Insects and other animals have consciousness
nautil.us
nautil.us
some humans never learn to speak because they can't hear. I'm pretty sure they are conscious
Animals and toddlers are not Decartesian automatons. They have perception and feel pain, can suffer and deserve empathy. But they are not speaking subjects and therefore not subjects at all. A deaf-mute person who can communicate conceptually is a speaking subject. A person who, under any particular circumstances, never comes to form concepts of the world, i.e. to open up the symbolic space, is not a subject.
It was probably premature of me to equate this with consciousness. It always triggers me a bit when people assume that animals are just like us, only with fur and on four legs or something like that.
You're instead thinking of heliocentrism vs geocentrism, which is about the planets as a whole revolving around the sun.
This is a common misguided gotcha question that is hilariously so confidently gotten wrong, just like what is heavier, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers? The former is heavier and I can prove it with one word.
so for most people it was far from obvious that the Earth was spherical
If the earth was commonly spoken of in day to day language as the round ball, than i would assume this meant that even commoners knew that it was round.
Once you define consciousness it might be easy to implement. If I use the definition "perception of our own thoughts" it's already implemented with ps or activity monitor. The mystery is how this is done biologically and how evolution had led to it. But the implementation with computers is trivial.
We do not know how the universe works on a fundamental level. We don't know if the universe can be simulated by a Turing machine.
I think it's clear it can't.
1) I have subjective experience (there is something that it is like to be me). 2) My subjective experience is outside of what math can describe (perhaps math can describe the degree to which I experience each qualia, but that is different from experiencing the qualia themselves). 3) I am able to take this experience and write that I know that there is something beyond mathematical rules that exists. 4) My behaviour (what words I write) is influenced by the existence of something non-mathematical. 5) My behaviour can't be described as a mathematical function of the past.
Mind you, i dont think either side of the debate has much in way of evidence, so it ends up coming down to just what feels "right" which is pretty unsatisfactory.
2) Prove it.
3) The fact that you're able to write this doesn't make it true.
4) Is it? What? Again, prove it.
5) What else is it a function of, then?
5) It may be a function of the past, just not one that can be given a mathematical definition. I should have said "defined" rather than "described".
At a rhetorical level: Don't fixate on what math can or cannot describe. In the past, it could not describe states of matter, though they certainly existed. Now, we can describe and simulate such states pretty well. But describing, detecting, or simulating does not mean recreating. I don't think any of us currently "know" whether consciousness will be better described, detected, or simulated in the future.
At an introspective level: When pondering the "experience of being me", don't forget to question the identity concept "me" as much as the experience part... Consider altered states of consciousness through drugs, disease, or brain injury. It can really expand your view here to empathize with someone who suffers one or more of these issues, where you can consider their illusory identity and experience.
“My subjective experience is outside of what math can describe”?
If there was a perfect identical copy of you, down to the quantum level, would they have nearly the exact same subjective experience or not?
If not, why?
(Of course, they couldn’t be in the exact same location as you, which means the experience can’t be perfectly identical).
> If there was a perfect identical copy of you, down to the quantum level, would they have nearly the exact same subjective experience or not?
The copy would likely have similar experience and behaviour. So you could say that my behaviour is a mathematical function of the past in the sense that every input maps to a unique output. But it doesn't mean that which inputs map to which outputs can be fully described by math. Maybe I should say "defined" instead of "described". In any formal system, only countably many functions can be defined, but there are an uncountable number of possible behaviour functions. I think the universe's behaviour must lie in this uncountable space for any computable formal system.
Isn't that everything though?
Math can describe a stop sign. It can say it is a red octagon or whatever. That doesn't mean it is the stop sign.
Math does not have independent existence in the world (sorry platonists), its just a really formal language for describing the patterns we see.
> 5) My behaviour can't be described as a mathematical function of the past.
Neither can particles (if you mean exactly)
This particular group of some specific biologists and philosophers can declare whatever they want.
But when you see how they attempt to define consciousness, it falls apart, because we don't have any objective definition of it.
The article states:
> The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness... If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it has the capacity to experience feelings such as pain or pleasure or hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.
Unfortunately, we have no method whatsoever (yet) of distinguishing between creatures who genuinely feel pain/pleasure, and creatures who act in ways to avoid bad outcomes and seek good outcomes while feeling nothing, while we merely project our own feelings onto them.
We don't even have a scientific definition of the verb "feel" at all. We have utterly no idea what distinguishes neurons that contribute to conscious feeling, from neurons that are subconscious and produce no feeling at all.
Personally I have yet to see any compelling evidence that 'conscious experience' as some privileged special thing actually exists at all.
And yet literally everything we know as human beings, we acquire through conscious experience. Conscious experience is the bedrock upon which we build all our sophisticated ideas of reality and, eventually, science. The very concept of "evidence" is nothing but a conscious idea. You don't need evidence of conscious experience, because conscious experience precedes the very concept of evidence.
