Why won't biologists say that animals might be conscious? | Hacker News Reader

Why won't biologists say that animals might be conscious?

aeon.co

45 pointseatitraw68 comments

It's so easy for humans to anthropomorphize animals and believe that they have thoughts, feelings and inner lives similar to that of humans. We do it every day when looking at cute cat videos on the internet and imagining that the cats are laughing, or smiling or crying based on superficial similarities with human emotions. I think it's so tempting for our species to project our inner words onto the animal kingdom.

I think that's why so few biologists are willing to consider this area, it looks like they are projecting their biases and ways of thinking onto their subjects of study, which wouldn't be conductive to their research.

Konrad Lorenz in "King Solomon's Ring" wrote about the fact that some birds, in the process of grooming each other, would emit sounds that are typical of their chicks, rather than grown ups.

This looked remarkably like something many people do while cuddling partners.

Lorenz concluded by pointing that we must not be too quick in thinking that animals "behave like humans", and we should rather realise that "humans behave like other animals".

The stance that they don't have 'inner lives similar to humans' could be seen as going against Occam's Razor—for some definitions of 'similar' of course (we wouldn't expect them to have linguistic thoughts for instance, but it might be fair to say their experience of temperatures is similar). This is the same basic inference we use to determine that other humans also have inner lives: we observe correlations between our inner state and external states of ourselves and others—others appear to be the same sort of thing on the outside, and we understand how external changes are dictated by internal changes in ourselves (e.g. facial expressions changing with emotions). It would be adding unnecessary complexity to say that what causes all of the similar external changes in others doesn't have the same internal 'stuff' driving it as in ourselves. What justification is there to think I would be set up in one way completely differently from everyone else? For (many) animals, you also have external behaviors that map roughly to external human behaviors driven by certain internal emotional conditions (e.g. when presented with a threat, or when feeling relaxed, etc.). I think it's a better hypothesis (not proof of course), that animals also have similar inner lives (again, for an appropriate definition of similar...).

Probably the bigger thing here, though, is that questions about 'inner lives'—if we're talking about subjective experience—are outside the purview of biology anyway.

I sometimes wonder if other humans have an inner life like me, it's very tempting for me to project my inner world onto other humans.

We don't have any more evidence that other animals are conscious than we have that other people are conscious. As far as evidence is concerned, your cat is no more conscious than I am.

Are logfiles enough to count as an inner life? We have clear evidence of those.

I think it's the other way around. We have plenty of evidence that humans are doing something different than most creatures and have trouble articulating exactly what it is.

I don't think we do. The only evidence I have that other people are conscious is by analogy; because I assume that whatever conscious is, I am, and other people seem like me.

You've skipped my point though, I'm saying that your definition of conscious isn't a useful articulation of the difference, so of course it doesn't yield a satisfying result.

Then compare the life's work of Picasso to the life's work of most cats. Art is evocative. Cats poop a lot.

Compare it to the life's work of most humans.

Humans poop a lot, I'd guess even more than cats...

See, it's hard to articulate.

I mean, we are just slightly more evolved primates.

What's the difference between a 2 year old child and an adult chimp? The chimp is probably smarter even.

I am a philosophical zombie.

It's not just animals, humans will anthropomorphize even robots which we know for sure aren't conscious. I remember how, not that long ago Boston Dynamics posted a video of a man kicking a robot dog and a lot of people were really unconformable seeing that.

> It's not just animals

This is entertainingly illustrated with googly eyes [1]. Stick a pair of them on virtually any inanimate object and you'll find people naming it, addressing it and contemplating its existence.

[1] http://factorydirectcraft.com/pimages/20120612115710-811278/...

Not just animals robots, humans will project emotions onto other humans. We see a photo of someone's face, or look at someone who isn't making any particular expression, and imagine an emotion based on transient artifacts captured at a single point in time. See also: "resting bitch face" and all the memes featuring baby's faces.

What you say about anthropomorphizing animals is true, but it doesn't mean biologists are not examining the ideas. Maybe we don't yet have the power to explain consciousness clearly enough in humans, and perhaps it will always be limited.

I think human hubris plays a role, by keeping a strong mental barrier between the behaviors of our species and all other vertebrates. Obviously there is something by virtue of our much larger brains, but we don't really understand enough about how we or other animals think, yet. We are inclined to disbelieve there may be more in common than we think.

The word consciousness, as most people seem to use it, is not defined in a way that science can touch it. It only makes sense from a certain perspective, and that is not the perspective of science.

