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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

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.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    Well, it's an interesting topic. I don't know why moss can't be (say) indifferent to its own growth. How does one know, other than that it seems to stand to reason? It seems to me that even cute fuzzy animals are much more indifferent to things than people tend to be. Even people are often pretty indifferent when they are in slightly altered states, without fundamentally changing their brain structures. If I am totally ridiculously zonked on GHB and barbiturates and someone breaks my toe, I might notice that and still be indifferent until I dry up. The outrage only comes after I start making decisions and putting things together, otherwise maybe it is just something that happens. Not that I suggest breaking bears' toes or anything.
- rosser 14y ago
  The only thing you can do (and I'm speaking as someone who's held the belief that all matter is experiential in nature for years) is act to minimize the harm you do to the world around you, and with respect and thanks when you must do harm. I routinely thank the food I eat for having given its life that mine might continue, and hope that it had as "happy" (for its particular value of "happy") a life as it could before it ended up on my plate. To that end, I only buy free-range chicken products (meat, eggs, &c), grass-fed grazing animals, wild-caught fish, and so-on, to the extent I possibly can. As for what would make a moss "happy", I guess it would be to be a moss. Since I can't begin to know what it's like to be a moss, I can only draw parallels with my experience, and that's what leaps most readily to mind. What makes me happiest as a human is to express my individual humanity most fully, so for a moss, it would be being the mossiest moss it can be. It's somewhat trite, and rather more tautological, but it's all I've got.
  - davidkatz 14y ago
    It's an amicable world view, but everything we know about the world suggests that moss does not have anything that resembles an experience, and that applying words such as 'happiness' to moss is utterly meaningless.
    - rosser 14y ago
      Nothing we know about the world suggests anything at all, either way, about whether or not moss, or anything else beyond our own, individual selves, are experiential — and we only have that knowledge because we have direct access to our own experiences. This is the essence of the problem of Epistemic Asymmetry, according to which I can't even know if you are an experiential thing. Yes, of course, you look and act like one, but it's perfectly logically consistent with all of my experiences of you (and utterly, a priori impossible to disprove) that you don't. (Aside: if you have trouble with this notion, do some reading on zombies — and I don't mean the shuffling, groaning undead that like to eat brains. A web search on "Chalmers" and "zombie" should get you started.) It might help in understanding the conclusion I've reached, to talk about how I got here. See, to my mind, no-one has yet satisfactorily answered Descartes' great question: How can I know that my experiences are at all reflective of an antecedent reality? His answer was to pull the biggest deus ex machina of all time, and asserted that reality is "real" because, well, God. That's a cop-out, if you ask me, and hand-wavy at best. So I'm left, philosophically speaking, stuck at solipsism. And, frankly, that sucks. In the alternative, I have to look at the data available to me through my experiences, and try to draw some kind of meaningful conclusions from it. The first datum I examined is that all the people I interact with have an external appearance that's similar in form and nature to the thing I see when I look at myself (assuming we first posit that they actually exist, experientially or otherwise, and that my experiences aren't the product of some vast sim in which I'm trapped; if that's the case, it's game over already and there's not much point in playing). So maybe the other people have an inner, experiential nature, too. If so, what's special about people? Don't other animals, in keeping with their forms and natures, act in a way that suggests they're experiential, too? Maybe they are. So what's special about animals? Follow that train long enough, of course, you end up in a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. You can cut the problem off by drawing some arbitrary line somewhere that says, "Things on this side of the line are experiential, and things on the other side aren't," but where can you meaningfully draw that line without access to the "inner state" of the things immediately on either side of your line? And what is it about those things on the one side that makes them special and privileged enough to be experiential, but not the others? Following, instead, the principle of positing the fewest number of entities in my attempt to dig my way out of the solipsist hell that Descartes left me in, it seems least arbitrary and hand-wavy to posit that everything in the "external world" of which I have an experience might also somehow have an experience of its own. It's as arbitrary a place as any to draw the line, but unlike every other place, it doesn't require explaining why the line happens to fall there and not somewhere else. Moreover, it cleanly solves the question of how it is that meat can feel. It can, because everything can. Please note, that's not remotely to suggest that the experience a moss has, let alone a rock, or a lone hydrogen atom, is