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It's Official: Consciousness Is Not Unique to Humans

50 points by sirteno 14y ago

azakai 14y ago
As someone with a computational neuroscience background, I am not sure I agree that those are the right authorities to decide on consciousness in animals, > cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologiests, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomist and computational neuroscientists Don't get me wrong, it's great to have their input on this topic. But to not include philosophers of mind for example seems very wrong. In particular because consciousness is very hard to define. The definition there involves "affective states" and "intentional behaviors" which in themselves are also extremely hard to define. edit: Also, how about psychologists studying animal behavior, ethologists, etc.
- samd 14y ago
  This article is as absurd as if it had said: "It's official, scientists have discovered the meaning of life!" The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, but that they can prove that something has it is astonishing.
  - dudeanon842 14y ago
    I say old chap, what audaciousness! Why the nerve of scientists, to claim that not only can they definitively say what gravity is, but that they can prove something has it is astonishing. If you disagree with them, state your case. Mere outrage is not a valid argument.
  - drewcrawford 14y ago
    > The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, That isn't what they say. The author of the article is editorializing, and the HN title needs to be changed. (puts up mod alert spotlight). What they say is what consciousness is not, that is, it does not require a complex brain, that's not a prerequisite. They don't say very much about what it is, just its prerequisites. Buried in their supporting arguments, they state that "birds appear to offer" "parallel evolution" of "near-human-like levels of consciousness". As a non-biologist I am not entirely sure what exactly is meant by that, but it is not within a hundred miles of a "proof".
    - samd 14y ago
      Yeah, should've known the article would grossly misrepresent the claims of the scientists.
- pygy_ 14y ago
  http://fcmconference.org/img/FCMCProgram.pdf http://fcmconference.org/img/FCMCProgram.pdf Have a look at the pannel of the conference where the declaration was published and signed... Even if they are not philosophers, (human or animal) psychologists or ethologists, the work closely with some. Among these are some of the smartest people I met in my life (and I never met Stephen Hawing). Edit: Two of the panelists are animal psychologists, actually.
  - azakai 14y ago
    I did take a look. They are all brilliant. But the declaration mentions only neuroscience-related specialties, not philosophy or (non-neuro-) psychology. Again, not a criticism, I have the utmost respect for them. But for such a declaration - which I 100% support - it would have been nicer to have a more rounded panel.
- bencpeters 14y ago
  Agreed. To my mind, this is one of the things that makes it so hard to REALLY achieve artificial intelligence - we don't even know exactly what we're supposed to be creating. It seems to me that CS types who are actually working on AI (as opposed to sophisticated machine learning) are going to need some help from philosophers to even fully define the problem.
  - dchichkov 14y ago
    As 'CS type' actually working on ML, I disagree. I'd rather prefer some help from hardware guys, that would allow me to run a neuro network with 100 billion neurons really really fast.
    - dmix 14y ago
      If it's your long term dream of fully replicating humans, it would be helpful to read Kant and similar philosophers to have a clear understanding of what consciousness is. If it's not and the goal is just replicating and accelerating certain cognitive abilities, then it might not be super helpful and possibly disheartening (disheartening because of how much we lack full understanding of consciousness due to limitations of only being able to understand it via our own consciousness).
      - rosser 14y ago
        My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, with a concentration in philosophy of mind, and while I can't recommend highly enough taking the time to read through and learn from the sundry perspectives and takes we've had on consciousness throughout history, be warned that that way lies confusion and dragons. Kant certainly didn't know what consciousness was. He had some instructive things to say, and massively helped frame the debate for people who came later, but even present-day philosophers who have the benefit of modern science and technology to help in their investigation are no closer to pinning down how it is that meat can feel.
      - aba_sababa 14y ago
        Absolutely not. After 2500 years, Western philosophy has yet to achieve broad consensus on anything at all. Philosophers don't have a clue what consciousness is - they can barely even describe it without using utterly ambiguous words like "qualia" or "sense datum". The only way we'll ever be able to know anything about consciousness besides what's going on inside our own heads is for us to directly experience what's going on inside someone else's (or some animal's). Not until the Singularity, basically. I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.
mercuryrising 14y ago
