Am I missing something? The difference is genetics, manifested via neocortex and thumbs.
The question isn't purely philosophical though, as there are entire fields devoted to the topic (cognitive sciences, areas of neuroscience, areas of ai research)
Personally, I subscribe to something along the lines of attention schema theory and panpsychism, and the last time I mentioned this on HN, lots of people agreed with this notion: the state of physical imbalance is, in mathematical terms, both sufficient and necessary for consciousness to evolve. (So if there is an imbalance in the realm of electromagnetic forces on some atom, the atoms 'urge' to adapt is what we describe as consciousness, albeit we usually experience the same phenomenon from a vastly more complex and abstract viewpoint (through the attention-mechanisms of our brain))
Do mice? Probably.
Do insects? I doubt it.
Here's just one of the many articles about consciousness in insects: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/expanding-consciou...
May I ask why? Given there are single-cell-organisms which display complex, intelligent behaviour [1]?
Where do you draw the line, and why? Are lobsters with their 18 'neurons' conscious to you? Because they look very conscious to me, although I'm biased (since electromagnetical imbalance is a sufficient explanation for consciousness in my eyes)
[1] https://www.sciencealert.com/this-single-celled-animal-can-m...
^ there's lots more to this than this single link. For example, I've read about single cell organisms that build shelter for themselves, not to mention 'the blob' (not sure if the ARTE-documentation was translated to english)
I don't know what consciousness is but I'm confident that it's more than just a page of if-then-else statements.
Are you? I'm not :/ I don't know what consciousness is either (if it is anything), but it doesn't seem unreasonable that it would be a spectrum. That the bottom of the spectrum would be as simple as "a page of if-then-else statements" doesn't seem particularly wild
The fact that millions of students taking intro CS courses haven't generated consciousness as part of their homework assignment leads me to believe that consciousness is a bit less trivial than a page of if then else statements.
Like all animals, we share a common ancestor with insects. At what point do you imagine our ancestors evolved this property that you imagine insects lack?
You personally began life as a single cell, which rapidly multiplied. At what point during your embryogenesis or subsequent development do you believe you gained the property of consciousness?
Would you claim that sub-atomic particles have consciousness? If not, and if you accept that humans have consciousness, then there are two options:
1) The step occured somewhere between sub-atomic particles and humans, so why not somewhere between insects and humans?
2) Consciousness is gradual, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if an insects consciousness is closer to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness than to a human's consciousness.
It makes no sense to say an atom has a little bit of temperature.
These are emergent properties that describe the interactions and interworkings of many many individual components.
It's not necessary that elementary particles have a "little bit" of consciousness. They also don't have any temperature, it not "a little" but undefined. It could be that you can only apply the concept of consciousness to sufficiently complex systems.
It reminds me of how some ancient Greeks felt there was a contradiction in 2 being large when compared to 1,but small when compared to 3. How can 2 possess the quality of smallness and largeness at the same time? Perhaps it has some smallness in it and also some largeness? Today we would say small and large are relative terms that apply to two things, it's a function that takes two inputs. They didn't have a solid grasp on concepts that exist in the relations between objects instead of them residing in the objects. I think today's consciousness debate is analogously misguided.
To be clear, when I say "closer to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness", I mean "not conscious at all". Hmm, I admit, that sentence could be misunderstood. Sorry, that was my fault.
How could that be what you meant? You laid out 2 options, and your corrected option 2 is the same as your option 1.
I don't get what you're saying. My "corrected" option 2 means that consciousness is a spectrum, that consciousness is not a binary property. A human is more conscious than a chicken, which is more conscious than an insect, which is more conscious than a bacterium, which is not conscious at all.
The more human something looks, the more plausible it seems that the being may be conscious.
But this begs the question of what consciousness is, and is not a scientific approach.
1) The step occured somewhere between sub-atomic particles and humans, so why not somewhere between sub-atomic particles and insects?
2) Consciousness is gradual, in which case I wouldn't be surprised if an insects consciousness is closer to a human's consciousness than to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness.
So we're back to the starting point of... nobody really has a clue what we're talking about :)
Did he? or did he begin at the point when that single cell multiplied into a sufficient number of properly organized cells?
That's what I take OPs argument to be, and you haven't provided any evidence as to why that isn't the case.
If you want to claim that an insect has consciousness or that a single cell does as well, why would you draw the line at a single cell? What would you say to someone who would claim that a virus has consciousness, or a ribosome? Why can't rocks be conscious?
At what number of cells do you figure consciousness exists? Call that N.
How does the addition of cells beyond N-1 imbue consciousness?
How did you determine N?
