The Consciousness of Invertebrates
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The book has a sequel, Echopraxia, which I also recommend. It's a novel based around the argument that consciousness is not only unnecessary, it's actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
nor the latter implying the former :D
Like the article says, every time we bother to look we are _surrpised_ to find abilities in all sorts of animals.
Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious, that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and intelligent.
My opinion: Intelligence is not rare, we are surrounded by it. Animals communicate with each other all day in say a forest, but we just hear it as random noises because we've stopped listening hundreds of years ago.
With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons.
Usually when observing and experimenting animals closely, especially insects, they are just state machines. Very complex sequences are often executed from start to finish blindly. You can reveal how ants, bees or flies are automatons by making little changes to their environment. They do the sequence from start to finish. If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start.
Who says we do any different?
Also there's a huge difference between proving something scientifically, and 'knowing' something. It is a hugely useful distinction, but science operates in it's own domain.
To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism.
Scientifically, even if we met face to face, you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious. It's just a bias that we consider ourselves to be these things and not other animals.
Experiments. You are taking this too philosophically.
>To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism.
I don't insist. It's just that there has not been demonstrated any other form of knowledge that could be accepted as evidence that things are different.
> you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious.
Proving is *never* natural science. Science never proves outside "formal sciences" like mathematics. Science can only show that hypothesis is wrong conditionally. In science you can only say you have evidence supporting hypothesis and evidence falsifying it.
To begin with, it is not at all clear that those form a valid dichotomy, as is evidenced by the debate over free will. If we have no free will, we too are automatons, but we still can assert that we are conscious. Can we be both? I'm pretty sure the jury is out on all of this.
Is a bed-ridden, non-communicative human patient non-conscious because they follow strict patterns? We frankly don't know, but it is widely regarded as unsafe to assume they are not. Are there philosophical zombies out there? It's unknown. Does the universe exist beyond our own perception? Again, sadly, no one can be completely sure.
So, your cat's behaviour might be on rails, but we know nothing of its true internal experience, let alone whether that experience meets any arbitrary bar we wish to claim is special or privileged, especially on the mere basis of it appearing to be similar to our own.
(apologies for making multiple edits here)
There is no reason to assume that intelligence and consciousness are strongly related. Why automaton can't be conscious. One may require another but I don't see why if one is more intelligent one has more consciousness. Or reflective etc.
> If we have no free will, we too are automatons,
In deepest philosophical sense free will not well defined or it's nonsensical statement. Albert Einstein said it well:
“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
I thought you were suggesting that animals are not conscious, and saying that you believe so because they are not detectably intelligent, suggesting a direct correspondence between the two. Instead it seems like you and I more or less agree on the matter: no correlation, and even an automaton could be conscious.
Thanks also for the interesting Einstein quote. I don't agree that free will is nonsensical to such a degree that it cannot be discussed, but I do agree it is not well defined.
I hoped to sidestep the vagueness of free will by discussing it in the meta sense of 'what broad philosophical consensus is held about it', i.e. that there is rather little to say for certain, but even what most people hold to be true doesn't seem to rule out the idea of an automaton being conscious.
And so people downvote.
For instance even ants have been seen to pass the mirror test. http://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTIz...
[a lot of citations needed]
Yes, some invertebrates have been found to execute fairly rigidly preprogrammed behavior patterns, and some reptiles as well, IIRC. But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors. And mammals? Exactly what evidence do we have that cats and dogs and horses and elephants are just mindless automata? To make such a claim certainly requires extraordinary evidence.
Examples? I'm really interested for finding at least one example of complex intelligent behavior of insects (that is actually studied and not just conjecture).
Complex communication via dances about food sources. Learned attacks against murder hornets to defend the hive.
Probably what I would look at first.
I think the bar is much lower, and intelligence is simply a measure of ability to learn. And from that perspective, a simple automaton does not learn. But insects DO learn.
http://www.womanaroundtown.com/contributed/the-worlds-smarte...
Now it's your turn. You've made a lot of assertions here, and substantiated none of them. Would you like to do so, or are you instead comfortable being regarded as no more closely abreast of the current state of the field than Fabre was when he published on spider wasps, a century and a half ago?
I think dogs are a bit smarter, but my aunt's dog checks behind the TV every single time there's an animal on screen.
As humans we tend to hold other animals only to our own standards, even if we often wouldn't score that well by theirs.
No, but I will close the bathroom door when I shit, even in an empty house. I imagine that's almost the same instinct.
Source? Plus how does the amount of time spent studying something matter? What if they're studying the wrong things or making faulty assumptions? Scientist spent an enormous amount of time studying humorism and blood-letting even as recent as 150 years ago..
I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see consciousness since I can't really come up with a good definition. The best I can think of makes a lot of assumptions about how much of our own behavior we actually control and perceive... which isn't exactly an objective truth.
Don’t feel too bad about it, Dennett argues that consciousness doesn’t even exist and I’m not sure he’s wrong.
Practitioners of meditation often describe a process of silencing a chorus of inner voices, one by one, and being faced with an existential crisis upon realizing that there is no singular "self" or "I" - a concept that "consciousness" implicitly relies on, because if there is no "I" then what is the thing that is conscious? So the idea that consciousness is an illusory phenomenon is also something you can directly experience.
(By the way - what's the other phenomenon?)
It isn't simple introspection. It is a rigorous scientific experiment, Descartes' evil demon thought experiment.
Additionally, you can only prove your own consciousness exists, not consciousness in general. But that's OK, classic materialism will suffice to determine that the world probably isn't an illusion and other beings like you probably experience similar phenomena.