qualitatively anything like the experience I have. How can they be? The nature of my experience is the product of absolutely squillions of different interactions of all the constituent particles, atoms, cells, organs, systems and structures that make up the vessel in which I have my experiences, each having their own individual experiences of being that part of the vessel. And it's likely some of those interactions are more directly relevant to the nature of my experience than others. My femur, for example, probably has less bearing on what it feels like to be me than my spine, but it's absolutely a factor in the complex interplay that gives rise to the whole thing. But again, at the end of all that searching — and this literally took me years of pondering, mulling, barking up the wrong tree, false starts, and starting over from first principles — it's the least arbitrary answer I can find, it posits the least number of things in the universe (only one: experiential stuff, otherwise known as "matter"), and seems to me to neatly address some absolutely huge, and eternally open questions. So, yeah. It's only a theory, but it's the best one I've got, and it beats the hell out of solipsism. EDITS: there were many.
- mercuryrising 14y ago
  Absolutely they could with my frame of thought. I like to think the best way to view the world is a world without humans. This, to me, is an easier way of thinking than attempting to place myself in the views of the thing I want to think about. Moss enjoy the simple things in life, while rocks enjoy even simpler things. To me, these things cannot experience happiness - happiness is a human emotion that requires a memory of the past. Maybe a piece of moss 'remembers' the sun when the sun hasn't shined in a week. When the sun comes out again, it will be energized and start to grow. This would be the 'happiness' in a moss' life. A rock lays dormant until it can find a point of lowest energy to fall to, in which case it does. I think that's all there is to say about rocks though, because they don't seem to do much else. But what about rocks before? They came from lava, maybe they were spewn from a volcano, hurled hundreds of feet in the air before landing and solidifying. To me, if I were a piece of rock, I would prefer flying through the air (maybe when people throw rocks, they allow the rock to relive its previous life as a hunk of lava). There are a couple things that you may run into trouble with when thinking about experience - humans have an innate sense of time that we base things off of. We have a certain number of experiences in a day, and that's the time frame of our experiences. What if experiences could be drawn out over hundreds, thousands, millions of years? What if suns experienced things on the time frame of hundreds of millions of years, what kind of experiences would be possible? One (of many) more things to ponder that's inline with this type of thought - the effects of networks on consciousness. Because I have a consciousness, does that make every cell in my body conscious? If every cell is conscious, does that make every organelle? Does that make every strand of DNA? Does that make every atom in my body conscious? I would like to say no, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and because of the configuration of things in my body, I have been allowed access to a consciousness. Maybe a moss can never experience anything, but moss is just a component of a forest. Maybe a forest could? Or are forests at the level of cells? Maybe an ecosystem could experience something? A rock was likely once a piece of a boulder, can a boulder experience? What about sand, the rock's likely next change in configuration? What about a mountain, where boulders come from? What changes when we step up levels of complexity? (sorry for the randomness of this, I write as the questions pop into my head - where do those questions come from?)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
_3u10 14y ago
"It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't" This is basically a variation on Pascal's wager and is the logic anyone who can't prove what they are saying insists on. The snowclone is roughly "We should believe X until we can prove Y because of horrible thing we don't want Z" Militant vegetarians claim it for animal consciousness. Abortion protestors claim it for human consciousness. Theists claim it about God. Atheists claim it about the invisible pink unicorn. etc. To me its a position to be taken that leads to tautologies. I don't personally think it's a very good epistemological method. Should you have to ask permission to turn off/throw out your computer because we have to assume it has consciousness until someone proves it doesn't?
- Xcelerate 14y ago
  I don't think this is a very good way to think about things. There are many examples in history of some people looking at other people as "sub-human" for various reasons. Should they have continued their (now considered evil) actions since it was uncertain if these "sub-humans" had consciousness or feelings?
lutusp 14y ago
> "It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't" This contradicts the "null hypothesis", on which science depends. Without the null hypothesis (the assumption that a claim is false until there's evidence that it's true), the gates are thrown open -- Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and alien visitations are assumed to be true until proven false, and proving them false would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden. The null hypothesis exists for a reason -- and among other things it's how we distinguish science from philosophy.