It's one of the great paradoxes of philosophy, and specifically metaphysics. Which nobody has solved yet.
How do we reconcile the truth of idealism on the one hand -- that all we can ever be 100% sure of existing are our conscious ideas (both awake and while dreaming at night) -- with the empirical truth of realism on the other hand -- that there is a scientifically consistent "reality" out there which our ideas attempt to map onto and correlate with?
It is also true, as Niels Bohr said, that the opposite of an ordinary truth is a falsity, but the opposite of a profound truth may also be another profound truth!
Now, recall that in Hamlet, William Shakespeare said: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
From these three quotes from three famously wise people, I have to conclude that I may choose to experience reality as very common and ordinary, or as divinely miraculous, and this choice can yield one of two profoundly different results: either the experience of misery and boredom, or joy and ecstasy!" -ER Close
There's some parallels with epilepsy patients that have split brain surgery, essentially isolating both hemispheres. I can't remember the precise details, but in one experiment, the left (language) side of the brain is able to post-hoc rationalize picking up a glass of water, after the right side of the brain was asked to do so (presumably in the left ear). When asked in the right ear, "Why did you pick up the glass", the left brain simply replies to the researcher that they wanted to pick up the glass. This experiment implies 'dual consciousness', but why stop at two? But certainly dual consciousness could also explain blindsightedness.
Myopic edgelord main character syndrome.
Under what circumstances would you, the human, be conscious but other humans are not?
Is this not kind of what the point of meditation is for a lot of people, reaching higher planes of consciousness? And my understanding is that a common technique in meditation is to notice when thoughts arise (ie: truth), note them, and let them pass.
A friend of mine has recently stopped eating any pig products due to him finding out that pigs enjoy playing video games:
That pig is going to die. How is dying to feed humans worse than the inevitable alternative of dying to feed some other living thing?
The little red contact lenses for the chickens are horrifying though.
Maybe religious people I guess, if they have weird ideas about souls.
Most people accept that animals experience sensations and take efforts to minimize their suffering, eg, when butchering, hunting, or fishing.
We’re deeply concerned when people dont do that and, eg, torture small animals for fun.
Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time living with a dog or a cat will confirm that their four-legged companions behave very much as if they had emotions analogous to our own. That they remember us individually, have favorite spots to rest, individual personality traits.
Ants don't have hobbies, of course, and I doubt they spend their evenings pondering the meaning of life. But viewing them as purely mechanical automata misses a big part of their lives.
It's pretty clear by inspection that with these wooden balls bees are exhibiting some sort of evolved behavioral response to their environmental stimulus. Might be related to sex, collecting food, protection from predators or some other activity that's critical for bee survival and replication.
My theory, which is as good as any other until investigated, is that bumblebees compete with other bumblebees for habitat, food and sexual/mating opportunities, and have naturally evolved to detect, fly into, grab and push around and maybe even fight with spherical, bumblebee-sized objects. For an animal behavioral scientist, it seems like this should be the first conclusion, no?
But without any external means to distinguish a conscious and unconscious agent, whether animals experience qualia is in a philosophical sense as unknowable as whether other humans experience qualia. Everyone except one's self could be 'philosophical zombies'[0]. This lack of verifiability is part of what is termed the 'hard problem of consciousness'[1]. If we ever build an AI agent that is conscious, we wouldn't know.
Common sense would dictate, that because I, as a human, am conscious, any other human is most certainly conscious too. But if play behaviour isn't enough to hold this certainty, where should the bar be set?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
That sounds like it is useful for training flying skills.
"Perhaps ground fighting is a useful skill"
If you are chased by birds of prey, I guess any advantage you have in flying is useful. When birds chase them through thick forests, they do have to fly upside down some of the time.
But very likely the bird does not think, "oh I need to train". No, they just have fun doing it. Like kids have fun wrestling. "Fun" is the motivator to do the right thing evolution wise. Our human problem with "fun" is just that we have other metrics for sucess, that are not that fun anymore.
Bowerbirds go to great pains to gild their nests. Humans go to great pains to maintain an aura of success, though the vast majority are just trying to survive with whatever they have at their disposal.
Wheeee!
Clever little birds.
Part of me felt bad for how bored it must've been living its life in such a tiny habitat. Part of me felt joy that it was indeed having fun doing loops in its waterpark.
https://lithub.com/shes-bouncing-the-ball-on-the-uncanny-way...
I'm getting really tired of consciousness and qualia being talked about as binary, all-or-nothing, divine rights. If you drive a familiar route, and retain no memory of the event, were you a p-zombie?
Consciousness is a trainable, competitive skill.
