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Comment by hencq | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I came across this question [1] (probably through Hackernews): "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it." I found the question hugely fascinating. For me one answer is that some attributes which we think of as uniquely human, such as intelligence or consciousness, aren't actually so unique. I believe at least many mammals and possibly other animals (birds? some fish?) have some form of (perhaps basic) intelligence.

Of course there is always a big risk in anthropomorphizing behavior and there are huge challenges in designing replicable experiments. However, ultimately humans are just apes so it shouldn't be too surprising if some of our human attributes actually evolved much earlier. In any case I find research like that mentioned in the article immensely interesting. There is still so much we can learn on this front.

[1] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/what-do-you-believe-is-...

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Humans are pretty good at pretending other humans aren't human, it should be no surprise that we find it easy to ignore traits that we consider human in other species.

Savage

> some attributes which we think of as uniquely human, such as intelligence or consciousness, aren't actually so unique

If you find this topic interesting I'd highly suggest reading the book Other Minds [1] and maybe Being a Beast [2]. Apparently there was a Y fork millions of years ago in the tree of life where vertebrates and invertebrates split. It's interesting that both branches developed advanced nervous systems, specifically octopi and mammals. What's the purpose of an octopus having the highest brain to body mass of any invertebrate? Especially when they live ~2 years. Also, 2/3 of their neurons are found in its arms. Imagine thinking with your arms or seeing with your skin - they have photoreceptors in their skin and are able to match their environment yet they're color blind.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28116739-other-minds

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28696605-being-a-beast

Ha, I did read Other Minds! You're right, it's absolutely fascinating. The book makes an interesting point how interacting with cephalopods are probably the closest thing we have to interacting with an alien intelligence. I'm adding Being a Beast to my reading list too.

Thanks for making me spend more money on books... :)

> What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it.

I suspect, but cannot prove, that the brain is necessary for consciousness but not sufficient.

Sort of like a handheld radio is necessary for hearing radio broadcasts, but not sufficient, it needs to tune into a signal originating elsewhere.

Some questions that have always bothered me:

Do mentally sick people have "consciousness"?

What happens to "consciousness" during episodes of extreme rage\trance\trauma?

Sometimes, I think that we are simply machines collecting data for someone. A other times, I feel there is a higher purpose.

I believe that many animals have forms of communication close to what we call language - an infinitely productive communication system with displacement and abstraction.

Many animals are capable of working in large groups. To coordinate the actions, efficient and rich communication is required.

On the other hand, with billions of years of evolution yielding advances in locomotion, speed, protection from the environment, it seems improbable that the communication will not develop as much and go sharply from nearly zero to one in a blink of an eye with the great apes.

You can go deeper than this. Attempt to define "intelligence" in any philosophically meaningful way and you might find that it isn't clear that a coffee table isn't intelligent on some level, or alternatively that a human being isn't just a sufficiently complicated coffee table. "Consciousness", in the philosophical meaning, is even more interesting because it is entirely non-empirical; it can't be measured in any objective sense.

Any deeper implications of this are left as an exercise for the reader.

I don't think that there is any philosophical difficulty in distinguishing an animal from a coffee table. Intelligence is a broad concept which can be defined or measured in several ways. One definition is the ability to act upon the environment to achieve one's goals.

In contrast, there is an epistemic problem about whether other minds exist: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/

> the ability to act upon the environment to achieve one's goals.

Prove that the animal has a concept of goals and is not simply a complex arrangement of reactions environmental conditions, like a coffee table moving when you bump into it.

Goals are a complex arrangement of environmental conditions. But not all such conditions are equal. It's perfectly sensible to classify arrangements of matter that have self-awareness and learning behaviour as distinct from those that do not exhibit such behaviours.

We have computers that demonstrate such behavior, but few would refer to them as intelligent or grant them higher moral worth than even animals.

> Few would refer to them as intelligent.

Few would refer to a coffee table as intelligent. You seem to be inconsistent in what sort of arguments you will accept.

I'm not the one trying to use intelligence as a metric for the moral worth of animals.

My argument is that intelligence is a much fuzzier thing than people like to admit. Usually though they're using it as a stand in for "consciousness", or the ability to experience the world as we do.

Your inconsistency is more straightforward than that: you started by writing "it isn't clear that a coffee table isn't intelligent on some level", but it is if the "few would regard..." form of argument is acceptable. You are also demanding proof from allenz while presenting a "few would regard.." argument for your own position.

