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Are animals more conscious than we are?
- oceanghost 5y agoI am not sure what this article is trying to accomplish. Consciousness might be binary, so rabbits might have it? Can you define consciousness at all?
- zwkrt 5y agoJust shitposting: How about “the number of bits a subsection of a system is able to encode about the rest of the system surrounding it”
- oceanghost 5y agoI appreciate about HN that your, fairly amusing comment is "shitposting." :-)
- erikhoel 5y agoAh, but what about the subsections of the subsections? And so, ad infinitum? Eventually you'll need something like the exclusion postulate of Integrated Information Theory
- maybe_pablo 5y agoIsn't consciousness the feeling of existing?
- oceanghost 5y agoWell the problem is that science makes predictions, and that is all. If we want to talk scientifically about consciousness then we need to be able to make predictions about it and test those... then refine our ideas. Up until that point its metaphysics or religion. Do I agree that rabbits are probably somewhat conscious? Yes. Do I know what that MEANS? No.
- justshowpost 5y agoThat's self-consciousness or self-awareness, a bit different thing, the next level for winners of the mirror test.
- AlbertCory 5y agoHe can speak for himself, so I'm not interpreting him here, but: This was an excellent article. To me "consciousness" cannot be thought of as binary, i.e. humans have it, no other creature does. That's the classical, religious view. Rather it's just an illusion your brain puts on for you, and rabbits get a different illusion. So it's silly to say "animals are more conscious." They have a different consciousness. Go ahead and google "what is it like to be a bat."
- oceanghost 5y agoHonestly, I thought your view was the default of most people?
- AlbertCory 5y agoMaybe, but oceans of ink over the millennia have been spilled on the question of "how does mind differ from matter?" Maybe you're right and we're beyond all that.
- shusaku 5y agoThe author isn’t trying to answer a philosophical or scientific question, but instead just commenting on how we often have aesthetic views of consciousness. So just like he feels like the man on the subway is conscious due to his expressed emotions, he also feels like the rabbit is conscious due to the liveliness of its movements. That’s contrasted with his own view of himself, which while ironically he knows he is conscious, he feels his lack of vigor is a huge limitation.
- hirundo 5y agoHow do you wire up the “conscious-o-meter”? What would a function for mapping consciousness to a quantity look like? How about [thoughts, emotions, sensations] .sum { |p| p.frequency * p.complexity } Collecting the data is left as an exercise for the student.
- tayo42 5y agoIntegrated information theory has one attempt at actually measuring how conscious a system is. It calls it phi.
- erikhoel 5y agoI worked on that in graduate school :)
- tayo42 5y agothats pretty cool, id ask you some questions about it if you didn't mind but im not ready for the moment lol
- ta988 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory Never heard of that before, thanks for the hint.
- tayo42 5y agono problem, the paper is actually not to bad either by the way.
- Razengan 5y agoYou have to define “thoughts, emotions, sensations” and “complexity” first. Pain, for example, counts as all 3, and some would say it’s simple while others might call it complex.
- growup12345 5y agoNo
- wait_a_minute 5y agoall that chicken must have a death wish then
- cherka 5y agoHeh
- causasui 5y agoThe US breeds and slaughters 8 billion chickens a year. If you at all believe (not you personally OP, as the above punchline makes it obvious that you have the empathetic range of a thimble) that animals have a level of consciousness/agency similar to humans, you should consider if you want to continue to pay for their suffering for a 15 minute meal.
- krasin 5y agoJust an observation: by this metric, bison meat is approximately 200 times more ethical than chicken meat.
- Zababa 5y agoSome people are actually starting to think about that, especially in the context of insect "meat". For example, a cow makes ~250kg of meat, a cricket weight ~0.5g. If you believe all life to be equal, eating a cow is 500 000 times better than eating the equivalent in crickets. If you believe that insect are worth 10 000 times less than cows (arbitrary number), that's still 50 times worse. I think it's important that people come to term that there's no magic way to avoid all suffering, and that they start thinking about what their values are.
- andy_ppp 5y agoAs I understand it someone did a count of all the animals killed in the production of a vegan diet and in pure numbers it was more than if you any ate beef by a huge amount. Will try to find the original study…
- joelbondurant 5y agoHumans are the dumbest animals.
- hprotagonist 5y agothe notion of "The Fall is self-awareness" is ... pretty old.
- ac42 5y agoSince there is no technical definition (not to speak of a measure of degree) of consciousness, we could assume that it is very likely, statistically. All life forms have undergone the same amount of evolution, after all. And even if we are wrong, this assumption would do this world great good.