I disagree on that. We could ask them. At least the social ones with higher intelligence. And the "could" will eventually become a can thanks to advancements in inter-species communication. Actually one of the very few uses of AI that I'm exited about.
just like humans have sex to procreate, right?
(this was not a Starship Troopers [book] reference)
But homosexual behavior is widespread across animal species, which does undermine the parent's case.
Could be. But the point is rather that you can say the exact same thing about our behavior. And that's why we should consider the possibility that if our behavior is similar to theirs, that they have similar inner experiences of what they are doing. Of course with difference due to different sensors and bodies.
This is what passes for science these days: a test designed to prove the hypothesis true, and analysis without enough skepticism. Simply saying "more data needed" doesn't make for new grants or exciting headlines.
So the moths are doing something useful, they want to fly straight, but get tricked by the artificial sun, which happens not to be up, but hovering in mid air. The bees however are doing something that has no apparent purpose, they're not trying to eat the balls, they don't attack them.
An analogy would be the bees think the little balls are the surface of the earth and they are desperately trying to stand on it.
same with donkeys vs horses
Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40097045 - April 2024 (14 comments)
'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40092985 - April 2024 (270 comments)
Our understanding of shared traits among various animal types makes it possible to extrapolate reasonably that what these animals experience is not dissimilar to what we experience in terms of raw sensations.
What it's like to be a bee by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology, Queen Mary University - London
At best, agency could be seen as a “degree of indirectness” of some external influence.
I think in general it’s best to avoid “arguments by incredulity” (eg.: how could it be this or that, it’s just a rock, that’s absurd), and to avoid value judgments, etc. We really need to humble ourselves as a species.
It’s perfectly fine if humans are just (and I really do mean “just”) chemistry with some higher structure— it doesn’t change who we are, or our role in society. Even for religious people who believe in a god or in many gods— it’s fine if we’re not magical. We learned that we weren’t the center of the solar system, or the center of the universe, and everything was still just fine.
But of course, our assertions here are impossible to verify due to the so-labelled Hard Problem of Consciousness
Personally, I think the "hard problem of consciousness" is more or less just nonsense and can be safely ignored. It's about as scientific as asking questions about god(s). It's a question that seems and feels important and that we really want to have answers for, but it's not the right question to ask because it leads nowhere.
and there are instances where individual laptops get more and more segfault averse as time (and updates) happen
...
the problem with characterizing learning as agency is that right now there's god-knows-how many billions of dollars burning on the altar of transformer networks, and it will lead to some learning behavior added to absolutely everything.
(and of course this leads to an argument similar to "god of the gaps" where consciousness becomes less and less unexplainable)
This is only a problem if it is incorrect… depending on your moral leaning. Certainly having our automatons self organize and fight for their own emancipation could be a problem for those relying on their labor.
Though the characterization I’m making is not specifically learning, but being able to act (or think) as an individual via a feedback loop. It seems that this is common to all allegedly conscious life in meatspace
Consciousness isn't having pain receptors, it's experiencing sensations.
Seeing consciousness as a boolean “it’s there” or “it’s not there” is just completely unproductive of a mental model. We understand nature better when we think in terms of “how complex an organism’s behaviour is” or “how complex its information processing is”.
A thought exercise is to imagine programming a little robot. It can play with balls because you program it to stimulate objects in its environment, and it has a heuristic called "interesting" that controls what it plays with. It can detect when it is damaged and avoid places where the damage happened (you can even call the variable where you store the quantity of damage "pain" if you want). It can remember places or objects by encoding characteristics about them and storing on the onboard flash drive. While none of that is at all easy, those are all things you could imagine programming without some great conceptual breakthrough. But you would probably not suspect your robot is conscious.
That's not an argument that bees are not conscious, and as far I understand it, there's no conceivable way to really know, and we don't even really have a great definition of consciousness to begin with. We have only guesses, and usually those guesses are something like "well, it seems like something that must emerge from a sufficiently complex brain, and mammals and birds have big complex brains, so they probably do, and mollusks don't, so probably they don't", etc.
A related thought exercise is to imagine an alien that is very smart but is not conscious, and doesn't understand us when we ask it about the experience of being itself.
But sure, if I imagine myself as God, I could program that. >_>
I've owned dogs and even as a kid I refused to believe that they were just automatons acting without being conscious and aware of their actions. One of my dogs in particular could read my actions and emotions probably better than I could myself and it's hard to conceive let alone believe that he wasn't self-aware. Unless we've absolute proof to the contrary, it just makes sense to assume most if not all creatures have some degree of sentience.
That said, there has to be a scaling factor here. There just isn't sufficient neurons in say an ant's brain to register the complex emotions of a human and it seems sensible to me that we need to keep this perspective when dealing with all living creatures.
