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Comment by jrlocke | Hacker News Reader

When I took classes with Daniel Dennett, he was always amazed at the strength of convictions people had about consciousness even without education in the area.

This is an unpopular opinion, but the human intuition is not a good discriminator of consciousness: "Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans), claims that intuitive attributions of mental states are “untrustworthy”, and points out that “it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds (1995).”"[1]

Personally, I'll be agnostic until consciousness is much better understood.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

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I come from the opposite direction: I'm not so sure humans are all that conscious. My personal theory goes something like:

* Consciousness is a side-effect of the brain running "what-if" scenarios that include anticipating it's own actions. Self-awareness. This definition allows for non-human consciousness, but also doesn't take a stance on it, as it also allows for a range of awareness, rather than a binary state. (that said, I'll talk in binary terms for simplicity)

* Consciousness is calorically expensive - the brain shuts it down when it isn't needed, because it stops adding value then in terms of survival.

* Side effect: The primary job of consciousness is to figure out how to turn the unexpected into the routine, which in turn shuts down consciousness.

Result: We spend a lot of time NOT self-aware, then back-fill that we must always be self-aware when we consider that time (because we are self-aware during that consideration). Impossible to self-measure, but my personal guess is that we spend somewhere between a high number of minutes to low number of hours "sentient" each day.

Note: I'm using Self-aware/consciousness rather broadly here. Even if it's illusion, there's a state of having that illusion (or however to phrase that) and a state of not being aware that you aren't even considering...anything. (Dang it is hard to describe that without using language that assumes awareness).

That would explain why spending a few hours meditating can feel like a very long time, being more conscious than usually.

Edit: On the other hand, when meditating deeply, one does not run what-if scenarios. Quite the opposite. Nevertheless, awareness is particularly strong in this state.

I have limited mediation experience, so I don't claim to be definitive at all, but I'd equate the feeling to asking "what if..." and never finishing the question...indeed, getting COMFORTABLE with never finishing the question, but the question is there. Or maybe you're trying to be aware without asking the question, and I'm still terrible at it.

Definitely an aspect I'll consider more of. Thanks for the thought!

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we have an illusion of consciousness.

Very interesting thought, thanks for sharing.

I feel like even this narrative only comments on the centralization of processing, rather than the complexity required to be conscious. I wonder how much of the time spent without sentience, as you put it, is more akin to the diffuse processing in octopii arms or the gut-brain relationship.

If you are interested, "The New Science of Consciousness" [1] is a solid read (it can get a little tedious in parts though) about the "easy" and "hard" problem of consciousness.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/New-Science-Consciousness-Exploring-C...

> Personally, I'll be agnostic until consciousness is much better understood.

How does this agnosticism work in practice?

Does it mean that you don't worry about potential suffering and pain you might be causing others, or does it mean you try to avoid harming others even if they may not be concious?

It seems to me that if one is going to claim that animals' actions only appear conscious because of humans applying heuristics, and that in reality animals are merely exhibiting complex non-conscious behavior, then there is no reason one should not consider that possibility of other human beings as well, or perhaps even one's self. Taken to its logical conclusion, one could claim that nothing is really conscious and it is all an illusion.

On the other hand, if we recognize that the behaviors we witness in other animals can be explained as complex responses to stimuli, and accept that our own behavior can be similarly explained, but never the less also recognize that our own experience of being is real, that there is something here, then I think we are forced to consider that whatever that quality is it also exists in other beings.

And if that quality exists in other human beings, because they are like us, then how much like us must they be? If mammals display similar behaviors to us then is it not reasonable to infer that they also have this quality? And if even some lizards, say, exhibit a few of these qualities, do they not also potentially posses it? And if we accept that even things very different from us can experience reality in this way, then how unreasonable is it, really, to say that everything does?

There is a larger gulf between the complexity of human behavior and animal behavior than you are acknowledging.

I like Dennet's books (along with popular works by Searle and Hofstader), and I would be very interested to know whether he has a dog. I foresee a future ethics paper (or short story like those in "The Mind's I") called, "Daniel Dennet's Dog" from the perspective of a being whose essential existence is strenuously denied by it's only care giver.

We’re talking about animals that share much of the same hardware as us, not robots. I doubt folks would argue that mammaries work vastly different, or spines work vastly different, but when it comes to the brain for some folks, another species (elephant, whale, dog, etc...) crying works vastly different?

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