Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare
quantamagazine.org
quantamagazine.org
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985
(118 points/13 hours ago/151 comments)
> The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature.
In other words, a) there is a clear definition of consciousness (as subjective experience, however minimal), b) the claim of subjective experience is backed up by evidence that the animals in question feel pain, play, and exhibit "intentional behaviours" (do things which look like they planned it, rather than just 'reacting to their environment').
Obviously all of the above are debatable (is that really what consciousness is? Do cuttlefish actually feel pain? Is feeling pain a measure of consciousness?) but there's no point claiming that they don't have a definition of consciousness or that they don't have a scientific basis for their claims, because they have both.
Only 50 years ago the thought of apes being conscious was considered largely naive, yet alone dogs, contrary to the experience of most owners with a close relationship with their canine companions. Come 2013 and a group of scientists much like in the attached make the argument that dogs, and other animals, share traits of consciousness (https://gizmodo.com/brain-scans-show-that-dogs-are-as-consci...).
The needle seems to have moved continually since in the direction of “human consciousness is likely to sit on a continuum of consciousness with other life”.
Given this I’m inclined to take this argument at face value. As to what that means and what we should take as moral guidance from the view is a broader question (I feel it sits a bit closer to the thinking of the recently passed Daniel Dennett, or David Chalmers).
But it seems evident that whatever we take to be associated with consciousness is shared across other forms of life. Even plants seem to react to anaesthetics, and demonstrate behaviour consistent with emotional experience. If you spend time with life you tend to observe similar things across all forms.
Sure you can reduce it to pure stimuli reactions, but you can also reduce all humans to philosophical zombies with the same arguments. I’d argue the trend of evidence is suggestive of broad consciousness.
In this spirit, I’m interested if we’ll see this property extend beyond life to other systems, and not merely AI - if we reasonably argue that we have consciousness, but “we” are a system composed of cells and bacteria, that is we are effectively a macro system composed of more micro systems within us, why doesn’t a city or a planet or a solar system have some element of consciousness? Is the energy we feel at a sporting match an emotional, and conscious, expression of the communal human group present at the game? And if not, why not?
I don't think it does because you can't derive ought from is. We could know exactly what consciousness is but it says absolutely nothing about whether or not we should be respecting it. Applying the Golden Rule (I don't like pain, therefore inflicting pain is bad) is outside the realm of science and requires another framework in order to justify it.