Asking "is some entity X conscious?" is sort of like asking "last December 6, what were the chances of there being a big earthquake in Indonesia the following day?" The only way to answer a "what are the chances?" type question is from the perspective of someone with limited knowledge. From the point of view of us, today, we don't have limited knowledge, we know the earthquake happened. So the question doesn't make sense.

Likewise with consciousness. You can't analyze it from a perspective other than that of the entity in question. It doesn't make sense.

There are plenty of other ways of defining consciousness that make it more accessible to science. But you might find it difficult to make sure it isn't inclusive of things that you don't consider conscious, like a self driving car or even your phone.

I once read someone theorize that the terms "consciousness" and "artificial intelligence" are much like the dragons & sea monsters that used to be drawn on ancient maps. "Consciousness" is what we don't know about how the human mind works and "artificial intelligence" is what we don't know about how to get a computer to work like the human mind. Once we learn something new about the human mind or getting a computer to act like the human mind, it is no longer "consciousness" or "artificial intelligence", but is filed away as psychology, neuro-biology, machine learning, or some other field of study.

Basically, because science can not define terms like "consciousness", because the term represents what we don't know and we can not define what we don't know.

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

I think this is not quite true. If an entity describes its own consciousness without any outside prompting, I think that's pretty good evidence that it actually is conscious. The odds of a non-conscious entity acting that way are minimal. This is why I'm pretty sure other people are conscious, for example. Of course, it doesn't work so well with animals....

Ok, so say a self driving car has a natural language interface. It can describe everything it knows about its environment, its relationship to its environment, and so on. And pretty much anything else that a decent phone or computer could talk about, given a few more years of advances in natural language processing, machine learning, etc.

What are examples of things it might say that would cause you to conclude it must be "conscious", by your definition?

Also, you seem to have ruled out animals like dogs or chimps. I've never heard of one them them describing their own consciousness. Are you saying they aren't conscious if they can't describe it? (should we not be concerned if an animal is in pain, if it can't describe pain to your satisfaction?)

A self-driving car built by humans would convince me of its own consciousness if it started describing to me its own consciousness, the idea of qualia, etc. But, crucially, only if it could be demonstrated that it had never been exposed to these concepts. Which is probably impossible.

I'm not saying animals aren't conscious. I'm saying they can't prove it. Remember, if A implies B, then not-A does not imply not-B. I'm saying that if a creature can describe its own consciousness without having learned of the concept elsewhere, that's good evidence that it's conscious. If it can't, that doesn't mean it's not.

> But, crucially, only if it could be demonstrated that it had never been exposed to these concepts. Which is probably impossible.

Not at all. I remember having qualia-like questions at 5 or 6. Particularly, "do you see red the same way or do we just have the same name for that color?" An AI could definitely ask these kinds of questions without prompting.

How certain are you that you were never exposed to those idea previously, possibly in passing or even without explicitly stating them?

Are you aware of a human ever describing their own consciousness or qualia without having been exposed to the idea first?

I understand your "can't prove it" regarding animals, but if your only way of "proving it" doesn't work for most examples, I would continue to say the concept is one that is not defined in a meaningful way, at least not meaningful when it comes to any sort of scientific analysis or even being able to say whether an entity other than yourself has it.

I know at least one human did without being exposed to it, and I know at least one other human is also conscious. For me, this is sufficient evidence to say that humans in general are likely conscious. It would be very weird for the two of us to be different in this way.

I agree that it remains fairly poorly defined, but I don't think it's correct to say that you can't even analyze it from the outside. There are many circumstances where you can't, but you can at least glean a little bit of information in some cases.

How do you know one human did? It is quite possible the concept evolved over a very long time, so no single human came up with the idea.

I don't think that matters much. The idea that it would evolve over time in a population where nobody experiences consciousness doesn't strike me as remotely probable.

So, you've convinced yourselves that humans are conscious (whatever that means).

The point, though, was how do we tell if something else is. You haven't given us much in order to show one way or another if either an animal or a human-created thing is. So I'm saying the concept is so weakly defined as to be essentially meaningless.

Also, you say that because humans have somehow developed the ability to talk about something, it must exist. What exactly have they said? That there is this thing that they can't define objectively but they swear it exists because it seems like it does? And that proves that it exists? Do you not see how circular that is?

It would be circular if it weren't so intimately connected with the very concept of "seems."

How would humans have arrived at the idea of qualia if they didn't experience it? What's your proposed alternate explanation for this?

Alternate explanation for the fact that people describe having qualia?

I've seen qualia described as "qualities or feelings, like redness or pain, as considered independently of their effects on behavior and from whatever physical circumstances give rise to them."

