6 ms·
Do we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?
by tunnuz 3y ago
Do we even have a sound definition of what consciousness is / looks like from the outside? How do we recognise it?
- hnfong 3y agoShort answer is no. The working definition is "I am conscious, I know it. Anything that looks sufficiently like me is presumed to have consciousness."
- Kim_Bruning 3y agoThat sounds like a rather anthropocentric application of anthropomorphism. (I'd have gone further but I ran out of applicable anthro- terms) It does feel a lot like the definition of "life" though. That's also a slippery moving-goalposts kind of thing.
- literalis 3y agoHow many angels can dance on the head of a pin? LLMs should make us take seriously that the whole idea of consciousness is just superstition and unnecessary. That definition is precisely how people define something that isn't real and doesn't exist. If you can get there, it is quite amusing to think about a huge group of people who would think the idea of angels as complete foolish superstition but consciousness? Of course, we just haven't located this extra property of the brain, yet! It is there though, I know it is because I know is.
- hackinthebochs 3y agoThere's something that goes on inside the heads of organisms sufficiently like us. We give that something the name consciousness. It doesn't make much sense to deny that it is there. Denying consciousness because it doesn't fit well into our ontology derived from science is to elevate science to unreasonable heights. Science is great, but it's subject matter is inferred (the external world). It doesn't have the power to undermine non-inferred knowledge.
- mannykannot 3y agoThere is a bit more to it than that, although still nothing close to a rigorous definition. Consciousness encompasses things like an ability to model the world and the causes acting in it, an awareness of oneself as an entity in that world, a theory of mind about other people, the ability to contemplate counterfactuals, and having general-purpose language skills. It is sometimes suggested that we cannot study it without a definition, but definitions are written (and rewritten) as we acquire knowledge. It is plausible that studying the above will lead to explanations.
- rvense 3y agoConsciousness, like intelligence and many others, is a prescientific term, and most debates about 'the nature of consciousness' (et al) are really just debates about the definition of the term.
- goatlover 3y agoIt's not a definitional problem, otherwise Chalmers wouldn't have won the bet. Philosophers are very adept with concepts. The problem is experiential in nature. We experience a world of color, sound, tastes/smells, feels, emotions in perception, imagination, memory, dreaming, internal dialog, hallucination, illusion. But we describe the world in terms that are objective, functional and mathematical, not experiential. The sensations are abstracted away because they are creature-specific, and vary among individuals. The room feels cold to you, hot to me, and normal to a third person. But we can describe the molecular motion of air in the room, and measure the temperature, which is the same for all people and creatures. As Thomas Nagel put it, science is the view from nowhere. There is nothing experiential about the physical understanding of the world. And yet we are part of that world.