Spiders seem to have REM-like sleep and may even dream
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The fact that human beings take a “all animals are savage, primitive machines until proven wrong” POV is genuinely tragic. Was it Descartes that posited the screams of a dog being flayed were merely its programming?
Being surprised that animals so different than us possibly dream is just another form of Descartes’ ridiculous thought.
It felt like a textbook example of not being able to see the forest for the trees; he was so focused on showing that the whale’s behavior was determined by biology (and therefore was not an example of altruism) that he forgot all behavior in all animals, including humans, is determined by biology.
To generalize, draw on your “experience” (movies, thought experiments) from crime, business, sports, society etc.
‘Altruism’ only appears so on the individual’s level but there’s zero surprise this is an evolutionary advantageous trait from a species perspective, so, frankly, I never understood why we make it out to be that mystery.
In humans, that genetic programming manifests via feelings of love that make us act accordingly.
Why would it be different for animals?
I was always tempted to respond with, “Good point. I’ll bet dogs are delicious.”
Our conscious experience of the world is limited by our 5 senses, but a machine wouldn't have that limitation. Their conscious experience of the world could be expanded to include radio waves or super-human hearing, for example. They could also have a far greater reasoning capability which would perhaps enable them to appreciate their senses as a conscious observer in a deeper way than we could ever imagine.
Personally I think this is more likely to be the outcome of super-human intelligence. We like to think our of consciousness as special, but in the space of all consciousnesses I suspect we're on the lower end of the spectrum given our sensory and intellectual limitations.
Completely agreed. The meta-question I’m asking is, how will we tell if we’ve built the right metrics? The answer used to be “if it passes the Turing Test,” but we’re rapidly superseding that answer and its replacements.
Maybe the answer will become obvious as our knowledge of the brain advances. Or, maybe we’ll be satisfied with a simplified model of consciousness that mostly works but is wrong in subtle yet critical ways, like Newtonian physics without theories of relativity. I suppose we’ll just have to keep asking questions, and aggressively pushing the limits of what machine intelligence can achieve relative to humans.
It's possible that you are missing some number between 1 and 10^12 components of consciousness. You can experience for yourself that your own consciousness is not simply composed of your senses, self, and reason through meditation. The initial realization is that the majority of your thoughts are not produced by any of those faculties and seem to arise on their own. So right there you have something not in your list which is pushing fully formed thoughts into your awareness. Pay close attention to your internal state and you soon find that thoughts, sensations, and emotions are happening concurrently and often compete with each other for attention. So this seems to indicate that there are a multitude of processes driving these. Thoughts can even compete with each other for attention so there is seemingly not a single origin for them. Finally, beyond all of that there is definitely something else that I can only describe as a sense of being or what it feels like to simply exist that undergirds all of that mental activity. It's the thing that remains when you take away or look past the other activity and it's always there since with practice you can switch to attending to that sensation at any point. I often wonder if that feeling is what it feels like to be a much simpler organism.
I might be extrapolating too far here, but if that is the case, couldn't we argue that this is also the case further up the scale?
Is the earth, with all its mountains, weather systems and inhabitants, conscious?
Is the solar system? The galaxy? The universe?
What does consciousness even _mean_ at that scale?
It does strike me as "arbitrary" that consciousness should only exist at our scale. Maybe our version of consciousness does, but is there some other type of consciousness at different scales?
What's amazing is that this extends out through time and distance - my neuronal firing patterns are shaped and affected by the neuronal firing patterns of beings long dead through both the same direct mechanisms described above and more indirect mechanisms mediated through other beings over time - in fact, by the time you've read this far, I'll have indelibly impacted your neuronal firing patterns. You'll never think again in a way that's not influenced by my thinking.
You and I are sharing a thought. This thought I am writing at you, implanting in your brain via words you understand... is fundamentally the same as the messages between cells in your body... a message is a message is a message, regardless of the methodology of the message.
Just being intelligent, and just being able to pass messages back and forth is all that's needed for a consciousness to be made up from the parts - it may be hampered by latency. But the default is that this process scales indefinitely.
If that's not convincing - here's an example of how this plays out in our day to day lives at a smaller scale than the whole species... you're work... you work in a group... that group has goals and desires the members of that group reach a consensus towards... precisely like the cells in your brain, taking various inputs from stimuli - reach a consensus to form your conscious experience...
even when we are separated by physical distance - we create connections to each other to mitigate that distance. planetary distances are small enough that connections might be fast enough...
I would default to {maybe: (bet on yes) }.
Which poses interesting questions, is it a form of molecular chemistry chained reaction? Or is additional physics / maths required? Or something else of course, not discounting anything.
I had a cellar spider that was hanging out by my outside door for about a week and he would seemingly wave when I walked in and out. I wonder if he ever dreamed of me.
I imagine their nightmares are probably about birds and centipedes.
(Only thing I could think of that rhymed with electric and made more than literally zero sense).
I don't think that'll convince my girlfriend to give up shrimp and crawfish boils, though...
Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590
cubic vulcanians.
> Another study by the same institute found that when a "drunk" (BAC of over .1) zebrafish is introduced to a group of sober ones, the sober fish will follow the drunk individual as their leader.
It's a very fun read.