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.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  Well, it's an interesting topic. I don't know why moss can't be (say) indifferent to its own growth. How does one know, other than that it seems to stand to reason? It seems to me that even cute fuzzy animals are much more indifferent to things than people tend to be. Even people are often pretty indifferent when they are in slightly altered states, without fundamentally changing their brain structures. If I am totally ridiculously zonked on GHB and barbiturates and someone breaks my toe, I might notice that and still be indifferent until I dry up. The outrage only comes after I start making decisions and putting things together, otherwise maybe it is just something that happens. Not that I suggest breaking bears' toes or anything.
rosser 14y ago
The only thing you can do (and I'm speaking as someone who's held the belief that all matter is experiential in nature for years) is act to minimize the harm you do to the world around you, and with respect and thanks when you must do harm. I routinely thank the food I eat for having given its life that mine might continue, and hope that it had as "happy" (for its particular value of "happy") a life as it could before it ended up on my plate. To that end, I only buy free-range chicken products (meat, eggs, &c), grass-fed grazing animals, wild-caught fish, and so-on, to the extent I possibly can. As for what would make a moss "happy", I guess it would be to be a moss. Since I can't begin to know what it's like to be a moss, I can only draw parallels with my experience, and that's what leaps most readily to mind. What makes me happiest as a human is to express my individual humanity most fully, so for a moss, it would be being the mossiest moss it can be. It's somewhat trite, and rather more tautological, but it's all I've got.
- davidkatz 14y ago
  It's an amicable world view, but everything we know about the world suggests that moss does not have anything that resembles an experience, and that applying words such as 'happiness' to moss is utterly meaningless.
  - rosser 14y ago
    Nothing we know about the world suggests anything at all, either way, about whether or not moss, or anything else beyond our own, individual selves, are experiential — and we only have that knowledge because we have direct access to our own experiences. This is the essence of the problem of Epistemic Asymmetry, according to which I can't even know if you are an experiential thing. Yes, of course, you look and act like one, but it's perfectly logically consistent with all of my experiences of you (and utterly, a priori impossible to disprove) that you don't. (Aside: if you have trouble with this notion, do some reading on zombies — and I don't mean the shuffling, groaning undead that like to eat brains. A web search on "Chalmers" and "zombie" should get you started.) It might help in understanding the conclusion I've reached, to talk about how I got here. See, to my mind, no-one has yet satisfactorily answered Descartes' great question: How can I know that my experiences are at all reflective of an antecedent reality? His answer was to pull the biggest deus ex machina of all time, and asserted that reality is "real" because, well, God. That's a cop-out, if you ask me, and hand-wavy at best. So I'm left, philosophically speaking, stuck at solipsism. And, frankly, that sucks. In the alternative, I have to look at the data available to me through my experiences, and try to draw some kind of meaningful conclusions from it. The first datum I examined is that all the people I interact with have an external appearance that's similar in form and nature to the thing I see when I look at myself (assuming we first posit that they actually exist, experientially or otherwise, and that my experiences aren't the product of some vast sim in which I'm trapped; if that's the case, it's game over already and there's not much point in playing). So maybe the other people have an inner, experiential nature, too. If so, what's special about people? Don't other animals, in keeping with their forms and natures, act in a way that suggests they're experiential, too? Maybe they are. So what's special about animals? Follow that train long enough, of course, you end up in a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. You can cut the problem off by drawing some arbitrary line somewhere that says, "Things on this side of the line are experiential, and things on the other side aren't," but where can you meaningfully draw that line without access to the "inner state" of the things immediately on either side of your line? And what is it about those things on the one side that makes them special and privileged enough to be experiential, but not the others? Following, instead, the principle of positing the fewest number of entities in my attempt to dig my way out of the solipsist hell that Descartes left me in, it seems least arbitrary and hand-wavy to posit that everything in the "external world" of which I have an experience might also somehow have an experience of its own. It's as arbitrary a place as any to draw the line, but unlike every other place, it doesn't require explaining why the line happens to fall there and not somewhere else. Moreover, it cleanly solves the question of how it is that meat can feel. It can, because everything can. Please note, that's not remotely to suggest that the experience a moss has, let alone a rock, or a lone hydrogen atom, is qualitatively anything like the experience I have. How can they be? The nature