That hinges on the fact that the brain, or human-like body, is related to the existence of consciousness. But there's no reason to believe that a bunch of electrical pulses as the source of consciousness. For example, had "I" existed as a plant, then it would be reasonable for me to think that other plants are also conscious and that plants are what give rise to consciousness.
But this explanation is meaningless, there's nothing about the waves that explain why "red" is the way it is. For example, why don't I experience red as blue and vice versa? Similarly, consciousness is like that. I can have an explanation down to the quarks and follow the chain of physical phenomena that happen from the big bang up to this point and I will find nothing that would explain why there's "something" at all. In some sense, it is a coincidence that I think of "red" as red. I had similar experience when I learnt that some people don't have inner monologue; it completely blew my understanding of what "is like".
In a sense, the fact that the color "red" is the way I perceive it is merely a coincidence. I happen to experience it that way. There's no reason why it has to be that way.
You can have a kiddo who can accurately name colors on a printed page, on blocks, or any other reduced setting, and have them completely fail at the real world task
The most noticable error is the color of the sky. A kiddo who can, with 100% accuracy telling blue blocks from white blocks will, before correction, label the sky as white. It's uncanny. We often forget this correction as parents, but if you look for it, it's there.
I'll can't help but wonder how much of our color perception is stochastic parroting once the appropriate labels have been learned.
And while the existence of a motor in a car not strictly implies that it can drive, the motor still makes it more likely that it can. So the fact that you have inner monologue, experience red in a certain way instead of another, is evidence that the same holds for other people.
Of course there could be defeating evidence in the opposite direction, like reading a survey where most people claim not to have inner monologue. (In terms of colors such evidence seems hard or impossible to obtain though. How would we test for switched color experience? Perhaps physically linking brains in the future.)
I think it only suggests necessary conditions. Example: whether you are breathing is also connected to your state of consciousness, but it doesn’t follow that it’s sufficient.
not to mention the stories about people reporting seeing strange things during the Near Death Experiences, often their brain is not quite working at the time.
That's what the evidence indicates. Anything else is mystical woo-woo that can be disregarded.
We now have AI which is trained on data generated by humans who are (probably?) conscious and feel pain etc. So it can generate output which implies that it's conscious and can feel pain etc., even when that isn't the case.
What do you do with something that can pass the Turing test but still isn't human?
The existing ones can write code. Suppose we get ones that can write better code and engage in self-improvement. Now you have something which is a billion lines of code and is under constant self-modification. We no longer have any idea how it works, but it can feign consciousness in much the same way as existing LLMs. What's the test for if it actually achieves consciousness?
I can give you one that a human being in good health will pass and a rock will fail. Can you give me one that an AI feigning consciousness will fail?
Or if you use a less selective filter then it goes the other way. Exclude philosophy texts but not Facebook posts and it would still have what it needs to emulate emotional text regardless of whether it has ever seen a formal discussion of it. And it could plausibly extrapolate from that to an analytical discussion, having seen both that and analyses of other subjects, without ever feeling anything itself.
There seems to be a wide variety of thinking processes. Some folks don’t have internal monologues. Some folks can’t visualize images at all, and the ones that do, do it will varying amount of detail.
Isn’t it also reasonable that other humans have different degrees of consciousness, including perhaps not having one?
From a human point of view, the things you describe are the contents of consciousness. I have Aphantasia, while my brother describes his mind’s eye as CAD software and he can construct and manipulate visualizations at will.
The overarching awareness we both have that allows us to compare and contrast these things and make any sense out of those comparisons points to a more fundamental layer.
What you describe sounds closer to levels of awareness and one’s ability to recognize the workings of their own mind, e.g. some people remain lost in and identified with thoughts, while some are able to both experience and observe thought as just more contents of conscious experience, but not the actual center of one’s consciousness.
And there’s evidence that this can be learned (through mindfulness), which to me points to something like: we’re all conscious whether we realize it or not, and not realizing it doesn’t make it not so.
I've long suspected that the condition might be trauma related, a suspicion my therapist shares, and the clarity that mindfulness has brought for me has led to some serious breakthroughs in processing past events. Only time will tell if this will unlock something more visual.
Without going into my life's story, it makes a lot of sense to me that aphantasia could be some kind of protective mechanism of the brain to shield someone from events too big to process.
