I think some animals have florbghji. What is florbghji? Well, I’m not going to define it. I’m just going to go on and on about it with no definition as though this wasn’t a total waste of time.
The entire article is about the controversies and difficulties of defining consciousness, and the hypotheses of neural correlates, and at what stage of evolution those correlates appeared.
So the literal thing you seem to be snarkily complaining about, is precisely what the article is trying to directly address. With various competing scientific definitions.
I honestly don't know what more you want.
So your counterpoint should be actually split into two parts:
1. Should we work on the unsolved problem even when it is very hard and ambiguous and there is no even clear hypothesis for the solution? Of course we should.
2. Should we make new conclusions derived from the the unsolved problem #1? No, we must not.
So listing the different parties:
a) Scientists should work on the researching consciousness problem.
b) Animal activists should continue protecting animals, but not because they are supposedly conscious, but because they MAY be. We just don't know yet.
c) Journalists MUST stop writing that such and such animal has consciousness.
Oh please.
There is a position about what consciousness is which implies many animals may have it. This article is about that position. Journalists have a moral obligation to keep writing about such positions, if we are to assume that imparting harm and pain on conscious beings is evil.
There are also positions that animals, even including humans, don’t have consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t exist. They are more comfortable to most humans, especially meat eaters. This article is not about those positions.
The incompleteness theorem has an important implication that we would not be able to construct a full and verifiably formally correct model of the system from within which we ourselves operate. All we have is hypotheses. Saying that people are not free to make hypotheses that are uncomfortable to you, or that journalists are not free to write about them, is a self-serving position.
- Whether animals are asleep or awake (conscious or unconscious)
- Whether animals have subjective experience / qualia
- Whether animals are self-aware
Etc. etc.
Once you narrow down then you can try to precisely define the topic or not, but without narrowing down, it's pointless.
Do you have a pet dog or cat? It's obviously conscious. I guess my construct breaks down if we consider things like plants, they obviously respond to their environment.
No, thats exactly wrong inverse-style.
Simply producing outputs from inputs is not consciousness. Being actively aware you exist is the whole and being of consciousness: Absence of inputs and outputs we can understand invites us to say "not conscious, no evidence of consciousness" but thats subject to validation.
I don't personally believe plants are conscious, but I'm open to somebody demonstrating a sense of awareness. It probably won't be a mirror-test.
I guess I probably see plants like fish not exactly conscious though they certainly respond to their environment. Plants are quite noisy if you pet them, the audio is just outside our hearing range but we have devices that can track that sort of thing now. And some fish actually like to be pet, my great grandmother apparently had some fish she would pet, never met her just know of the stories. Probably everything that can grow has some level of it.
Also fun fact worm memories are stored outside the brain, their are some trained worm studies you can Google that are interesting too.