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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 s

by 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.

LOLtampicoLOL 14y ago
Why do you restrict your definition of consciousness to the capacity of a being to experience qualia?
vacri 14y ago
My last paragraph is intentionally supposed to humourously expose one of the difficulties in using 'consciousness'. I think the term is extraordinarily difficult to define, so a good start is removing it from easy conflators. My gut response is that it's the 'thinking about thinking' or being able to think in a 'meta' fashion that makes up self-awareness. That you can observe your own actions from a hypothetical third person view. Animal minds are of course a black box - dogs could theoretically be far more intelligent than the smartest humans, but it may just be that their brains don't allow them to express themselves appropriately. As they're a black box, we're reduced to things like the mirror test to try and approximate an idea. Ultimately I think the real answer will be that consciousness/self-awareness is not a binary thing, but a sliding scale. I think the biggest block in discussing these concepts is the next link in the chain: the unwritten assumption that once something is 'conscious', it has a 'soul' or 'special essence' of some kind and therefore can't be morally farmed/eaten/whathaveyou. Because the label of 'conscious' carries this weight, it becomes a sacred label we have to be cautious about applying. An interesting paradox, in that scientific observation might suggest other animals are capable of consciousness, but there is no scientific evidence to suggest that consciousness is particularly special in a moral sense, yet the latter is largely taken for granted.

by derrida 14y ago

LOLtampicoLOL 14y ago

Why do you restrict your definition of consciousness to the capacity of a being to experience qualia?

vacri 14y ago

My last paragraph is intentionally supposed to humourously expose one of the difficulties in using 'consciousness'. I think the term is extraordinarily difficult to define, so a good start is removing it from easy conflators. My gut response is that it's the 'thinking about thinking' or being able to think in a 'meta' fashion that makes up self-awareness. That you can observe your own actions from a hypothetical third person view. Animal minds are of course a black box - dogs could theoretically be far more intelligent than the smartest humans, but it may just be that their brains don't allow them to express themselves appropriately. As they're a black box, we're reduced to things like the mirror test to try and approximate an idea. Ultimately I think the real answer will be that consciousness/self-awareness is not a binary thing, but a sliding scale. I think the biggest block in discussing these concepts is the next link in the chain: the unwritten assumption that once something is 'conscious', it has a 'soul' or 'special essence' of some kind and therefore can't be morally farmed/eaten/whathaveyou. Because the label of 'conscious' carries this weight, it becomes a sacred label we have to be cautious about applying. An interesting paradox, in that scientific observation might suggest other animals are capable of consciousness, but there is no scientific evidence to suggest that consciousness is particularly special in a moral sense, yet the latter is largely taken for granted.