As far as I know, aphantasia has never had any meaningful negative impact on my life. We just think without mental images, but we can solve the same kind of problems as the rest. That's why most of us don't even find out that we are different until we read about it somewhere on the Internet (in my case, in my 30s). How can something that has so little real-life impact that neither we nor our close persons can even notice be seen as a disorder to be cured?
I can understand being curious about how mental imagery is like. I'm curious, as well. But I think I'd still rather not start a "treatment" as it seems that I'm good at thinking without mental imagery (perhaps it has even made me better at symbolic and linguistic processing, as I seem to be better at that than most), and "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". Not sure that something that seems to quite fundamentally alter my way of thinking (to use a mental imagery that I would never be good at, I suppose) is a good idea. To each their own, of course.
When I first learned this is a thing and realized that I have it, I initially started feeling like I’d been deprived of something. That this mode of experience was so absent in me that I couldn’t even imagine what other people actually meant when they talked about visualization, and this bothered me.
But over time my perspective shifted, and I stopped seeing it as a disability of some kind and instead as a different flavor of experiencing the world. To your point, I have linguistic strengths that are far more attuned than the strong visualizers I know. They come to me when they need something written. I go to them when I need advice about arranging my living room.
I think there are problems with this.
Take something like the roundworm, with 300 neurons.
It has senses, and I assume a base level consciousness to process those senses. It would be something to be like a roundworm.
On the other hand, a roundworm likely has no sense of self, no identity, no awareness..no mental self to be able to acknowledge and reflect on those experience, so there is no 'someone'. And isn't that the point that matters?
We can always point to something we have that other organisms don't have and ask whether that is the point that matters. We can hypothesize things that probably don't exist and say that those things are what matters (e.g. the posited purpose of reincarnation, if such a thing existed).
Re: roundworm
1) sense of self -> it has to have a sense of proprioception, of embodiedment, in order to properly respond to its sensory information.
2) identity -> humans with global amnesia would lack a memory of identity.
3) a roundworm is sensorily aware, and, if it has a sense of proprioception, bodily aware of it's own actions and environmental responses to its actions.
4) It probably isn't self-reflective, but is this necessary in humans?
Sure. In this case it's introspective self-awareness, and I would say it matters very much.
> sense of self -> it has to have a sense of proprioception, of embodiedment, in order to properly respond to its sensory information.
Sure, it has bodily self-awareness. It has enough awareness to react to something its body detects. ut not enough of a mind to reflect on or appreciate on an experience. There is no 'someone'. It's automata.
> identity -> humans with global amnesia would lack a memory of identity.
Sure, but we don't use outliers to establish baselines.
> It probably isn't self-reflective, but is this necessary in humans?
For establishing a baseline? Absolutely.
e.g. does it matter if self reflection is possible if it is possible for the organism to experience pain?
I think the answer lies in what we’re trying to understand and why we’re trying to understand it. If the threshold is applied for the purpose of understanding when an organism or machine has reached some level of human-ness, purely for the purpose of some kind of benchmark, self reflection is an interesting bar to reach.
But usually these questions are aimed at finding some moral direction about how we should treat these entities.
We have strong intuitions that abusing animals is morally wrong even if animals cannot self reflect. When thinking about a future AI, I think we have to consider the possibility that self reflection is not a necessary bar to reach before we have some uncomfortable moral questions to answer.
Put another way, I suspect there will be many milestones that are meaningful and interesting, each introducing a new set of questions and implications. And I think some of the early milestones carry implications that are worth caring about long before self awareness is reached.
Yes. Without introspective self-awareness there can be no 'identity, there can be no 'someone' - you just have a base consciousness that can react to stimuli, which is not morally significant.
We have the full connectome of the roundworm and were able to implement it in software and place it in a lego robot. It's going to be pretty equivalent to the actual work. Does it feel pain?
Besides which, we can kill animals humanely, so pain doesn't have to come in to it, only the right to life.
I'm not convinced of this a priori. And even if it was proven to me, the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant. It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life.
We can't really say for certain much at the moment, but what I stated makes the most sense based on the evidence we have.
> the non-self-aware impulse-to-live would still be enough for me to find it morally significant.
That non-self-aware impulse-to-live is morally equivalent to a plant seeking sunlight IMO.
> It would feel morally significant to me euthanizing a human neonate with a lethal condition that would otherwise prevent it from ever getting to a self-aware stage of life.