- TaupeRanger 5y agoUnclear what "more" means in relation to consciousness. More vivid? More varied? More aware? All or some of these? Just because our behavioral expressions seem subdued compared to animals (but do they really?), it doesn't follow that their inner experience has "more" of anything.
- rubyfan 5y agoThe rationale that the uncontrollable feelings convey more consciousness doesn’t follow for me either. Our own ability to reason about the state of our being, threats to our safety and a command over what we do seems reasonable that humans are experiencing a consciousness that animals do not enjoy. Perhaps I overlook the author’s point here.
- IgorPartola 5y agoTo me it seems that what separates us from other animals mentally is the ability for abstract thinking. A thought about a thought is itself a thought.
- mbfg 5y agoi'd suggest the difference is our ability to communicate to other what we perceive is at a much higher level. I have no reason to believe there's any difference in the actual experience.
- coldnose 5y agoThis seems like a trivial case of Betteridge’s law of headlines.
- shannifin 5y ago> Seen as biological robots, their cognition is essentially in service to this, and so must necessarily be algorithmic, and limited. All to say they are generally assumed to have lesser forms of consciousness. This seems to define consciousness as measurable by algorithmic determinism and limitation, which seems a complete non-sequitur. Seeing something as a biological robot need not necessarily imply anything at all about consciousness. > Perhaps consciousness doesn’t come in degrees at all. If I consider my altering states of awareness (awake & alert vs foggy vs dreaming) as degrees of consciousness, then yes it does. (But perhaps the question is really one of semantics.) > Some people may be unable to articulate their inner life, but is there any doubt they feel intense, recognizable emotions? Does not water for them taste as it does to us, does not touch reassure, does not heat burn and ice freeze, do not their emotions swell and slosh within them? I do doubt this (eta: at least in regards to animals; for humans, see comment about states of awareness above), for I see no evidence that any earthly creatures other than humans can actually reflect on their own feelings and therefore create an emotional feedback loop that serves to intensify emotions. (Granted, without the ability to communicate, or behave in a way that human intelligence can recognize as intelligent (the metrics for which are another rabbit hole), I'm not sure what such evidence would consist of.) Anyway, without a concrete definition of consciousness, does something necessarily even need a brain to be considered conscious? What's to stop every feedback loop in existence from being conscious? Or, for that matter, every atom in the universe?
- vlovich123 5y ago> for I see no evidence that any earthly creatures other than humans can actually reflect on their own feelings and therefore create an emotional feedback loop that serves to intensify emotions. Haven’t we observed complex human-like emotions for elephants, dolphins, and various other primates (eg grieving rituals for lost family members)? Heck even dogs clearly show signs of depression and happiness although whether they reflect on these feelings (whatever that means) is obviously up in the air.
- shannifin 5y ago> Haven’t we observed complex human-like emotions for elephants, dolphins, and various other primates (eg grieving rituals for lost family members)? I think we observe complex behavior that we associate with our own emotional experiences (which seem appropriate given our genetic / biological / physiological similarities), I just doubt they're necessarily as intense as we experience them given our ability to reflect on them. And if you can't reflect on an emotion, can you even necessarily be conscious of it at all? It seems more likely to me that animals experience no conscious awareness of their own emotions at all, however complex they may be.
- zupreme 5y agoThat was a magnificent piece of writing. I will definitely be pondering human vs animal consciousness this weekend, because of it.
- TrispusAttucks 5y agoQuantification of consciousness is such a prickly question. Some ants can lift 10 to 50 times their own weight. Are they stronger than a human? The question makes no sense. Is a human more conscious than an electron? Perhaps also makes no sense.
- wildermuthn 5y agoSensation, emotion, and reason all exist inside consciousness. The article points out that some animals seem to have great depth of emotion and sensation, whereas human consciousness often is more focused upon reason. Anyone who has lost time while driving a car while thinking about something else has experienced what the author is describing. We don’t always live in the moment — sometimes we live “in our head”. Meditation is one way that we train our consciousness to focus less on reason and more on sensation and emotion, in order to exert more control over both. So I’d agree with the author if he reframed the question as I have. But how do we know that animals, or even other humans, are conscious? The answer is in the definition: that sensation, emotion, and reason are all aspects of conscious experience. These aspects can be considered metadata that is only available to conscious beings. This metadata is most uniquely useful in social scenarios, as it is a shared dataset that enables highly coordinated and flexible social behaviors. The author mentions one of these behaviors: play. Non-conscious entities will have a harder time distinguishing between play-fighting and real fighting, and engage in play-fighting less often (if at all).