is coincidental or internally generated, or the model where there actually is an external world and we perceive it through our senses. The latter model is more likely given various criteria, e.g. parsimony.
arduinomancer 5y ago
Found this confusing to read because consciousness is never defined but then the author starts giving examples of behaviour that indicate consciousness. Does consciousness mean “can solve a variety of tricky tasks?” Is it having emotions? Is it self-awareness? Googling the definition I get “the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.” If I have a computer with a camera running image recognition that can detect itself in a mirror is that consciousness?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Consciousness has no definition outside of our interpretation that certain behaviors indicate its activity. That is perfectly OK. When people suggest atoms and planets exhibit consciousness, that stretches the patience of many observers, but it is a matter of convention: here's what I mean by consciousness, and these things I observe have interesting consequences for it. Nothing wrong with that, either. But insisting that both refer to the same phenomenon gets nobody anywhere.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  Are you really looking for a black and white answer?
betwixthewires 5y ago
I personally think the distinction is agency, that is, the ability to act in some way, however small. A rock in space has it's orbit, this cannot change. The sun is a very very complex system, but it is all deterministic (unless there's some profound thing going on in it we have yet to comprehend). But a plant bends itself to face the sunlight. You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic. I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.
- mechEpleb 5y ago
  >You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic. What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders. To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    Well, let's start at the foundation of reason and what it means to reason. Descartes demonstrated that the only two things that any observer can verify with certainty on his own are the existence of his own consciousness and free will. Everything else can be reliably ascertained but not known with certainty, due to the nature of interpretation. This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things. Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.

96 points by quercusa 5y ago

This is all fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from this article, but it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly. It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the latter.

quercusa 5y ago
The novel Blindsight, by Peter Watts, explores exactly your quandary. Highly recommended.
- ilikecode 5y ago
  Thanks for that. It's exactly what I've been looking for. My mind has been on this whole topic for the last year. Even the name is a big hint I'll like it as blindsight is fascinating.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Strongly seconding the recommendation. You'll probably also like the references to scientific studies included at the end of the book. The book has a sequel, Echopraxia, which I also recommend. It's a novel based around the argument that consciousness is not only unnecessary, it's actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
  - kanzenryu2 5y ago
    Don't be put off by the bit about vampires.
whateveracct 5y ago
> It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the latter. nor the latter implying the former :D
gerbilly 5y ago
The only reason we think animals are stupid automatons is because in our culture we don't observe them very closely. Like the article says, every time we bother to look we are _surrpised_ to find abilities in all sorts of animals. Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious, that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and intelligent. My opinion: Intelligence is not rare, we are surrounded by it. Animals communicate with each other all day in say a forest, but we just hear it as random noises because we've stopped listening hundreds of years ago.
- nabla9 5y ago
  Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe. With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons. Usually when observing and experimenting animals closely, especially insects, they are just state machines. Very complex sequences are often executed from start to finish blindly. You can reveal how ants, bees or flies are automatons by making little changes to their environment. They do the sequence from start to finish. If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start.
  - gerbilly 5y ago
    > by making little changes to their environment. [...] If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start. Who says we do any different? Also there's a huge difference between proving something scientifically, and 'knowing' something. It is a hugely useful distinction, but science operates in it's own domain. To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism. Scientifically, even if we met face to face, you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious. It's just a bias that we consider ourselves to be these things and not other animals.
    - nabla9 5y ago
callesgg 5y ago
Consciousness being something like having thought processes that model other thought processes. Finding a hole in a piece of plastic does not require that. Or so it seams to me.
- kbelder 5y ago
  Yeah, I think it has something to do with a brain that has enough complexity that it can begin to model itself and others' brains, allowing self reflection. A dog can think, I think, but I don't think it can think about its own thoughts. But this may be unknowable.
- incompatible 5y ago
  It seems to be possible to be in a conscious state without consciously thinking about anything at all. Presumably consciousness is created by a subconscious process. I can't say much more than that it's possible for information-processing systems (such as the human brain) to be conscious. My guess is that consciousness is a non-physical, emergent property, that only exists while a certain component of the information processing system is operating in a particular way.
pdonis 5y ago
> it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly It seems to consider them to be the same thing. Which is a common viewpoint. Basically, the idea appears to be that, in order to display all those intelligent behaviors, the animal must be aware of them just as we are (or think we are) aware of what we're doing when we display such behaviors. Of course my parenthetical qualifier there is the key point: actually, we humans are often not aware of what we're doing when we display behaviors that, to an outside observer, would appear to be intelligent. We perform all kinds of complex tasks on autopilot, while our conscious awareness is elsewhere. If we can do it, we should expect that other animals can do it, too. And that at once raises the question, how do we know when we are consciously aware of intelligent things we are doing? The only answer we have, at least at our current level of understanding, is that we can talk about the things we are consciously aware of. We can report what we did and why we did it, and can answer questions about it. Which, if we take this at face value, means that without such evidence from animals, the default assumption should be that they do all their intelligent behaviors on autopilot--they are never consciously aware of what they are doing. I think that claim, as it stands, is too strong--for example, anyone who has cats or dogs as pets would probably say that their cats or dogs give plenty of nonverbal evidence of being aware of things they are doing (and I include myself in this category)--but it should at least make clear that intelligent behavior and consciousness are not the same thing and do not have to go together. Which in turn means that our scientific efforts should be focused on figuring out what kinds of nonverbal evidence would count as indicating, not just intelligent behavior, but consciousness.

