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The article defines “phenomenal consciousness “ as feeling pain, pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily a sense of self.
by dstroot 2y ago
The article defines “phenomenal consciousness “ as feeling pain, pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily a sense of self.
- cess11 2y agoSounds like they're including plants.
- causal 2y agoBut even those terms a human can only understandable from a human standpoint. I'm guessing that pleasure for a bee is nothing at all like pleasure for me, but I cannot avoid projecting my own experience when I think about the bee's experience.
- haswell 2y agoWe descended from apes. Before we made the jump, apes presumably still felt pain and pleasure. They just didn’t have the same degree of sophistication when making sense of these sensations. Our understanding of shared traits among various animal types makes it possible to extrapolate reasonably that what these animals experience is not dissimilar to what we experience in terms of raw sensations.
- wolverine876 2y agoYou may be interested: What it's like to be a bee by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology, Queen Mary University - London https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/what-its-like-to-be-a-bee https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/what-its-like-to-be-a-bee
- taneq 2y agoAll this does is push the lack of definition into “feeling”. Is a nerve cell reacting to stimulus and transmitting an impulse to the brain “feeling”? If so then anything with a nervous system is conscious, but fairly often it’s argued that some secret sauce in the brain is required to “experience” a stimulus rather than simply detecting it and acting on that information.
- exe34 2y agoI can never get these phenomenologists to accept a kalman filter as conscious, but somehow the only thing it tends to lack is being made in flesh.
- bawolff 2y agoIf all we are saying is that they respond to those stimuli, then i am pretty sure my laptop is concious (it beeps when it is hungry because the battery is about to run out. Segfaults look like a pain response to me, etc)
- h0l0cube 2y agoBut does your laptop develop a deep aversion to segfaults? I'd imagine agency is a big part of consciousness. The philosophical implication of this is that if you take the agency from someone mentally (e.g., the Ministry of Love in 1984), this over time renders the person unconscious. Taking agency from someone just physically (e.g., locked in syndrome) still doesn't render a person unconscious however, so if your AI powered laptop actually had agency of thought, it could be screaming on the inside. Terrifying.
- taneq 2y agoI always feel a twinge of unease testing alarm systems on automated equipment. While “of course” the machine isn’t actually feeling pain when I trip a low oil shutdown or an over-temperature cutoff, I can’t point to any concrete qualitative difference between its aversion response to stimulus and my own.
- gunapologist99 2y agoWell, agency wasn't part of that definition in TFA. (Also, we'd have to define agency as well.)
- h0l0cube 2y agoAble to do something by one’s own desires. So certainly not by the programming by another agent. In a sense, self-programming according to its own interests as they evolve over time
- epgui 2y agoWhen you consider that human behaviour is just trained by evolution and experience, with a bunch of stochastic effects in the mix, it’s hard to justify this magical notion of agency. At best, agency could be seen as a “degree of indirectness” of some external influence.
- gunapologist99 2y agoSo, an amoeba has consciousness then, because it moves away from negative stimuli.
- DangitBobby 2y agoWe don't know if they actually "experience" the pain any more than a gear feels the teeth of another gear causing it to move.
- epgui 2y agoYou’re just using another slippery term when you invoke “experience” in that way though. We know that experience is just chemistry with higher-order structure, even in humans.
- DangitBobby 2y agoOkay? Does that mean it doesn't exist? Or that we can know whether things have it? Whether a rock has it? Whether you have it? I don't understand what point or concept you're trying to refute. Consciousness isn't having pain receptors, it's experiencing sensations.
- epgui 2y agoAnd I'm saying that "experiencing" is a matter of degree, just as "consciousness" is. It's not there or not there, it's not a boolean. It's a question of "how much complexity is there".
- epgui 2y agoEssentially yes. Seeing consciousness as a boolean “it’s there” or “it’s not there” is just completely unproductive of a mental model. We understand nature better when we think in terms of “how complex an organism’s behaviour is” or “how complex its information processing is”.