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> People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consid

> People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness. If your attempt at a formalism provides useful, actionable implications, and only really disagrees with people's intuitions on cases that are generally believed to be edge cases, or maybe that you also have good reason to believe are edge cases on different ground, then you might have a decent definition. If your attempt at a formalism provides useful implications, but disagrees with everyone's intuitions on what the words you're using mean, you've probably defined the wrong thing. That's not to say that you aren't defining something sensible (you might still be), but strongly suggests it's not what you want it to be. Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries.

atoav 5y ago
> Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries. Not trying to defend IIT, but the only reason your example works here is because from our human perspective (eating these plants) we find it absurd to include cucumbers and exclude raspberries. So talking about hubris: Wouldn't plants (if they could) very likely have a totally different perspective? To then it would probably seem totally absurd that we use taste or shape of the fruit as a grouping feature and not something that might be totally more defining that plants can experience. Of course it is intuitively understandable to look at ourselves and animals we understand when defining consciousness. Even like that it is hard to define. Trying to incorporate things that show conscious-like behaviors, but in totally human-unrelatable ways is not a bad next step, but it is hard to know where to draw the border. A rock could have conscious processes running in it on geological timescales — how would one falsify that?

atoav 5y ago

> Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries. Not trying to defend IIT, but the only reason your example works here is because from our human perspective (eating these plants) we find it absurd to include cucumbers and exclude raspberries. So talking about hubris: Wouldn't plants (if they could) very likely have a totally different perspective? To then it would probably seem totally absurd that we use taste or shape of the fruit as a grouping feature and not something that might be totally more defining that plants can experience. Of course it is intuitively understandable to look at ourselves and animals we understand when defining consciousness. Even like that it is hard to define. Trying to incorporate things that show conscious-like behaviors, but in totally human-unrelatable ways is not a bad next step, but it is hard to know where to draw the border. A rock could have conscious processes running in it on geological timescales — how would one falsify that?