One day about a year ago, I woke up and had a single thought pouring through my mind - "It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't". At this point in human history, we are standing at the top of a pyramid looking down, wondering what else could be like us. What else could feel things like we do? This is a poor way of attacking the problem though, we only know what we (internally, as an individual person) experience. We never really question when someone says 'I'm happy'. What if it feels like something completely different? It's easier to hear 'happy' and relate to how we feel 'happy'. But that's not necessarily true. We stand at the top of a pyramid, wondering if other animals, plants, forests, ecosystems, planets can experience. Think of someone who views the world entirely differently than you with essentially the same genome. Now think of what makes them happy, sad, how they see a piece of technology, what they think of when they're alone, or with their best friends, hard right? Now imagine you are completely different species, or groups of species working together, you will never, ever know what kind of experiences could be felt inside the 'mind' of a planet, or a forest). It's odd thinking that people still hold the belief that humans are the only beings privy to a consciousness, we barely know what that word even means.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  According to your realization, let us assume that mosses - or even stones - or your fingers - have consciousnesses. We can't prove otherwise. So what follows, what kind of respect does a moss or a stone or your finger demand? If you question what makes a person happy, how do you hope to know what makes a stone or a moss happy?
  - ktizo 14y ago
    You could think of it in terms of minimal states, sunshine and moisture might make moss happy. But happy for moss is only a very mossy kind of happyness and so is just a fairly simple form of cellular "Woo!" and not a lot else.
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      At that point, "conscious" means nothing more than "exists", and we already have a good word for that. I do think we should give animals far more credit than we do. Personality seems like it would be heavily related to and influenced by/influences consciousness, and most animals express personality to some degree.
vacri 14y ago
Meh, the title is not what this declaration is about. The meat of the declaration is this line "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states", which in layman's terms means 'you don't need a fancy brain to have self-awareness'. (actually 'affective states' means 'emotions' in laymans terms, but in this given context, it's meant to mean 'self-awareness') It's clear from the document that they already consider primates, cetaceans, and elephants to be in the 'self-aware' group with humans. This has generally been accepted for some time, both from the angle of behavioural studies and that of comparing the complexities of brains. What this declaration is really about is recognising the rather surprising result that some birds can do the behavioural part while not having a similarly complex brain. Some of the other stuff in the declaration is incredibly humdrum and clearly visible to a layman. Animals are known to experience emotions - seen a happy or scared dog? An angry bird defending it's nest? The question of whether animals experience emotion is different to the one of self-awareness. Similarly, it's obvious that pharmaceutical compounds affect animal awareness - because vets use things like that all the time to sedate animals for surgery. Or if you want mood-altering evidence, check out catnip. Euphoria? vets have drugs for that too. The only new thing here is "we recognise that self-awareness can be present in birds, which means that you don't need a fancy brain (neocortex) to have it". The stuff about emotion not necessarily being in the neocortex is very old hat, and was in textbooks when I did my degree nearly 20 years ago. Personally, I'm also not fond of 'consciousness' to mean 'self-awareness' or perhaps 'sentience', because it conflates heavily with anaesthesiology. A vet can knock a dog out for an operation, after which it regains consciousness, but not consciousness, because while it was conscious before the operation, it wasn't conscious... :)
- derrida 14y ago
  In the last paragraph, you said a dog is not conscious. How do you define conscious here? Why do you think it isn't? I define conscious as 'having qualia'. I see red, but also, I notice the 'redness of red'. One may consider this a sort of reflexive/recursive self awareness. I am thinking, so I know I am thinking about thinking. I am interested to hear why you believe a dog is not conscious. In my opinion, a positive test may be if a dog can count to infinity. Successor functions in mathematics might be an indicator of the presence of the recursive thinking necessary to conceptualise constructions such as "the redness of red" or "thinking about thinking", and these are necessary to understand the infinity of the natural number line. So 1 == S(0), 2 == S(S(0)), 3 == S(S(S(0))) and so on.
slurgfest 14y ago
This is a political statement based on speculation, not a scientific breakthrough based on evidence. And what it's really about is animal rights (and perhaps grant money for 'consciousness' research). Scientific and philosophical footwork are entirely lacking here, and the body is a random committee with no special authority to declare anything. Among the weird suggestions of this document are that birds show a "parallel evolution of consciousness," implying that our common ancestors (ancient amniotes, lizardy things) were not conscious; also that whole classes of amniotes are not conscious. The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata, while we and birds are conscious, is at least worth raising an eyebrow over.
- vacri 14y ago
