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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

OK, I will challenge you on this.

How many dogs and cats have you personally lived with?

Have you ever hurt them, intentionally or by mistake?

Did their response change based on whether you reassured them that it was an accident, or making it clear you really meant to hurt them?

And honestly, I have to say I am a bit offended by being accused of anthropomophism.

I am not attributing "human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities" like the dogs and cats I've lived with.

I am doing my best to understand their dog and cat emotions. They are not human emotions, they are dog and cat emotions. You can't deny that they are emotional creatures, and it is my job as their caregiver and protector to understand them and meet them where they are.

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I’ve always had pets. I currently have two Siamese cats. I’ve accidentally stepped on them, but never intentionally hurt them. All of that is beside my point, though.

What you’re saying is clearly correct. The OP’s post supports this. I was simply telling you why studies like these are necessary: because things that can seem very real can be a case of cognitive bias. A scientist’s job is to gather evidence to reveal whether what we perceive is real or illusion.

So how would a scientist prove conclusively that other humans are conscious and self-aware and not just very advanced automata that behave in ways which mimic consciousness and self-awareness?

No matter how much data you collect, when you're assessing behaviour there's always a subjective interpretation of how behaviours differ and what they mean in context.

Experiments like these simply disguise and hide the subjectivity.

Questions of subjective experience are absolutely unprovable scientifically.

You can collect correlations between stimuli and responses, but when you're done you have a table of correlations between stimuli and responses - and that's all.

In practice we assume that our own states correlate with behaviours, and this also applies to other humans in a straightforward way. (It often doesn't, but it's a nice thing to believe.) From there it's an easy step to making the same mapping for certain animals, albeit with more of a stretch.

But this is all unprovable, even as a hypothesis. All you can say objectively is that stimuli either match or don't match expected behaviours.

That's all that's ever on the table.

> So how would a scientist prove conclusively that other humans are conscious and self-aware and not just very advanced automata that behave in ways which mimic consciousness and self-awareness?

That's not the topic we're discussing but this isn't meaningfully different from the "are we in a simulation" question.

This particular question is about animals understanding the difference accidents and not, which is a super interesting question because they can't communicate. This is something you can construct experiments around and observe different behaviors.

Anecdotes are still anecdotes regardless of how many you have.

For data you need to actually measure a response in a controlled environment. Making sure you record both the interesting, and non-interesting, responses so you can compare them.

Humans have a very strong natural tendency to only remember and evaluate interesting responses. Causing us to vastly overestimate the frequency of interesting outcomes. That paired with our brains strong desire to pattern match, means we’re terrible at making accurate observations on a day-to-day basis.

Hence scientists do experiments like this to discover what aspects of our intuition are accurate, and what parts are inaccurate.

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