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> What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? Ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. > What is reflecting upon something, if not proc

> What is sensing, if not ingesting data from sensors? Ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. > What is reflecting upon something, if not processing data related to that thing? You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? That's like saying a digital representation of the mona lisa is no different from the output of /dev/urandom because "it's all just bits". Nuance and context matter. In this case, reflecting again requires a level of awareness, not just base processing. A camera is closer to a rube goldberg machine than even a gnat. > The camera which processes its own image is not truly conscious, even if there's an image recognition algorithm onboard which identifies its reflection as an image of itself, even if the image goes through extensive processing. The camera isn't conscious at all, but semantics aside I think we agree on this point. > But if the camera feels something about seeing itself, then it's certainly conscious. This would be self-awareness though. > You say "the camera is not sensing,"—I would argue that it's trivially sensing, but I suspect that what you mean by "sensing" is similar to what I've been calling "feeling." Perhaps. What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses - so I think 'sensing' is a perfectly apt term here. 'Feeling' is fine as well, but I would say it is less accurate. I would not say a worm sensing food is 'feeling' there is food out there - I would limit feeling to emotional or physical sensation as opposed to any kind of stimuli. > Why is awareness of "red" necessarily mediated by awareness of the self? If you can't reflect to any extent on the 'red', then all you are doing is sensing data like the camera as you suggest. The self-awareness is what separates a conscious being from a non-conscious organism or device. > I'm curious why this would come up in a discussion on veganism. The level of consciousness of a being has a direct relationship of to ethical considerations of how that being should be treated which comes up in some vegan arguments.

bccdee 2y ago
> [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another? I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. > What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses. Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. > You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. Well, surely you can agree what you've described isn't awareness in any sense? A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight. > Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. Yes, that's a necessary requirement for sentience. You want to try and equate organisms processing stimuli to a camera, but you can only do so when you omit the key thing that differentiates them. What's the point of that? > A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. It's not sensing anything more than a rube Goldberg machine makes decisions. If you wanted to make a comparison to technology, a roomba would work much better. > I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. Self-awareness. > If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Well, we're not even close to programming anything resembling human consciousness, so that's pretty much impossible to answer at the moment. It's basically fantasy. > Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm? I'm going to go ahead and guess your the type of person that insists the universe is entirely deterministic, yes? You realize no one can answer these questions right now, right? Consciousness is still very poorly understood. Even if it is just the result of hardware and algorithms, it's hardware and algorithms we are a long way from understanding or re-implementing. So frankly, trying to think of it in the terms that you are here, isn't helpful to any sort of argument or discussion trying to understand it better.
  - bccdee 2y ago
    > A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight. Why not? Because the plant isn't conscious? Awareness can't be defined in terms of consciousness if consciousness itself is defined in terms of awareness—that's circular. How do you define awareness? >> I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be > Self-awareness. Yeah but what is that? That's my big stumbling block here—what is "awareness"? What distinguishes things that are aware from things that are not?

bccdee 2y ago

> [Sensing is] ingesting data from sensors with a level of awareness. What does "awareness" mean to you? How can we tell whether one thing is aware of another? I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. > What I'm calling sensing is what happens when an organism senses something via one of it's senses. Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. > You really don't think reflection via higher level cognition is equivalent to processing data at the lowest level, do you? I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm?

ruthmarx 2y ago
> I would consider "x is aware of y" to only mean (fundamentally) that x is responsive to the state of y, but your notion of awareness clearly goes beyond that. Well, surely you can agree what you've described isn't awareness in any sense? A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight. > Well, no, because you've got this idea of "awareness" in there too. Yes, that's a necessary requirement for sentience. You want to try and equate organisms processing stimuli to a camera, but you can only do so when you omit the key thing that differentiates them. What's the point of that? > A camera can sense things with its sensors, but you don't consider that "true sensing" because there's no awareness going on. It's not sensing anything more than a rube Goldberg machine makes decisions. If you wanted to make a comparison to technology, a roomba would work much better. > I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be, beyond one being more complicated than the other. Self-awareness. > If a machine takes input from a sensor and runs an analytical algorithm on it, how complex does that algorithm need to be before it's considered an act of reflection? Well, we're not even close to programming anything resembling human consciousness, so that's pretty much impossible to answer at the moment. It's basically fantasy. > Does "awareness" involve a specific process that the algorithm may or may not perform, or is it an emergent property of any sufficiently complex algorithm? I'm going to go ahead and guess your the type of person that insists the universe is entirely deterministic, yes? You realize no one can answer these questions right now, right? Consciousness is still very poorly understood. Even if it is just the result of hardware and algorithms, it's hardware and algorithms we are a long way from understanding or re-implementing. So frankly, trying to think of it in the terms that you are here, isn't helpful to any sort of argument or discussion trying to understand it better.
- bccdee 2y ago
  > A plant creeping toward sunlight isn't aware of the sunlight. Why not? Because the plant isn't conscious? Awareness can't be defined in terms of consciousness if consciousness itself is defined in terms of awareness—that's circular. How do you define awareness? >> I'm not sure what you consider the difference to be > Self-awareness. Yeah but what is that? That's my big stumbling block here—what is "awareness"? What distinguishes things that are aware from things that are not?