  Nice hand-waving dismissal. You clearly haven't been tracking recent scientific research in the area - corvids and parrots have been shown to have these responses for quite some time now. The rest of the stuff in the declaration is humdrum stuff that has been accepted for decades. Yes, it may be political, but that's most likely because the field doesn't have any layman-recognisable heavyweights like CERN to say "professional opinion on the matter says -foo-". The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata This is why I think the term 'consciousness' has a problem with conflation, because it leads to responses like this. Just because an entity does not have the 'consciousness' they are talking about does not make then an 'unconscious automata'. You're mixing terms from different contexts.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    You clearly know little about the field if you have never talked to a bird researcher (neurobiologist, ethologist, psychologist) who would question the cavalier application of the word 'consciousness' to more-or-less arbitrary bird behaviors. The behavior you are talking about is not 'latest' or even new. But I can point at any behavior to indicate anything, if my concepts do not have any real relationship to explaining how the behavior is produced or its evolutionary function. Which consciousness doesn't. You are hand-waving at "latest research" to solve an actually insoluble problem: of nailing down what consciousness is, and also of developing philosophical consensus around that concept. Apparently you think that a random committee vote will do the job. That is the only recent development here, and it isn't scientific. What you have is some fairly arbitrary experiments with a note attached to them saying 'consciousness!' The issue of consciousness was never about this. "Parallel evolution" implies that the feature at issue was not present in the common ancestors, and probably isn't present in all the descendants of those common ancestors. This is a deeply weird assumption for which there is NOT scientific evidence. Yet it made its way into this hokey little document, making it abundantly clear that its claims have not seen any serious kind of review. Your complaint about "conflation" is the tip of the iceberg - consciousness is such a vague concept, and so well detached from observables, that you will never see an end to such problems. In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness - while you will get others to agree on the preening you won't get them to agree on the consciousness, leaving you with a pile of data concerning just plain preening.
ars 14y ago
That's not exactly official. If you need a signed deceleration then that's very good proof that you have no actual science to back you up.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  Or that there is plenty of science in a form that most people don't (or won't) understand and so a declaration can make it digestible.
  - ars 14y ago
    That deceleration has cleared up nothing. They used some big words and declared "I win". It doesn't matter that I understand what they are saying. If you have to use technical language to explain something then you don't really understand it, rather what you know is how to work with it, or manipulate it.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > Or that there is plenty of science in a form that most people don't (or won't) understand and so a declaration can make it digestible. But there isn't. This sort of thing isn't scientific because empirical, falsifiable tests aren't available. So instead of scientific evidence, we have a panel of "experts" declaring something so. It's philosophy, not science, and, all else aside, science is to be preferred.
    - vacri 14y ago
      That is not what science is. Science is 'robust observation and reporting'. This includes, but is not exclusive to, empirical, falsifiable tests. From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy.
      - lutusp 14y ago
        > Science is 'robust observation and reporting'. No, that is stamp collecting. Science is not merely observing, and it is not merely theory-creation. It is both. Observations (descriptions) lead to theories (proposed explanations). The explanations must be testable and falsifiable. > This includes, but is not exclusive to, empirical, falsifiable tests. No, that's not optional. Without falsifiable tests, astronomy and astrology are indistinguishable. Therefore empirical testability and falsifiability are essential to any definition of science. > From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy. That's correct. Let's say I claim that stars are actually tiny dots pained on a huge glass bowl in the night sky. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Let's say I claim that life was created by a supreme being, and natural origins are a myth. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Let's say I claim that women are inferior to men on the ground that they have fewer teeth than men do (Aristotle actually made this claim, and it stood unchallenged for centuries). Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Ideas must be compared to reality, and if reality disagrees, they must be discarded. When reality-testing proves a theory false, a scientist abandons the theory, but a pseudoscientist abandons reality. Take your pick.
pdog 14y ago
> On July 7 the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was signed by a group of recognized authorities (cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologiests, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomist and computational neuroscientists). This, to me, significantly cheapens the message. Imagine a group of recognized "authorities" in mathematics coming together to sign the proof of an important theorem in an attempt to further bolster its truth. It almost makes me doubt the truth (or importance) of this statement.