The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not.
Do you find the practice of raising meat in factory farms to be acceptable?
> The difference is humans have an innate potential for self-awareness that the animals we eat for food do not.
There are lots of differences. This is one. But what specifically about human self awareness lessens the value of animal life?
If we were not self aware, we’d kill and eat meat without considering the morality. So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here?
Not really, I would push for reform. We should be following what Dr Temple Grandin advocates for.
> So what is it about self awareness that somehow becomes a deciding factor here?
Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood.
That's where I draw the line. At being with introspective self-awareness or the innate potential for such.
I’m not trying to catch you in some kind of “gotcha” but trying to understand your reasoning. If the moral implications of killing animals are roughly the same as killing plants, do you also believe agriculture needs reform for similar reasons? And if not, wouldn’t that indicate some higher moral obligation towards animals?
> Without self-awareness, there is no 'someone' to reflect on experiences. No personhood.
Why is reflection on experience the bar and not experience itself? Animals demonstrate learned behaviors, e.g. recognizing humans from memory and resuming friendly behavior based on that recognition. Similarly, avoidance of situations that are known to cause pain.
Our not-so-distant primate ancestors had a similar kind of experiential existence before gaining the ability to reflect on that experience.
The underlying experiences that this reflection reveals are the same experiences that predate our ability to self reflect and are the parts of us that are most common to us and other animals.
I guess what I’m fundamentally not understanding in your argument is the basis for the idea that a species gaining self reflection somehow becomes the point at which it becomes immoral to kill or harm that species.
Furthermore, moral behavior can be found all throughout the animal world, with clear indications of love/protection, companionship, sharing/cooperation, reciprocity, memory of transgressors, etc. Obviously the subjective experience of these behaviors will differ across species, but the more important point is that it seems problematic to attribute the existence of moral behavior to self awareness. Self awareness helps us improve our understanding of moral behavior through rational thought, but the logic of such inquiry ultimately still relies on those underlying subjective experiential states. The fact that through introspection we can identify and label these concepts is unique to humans, but what I conclude about this is quite a bit different than your claim.
I’d argue that gaining the ability to self reflect is the very thing that increases our moral obligations. Only through self reflection can we realize that as a species, we’re no longer bound to our evolutionary defaults, and no longer required to kill other animals to survive. What arguably started as natural selection of traits that are adaptive (but imperfect) for the survival of a social species could evolve beyond those more primitive defaults. And through self reflection we can now understand what pain feels like, and how inflicting it on others is harmful - to them and to us.
I’m not arguing that eating animals is never acceptable. But the way we go about it surely seems to matter, and if it matters, the implications of it mattering are worth exploring more broadly.
There is a difference in killing and suffering. I advocate to eliminate suffering and kill humanely. That's not a concern with plants.
> Why is reflection on experience the bar and not experience itself?
It is for suffering, but not for a right to life. There is no 'person' without self-awareness. Thus I don't see a need to grant a right to life.
> Animals demonstrate learned behaviors, e.g. recognizing humans from memory and resuming friendly behavior based on that recognition. Similarly, avoidance of situations that are known to cause pain.
Animals, most mammals at least, are hardwired for socialization and to avoid harm. This doesn't really indicate anything.
> this reflection reveals are the same experiences that predate our ability to self reflect
That's the key though. Self-awareness is the distinction.
> I guess what I’m fundamentally not understanding in your argument is the basis for the idea that a species gaining self reflection somehow becomes the point at which it becomes immoral to kill or harm that species.
Without self-awareness, they are not a 'person', essentially just more complex automata. They can't shape their environment, they are just a part of their environment, following their instincts.
They don't think, therefore they are not.
> Furthermore, moral behavior can be found all throughout the animal world, with clear indications of love/protection, companionship, sharing/cooperation, reciprocity, memory of transgressors, etc.
Some of that is just programmed instinct, quite different from humans. For examples, some mothers will attack their young, does this mean they 'love' them, or they have a programmed instinct to protect their young? Some of those same mothers will eat some of their young also, keep in mind before you answer.
> I’d argue that gaining the ability to self reflect is the very thing that increases our moral obligations.
Sure, to reduce harm, but not to not take a life.
Take a cod for example. It has no self-awareness, no personhood, no traits worth valuing. Its body is worth more than it's life, and if killed humanely no harm is done.
> the implications of it mattering are worth exploring more broadly.
