3 ms·
Subjective consciousness is defined by the experience of qualia, one of which is a sense of a persistent and separate self-object. We know what that means to u
by TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
Subjective consciousness is defined by the experience of qualia, one of which is a sense of a persistent and separate self-object.
We know what that means to us but we can only assume others have similar experiences.
And the only way to do that is by looking at behaviours.
So we point at cats and humans and say they're conscious because they demonstrate behaviours that we associate with our subjective experience of consciousness - goal seeking and planning, apparent emotional responses, awareness of context, decision making, pattern- and repetition-based learning, and other kinds of responsiveness and agency.
It's a very specific idea of what consciousness is, and it only really applies at human scale.
If an object/entity/subsystem experienced qualia of any kind - including the experience of any kind of self-object, from the most rudimentary to the most universal - without demonstrating any of the behaviours at a human scale, we'd never know.
- ds_opseeker 2y ago> goal seeking and planning, apparent emotional responses, awareness of context, decision making, pattern- and repetition-based learning, some argue (using data and experimentation) that trees and/or other plants express all of these behaviors
- RobertRies 2y agoMy strong personal assessment of this is that panpsychists (in general, if you can pin one down) are not talking about consciousness in a colloquial sense - but I think this is a mistake. I think the common conceptualization of consciousness is the only definition that is useful, or makes sense. Which is something that can experience things. For many reasons, I don't think these rudimentary behaviors in plants suggest they are capable of experience.
- RobertRies 2y agoI don't think we _all_ point at cat's behavior and conclude consciousness. I think its the behaviors you describe plus we see how anatomically similar to humans they are. As someone who believes consciousness is an emergent property of the configuration of matter that makes up our bodies, particularly our brains, it seems plausible that cats have some sort of recognizable version of experience to ours (though I'm very amenable to discovering that actually they don't). But also jellyfish has goal seeking behavior, and a most of those other characteristics you mention, and my intuition (based on the vastly different neural structure and anatomy), is that they experience probably nothing.