- vacri 14y ago
  It shouldn't. Mathematics is lucky in that it's an entirely logical field where things can be absolutely proven. Not even Physics has that advantage. Psychology is a discipline full of minefields and gotchas - experience is very important here.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    "Mathematics is lucky in that it's an entirely logical field where things can be absolutely proven." A professional mathematician should confirm this, but my impression is that most of the interesting bits of math are fairly informal and creative--rigorous proofs only come long after the fact, if they come at all, and really just amount to dotting is and crossing ts that few people double check anyways. Absolutely proven is a bit stronger than is warranted, and at least some other fields can produce statements that have the level of "truth" that a mathematical statement has.
    - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
      The point is that the proofs are actually possible. Even physics requires "proof by statistics".
      - scarmig 14y ago
        My point, though, was that mathematics is also a field filled with minefields and gotchas where experience is very useful. Moreover, that mathematicians are more than glorified theorem provers.
mukaiji 14y ago
I've always been fascinated by the societal implications of "i think therefore I am" when demonstrated for mammal other than humans. For one, can one justifiably continue to eat their meat if we consider the reverse role, where we would exist, consciously so, only for a superior species to consume our flesh for nothing else than it's nutritional value.
guscost 14y ago
Really? I'm seriously confused.
Xcelerate 14y ago
The word "consciousness" needs to be used very carefully. There is no scientific experiment that anyone can do that would demonstrate anything "experiences" events. In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something. This is of course more of a philosophical area than a scientific one. Do most humans perceive "red" as the same experience? It's not really something that can be tested. Sure, you can measure how sensitive cone cells are to certain wavelengths and compare that among groups, but I'll never know if my red is your blue. The scientific document itself does a decent job of staying out of the philosophical questions. Science concerns itself with reproducible, testable predictions. Using a word that has strong connotations with philosophy (also words like "qualia") should be discouraged in scientific practice simply due to the controversy it would generate that would detract from further progress. Studies of "synaptic activity patterns" is perhaps a better description.
- derrida 14y ago
  > In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something. I ask someone 'you know the redness of red', they nod knowingly. Thus I know they have experiences.
  - Xcelerate 14y ago
    You could ask a well-programmed robot the same question and it would also nod. What makes something "experience" something?
  - rosser 14y ago
    Suppose for a moment that, unbeknownst to you, the reality you experience were a giant, perfect-fidelity sim. Suppose, further, that everyone in the sim but you is an "NPC" — that is, you're the only "real" person there. Again, you don't know this. Now, suppose you asked one of these NPCs about the redness of red. It nods. Is it somehow suddenly conscious because it could nod sagely in response to your question?
- andyl 14y ago
  "In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something." How can you be certain?
lutusp 14y ago
> The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. There's no basis for falsification, the claim revolves around denying a negative, there's no testable positive claim, therefore it's not science. And saying "it's official", apart from replacing evidence with authority, adds nothing except to sound like law or politics rather than science.
- vacri 14y ago
  It's denying a positive, not a negative. "Previously, it was thought you had to have a neocortex. Now, we see evidence that you don't". Corvids and Eastern Grey Parrots don't have a neocortex, and they still perform well on experiments we apply to other animals around the concept of consciousness. The sentence you're quoting is a triple negative, not a double negative, perhaps that's the problem.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > The sentence you're quoting is a triple negative, not a double negative, perhaps that's the problem. I see a double negative: "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states." The above relies on the negation of a negative state -- the absence of a neocortex. In any case, to refute the claim would require some heavy lifting -- an objective definition of consciousness, an objective measure of consciousness that somehow evades issues like the Turing test, and a handful of other obstacles. And consensus -- general agreement on the meaning of these terms. That's why it's philosophy.
    - vacri 14y ago
      preclude is the third negative. edit: There are testable positive claims - things like the mirror test. Yes, it is hard to define consciousness, but dealing with things that are hard to define doesn't mean something 'is not science'. Like I said above, we worked for a century with a model of the atom that we knew was wrong, yet we did a lot of good science with it. People didn't run around saying 'oh, the atom is just philosophy', they accepted that there were shortcomings and took that in as part of their work.