I go into a good bit of detail about how such a thing is unsurprising in this thing I wrote (8 years ago). http://www.karmatics.com/docs/violet.html

The thing is, you have this intuitive feeling that something (say, redness) is real. Fine. But the external behavior you are describing as "proof"? I would consider that beyond weak. There is nothing at all surprising about an entity that can communicate, expressing that there is a certain something that it is having trouble communicating directly.

If I"ve understood you correctly so far, your overall approach to the problem seems to be that if we can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, then we don't really know what we're referring to, and so it's not real. For example:

> I can't help but have a lingering feeling that there must be more to the concept of "subjective experience" than "arbitrary details of the internal implementation of an algorithm that don't affect the results," but alas, I can't come up with words to describe whatever else there might be.

I sympathize, but disagree. It's quite clear to me that the sensation of perceiving things, whether it's redness or sweetness or pain, has something about it that is not just arbitrary details of how my brain works. There is a me which is qualitatively different from the rest of the universe in some way. No, I can't really describe it very well, but that doesn't make it any less real.

You do have me wondering, though, if maybe not everyone has this. Take aphantasia, for example. Some people can see things in their mind, and some can't. For a long time, neither group realized that the other even existed. Those who could see things just assumed everyone could, and those who couldn't assumed everyone couldn't. Maybe some subset of humanity consists of p-zombies, and they only know of these concepts because they've heard of them from others.

> If I"ve understood you correctly so far, your overall approach to the problem seems to be that if we can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, then we don't really know what we're referring to, and so it's not real.

I don't think that's exactly what I'm saying. Maybe I am saying that if you can't define it in a reasonably rigorous way, that it doesn't make a lot of sense to claim that it absolutely must exist. There is a difference.

Of course this is real to you. But I am saying it is not real from the perspective of science. For instance, it isn't something that can have value that natural selection could have selected for.

It is, by nature, subjective. And that basically means "from a particular perspective." If you view it from a different perspective -- for instance, the external objective view that is appropriate in a scientific context -- it disappears.

Even amongst same species things might be different. Take humans for example. Women and men have no clue how each other think about certain things that are very closely related to gender because they don't experience what other gender go through and experiences everyday. Some ant species farm coffee trees. Many rear aphids. It is very good enough evidence that they are conscious. Similarly animals and birds. They all know enough about their environment to identify their family/tribe, find food, etc. We may never understand ways of a cat unless we become one and live as a cat. Human kernal is incompatible with cat kernal and so for many inputs native to a cat we may not even know those exists. Like we didn't knew about animals communicating in frequency outside our freq etc until we developed tech to detect such sound. Its so amazing.

I think it's a pendulum. I remember when no scientist would say in print that animals could experience pain, and my shock when first reading a peer-reviewed article that suggested that (fish I think it was) did. Back then the Nim experiments were held to show that animals were not capable of understanding language in any way ('cause their syntax was imperfect.) However, before that scientists had been too quick to trumpet any sign of symbolic understanding as "animals understanding language." Of course, it is also strict traditional (Thomist) Catholic doctrine that animals do not have souls (the seat of experience) or go to heaven; go back far enough and that was a strong limit on what science it was easy to publish.

Why won't they say that humans are conscious? Because this is not a question of biology and it is not a question biologists have the training or data to answer, even if you want them to take this stand for essentially political reasons.

The fact that pushed me over the edge is when I learned a cat twitching in its sleep is dreaming. Apparently all mammals dream.

Now we haven't exactly defined consciousness, but I can't really imagine how you can have dreaming without having an experience that "counts" to me.

Sometimes scientists use "recognizing oneself in a mirror" as the definition of "self-awareness", but I'd be sure to differentiate self-aware and conscious, because infants can't recognize themselves in mirrors, but they almost certainly experience pain that shapes them for life.

Philosophers have come up with a long string of traits which supposedly separate us from the animals, and they have a very poor track record:

"Animals can't recognize themselves in a mirror"

"Animals can't use tools"

"Ok, but animals can't make a plan to go get a tool and use it"

"Animals can't make tools" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYZnsO2ZgWo)

… and so it goes on. My impression at this point is that scientists are spending time patiently disproving these theories only because philosophers are so far off track in suggesting them to begin with.

The article deals with this, slightly tongue in cheek, as:

> A funny pattern in animal behaviour seems to be that whatever difficult task you devise will eventually be done by pigeons

A charitable interpretation is that scientifically, we ascribe the simplest possible behaviour (no conscious thought! No tool making! No tool using!) to animals and treat it as a notable result when these assumptions are proven wrong.

