There's actually a fair amount of recent research on consciousness in insects. There's hardly universal agreement and no one really thinks consciousness is a binary yes/no thing but I get the impression that most researchers are willing to say that insects have many signs of consciousness putting them further along the spectrum than previously thought.

Here's just one of the many articles about consciousness in insects: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/expanding-consciou...

> Do insects? I doubt it.

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)

From the description in the article you've linked to it seems to me that the described behaviour of this single cell organism could be encapsulated in a page or so of conditional logic with some counters and if-then-else statements.

I don't know what consciousness is but I'm confident that it's more than just a page of if-then-else statements.

> 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

If consciousness was a trivial as a page or so of if then else statements it would be trivial to just generate all possible combinations of these control structures and then test them all for consciousness properties.

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.

That tells us something about your imagination, and nothing about insects.

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?

> 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?

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.

Ask the same question about color or temperature. Atoms by themselves have no color, nor temperature, but macro scale objects do.

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.

I'm not sure why you're arguing with me. I didn't claim that atoms are conscious, nor did I claim or imply that the consciousness of a complex organism emerges from the consciousness of its sub-atomic components. If consciousness is gradual – and I believe it is – then it's possible that insects are not conscious, and simple consciousness only starts at the complexity of, e.g., a reptile's brain, or somewhere along the development of a fetus.

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.

> To be clear, when I say "closer to a sub-atomic particle's consciousness", I mean "not conscious at all".

How could that be what you meant? You laid out 2 options, and your corrected option 2 is the same as your option 1.

> 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.

I don’t think the topic being discussed here is “consciousness”. Rather it is how similar an other organism seems to humans, from the point of view of a human.

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.

You don't particularly give arguments for thinking that insects don't have consciousness though, your points can absolutely get reversed:

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 :)

> You personally began life as a single cell, which rapidly multiplied.

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?

Would you like to answer the question, Teever?

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?

Most likely the number of cells is irrelevant, but there really is no way around the fact that an egg and a sperm are not conscious and that a 5-year old is conscious (for any useful definition of consciousness).

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.

You can't assume your conclusion like that.

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.

I'm not defining consciousness like that. I defined consciousness (rather vaguely, but in line with the common usage) as having internal experiences, like an inner voice or qualia. I am then asserting that (disregarding spiritual ideas) it is obvious that sperm cells don't have this kind of consciousness, while 5 year old children do have it (and at least some animals as well!).

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.

If your definition of consciousness is vague, how can it be obvious that X does not conform with it?

What test do you apply?

Since there is no way at the moment to formalize the common sense definition of consciousness, I'll use what I have at the moment.

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?

I've read your discussion, and having talked about something related recently, came up with a (IMHO) descent definition:

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.

Im afraid that by this definition, a cell in my body is about as conscious as I am, and the LHC is far more conscious than I am.

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.

I don't think a cell in your body is as conscious as you are by that definition. You can probably abuse much more energy to get more difference. You have to sum over the entire volume.

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.

This is an argument from Sorites' paradox and can be used to deny the existence of mountains.

It's not just the number of cells but the layout and connections between them. Imagine if you could feed a tumour everything it needed to live and it would grow to be disgustingly large mass of undifferentiated cells the size of a whale. That thing isn't conscious.

> Dogs clearly have consciousness. Consciousness is not exclusive to humans.

that is not very clear to me, care to explain how we know dogs have consciousness?

They show (to me) pretty clear signs of being able to imagine people and things not in their presence, for one thing.

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.

You can’t prove that your neighbor is conscious. It’s the old “zombies hypothesis” from Philosophy Of Consciousness 101.

Since we're talking about consciousness right now - doesn't that mean it must have at least some impact on the physical world for our physical selves to even know about it? Just from that, I don't see how it's conceivable something could be physically identical if it lacks consciousness.

By that argument my home security system is conscious.

What is consciousness? Merely self awareness?

Are consciousness and free will the same thing?