I agree. But I've spent the last few years debating and researching this stuff, and I've come to my conclusions. They are in line with our current scientific understanding, and unless something changes it's what will continue to make sense to me.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990's and 2000's. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I've encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there's lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar's lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman's roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
Thanks for sharing!
There is a related Bayesian argument: You draw one ball from an urn with an unknown number of black and white balls. The drawn ball is black. This is some evidence that most balls are black, because otherwise it would have been less likely that you have drawn the black ball earlier.
If there is indeed such a phenomenon, then why should I care about the suffering of non-humans?
Granted, it may be a very bad idea to ignore the suffering of some superhuman AI that was recently invented... don't piss off your godlings after all or they'll smite you. But animals? If suffering made chicken taste better, I don't see any problem with Torture Nuggets.
I am having trouble deciding if a conversation with you is possible, you do not seem to be a rational being. You use the word "bad" in a way that another person would if they were saying "this is either bad for me personally, for those I care about, or humanity in general".
Does that mean you'd include sea urchins and wombats in "humanity in general"? If it did, then you're mentally ill in a way I'm not qualified to treat.
When a lion eats a gazelle in Africa (or anywhere else, I suppose, if such events occur), it is nothing that I or other humans should care about. It does not matter that the lion eats it while it is alive instead of "slaughtering it humanely" (imagine how I have to word that idea, it's absurd).
This "suffering" does not make the universe less optimal. If I could push a button to increase the intensity of that "suffering" a thousandfold, or increase its quantity (or even both!), is there any reason not to push that button? If I didn't push the button, mind you, it would only be because the suffering of those gazelles matters not to me one way or the other. If I could decrease the intensity/quantity with a different button, I wouldn't push it either... and for the same reason.
For that matter, if suffering exists at all in any meaningful way (that is, empirically quantifiable), I'd still contend that it only exists for humans. Non-humans can't suffer, they are from a moral standpoint nothing more than meat robots.
That's just false. Do you think humans are some God chosen species which makes them magically matter while the rest (including aliens on other planets I suppose) lacks that godly spark?
> I am having trouble deciding if a conversation with you is possible, you do not seem to be a rational being. You use the word "bad" in a way that another person would if they were saying "this is either bad for me personally, for those I care about, or humanity in general".
Yeah, and any normal human would understand the sentences "my cat hurt its foot, I hope it doesn't suffer too much." and "If it suffers, that would be bad".
> Does that mean you'd include sea urchins and wombats in "humanity in general"? If it did, then you're mentally ill in a way I'm not qualified to treat.
Who said sea urchins are humans?
> When a lion eats a gazelle in Africa (or anywhere else, I suppose, if such events occur), it is nothing that I or other humans should care about. It does not matter that the lion eats it while it is alive instead of "slaughtering it humanely" (imagine how I have to word that idea, it's absurd).
Well, humans can do little about suffering of animals in the wild, but that doesn't mean their suffering doesn't matter. Your own pain doesn't matter less when it can't be treated.
> If I could push a button to increase the intensity of that "suffering" a thousandfold, or increase its quantity (or even both!), is there any reason not to push that button? If I didn't push the button, mind you, it would only be because the suffering of those gazelles matters not to me one way or the other. If I could decrease the intensity/quantity with a different button, I wouldn't push it either... and for the same reason.
This seriously sounds psychopathic.
Pain is one of the few sensations that is unmistakeable. If you think you are in pain, then you definitely are.
Pain is a signal of impending damage/injury, or existing damage/injury that may well worse if not dealt with immediately.
All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
Pain is not necessarily associated with injury.
>All signals within a human nervous system can be mistaken in principle. Why would this one be different? Phantom pains that indicate no injury seem plausible.
What would phantom pain feel like? Would it hurt? Then it is incidental that it phantom and is nevertheless pain. If you believe you are in pain even if there is no stimulus associated with it, then you are in pain. You can not mistake pain regardless of whether it is "real" or not. What makes pain so special? It hurts, it is painful.
And whether or not something is conscious matters a lot ethically. If something is conscious, it may suffer. Conscious and unconscious objects have to be treated in a completely different way. We assume rocks aren't conscious and don't suffer from being broken apart, but we assume animals are conscious. That's why we treat them differently.
We can't know for certain whether something is or isn't conscious, but we have to try to make a best guess.