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Comment by crystalmeph | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that scientists talk about animals displaying "anxious behavior," rather than "being anxious," because we don't "know" what's actually going on in their minds. But we're perfectly willing to believe that none of our fellow humans are philosophical zombies[0], even though we don't know other people's true state of mind, or if they even have a state of mind, anymore than we know about rats' or cats'.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

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Our evidence is much, much, much better in the case of people. We talk to them, dance with them, have sex with them, have a lifetime of interpreting subtleties of their tone and body language and power politics. We are the same species as they are.

It makes sense to talk about not knowing the mind of a cat or dog in a way that it does not make sense to say the same of a person, even if you grant that "you never really know someone else," and even if you grant the technical possibility that everyone else is just a sophisticated automaton (though it's unclear what that would even mean, or how that would change anything).

Let's make it more complicated than history and personal experiences. How do you know that you are not a Boltzmann brain? It's highly improbable, I'm not claiming it to be true. There is the smallest possible probability that I am the only one that has qualia and sentience. It's a philosophical zombie for a reason: it's a source of creative thought, not necessarily truth.

>We talk to them, dance with them, have sex with them, have a lifetime of interpreting subtleties of their tone and body language and power politics. We are the same species as they are.

How is this any more of an evidence?

I would say these are all different ways to know somebody. We do after all speak of knowing somebody intimately as opposed to a passing acquaintance. There's a wide gap between the two.

Colloquially, we don't describe behavior as 'anxious behavior' because people tend to react with 'annoyed behavior' when you describe their actions using distancing terminology like that.

But in fields like behaviorology, and psychology you can regularly see people talking about "X behavior" as generalization for "short ticks, flinching, quicker speech, pacing, etc." which will be given a fuller treatment elsewhere.

Until we have a deep theory of how minds work and how conscious, subjective experience relates to that, the lines we draw in interpreting the experiences of other entities are bound to be somewhat arbitrary.

Isn't that just because that's not a useful or testable hypothesis? It's technically possible that I'm the only conscious being on Earth, but there's no evidence for that and it would be impossible to ever know, so it's not really worth thinking about.

The point is that the hypothesis that animals are philosophical zombies is just as untestable, but we're married to the opposite conclusion for no good reason.

I don't think that's true. We have lots of evidence that other humans are not philosophical zombies, we just technically can't rule it out. We can look for similar evidence that animals feel emotion, even though it's always possible that we're just seeing convincing imitations.

I don't agree that we have any evidence that other humans aren't p-zombies. The whole point of the exercise is that it's logically impossible for such evidence to exist. If you're aware of any, I'd love to hear it.

(FWIW I don't personally believe that people are p-zombies, but I believe that purely on faith, and because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.)

It's logically impossible for proof to exist, but I think observation and comparison count as evidence. For example, if I see your signature on a document, that's evidence that you signed it, even though I can't prove that it's not forged. Similarly, if I see you act distressed after touching a hot stove, that's evidence that you felt pain, even though I can't prove it.

The only thing you need to take on faith is that your perception of the world is not simulated. Assuming that your experiences are real, every comparison of yourself to other people is evidence that you work the same. You can compare behavior, MRIs, xrays, whatever.

Ah, I think I understand what you're saying now. I think where we're parting ways is that when I say "evidence" I mean unambiguous evidence. There's definitely evidence that people aren't p-zombies, like your example (other people react to certain things the same way I do and it's reasonable to assume those reactions are accompanied by similar experience). There's just not unequivocal evidence. Have I understood your view correctly?

Yes, definitely. But from a certain point of view, almost nothing is unambiguously true, right? You have to set a bar, and accept anything below that bar as a fundamental assumption that you take on faith. And if your bar is so low that other people might not be conscious, then you know, maybe nothing is real. You definitely can't believe in the existence of anything you haven't seen with your own eyes.

I know nobody here actually believes in p-zombies, I'm just making a point in response to the original comment that it's totally reasonable to be sure that other humans are conscious, and not sure that animals are. Those positions are consistent if you're operating with a usable definition of evidence and truth. It's philosophically possible that other people are zombies, but it's practically possible that some animals are zombies.

Yeah there is a certain dissonance in conducting research to create psychoactive drugs based on "anxiety-like symptoms", then giving that drug to humans and seeing that it does in fact cure anxiety, and the refuse to attribute that emotion to animals. How do they think that the research worked then, sheer coincidence ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Speaking elegantly to available observations is different from rejecting the inner world of animals, but a lot of people view the non-acceptance of their view as the rejection of their view. It's just disciplined conservatism, as opposed to the affirmative belief of nothingness inside an animal.

A difference is that humans can report their subjective experiences directly (i.e. "I feel anxious") whereas animals cannot. It's not dispositive, of course, (would a p-zombie report that they feel anxious?) but it makes a big difference.

In science, we >do< actually focus on external behaviour in describing human internal states.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)

It's only lay persons who think there's any difference.

"Anxious behavior" still implies insight into the mind.

Rather than downmod, why not show how it doesn't?

Because it's describing a type of behavior we can observe that we classify as anxious. Observing a behavior doesn't require insight into the mind.

Observing may not require insight into the mind, but classifying it as anxious does. "Anxious" makes a claim about the state of mind of whatever is being described. One would need to rename the classification, perhaps to something actually descriptive of the observations.

I see what you're getting at, but in this case it's not really describing the state of mind. My behavior could be anxious without actually being anxious. For example shaking your leg is an anxious behavior, being jumpy or twitchy as well, but they don't necessarily mean that the person behaving that way is anxious.

Anxious is describing the behavior itself, not the cause of it. You would be correct if it had said the behavior was due to being anxious, because that's describing the mind state of who's performing the behavior and the cause of it.

There must be a relationship between those behaviors described as anxious and those caused by being anxious, otherwise a different label would have been used to classify the behaviors.

Why is twitching labeled anxious? Perhaps it is part of a workout routine, in which case it would be more accurate to label the same observed behavior as exercise.

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