willis936 5y ago

Consider the Lobster - David Foster Wallace (2004) http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf http://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf

mathewsanders 5y ago

The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. Children of Time is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who evolve to become a complex technological society and it’s a really enjoyable read :)

totetsu 5y ago
I know its not that much of a coincidence, but on reading the summary of this book on goodreads I looked up to see a jumping spider staring at me from the curtain.
- tomcam 5y ago
  And so it begins

ilikecode 5y ago

> I had just seen with a common assumption that flies are nothing more than robotic automatons, with no experience, no awareness. Think very long and hard and you might agree you fall into that (minus the "no awareness"). Cannabis is a trigger for me to think about this stuff as I can just relax and get stuck in my head and deeply think about things. At least for me through extra free time during Covid lockdowns I've come to believe I have no free will. Through daily interaction with my family I've come to believe we are automatons too. People you know very well are very predictable because their "code" doesn't change very fast, especially with the lack of new experiences. Which made me remember that's how I used to view all other animals and creatures. It's given me a new appreciation for other animals/life. Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? You aren't going to choose to think of that time in 4th grade you did something stupid unless something prompts you to think of it. Cause and effect. We are trained by all of our experiences to behave and respond in certain ways when certain events happen. When someone says "hello" you might say "hello" back because you've been trained to do it. This goes all the way down to everything we do. It's the reason learning involves so much repetition. Everything is conditioning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight are fascinating reads about people not being aware of something they obviously should be aware of. What is awareness but simply processing of our inputs/senses? What even is consciousnesses then? And yeah our brains are far more intelligent than other life forms giving us far more abilities and abstract thought, etc. As another comment mentioned though that's not a consciousness thing. We give ourselves far too much credit.

AnthonBerg 5y ago
Free will is an offline rendering job.
quercusa 5y ago
> Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? This has me thinking of the "plate o' shrimp" scene in the movie Repo Man.

bsrhng 5y ago

I think it's a strange idea to talk about 'evolving consciousness.' As if matter somehow manufactured being out of an absence of being.

hackinthebochs 5y ago
What reason is there to think "being" is fundamental?
- bsrhng 5y ago
  Is there any meaningful way for you or anyone else to claim anything exists outside of their experience?
  - hackinthebochs 5y ago
    Absolutely. Credence, i.e. degree of belief is a thing. We can have a high degree of belief in things outside of our experience.
    - bsrhng 5y ago
      No, 'things outside' are only known to us as mediated through (what we perceive as) the body. The object of which you estimate your degree of belief lies within our experience. There is no sense in which you can say that you know something outside the means of perception. You cannot have degrees of belief about whether you are experiencing something in the first place.
      - hackinthebochs 5y ago
        That our perception mediates our access to the outside world does not undermine our ability to deduce the existence of the outside world. We can't have 100% certainty that the outside world exists, but we don't need 100% certainty for knowledge. The question is which model do we give higher credence to: the one where all the structure inherent in our perception that suggests an external world is coincidental or internally generated, or the model where there actually is an external world and we perceive it through our senses. The latter model is more likely given various criteria, e.g. parsimony.

arduinomancer 5y ago

Found this confusing to read because consciousness is never defined but then the author starts giving examples of behaviour that indicate consciousness. Does consciousness mean “can solve a variety of tricky tasks?” Is it having emotions? Is it self-awareness? Googling the definition I get “the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.” If I have a computer with a camera running image recognition that can detect itself in a mirror is that consciousness?

ncmncm 5y ago
Consciousness has no definition outside of our interpretation that certain behaviors indicate its activity. That is perfectly OK. When people suggest atoms and planets exhibit consciousness, that stretches the patience of many observers, but it is a matter of convention: here's what I mean by consciousness, and these things I observe have interesting consequences for it. Nothing wrong with that, either. But insisting that both refer to the same phenomenon gets nobody anywhere.
canadianfella 5y ago
Are you really looking for a black and white answer?

betwixthewires 5y ago

I personally think the distinction is agency, that is, the ability to act in some way, however small. A rock in space has it's orbit, this cannot change. The sun is a very very complex system, but it is all deterministic (unless there's some profound thing going on in it we have yet to comprehend). But a plant bends itself to face the sunlight. You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic. I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.

mechEpleb 5y ago
>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic. What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders. To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  Well, let's start at the foundation of reason and what it means to reason. Descartes demonstrated that the only two things that any observer can verify with certainty on his own are the existence of his own consciousness and free will. Everything else can be reliably ascertained but not known with certainty, due to the nature of interpretation. This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things. Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.