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The problem with consciousness is that it’s both a vague term that’s been difficult to define and it has social roots that are not really universal. The debate
by light_triad 2y ago
The problem with consciousness is that it’s both a vague term that’s been difficult to define and it has social roots that are not really universal.
The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog’s 1972 documentary ‘The Flying Doctors of East Africa’ where multiple people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have difficulty with the task. Even though it’s not scientific it makes you realize how much of what we see and recognize is a learned behavior through year of social training rather than an innate ability.
Here’s the scene (starts at 40min it’s in German but you can auto translate subtitles): https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO
- martin-t 2y agoDo we know why they failed at the task? My immediate thought is that it's a failure of translation. My second is to "debug" their reasoning by asking them to describe the pictures. There's gotta be somebody who knows more but the information was lost on the cutting room's floor in favor of a moral lesson.
- light_triad 2y agoAgreed it's not possible from the footage to draw any definite conclusions - the whole exchange and portrayal is deeply flawed. I wonder if anyone has seen some scientific papers with a reproducible methodology that look into the deep differences in cultural framing along those lines?