50 points by sirteno 14y ago

As someone with a computational neuroscience background, I am not sure I agree that those are the right authorities to decide on consciousness in animals, > cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologiests, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomist and computational neuroscientists Don't get me wrong, it's great to have their input on this topic. But to not include philosophers of mind for example seems very wrong. In particular because consciousness is very hard to define. The definition there involves "affective states" and "intentional behaviors" which in themselves are also extremely hard to define. edit: Also, how about psychologists studying animal behavior, ethologists, etc.

samd 14y ago
This article is as absurd as if it had said: "It's official, scientists have discovered the meaning of life!" The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, but that they can prove that something has it is astonishing.
- dudeanon842 14y ago
  I say old chap, what audaciousness! Why the nerve of scientists, to claim that not only can they definitively say what gravity is, but that they can prove something has it is astonishing. If you disagree with them, state your case. Mere outrage is not a valid argument.
- drewcrawford 14y ago
  > The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, That isn't what they say. The author of the article is editorializing, and the HN title needs to be changed. (puts up mod alert spotlight). What they say is what consciousness is not, that is, it does not require a complex brain, that's not a prerequisite. They don't say very much about what it is, just its prerequisites. Buried in their supporting arguments, they state that "birds appear to offer" "parallel evolution" of "near-human-like levels of consciousness". As a non-biologist I am not entirely sure what exactly is meant by that, but it is not within a hundred miles of a "proof".
  - samd 14y ago
    Yeah, should've known the article would grossly misrepresent the claims of the scientists.
pygy_ 14y ago
http://fcmconference.org/img/FCMCProgram.pdf http://fcmconference.org/img/FCMCProgram.pdf Have a look at the pannel of the conference where the declaration was published and signed... Even if they are not philosophers, (human or animal) psychologists or ethologists, the work closely with some. Among these are some of the smartest people I met in my life (and I never met Stephen Hawing). Edit: Two of the panelists are animal psychologists, actually.
- azakai 14y ago
  I did take a look. They are all brilliant. But the declaration mentions only neuroscience-related specialties, not philosophy or (non-neuro-) psychology. Again, not a criticism, I have the utmost respect for them. But for such a declaration - which I 100% support - it would have been nicer to have a more rounded panel.
bencpeters 14y ago
Agreed. To my mind, this is one of the things that makes it so hard to REALLY achieve artificial intelligence - we don't even know exactly what we're supposed to be creating. It seems to me that CS types who are actually working on AI (as opposed to sophisticated machine learning) are going to need some help from philosophers to even fully define the problem.
- dchichkov 14y ago
  As 'CS type' actually working on ML, I disagree. I'd rather prefer some help from hardware guys, that would allow me to run a neuro network with 100 billion neurons really really fast.
  - dmix 14y ago
    If it's your long term dream of fully replicating humans, it would be helpful to read Kant and similar philosophers to have a clear understanding of what consciousness is. If it's not and the goal is just replicating and accelerating certain cognitive abilities, then it might not be super helpful and possibly disheartening (disheartening because of how much we lack full understanding of consciousness due to limitations of only being able to understand it via our own consciousness).
    - rosser 14y ago
      My undergraduate degree was in philosophy, with a concentration in philosophy of mind, and while I can't recommend highly enough taking the time to read through and learn from the sundry perspectives and takes we've had on consciousness throughout history, be warned that that way lies confusion and dragons. Kant certainly didn't know what consciousness was. He had some instructive things to say, and massively helped frame the debate for people who came later, but even present-day philosophers who have the benefit of modern science and technology to help in their investigation are no closer to pinning down how it is that meat can feel.
    - aba_sababa 14y ago
      Absolutely not. After 2500 years, Western philosophy has yet to achieve broad consensus on anything at all. Philosophers don't have a clue what consciousness is - they can barely even describe it without using utterly ambiguous words like "qualia" or "sense datum". The only way we'll ever be able to know anything about consciousness besides what's going on inside our own heads is for us to directly experience what's going on inside someone else's (or some animal's). Not until the Singularity, basically. I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.