I agree that intelligence is largely mysterious at this point, but I think you are pushing it too far in the unknown-and-unknowable direction. A debate in which the intelligence of coffee tables is an issue is not likely to provide much enlightenment about intelligence.

> You are also demanding proof from allenz while presenting a "few would regard.." argument for your own position.

"few would regard" isn't my argument though. It is an assumption of the other poster's position. I suppose I could have phrased it as "I would assume you wouldn't regard...". This was done to point out the inconsistency in their reasoning (which is admittedly assumed, if they had responded otherwise then we probably wouldn't actually be disagreeing).

>but I think you are pushing it too far in the unknown-and-unknowable direction

Actually where I'm going with this is that intelligence isn't actually what we care about re: morality, it's just a metric sometimes used because people haven't thought it through.

When one "point[s] out the inconsistency in [someone's] reasoning", one is making an argument.

Your concern with morality seems to have entered the thread rather late and tangentially, and it is not clear to me what you are trying to say about it - in fact, it feels as if you are arguing against a position that no-one here has taken.

> We have computers that demonstrate such behavior

Not yet we don't. The full spectrum of intelligent behaviour is still out of reach for computers because we don't yet precisely know what intelligence entails. At best, we have small pieces of the puzzle that only sort of fit together.

It's still pretty clear that coffee tables exhibit none of them though.

I think what you're asking about is Efference copy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efference_copy

Other animals do this. They perceive their own movements as different from an others.

An obsession with proof leads to the sort of sterile, unresolvable discussion that you describe in your first post. It is much more productive to make some defeasible assumptions and then look for evidence one way or another.

If you're a behaviorist, you would define intelligence as "demonstrates problem-solving behavior".

If you're not a behaviorist, then it's perfectly reasonable to presuppose some definition of intent. You could further debate how I would define the coffee table itself (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/object/), but that's the wrong level of analysis.

> "Consciousness", in the philosophical meaning, is even more interesting because it is entirely non-empirical; it can't be measured in any objective sense.

Don't mistake "don't know how" with "cannot". The fact that we currently don't know what consciousness is, doesn't entail that we won't one day. Consciousness will likely one day be considered a some physical process, which means it will one day be measurable.

The difficulties surrounding qualia require a resolution, but it's a mistake to just take some people's word that physicalism can't account for our qualitative perceptions.

No. You are incorrect.

Let us say that we have a computer system so complicated that it is capable of mimicking a human being with perfect accuracy. You would probably say that that computer is not a being that has consciousness, because it is merely doing calculations to replicate behavior. Problem is, you could easily say the same about any given human being. There is, quite literally, no way to tell the difference through objective measurement.

We can measure responses to stimuli, we can determine the complexity of a system, but we have no way of determining if a system experiences anything or is simply running a program, and we never will.

> Let us say that we have a computer system so complicated that it is capable of mimicking a human being with perfect accuracy. You would probably say that that computer is not a being that has consciousness, because it is merely doing calculations to replicate behavior.

Actually, I would seriously consider the proposition that it is intelligent, especially if it wasn't mimicking one specific person, and would be inclined to take Occam's razor to the proposition that it is actually faking it in ways that cannot be explained.

I have no problem considering such a system conscious and intelligent. What's the difficulty exactly?

> Problem is, you could easily say the same about any given human being. There is, quite literally, no way to tell the difference through objective measurement.

Exactly, which means there is no difference.

Consciousness will turn out to be a functional process, which means any system with the same structure will exhibit consciousness. This would be an objective measurement.

Then how can you make a statement to the effect that we may one day know how to measure consciousness, which you have just agreed is fundamentally unmeasurable?

It's just a question of definition. Instead of "consciousness" being unmeasurable, the word would get redefined to something that can be measured, like a particular volume and/or type of calculation.

If that happens it will be in good company; at one point people thought that temperature and heat, for example, were fundamentally subjective and not measurable.

> which you have just agreed is fundamentally unmeasurable?

Where did I do that?

Looks like you added a line to clarify, or I missed it on first reading:

> Consciousness will turn out to be a functional process

Here's where I disagree. In order to know what kind of physical structure produces consciousness, you need to know what consciousness is, and we have no way of doing that. You can define some arbitrary criteria, say, having the ability to make metatools, but that is meaningless in this context, "conscious" will just be another word for "can make metatools".

In an effort to clarify, let me ask you this: why do you care what is and is not conscious?

> In order to know what kind of physical structure produces consciousness, you need to know what consciousness is, and we have no way of doing that.