of my experience is the product of absolutely squillions of different interactions of all the constituent particles, atoms, cells, organs, systems and structures that make up the vessel in which I have my experiences, each having their own individual experiences of being that part of the vessel. And it's likely some of those interactions are more directly relevant to the nature of my experience than others. My femur, for example, probably has less bearing on what it feels like to be me than my spine, but it's absolutely a factor in the complex interplay that gives rise to the whole thing. But again, at the end of all that searching — and this literally took me years of pondering, mulling, barking up the wrong tree, false starts, and starting over from first principles — it's the least arbitrary answer I can find, it posits the least number of things in the universe (only one: experiential stuff, otherwise known as "matter"), and seems to me to neatly address some absolutely huge, and eternally open questions. So, yeah. It's only a theory, but it's the best one I've got, and it beats the hell out of solipsism. EDITS: there were many.
mercuryrising 14y ago
Absolutely they could with my frame of thought. I like to think the best way to view the world is a world without humans. This, to me, is an easier way of thinking than attempting to place myself in the views of the thing I want to think about. Moss enjoy the simple things in life, while rocks enjoy even simpler things. To me, these things cannot experience happiness - happiness is a human emotion that requires a memory of the past. Maybe a piece of moss 'remembers' the sun when the sun hasn't shined in a week. When the sun comes out again, it will be energized and start to grow. This would be the 'happiness' in a moss' life. A rock lays dormant until it can find a point of lowest energy to fall to, in which case it does. I think that's all there is to say about rocks though, because they don't seem to do much else. But what about rocks before? They came from lava, maybe they were spewn from a volcano, hurled hundreds of feet in the air before landing and solidifying. To me, if I were a piece of rock, I would prefer flying through the air (maybe when people throw rocks, they allow the rock to relive its previous life as a hunk of lava). There are a couple things that you may run into trouble with when thinking about experience - humans have an innate sense of time that we base things off of. We have a certain number of experiences in a day, and that's the time frame of our experiences. What if experiences could be drawn out over hundreds, thousands, millions of years? What if suns experienced things on the time frame of hundreds of millions of years, what kind of experiences would be possible? One (of many) more things to ponder that's inline with this type of thought - the effects of networks on consciousness. Because I have a consciousness, does that make every cell in my body conscious? If every cell is conscious, does that make every organelle? Does that make every strand of DNA? Does that make every atom in my body conscious? I would like to say no, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and because of the configuration of things in my body, I have been allowed access to a consciousness. Maybe a moss can never experience anything, but moss is just a component of a forest. Maybe a forest could? Or are forests at the level of cells? Maybe an ecosystem could experience something? A rock was likely once a piece of a boulder, can a boulder experience? What about sand, the rock's likely next change in configuration? What about a mountain, where boulders come from? What changes when we step up levels of complexity? (sorry for the randomness of this, I write as the questions pop into my head - where do those questions come from?)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

_3u10 14y ago

"It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't" This is basically a variation on Pascal's wager and is the logic anyone who can't prove what they are saying insists on. The snowclone is roughly "We should believe X until we can prove Y because of horrible thing we don't want Z" Militant vegetarians claim it for animal consciousness. Abortion protestors claim it for human consciousness. Theists claim it about God. Atheists claim it about the invisible pink unicorn. etc. To me its a position to be taken that leads to tautologies. I don't personally think it's a very good epistemological method. Should you have to ask permission to turn off/throw out your computer because we have to assume it has consciousness until someone proves it doesn't?

Xcelerate 14y ago
I don't think this is a very good way to think about things. There are many examples in history of some people looking at other people as "sub-human" for various reasons. Should they have continued their (now considered evil) actions since it was uncertain if these "sub-humans" had consciousness or feelings?

lutusp 14y ago

> "It's better to assume everything has a consciousness until you can prove it doesn't" This contradicts the "null hypothesis", on which science depends. Without the null hypothesis (the assumption that a claim is false until there's evidence that it's true), the gates are thrown open -- Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and alien visitations are assumed to be true until proven false, and proving them false would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden. The null hypothesis exists for a reason -- and among other things it's how we distinguish science from philosophy.