Meditation is not a rigorous experiment, if someone can formulate a reproducible experiment like Descartes' thought experiments that produces this phenomenon then there's something. Further, there's no requirement that a voice be a singular one for the self or consciousness to exist. We can deduce that they exist, how they work or what exactly they are is not known.
I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.
The irony is that "intelligence" seems to be this constantly-receding goalpost (especially in AI) while consciousness gets identified with more and more basic processes.
Proving animals are conscious isn't just about breaking down the history of prejudice and treating other animals with dignity or something, it's about figuring out exactly where that line comes in evolutionarily, so we can study simple animals to help someday figure out how the hell this mystery of consciousness works in humans.
I suspect that the self reflective aspect of consciousness evolved to help us learn and develop new skills. It’s at least partly for responding to entirely novel situations using new behaviours. But once a new behaviour is embedded we can often do it largely unconsciously. So I don’t see complex behaviours performed instinctively or by rote as indicating conscious thought.
I think it is very interesting in terms of creating an artificial conscious program. Obviously we can reduce the definition so much it seems absurd to call it conscious, at least to me. But there may be some basic level of ability to form meta-representations that is the key.
It seems to consider them to be the same thing. Which is a common viewpoint. Basically, the idea appears to be that, in order to display all those intelligent behaviors, the animal must be aware of them just as we are (or think we are) aware of what we're doing when we display such behaviors.
Of course my parenthetical qualifier there is the key point: actually, we humans are often not aware of what we're doing when we display behaviors that, to an outside observer, would appear to be intelligent. We perform all kinds of complex tasks on autopilot, while our conscious awareness is elsewhere. If we can do it, we should expect that other animals can do it, too.
And that at once raises the question, how do we know when we are consciously aware of intelligent things we are doing? The only answer we have, at least at our current level of understanding, is that we can talk about the things we are consciously aware of. We can report what we did and why we did it, and can answer questions about it. Which, if we take this at face value, means that without such evidence from animals, the default assumption should be that they do all their intelligent behaviors on autopilot--they are never consciously aware of what they are doing.
I think that claim, as it stands, is too strong--for example, anyone who has cats or dogs as pets would probably say that their cats or dogs give plenty of nonverbal evidence of being aware of things they are doing (and I include myself in this category)--but it should at least make clear that intelligent behavior and consciousness are not the same thing and do not have to go together. Which in turn means that our scientific efforts should be focused on figuring out what kinds of nonverbal evidence would count as indicating, not just intelligent behavior, but consciousness.
Finding a hole in a piece of plastic does not require that. Or so it seams to me.
A dog can think, I think, but I don't think it can think about its own thoughts. But this may be unknowable.
Think very long and hard and you might agree you fall into that (minus the "no awareness"). Cannabis is a trigger for me to think about this stuff as I can just relax and get stuck in my head and deeply think about things. At least for me through extra free time during Covid lockdowns I've come to believe I have no free will. Through daily interaction with my family I've come to believe we are automatons too. People you know very well are very predictable because their "code" doesn't change very fast, especially with the lack of new experiences. Which made me remember that's how I used to view all other animals and creatures. It's given me a new appreciation for other animals/life.
Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? You aren't going to choose to think of that time in 4th grade you did something stupid unless something prompts you to think of it. Cause and effect. We are trained by all of our experiences to behave and respond in certain ways when certain events happen. When someone says "hello" you might say "hello" back because you've been trained to do it. This goes all the way down to everything we do. It's the reason learning involves so much repetition. Everything is conditioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight are fascinating reads about people not being aware of something they obviously should be aware of.
What is awareness but simply processing of our inputs/senses?
What even is consciousnesses then?
And yeah our brains are far more intelligent than other life forms giving us far more abilities and abstract thought, etc. As another comment mentioned though that's not a consciousness thing. We give ourselves far too much credit.
This has me thinking of the "plate o' shrimp" scene in the movie Repo Man.
Does consciousness mean “can solve a variety of tricky tasks?”
Is it having emotions?
Is it self-awareness?
Googling the definition I get “the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.”
If I have a computer with a camera running image recognition that can detect itself in a mirror is that consciousness?
That is perfectly OK.
When people suggest atoms and planets exhibit consciousness, that stretches the patience of many observers, but it is a matter of convention: here's what I mean by consciousness, and these things I observe have interesting consequences for it.
Nothing wrong with that, either.
But insisting that both refer to the same phenomenon gets nobody anywhere.
I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.
What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.
To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things.
Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.
Except that every one of us experiences otherwise daily in our own decision making.
How exactly are you down voting me? I thought HN doesn't allow us to down vote responses to our own comments.
At any given point all you have is your singular experiential point of view -- you're reading this comment, coding, chewing your food, remembering a childhood memory, having sex or whatever. That any of this has any correspondence to anything beyond the fact that you are experiencing it at that moment is an assumption. Only then you might start reasoning about the contents. And the contents are of course subject to any brain-in-a-vat objections you might make.
Obviously you cannot live at all if you start questioning your experience at that level. But the point I'm trying to make is that that singular point of view, whatever you are experiencing, is literally all there is. Nothing ever happens, as far as you (or anyone) is concerned, that is different from a personal experience.
To continue to exist at all of course, I don't think there is any other way than what you describe, to start acting based on whatever it is that you are experiencing. But you have to take that initial step and I think being aware of it can lead to a somewhat different understanding of why you feel what you feel and in particular how culture works.