mercuryrising 14y ago

One day about a year ago, I woke up and had a single thought pouring through my mind - "It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't". At this point in human history, we are standing at the top of a pyramid looking down, wondering what else could be like us. What else could feel things like we do? This is a poor way of attacking the problem though, we only know what we (internally, as an individual person) experience. We never really question when someone says 'I'm happy'. What if it feels like something completely different? It's easier to hear 'happy' and relate to how we feel 'happy'. But that's not necessarily true. We stand at the top of a pyramid, wondering if other animals, plants, forests, ecosystems, planets can experience. Think of someone who views the world entirely differently than you with essentially the same genome. Now think of what makes them happy, sad, how they see a piece of technology, what they think of when they're alone, or with their best friends, hard right? Now imagine you are completely different species, or groups of species working together, you will never, ever know what kind of experiences could be felt inside the 'mind' of a planet, or a forest). It's odd thinking that people still hold the belief that humans are the only beings privy to a consciousness, we barely know what that word even means.

slurgfest 14y ago
According to your realization, let us assume that mosses - or even stones - or your fingers - have consciousnesses. We can't prove otherwise. So what follows, what kind of respect does a moss or a stone or your finger demand? If you question what makes a person happy, how do you hope to know what makes a stone or a moss happy?
- ktizo 14y ago
  You could think of it in terms of minimal states, sunshine and moisture might make moss happy. But happy for moss is only a very mossy kind of happyness and so is just a fairly simple form of cellular "Woo!" and not a lot else.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    At that point, "conscious" means nothing more than "exists", and we already have a good word for that. I do think we should give animals far more credit than we do. Personality seems like it would be heavily related to and influenced by/influences consciousness, and most animals express personality to some degree.

vacri 14y ago

Meh, the title is not what this declaration is about. The meat of the declaration is this line "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states", which in layman's terms means 'you don't need a fancy brain to have self-awareness'. (actually 'affective states' means 'emotions' in laymans terms, but in this given context, it's meant to mean 'self-awareness') It's clear from the document that they already consider primates, cetaceans, and elephants to be in the 'self-aware' group with humans. This has generally been accepted for some time, both from the angle of behavioural studies and that of comparing the complexities of brains. What this declaration is really about is recognising the rather surprising result that some birds can do the behavioural part while not having a similarly complex brain. Some of the other stuff in the declaration is incredibly humdrum and clearly visible to a layman. Animals are known to experience emotions - seen a happy or scared dog? An angry bird defending it's nest? The question of whether animals experience emotion is different to the one of self-awareness. Similarly, it's obvious that pharmaceutical compounds affect animal awareness - because vets use things like that all the time to sedate animals for surgery. Or if you want mood-altering evidence, check out catnip. Euphoria? vets have drugs for that too. The only new thing here is "we recognise that self-awareness can be present in birds, which means that you don't need a fancy brain (neocortex) to have it". The stuff about emotion not necessarily being in the neocortex is very old hat, and was in textbooks when I did my degree nearly 20 years ago. Personally, I'm also not fond of 'consciousness' to mean 'self-awareness' or perhaps 'sentience', because it conflates heavily with anaesthesiology. A vet can knock a dog out for an operation, after which it regains consciousness, but not consciousness, because while it was conscious before the operation, it wasn't conscious... :)

derrida 14y ago
In the last paragraph, you said a dog is not conscious. How do you define conscious here? Why do you think it isn't? I define conscious as 'having qualia'. I see red, but also, I notice the 'redness of red'. One may consider this a sort of reflexive/recursive self awareness. I am thinking, so I know I am thinking about thinking. I am interested to hear why you believe a dog is not conscious. In my opinion, a positive test may be if a dog can count to infinity. Successor functions in mathematics might be an indicator of the presence of the recursive thinking necessary to conceptualise constructions such as "the redness of red" or "thinking about thinking", and these are necessary to understand the infinity of the natural number line. So 1 == S(0), 2 == S(S(0)), 3 == S(S(S(0))) and so on.

slurgfest 14y ago

This is a political statement based on speculation, not a scientific breakthrough based on evidence. And what it's really about is animal rights (and perhaps grant money for 'consciousness' research). Scientific and philosophical footwork are entirely lacking here, and the body is a random committee with no special authority to declare anything. Among the weird suggestions of this document are that birds show a "parallel evolution of consciousness," implying that our common ancestors (ancient amniotes, lizardy things) were not conscious; also that whole classes of amniotes are not conscious. The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata, while we and birds are conscious, is at least worth raising an eyebrow over.