I don't see how this is different than any other empirical fact we didn't know before we started exploring the world. In what way could we properly characterize fire, or stars, or bacteria before we had any conception of such things? Yet, I don't think anyone sensible would disagree that we largely understand these concepts now.

Similarly, consciousness is an amalgamation of different information processes that we have yet to disentangle, and all we have is a catch-all term "consciousness" to describe our ignorance.

> In an effort to clarify, let me ask you this: why do you care what is and is not conscious?

I care about anything that is not yet explained.

> I don't see how this is different than any other empirical fact we didn't know before we started exploring the world.

We didn't know that bacteria existed, but we knew what disease was. Once we had the concept of bacteria, showing it to be related to disease was a matter of testing. How do you test if something has a consciousness? I know that consciousness exists because I experience it, but for all I know you don't, and I have no way of knowing any different because experiences are, by definition, subjective.

You've probably seen this old XKCD about color [1]. It's like that. We can both perceive a wavelength of light and have labeled it "blue" for the purposes of communication, but we cannot possibly know eachother's experience of it. The very question is meaningless in an empirical model of reality.

> Similarly, consciousness is an amalgamation of different information processes that we have yet to disentangle, and all we have is a catch-all term "consciousness" to describe our ignorance.

I disagree. You describe what I would call "mind". The kind of consciousness I'm talking about could be described as "the experience of being". We all know what it is, but we get our communication about it confused with concepts like intelligence, mind, and complexity. I suspect this is because we grew up with a scientific worldview and have difficulty allowing ourselves to believe something non-objective can exist, so we entangle it with concepts that are objective to force it into our model of reality.

> I care about anything that is not yet explained.

Ok, fair enough. I asked because this sort of discussion usually takes place in the context of people having already come to the conclusion that human beings (and maybe some animals) are special and trying desperately to find a line of reasoning that allows for them being conscious, but not computers or plants or other such things. Some of my earlier arguments presumed this context and that may have been a source of mutual confusion.

[1] https://xkcd.com/32/

> Consciousness will likely one day be considered a some physical process

The only people I know of that might contest that non-human animals are conscious are dualists who attribute consciousness to minds and minds only to human beings.

> it's a mistake to just take some people's word that physicalism can't account for our qualitative perceptions

Physicalism BY DEFINITION cannot account for qualia because the presuppositions of physicalism BY DEFINITION rule out the possibility of accounting for qualia. This is not the same as saying that consciousness or the experience of color is non-physical. It is the same as saying that the metaphysics of physicalism is too inadequate. Sadly, physicalism has become a blindly held dogma by philosophers like Dennett and Rosenberg, leading them to embrace eliminativism (the denial that qualia exist at all). Naturally, this is an evasion, a Procrustean cherrypicking of the evidence to suit the scientistic, physicalist dogma. It is an incoherent position and a non-starter.

The solution is to embrace a richer metaphysics instead of repeating the vacuous claim that we will/may one say have a solution to the problem of qualia while clinging to presuppositions that are false. It can't and won't happen.

> Physicalism BY DEFINITION cannot account for qualia because the presuppositions of physicalism BY DEFINITION rule out the possibility of accounting for qualia.

Except we clearly invented a term describing something we've observed or believe, therefore something must be accounted for. Ergo, physicalism still must account for qualia, even if it's not the account you were hoping for.

> Sadly, physicalism has become a blindly held dogma by philosophers like Dennett and Rosenberg, leading them to embrace eliminativism (the denial that qualia exist at all).

Please, every time we thought humans were special, we were wrong. Arguments arguing for our specialness effectively amount to special pleading.

> The solution is to embrace a richer metaphysics instead of repeating the vacuous claim that we will/may one say have a solution to the problem of qualia while clinging to presuppositions that are false. It can't and won't happen.

So said the vitalists. Met any vitalists lately?

Such discussions reveal more about the practice of philosophy than they do about consciousness. The putative intelligence of coffee tables is much more likely to be raised as a counter-argument that it is offered as a plausible deduction.

If you have a means of determining whether or not something is conscious or merely responding to stimuli, by all means please share.

If your argument is that there is no difference, then you have to start adding a bunch of other rules to justify how you determine the moral worth of one class of things that respond to stimuli from others, which is beyond the original scope of discussion, I think.

The response of a coffee table when one bumps into it can be explained by Newton's laws alone, so by Occam's razor we can exclude the notion that consciousness is also involved.

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