What about a self driving car that, when it is not operational and is just sitting in the garage with its sensors turned off, replays scenarios from the past, creates fictional scenarios loosely or directly based on those experiences, and so on, so as to better organize and refine its data and decision making logic? Gaining additional experience without actually driving on roads.

Basically dreaming, at least in a functional sense. Does that mean it is conscious?

(and what if that same car, when operational and passing a reflective store window, can identify the reflection of itself as being itself, as opposed to being another car?)

What you are describing for the self driving car is completely different.

Programmatically reviewing stored data as defined by some machine learning algorithm is not dreaming.

Unless you are imagining some not yet invented general AI tech to be present in the car.

Why is it not?

How do you know the cat isn't doing something just like that? Because it twitches?

Or are you just saying that because it is "programmatic" that it doesn't count?

Are you honestly arguing that algorithms of the current AI wave may possess consciousness? Or that they are comparable to a cat?

I have no hold ups with programmatic intelligence. I just don't think it has been created yet. Our best attempts are incredibly faint shadows of the general purpose intelligence of living creatures.

There have been some great advancements with targeted AI for specific problems. But these approaches don't involve approaching the world holistically or with any high powered general adaptability. They fail calamitously if the parameters in which they operate are barely tweaked and are no more aware than my microwave.

I have been thinking more and more these days that it may be very difficult for a general intelligence to arise without a comprehensive, coherent world model that is developed over time through interactive, direct experience in the world.

"Are you honestly arguing that algorithms of the current AI wave may possess consciousness? "

I'm arguing that you haven't defined consciousness in a meaningful way, so that question is unanswerable.

It's like debating whether or not a submarine can swim.

I was just responding to your initial claim that a self driving car could dream at night and the suggestion that this might make it conscious.

My claim is that the word "conscious" must be clearly defined before you make any claims about whether or not any entity is conscious.

Same goes for the word "dream."

I must say I find it bizarre that observing an biological entity twitch during a state of decreased activity causes people to speculate that some sort of magic is happening. Or even that they need these concepts that they are unwilling to define to explain it.

That old word - 'conscious'. We misuse it terribly. For instance we know when someone is 'unconscious', which should reasonably be the converse of being conscious. By that view, every animal that is aware and responding to its environment is conscious.

Another use (misuse?) of the word is to mean 'self-aware'. That one is harder to measure. But plenty of animals seem to meet that bar - if they recognize themselves in a mirror; if they can empathize with others etc.

I'd happily forfeit all my Christmas presents this year if internet people would all stop noising up discussions of consciousness with protests that it's ill-defined. One meaning is the opposite of unconscious. Another perfectly fine meaning is having subjective experience. Just like every other word with shades of meaning, we can tell from context - e.g. if the one using the word is a philosopher, or an anesthesiologist. Neither necessarily implies self-awareness. That's a third thing. Poorly understood, yes. Ill-defined - I just don't see it.

you just gave two vague definitions and also said it has shades of meaning -- that's what "ill-defined" is.

For self awareness and subjective experience: can you tell me if a self driving car has either of those?

Hmm. I had read in a book that volitional attentional binding (being able to shift your attention to different parts of your experience was closely related to what we call consciousness/experience, and that a lot of animals exhibit this behavior. So, most likely, animals are in fact conscious. Sadly I don't have any sources of research done in this area...

Consciousness is tricky philosophical business.

The reality is that on our planet, even something as simple as a plant (or fungi) can have memory, communication, and the ability to anticipate results. Where do we draw the line? Is there even a line that can be drawn? This issue goes way beyond just animals and until we have a functional metric of intelligence, I can't see us getting any real answers past simply recording data.

A link to a researcher on this subject as well as some of her published work: http://www.web.uwa.edu.au/people/monica.gagliano

There are quite a few people, all more qualified than I, researching matters like this. Figured that this was something that most might not even consider and thus was worth mentioning.

For anyone that wants to actually learn about consciousness, I recommend the book "In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind"[1]. It teases apart different aspects of what people call "consciousness", gives a theory that explains them, and describes the supporting evidence found so far. The theory suggests that some but not all animals are conscious.

I believe the theory -- "Global Workspace Theory"[2] -- is currently the leading theory of consciousness, though the field is still very new.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Theater-Consciousness-Workspace-Mind/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Workspace_Theory

I think the author is conflating two every different notions of consciousness here, more specifically by not quite getting what the 'hard problem' of consciousness refers to.

The easy problem, which is what most of the article is about, is just self-monitoring—having some 'meta' processing. It's not hard to conceive of a system structured (roughly) like this: you start with a first order brain that just reacts to external stimuli, then you layer another system on it that monitors its state and calculates new inputs for it based on what was observed.

