5 ms·

Interesting theory, but wouldn't Jaynes' definition of consciousness imply that animals are not conscious?

• girvo 3y ago
  I think a non-zero amount of people would argue that. I disagree with them, and point to the fact that, say, dogs appear to dream, and in those dreams reflect on past or possibly future behaviour as a sign that they could indeed be conscious in an analogous manner to humans, but that's a bit of a longer bow to draw perhaps.
  • pelorat 3y ago
    I think we need to stop treating consciousness as a binary that is either on or off. It's quite clear that consciousness is a scale with many different levels and that even in humans we start out as being no more conscious that any other animal.
    • TeMPOraL 3y ago
      LLMs give a hint here too: the last few generations showcased clearly that "cognitive capabilities" of the models grow with latent space size and context window. There is a continuity here.
• green_man_lives 3y ago
  In the beginning of his book he spends a chapter explaining exactly what he means by consciousness. I'd say the first few chapters are worth reading since it does a really good job of de-obfuscating the term consciousness, and also has a really interesting take on metaphors as the language of the mind. He points out that most reasoning is done automatically and done by your subconscious. When something "clicks" it's usually not because your internal monologue reasoned about it hard enough, it's because something percolated down into your subconscious and you learned a metaphor that helped you understand that thing. So animals can also reason and make value judgements even without language or an internal monologue.