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As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't exper
by teekert 2y ago
As a scientist, articles like this also annoy me. Because it, right off the bat, assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness. Just because we don't experience those degrees, and animals can't convey what they feel through language, we assume it is "emergent", or "suddenly there". I think we are too caught up in believing that consciousness must be something really special or some magic discontinuity of spacetime.
I don't believe it is. Somewhere inside our brain there is some perception of self related to the outside world. So we can project self into the future using information from the now and make better choices and survive better ("Information is that which allows you [who is in possession of that information] to make predictions with accuracy better than chance"- Chris Adami). Why do we need all these difficult words?
I bet animals also have some image of self inside there somewhere, and make decisions based on simulated scenarios. Perhaps to a lesser degree, perhaps because of a lack of language they experience it in a different way? Not being able to label any of the steps in the process... Who knows?
Perhaps when we get to simulate a whole brain we can get some idea. But then there is the ethics. We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self.
- IsTom 2y ago> assumes that there are no degrees in consciousness And I don't get why, it seems to me quite self evident that you yourself can experience reduced-consciousness states, be it being half-asleep or quite drunk.
- ffwd 2y agoThe problem for me is that we haven't conceptualized what we mean by "reduced" consciousness. Reduced in what way? If we create an analogy with audio - audio can have 2 properties: frequencies and volume. Frequencies are the content of the audio and volume is how "present" the sound is. Well the same could be applied to consciousness. When we say reduced consciousness do we mean that the mind experiences less content (frequencies) or do we mean that all the frequencies are there but at a reduced volume?
- IsTom 2y agoPersonal experience would tell me "both" - less complex thoughts with less intensity and with worse SNR.
- wruza 2y agoReduced in what way? In any. C. is a complex thing, and these can fail to lower level in myriads of ways. You have to align millions* of things to make it work. The biological (in our case) nature of it allows for some slack rather than immediate breakdown, so there are thousands of parameters to play with. * numbers arbitrary
- taneq 2y agoAnd these aren't even generally low-functioning or undesirable! The much-sought-after 'state of flow' is defined in part by a lack of self-aware consciousness.
- garden_hermit 2y agotbf, many materialists dislike the "degrees of consciousness" idea because a theory that posits "consciousness is on a spectrum" is one that starts to resemble panpsychism, which they consider magical woo.
- readyplayeremma 2y agoThe article’s real contribution is in highlighting evidence of complex behavior in living systems that often get excluded from definitions of "intelligence". In doing so, it invites deeper philosophical reflection, even if it doesn’t mount that reflection itself.
- vidarh 2y agoAdd to this that a lot of people presume that peoples experience is the same. E.g. I have aphantasia - I don't picture things in my "inner eye". Through discussions with people about that, a lot of people described own differences from the perceived norm, and it is clear a not insignificant numbers also have other differences, such as not thinking consciously in words. A lot of people then tend to express disbelief, and question the whole thing on the basis of a belief that if people's inner life does not match theirs, people couldn't possibly be conscious or reason. People make far too many assumptions about the universality of their own experience of consciousness.
- torginus 2y agoI'm curious about aphantasia - if I asked you to draw a floorplan of your home/office etc. would you not be able to do it? If you could wouldn't that involve you imagining what the building looks like from the inside and how the rooms are connected together? Or would do it some other way? (I'm assuming you could do it, since if you couldn't I think that would be a majorly debiliating condition rather than just some amusing fact)
- vidarh 2y agoYes, in fact my ability to draw from memory places I've seen is, if anything, from experience, substantially above average. However, when I draw from memory, my drawings do tend to be more stylized. I can "imagine" what a building looks like, but I can't see it. Even our language makes this hard to describe, and the reason why I didn't realise that this isn't how other people do it, because most of our language for remember how something looks uses terms that implies we see them, so I just assumed until a few years ago (and I turn 50 this year) that that was just a metaphor to everyone else too. How do you imagine (there's that word again...) blind people remember places they can't see? To me, the notion that I'd need to "see" what the building looks like to draw it is bizarre because I know where everything is in relation to each other, and their shapes, so why would I need to see it? EDIT: increasingly, and in part drive by split-brain experiments, I tend to think that a whole lot of what we see as our conscious decision-making, are instead shallow retroactive attempts by parts of the brain at rationalising decisions largely already taken autonomously into a cohesive self/ego.
- whymeogod 2y ago> We do attribute great value to organisms that have this image of self. My impression is we attribute great value to organisms that can effectively push back against us. respect based on force. Not saying I want things to be that way.
- wordpad25 2y agoDoes that mean LLMs can already be considered conscious at some level since they are able to reason and self reflect?