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Comment by gerbilly | Hacker News Reader

The only reason we think animals are stupid automatons is because in our culture we don't observe them very closely.

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.

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I do a lot of spearfishing. It's very obvious when hunting that creatures like fish are a lot more intelligent than one would expect without those experiences. Until you are in their environment trying to carry out similar tasks their behaviors are just not legible to our understanding.

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.

> I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see consciousness since I can't really come up with a good definition.

Don’t feel too bad about it, Dennett argues that consciousness doesn’t even exist and I’m not sure he’s wrong.

Somewhere in his writings he calls it a "user illusion". I _think_ what he means is that nature selects for the creatures that attach a lot of "weight" to their sensory inputs. In other words, if we perceived our thought processes as they really are (as a purely material computation by our brains), our evolutionary fitness would be lower.

I personally am with Noam Chomsky on this one: I think it is absurd to conclude that consciousness is an illusion, it is one of two phenomena in the universe that every human being can prove to themselves exists through experimentation, in part ocular using Descartes' evil demon thought experiment. We can all directly observe that it exists.

Proving that "consciousness" exists by introspection strikes me as being a bit like proving phlogiston exists by burning something. No one questions our surface experience, but is "consciousness" (whatever that means) a good framework for understanding that, or even a coherent concept?

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?)

Free will.

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.

Consciousness is all of your inner experience. It's not about control or perception, that is it's not about what you can control and how you perceive things but that you can control and perceive things.

I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.

> 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.

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.

There seems to be a trend recently to push consciousness “down the stack” of intelligent behaviours and consider it to be fundamental. As has been pointed out in another comment though, our own experience as humans is that we often perform highly complex tasks requiring intelligent behaviour unconsciously. Driving, or reading for example. Sometimes I’ll drive a route, or read a chapter, but afterwards I won’t be able to tell you what happened on the route, and won’t remember anything I read, because I was thinking about something else at the time, or maybe was just ‘zoned out’.

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 imagine the author of the article would say you are still conscious while zoned out, just not necessarily self-aware about it. Your mind contains an internal representation of the world and your place in it, just not also a high-order self-reflective representation of your own thought processes at the time. There's a lot of ways people divide consciousness into levels of low vs high order, cortical vs sub-cortical, or whatever to capture such nuances.

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.

Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe.

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.

> by making little changes to their environment. [...] 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.

> Who says we do any different

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.

This is interesting but it is not in the least bit philosophically satisfying as an attempt to answer the question of whether beings are "automatons" or "conscious".

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)

I was not taking about consciousness, just intelligence.

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 don't understand at all who is downvoting you here! I appreciate the thoughtful and wonderful response you've put in, so thank you. I wish so much that people wouldn't use votes to express mild disagreement.

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.

Compatibilism seems to be relatively broad philosophical consensus. It's a position that free will is compatible with determinism. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

I hazard that some people find attacks on the idea of free will to be philosophically or even politically threatening. If our behavior is deterministic, at any level, how can anything be anyone's fault? Ideas like "justice" and "accountability" are forced into crisis. "That criminal doesn't "deserve" prison, they had a bad childhood!" And maybe this is correct and proper at some level. But powerful evolutionary forces have shaped us not to think this way. It is adaptive to become angry, to punish those who wrong you or your tribe; to treat people as agents rather than phenomena.

And so people downvote.

There's plenty of science being done showing animals exceeding the bounds you're setting.

For instance even ants have been seen to pass the mirror test. http://www.journalofscience.net/showpdf/MjY4a2FsYWkxNDc4NTIz...

Good find. And the writers are very skeptical about what the mirror test indicates.

This study was discussed in the article.

> With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons.

[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.

> But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors.

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).

I’m not an expert, but my guess at an example would be bees.

Complex communication via dances about food sources. Learned attacks against murder hornets to defend the hive.

Probably what I would look at first.

Bees and jumping spiders are both acknowledged to be relatively intelligent.

I find conversations like this difficult. I don’t think anyone here will change your mind. If your position is that intelligence must rival a humans to be worthy of “being intelligent”, you are free to do so.

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...

"Visual signals of individual identity in the wasp Polistes fuscatus" (Tibbetts, 2002) establishes recognition of individual nestmates by facial markings.

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?

Cats really aren't that intelligent in all cases, unfortunately. They are very picky eaters because of instincts about food poisoning, and if something scares them once in the presence of a food they might just associate them and refuse to eat that food ever again.

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.

Humans think dogs are not conscious because they don't recognize themselves in a mirror, and if the roles were reversed dogs would probably conclude the same about us since we don't even recognize our own pee.

As humans we tend to hold other animals only to our own standards, even if we often wouldn't score that well by theirs.

I used to love eating meatball sandwiches as a kid. Ate them once while I had the flu, threw up, still can't eat them without gagging today years later. That doesn't particularly say much about my intelligence. Humans have phobias too.

Will you refuse to eat unless someone guards you during dinner in an otherwise empty house? Attack your roommate cat because you saw a strange cat out the window and now think your roommate is that cat?

>Will you refuse to eat unless someone guards you during dinner in an otherwise empty house?

No, but I will close the bathroom door when I shit, even in an empty house. I imagine that's almost the same instinct.

Ants, bees?

> Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe.

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..

Cite this.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill comes to mind

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