Sure, you could opt for the scientific version of panpsychism, where we attribute a property that we call consciousness purely by analogy to any system with some physical properties. But that still leaves you with the hard work of (a) proving that that property has anything to do with what we normally understand as consciousness (qualia, inner voice, etc.), and (b) defining the point/range where a system has enough panpsychism-consciousness to be considered conscious in the regular sense - e.g. at what size/age does a human have its first experience of thought? When the first neurons differentiate? When it is born? Later? Panpsychism could be a way to give an answer, but you still need to actually quantify this.
Of course, spiritual/religious panpsychism doesn't have this problem, it can posit that the soul should exists even outside of a physical body, that electrons can feel love etc. It is not provably wrong, but it is also outside the realm of what we can scientifically study, at least for now.
If you define consciousness as "something a child has that a sperm doesn't have" you are muddled up right at the start -- maybe thumbs are the essence of consciousness.
My point is that panpsychism seems to me to be using definitions to try to hide away the fact that it can't actually answer the questions of consciousness that we are really interested in any more than brain-based theories can.
What test do you apply?
I can well define "consciousness" formally as anything you like, even as something that vaguely intersects with the common-sense definition, like the information schema people did. But the fact of the matter is that we first have to understand consciousness, the vague common-sense concept, and only after we understand it can we give a precise formal definition that is actually useful.
Otherwise, it would be like defining the mass of an object to be the volume of an object - there is some overlap, and it is a perfectly formally defined, but it's just not the right definition for what you want to explain.
Let me ask you - do you believe that when a photon in the red wavelength hits an electron, the electron "sees red" in the same sense that you "see red" when that same photon hits your retina? What about your retina itself? Does it "see red" in the same sense that you do?
Consciousness of a physical system A is the difference between the behavior of A and the behavior of a system Aavg, that has the same content as A, but mixed randomly (think water and organics of the right weight and proportion simply mixed in a barrel).
This apparently breaks when you start using tools though.
Also, this definition does nothing to capture the difference between a philosophical zombie and a human, or help us tell if there is such a difference.
As for LHC, it actually needs quite a lot of people to be "conscious". E.g. to be powered and able to operate, so it makes sense, that, as an organization, it is more conscious than you are.
On the philosophical zombie I don't believe there's any difference in consciousness to a human, and the definition matches that idea.
Now I'd challenge anyone to give a better definition in terms of the number of examples contradicting it.
that is not very clear to me, care to explain how we know dogs have consciousness?
Spend enough time with dogs, and it becomes hard work explaining away that they are conscious, and most of the arguments you would come up with could be used to explain away that your neighbour is conscious, too.
So what we label “consciousness” is the ability to turn off the connectedness thing. We see ourselves as present and everything else as abstract or distant.
I think it’s evolutionarily adaptive, because the insect doesn’t _really_ care if it’s eaten by the flower. It’ll recoil from stress but it won’t fight to continue to exist with the same fervor that a “conscious” creature will.
But the irony for many of us is we are on a journey to rekindle that connected feeling. A major goal of life for some is to shed the lie of individualism and keep in mind the truth we knew before we became “conscious”—that we don’t really exist separately from the world around us. We are part of thousands of collective consciousnesses and we can only perceive the world at all through those collective eyes.
What I conclude from your statement is that you've never watched a nature documentary in your entire life.
A fly in a spider web: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0SkOXtq7Nw
Seems to me that this fly doesn't really consider itself a part of the spider web, and it very much cares whether it'll be eaten by the spider. It also seems to put up quite the fight. By your theory, that would mean the fly is conscious.
But... have you ever been in fight or flight mode? Subjectively it doesn’t feel like consciousness to me, it’s more a form of blacking out.
I’m not suggesting that “human consciousness“ is what allows us to recoil. I’m saying it adds another layer of survivalism on top of normal organism survival. It allows someone to move their family across an ocean, or spend your life building rockets to get off Earth.
Like, I don’t think Elon musk would be trying to get to Mars without his human consciousness telling him not just that humans are unique and distinct from the world, but that he personally is unique and distinct from the world.
And I guess I’m saying there’s another form of “consciousness” which I guess I have to call “life consciousness” to differentiate it from this “human consciousness” and that the differentiating factor that human consciousness feels separate from other consciousnesses.
And that was an evolutionary advantage for us apes and our survival.
Definitely not suggesting it’s the only way an organism fights for its survival.
That's a very good question, what is the first thing our evolutionary ancestors ever did, the first thought they ever had that made them different from all other species on the planet and deemed us sentient?
Or is the question of consciousness purely a philosophical one? since we can't really define the difference between humans and other species? Or can we?