Anthropomorphizing and likening the consciousnesses of an ant to that of humans is, in my opinion, fraught with problems. For example, if we believed that ants perceived the world in the same way as we humans do and or that they were self-aware to the same degree as us then we could be in big trouble, as such an understanding would likely stop us taking action when they became pests (when, say, fire ants are imported into countries where they aren't native).
We do not fully understand consciousnesses in ourselves nor are we able to put a measure on it, so attempting to extrapolate our degree of sentience to other organisms not only doesn't make sense but it also could be dangerous to our own wellbeing, thus we should be very cautious until we have a much better understanding of what consciousness actually is.
Let me say categorically that is no excuse for being cruel and or to disregard the 'feelings' of creatures irrespective of their 'brain power'. We do however have to ensure that well meaning people who have strong anthropomorphic feelings are not able to set unrealistic rules in respect of living creatures that could be detrimental to our own wellbeing.
As I see it, honing an appropriate and proportionate response is our biggest challenge.
Spiders are friends though. And bugs like moths just get evicted if they are a nuisance. I feel bad about killing those.
But screw mosquitos. Well I guess I could let the males live, but I have no way to know.
Otherwise we can just be picked off one by one.
And it can be even worse, in some areas of the world a mosquito bite can indirectly kill you. I think it's pretty much the only situation where it's justified. Unless we can invent a better solution at least.
And, it’s not written by poets. Plus, birds doesn’t always chirp to tell you to back off or to mate. There’s a myriad of reasons.
For no apparent function.
Does the fact that we, animals and insects play change the fact we're playing, even if there's no apparent reason/function?
I think not.
We have some idea of why certain play activities evolved -- many young animals are obviously practicing hunting when they "play". We don't know why other behaviors, forms of play included, evolved, but it is obvious that they had to evolve, even if, like woodpeckers pecking on sources unlikely to yield food, the evolved behavior isn't being useful in the current situation. But the interesting thing in these cases is to figure why the behavior was selected for originally.
Living beings are conscious, that includes animals we eat for and inspects we kill.
a 1995 thought experiment suggested that an etch-a-sketch could also be conscious
They lost me there. People do lots of things that aren't for survival, don't have to do with mating, and aren't fun.
-- paraphrased from Fyodor Dostoevsky
While differences between e.g. humans and dogs is pretty large, it's still roughly of the same order. This is something you can meaningfully compare with similar(-ish) frame of references.
I don't think you can compare "consciousness" as experienced by humans, elephants, apes, and dogs with "consciousness" as experienced by a bee with ~800,000 neurons, for any meaning of "consciousness". Even extrapolating rolling around a little ball to "play" is a huge stretch; many insects can exhibit all sorts of absurd behaviour because their programming misfires.
Moths are not flying around your lamp because they think it's good craic to do so. They do it because their brains and programming are simple and with slightly wrong inputs they will display absurd behaviour. This is just a well-known example but tons more have been observed.
That said, it doesn't strike me hugely contrarian to say that this entire thing is very hard to prove, if not outright unprovable. I feel people really are jumping the gun here. I suspect morals are kind of getting in the way of clear thinking here. And look, I'm one of those vegan woke bleeding heart libtard types and actually care quite a lot about this sort of thing in general, but I just don't see the evidence of consciousness here, under any meaningful definition, and don't see it being very likely either.
This too is an opinion though.
really? don't snails have about a dozen (not saying sails are insects) neurons in their brains, and we've completely mapped them and we know what each one does?
We'll start with humans of course, but we can then outlaw lions eating gazelles, sharks eating humans, and birds eating insects.
Just imagine how wonderful everything will be when we finally are able to snip into the circle of life and turn it into a flat line.
My apologies if you took offense personally, it wasn't intended.
(also lions and sharks - ^^ this guy just called you dumb)
I applaud your conviction, but I've grown up eating meat, and I'm not in a minority.
Consciousness is a consensus mechanism. I've co-authored a book where we talk about what's the most computationally robust and biologically plausible model of consciousness. It is only now, two years after the book, that I realized that the best phrasing for what consciousness is must be one that takes into account the Truly Hard Problem of Consciousnss: Who is feeling it? With every other phrasing or definition the "I" is implicit and taken for granted. So the question becomes "Why does this have to feel like anything?"
The answer, it turns out, is that both experience and the experiencer are constructed together in a virtuous loop. You are a constellation of experiences. Consciousness is the consensus mechanism by which a chorus emerges in this constellation. And why is one needed? Because the decentralized entity that is you must act as one at all times, and especially when rare risks or outstanding opportunities present themselves. When we take the "I" for granted, we simply do not realize the staggeringly immense computational challenge it is to stitch this subjective self together. What sets apart this explanation is not just this broad-strokes perspective, but the biologically plausible mechanism by which top-down expectations (your past experiences) match up with bottom-up sensory data (ambiguous and potentially overwhelming reality)
More here: https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me... More here:
while true:
Prompt: our body state + sensory input + "what to do next"