The hard problem isn't a scientific problem at all. It relates to immediate experience: what it's like to actually feel cold, or the experience of the color red, etc. It's basically accounting for 'qualia'—and it has nothing to do with what's usually called 'conscious thought.'

I recently spent good bit of time studying neuroscience. It's fascinating the way brain and nervous system functions. My own understanding is that animals are much more a slave to their neural networks as compared to humans. Because of frontal lobe and series of evolutionary changes, human beings have branched too far. Consciousness is also not fully understood at this stage. But I do concur that on cellular and structural level we are quite similar to other vertebrates. Still different.

Edit: if anyone is studying biology, medicine and are from software background; give me a shout. I would love to exchange ideas and collaborate

I was in a lecture by James Blackmon (cool dude, has some really interesting points about AI consciousness) He gave this example of testing for a Moral Patient, he stated "you would not hit a dog with a hammer, not because it can feel pain, but because it has an adverse reaction to the sensory input." By that conclusion he was saying that similarly an AI could be a moral patient because it can react to sensory input.

Interesting to think about.

because there is no precise definition of consciousness...duh.

All the better to eat you, my dear..

Because we have much more urgent problems to solve, that aren't being solved.

My friend. I'm sad to say, that's not how science works.

Ok, I'll rephrase it. Becoming a scientist is so incredibly hard that for the 99% or scientists in the planet there is absolutely neither point nor desire into spend their huge inversion validating the 2.0 version of old uninteresting themes linked with pseudo-religious connotations.

We are instead thinking about cancer and other diseases, biological invasions, contamination, climate change, and how explore, discover and save new animals and plants. Each one of this problems could fill several lives.

Do you feel that your turtle pet is so smart that could read your mind? Sorry if I'm being rough, but honestly... I don't care. We are trying to fight against the sixth extinction here.

Perhaps if you valued the philosophy of considering lower intelligence as more than resources to be exploited, we would not have so many problems to solve in the first place.

To expand, there is value in nature and the existent ecosystems in ways that are not immediately apparent. The perspective of mankind subjugating nature, conquering our planet is in my mind the root cause of the disruptions creating the extinction event you allude to. Consider there is value in caring about these sort of questions.

"If you embrace (our) philosophy the world would became sin-less and a paradise again, just because". Yeah, I've heard this before. Illusory correlation.

Maybe it's my old "moral relatavism" kicking in, but the point of view you espouse here seems to have at its core an extreme utilitarianism. As if saving the quantity of lives trumps all other concerns of existence. That's fine and all, but I choose other, less rigid ways of looking at things like to study of consciousness. On a practical level, the study of consciousness seems to promise real world benefits. on a more mystical level, it's an extension of our desire to understand the fantastic experience of being alive.

It is interesting to note how often the need for "consciousness raising" is connected to strategies for environmental preservation.

On the topic of the OP, extending to argument that other human consciousnesses exist to animals seems entirely sensible. We share so much biology and physiology with the higher animals, as well as behavior, it seems strange to exclude the experience of "self" from animal behavior.

As someone noted, the fact that animals dream strikes me as a compelling argument the the animal has a psychological construct of self.

I live with a very smart dog, and am continually fascinated by sharing my life with another being, who is non-human.

One of the things that I find interesting is noticing how my dog has its own mental construct of physical reality. She is highly attuned to things that interest her, that she has a mental construct for. So she will become quite focused on a fly, buzzing around the room. But she seems to have very little awareness of cars, paying them little to no attention. Unless the it is a stopped car with door open, then she tunes right in.

It's informative to me in trying to understand my own lived experience of reality, and how heavily filtered it is enable experiencing the constant sensory input to my brain as more than an overwhelming stream of pure sensory data, rushing in at a far greater rate than my conscious brain could ever process.

This seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Many of those things we are 'thinking' about that you listed above are issues that humans created, partly because of our lack of respect and knowledge of the other living things on our planet. Perhaps trying to understand them should be something we spend more time on and not less.

Whether or not it is an appropriate thing for science to discuss is a separate issue from whether it has utility.

There are plenty of things of limited utility that scientists spend time on, and I'm fine with that.

On the other hand, I don't think this is a scientific question.

Because the bible says so. And, it has always been the taboo in biology where biologists are a tad more reverent to religions than in other science.

Bibles says so: else eating/using animals would be a sin, and a lot of human «non virtuous behaviour» could be acceptable and animalism would be almost acceptable.

If human beings where animals (and animals considered conscious) monotheism most important axiom would disappear and most of our social order.

You know there are a lot of non-monotheistic biologists out there?

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