vacri 14y ago
Nice hand-waving dismissal. You clearly haven't been tracking recent scientific research in the area - corvids and parrots have been shown to have these responses for quite some time now. The rest of the stuff in the declaration is humdrum stuff that has been accepted for decades. Yes, it may be political, but that's most likely because the field doesn't have any layman-recognisable heavyweights like CERN to say "professional opinion on the matter says -foo-". The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata This is why I think the term 'consciousness' has a problem with conflation, because it leads to responses like this. Just because an entity does not have the 'consciousness' they are talking about does not make then an 'unconscious automata'. You're mixing terms from different contexts.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  You clearly know little about the field if you have never talked to a bird researcher (neurobiologist, ethologist, psychologist) who would question the cavalier application of the word 'consciousness' to more-or-less arbitrary bird behaviors. The behavior you are talking about is not 'latest' or even new. But I can point at any behavior to indicate anything, if my concepts do not have any real relationship to explaining how the behavior is produced or its evolutionary function. Which consciousness doesn't. You are hand-waving at "latest research" to solve an actually insoluble problem: of nailing down what consciousness is, and also of developing philosophical consensus around that concept. Apparently you think that a random committee vote will do the job. That is the only recent development here, and it isn't scientific. What you have is some fairly arbitrary experiments with a note attached to them saying 'consciousness!' The issue of consciousness was never about this. "Parallel evolution" implies that the feature at issue was not present in the common ancestors, and probably isn't present in all the descendants of those common ancestors. This is a deeply weird assumption for which there is NOT scientific evidence. Yet it made its way into this hokey little document, making it abundantly clear that its claims have not seen any serious kind of review. Your complaint about "conflation" is the tip of the iceberg - consciousness is such a vague concept, and so well detached from observables, that you will never see an end to such problems. In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness - while you will get others to agree on the preening you won't get them to agree on the consciousness, leaving you with a pile of data concerning just plain preening.

ars 14y ago

That's not exactly official. If you need a signed deceleration then that's very good proof that you have no actual science to back you up.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
Or that there is plenty of science in a form that most people don't (or won't) understand and so a declaration can make it digestible.
- ars 14y ago
  That deceleration has cleared up nothing. They used some big words and declared "I win". It doesn't matter that I understand what they are saying. If you have to use technical language to explain something then you don't really understand it, rather what you know is how to work with it, or manipulate it.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Or that there is plenty of science in a form that most people don't (or won't) understand and so a declaration can make it digestible. But there isn't. This sort of thing isn't scientific because empirical, falsifiable tests aren't available. So instead of scientific evidence, we have a panel of "experts" declaring something so. It's philosophy, not science, and, all else aside, science is to be preferred.
  - vacri 14y ago
    That is not what science is. Science is 'robust observation and reporting'. This includes, but is not exclusive to, empirical, falsifiable tests. From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > Science is 'robust observation and reporting'. No, that is stamp collecting. Science is not merely observing, and it is not merely theory-creation. It is both. Observations (descriptions) lead to theories (proposed explanations). The explanations must be testable and falsifiable. > This includes, but is not exclusive to, empirical, falsifiable tests. No, that's not optional. Without falsifiable tests, astronomy and astrology are indistinguishable. Therefore empirical testability and falsifiability are essential to any definition of science. > From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy. That's correct. Let's say I claim that stars are actually tiny dots pained on a huge glass bowl in the night sky. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Let's say I claim that life was created by a supreme being, and natural origins are a myth. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Let's say I claim that women are inferior to men on the ground that they have fewer teeth than men do (Aristotle actually made this claim, and it stood unchallenged for centuries). Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim? Ideas must be compared to reality, and if reality disagrees, they must be discarded. When reality-testing proves a theory false, a scientist abandons the theory, but a pseudoscientist abandons reality. Take your pick.

pdog 14y ago

> On July 7 the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness was signed by a group of recognized authorities (cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologiests, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomist and computational neuroscientists). This, to me, significantly cheapens the message. Imagine a group of recognized "authorities" in mathematics coming together to sign the proof of an important theorem in an attempt to further bolster its truth. It almost makes me doubt the truth (or importance) of this statement.

