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If you believe having no agreed-upon definition of “consciousness” means we should not bother talking about it at all, try to define the “I” in “I don’t know wh

If you believe having no agreed-upon definition of “consciousness” means we should not bother talking about it at all, try to define the “I” in “I don’t know what consciousness is and therefore refuse to talk about it”, you might get a tad closer to the crux of the issue and perhaps see why it is considered “the hard problem”.

Yizahi 3y ago
The thing is - just because we can't find an answer to a hard problem we can't simply use a whatever placeholder "answer" in the meantime. There is no mandate from the above to have some/any answer, as a must have thing. If we don't have a real (maybe incomplete) answer then we just don't. Full stop. We can't substitute it with random words just because it is convenient. So your counterpoint should be actually split into two parts: 1. Should we work on the unsolved problem even when it is very hard and ambiguous and there is no even clear hypothesis for the solution? Of course we should. 2. Should we make new conclusions derived from the the unsolved problem #1? No, we must not. So listing the different parties: a) Scientists should work on the researching consciousness problem. b) Animal activists should continue protecting animals, but not because they are supposedly conscious, but because they MAY be. We just don't know yet. c) Journalists MUST stop writing that such and such animal has consciousness.
- strogonoff 3y ago
  > Journalists MUST stop writing Oh please. There is a position about what consciousness is which implies many animals may have it. This article is about that position. Journalists have a moral obligation to keep writing about such positions, if we are to assume that imparting harm and pain on conscious beings is evil. There are also positions that animals, even including humans, don’t have consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t exist. They are more comfortable to most humans, especially meat eaters. This article is not about those positions. The incompleteness theorem has an important implication that we would not be able to construct a full and verifiably formally correct model of the system from within which we ourselves operate. All we have is hypotheses. Saying that people are not free to make hypotheses that are uncomfortable to you, or that journalists are not free to write about them, is a self-serving position.
  - Yizahi 3y ago
    Ad-hominem attacks don't really make your opinion more credible.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Defining anything is a hard problem, but the English word "consciousness" clearly refers to multiple distinct phenomena. There is literally no point in talking about if animals have consciousness if you don't pinpoint whether you mean: - Whether animals are asleep or awake (conscious or unconscious) - Whether animals have subjective experience / qualia - Whether animals are self-aware Etc. etc. Once you narrow down then you can try to precisely define the topic or not, but without narrowing down, it's pointless.

Yizahi 3y ago

The thing is - just because we can't find an answer to a hard problem we can't simply use a whatever placeholder "answer" in the meantime. There is no mandate from the above to have some/any answer, as a must have thing. If we don't have a real (maybe incomplete) answer then we just don't. Full stop. We can't substitute it with random words just because it is convenient. So your counterpoint should be actually split into two parts: 1. Should we work on the unsolved problem even when it is very hard and ambiguous and there is no even clear hypothesis for the solution? Of course we should. 2. Should we make new conclusions derived from the the unsolved problem #1? No, we must not. So listing the different parties: a) Scientists should work on the researching consciousness problem. b) Animal activists should continue protecting animals, but not because they are supposedly conscious, but because they MAY be. We just don't know yet. c) Journalists MUST stop writing that such and such animal has consciousness.

strogonoff 3y ago
> Journalists MUST stop writing Oh please. There is a position about what consciousness is which implies many animals may have it. This article is about that position. Journalists have a moral obligation to keep writing about such positions, if we are to assume that imparting harm and pain on conscious beings is evil. There are also positions that animals, even including humans, don’t have consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t exist. They are more comfortable to most humans, especially meat eaters. This article is not about those positions. The incompleteness theorem has an important implication that we would not be able to construct a full and verifiably formally correct model of the system from within which we ourselves operate. All we have is hypotheses. Saying that people are not free to make hypotheses that are uncomfortable to you, or that journalists are not free to write about them, is a self-serving position.
- Yizahi 3y ago
  Ad-hominem attacks don't really make your opinion more credible.

earthboundkid 3y ago

Defining anything is a hard problem, but the English word "consciousness" clearly refers to multiple distinct phenomena. There is literally no point in talking about if animals have consciousness if you don't pinpoint whether you mean: - Whether animals are asleep or awake (conscious or unconscious) - Whether animals have subjective experience / qualia - Whether animals are self-aware Etc. etc. Once you narrow down then you can try to precisely define the topic or not, but without narrowing down, it's pointless.