vacri 14y ago
It shouldn't. Mathematics is lucky in that it's an entirely logical field where things can be absolutely proven. Not even Physics has that advantage. Psychology is a discipline full of minefields and gotchas - experience is very important here.
- scarmig 14y ago
  "Mathematics is lucky in that it's an entirely logical field where things can be absolutely proven." A professional mathematician should confirm this, but my impression is that most of the interesting bits of math are fairly informal and creative--rigorous proofs only come long after the fact, if they come at all, and really just amount to dotting is and crossing ts that few people double check anyways. Absolutely proven is a bit stronger than is warranted, and at least some other fields can produce statements that have the level of "truth" that a mathematical statement has.
  - SoftwareMaven 14y ago
    The point is that the proofs are actually possible. Even physics requires "proof by statistics".
    - scarmig 14y ago
      My point, though, was that mathematics is also a field filled with minefields and gotchas where experience is very useful. Moreover, that mathematicians are more than glorified theorem provers.

mukaiji 14y ago

I've always been fascinated by the societal implications of "i think therefore I am" when demonstrated for mammal other than humans. For one, can one justifiably continue to eat their meat if we consider the reverse role, where we would exist, consciously so, only for a superior species to consume our flesh for nothing else than it's nutritional value.

guscost 14y ago

Really? I'm seriously confused.

Xcelerate 14y ago

The word "consciousness" needs to be used very carefully. There is no scientific experiment that anyone can do that would demonstrate anything "experiences" events. In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something. This is of course more of a philosophical area than a scientific one. Do most humans perceive "red" as the same experience? It's not really something that can be tested. Sure, you can measure how sensitive cone cells are to certain wavelengths and compare that among groups, but I'll never know if my red is your blue. The scientific document itself does a decent job of staying out of the philosophical questions. Science concerns itself with reproducible, testable predictions. Using a word that has strong connotations with philosophy (also words like "qualia") should be discouraged in scientific practice simply due to the controversy it would generate that would detract from further progress. Studies of "synaptic activity patterns" is perhaps a better description.

derrida 14y ago
> In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something. I ask someone 'you know the redness of red', they nod knowingly. Thus I know they have experiences.
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  You could ask a well-programmed robot the same question and it would also nod. What makes something "experience" something?
- rosser 14y ago
  Suppose for a moment that, unbeknownst to you, the reality you experience were a giant, perfect-fidelity sim. Suppose, further, that everyone in the sim but you is an "NPC" — that is, you're the only "real" person there. Again, you don't know this. Now, suppose you asked one of these NPCs about the redness of red. It nods. Is it somehow suddenly conscious because it could nod sagely in response to your question?
andyl 14y ago
"In fact, scientifically speaking, you can only be certain that you yourself are experiencing something." How can you be certain?

lutusp 14y ago

> The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. There's no basis for falsification, the claim revolves around denying a negative, there's no testable positive claim, therefore it's not science. And saying "it's official", apart from replacing evidence with authority, adds nothing except to sound like law or politics rather than science.

vacri 14y ago
It's denying a positive, not a negative. "Previously, it was thought you had to have a neocortex. Now, we see evidence that you don't". Corvids and Eastern Grey Parrots don't have a neocortex, and they still perform well on experiments we apply to other animals around the concept of consciousness. The sentence you're quoting is a triple negative, not a double negative, perhaps that's the problem.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > The sentence you're quoting is a triple negative, not a double negative, perhaps that's the problem. I see a double negative: "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states." The above relies on the negation of a negative state -- the absence of a neocortex. In any case, to refute the claim would require some heavy lifting -- an objective definition of consciousness, an objective measure of consciousness that somehow evades issues like the Turing test, and a handful of other obstacles. And consensus -- general agreement on the meaning of these terms. That's why it's philosophy.
  - vacri 14y ago
    preclude is the third negative. edit: There are testable positive claims - things like the mirror test. Yes, it is hard to define consciousness, but dealing with things that are hard to define doesn't mean something 'is not science'. Like I said above, we worked for a century with a model of the atom that we knew was wrong, yet we did a lot of good science with it. People didn't run around saying 'oh, the atom is just philosophy', they accepted that there were shortcomings and took that in as part of their work.