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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Most insects have hundreds of thousands of neurons. Even simple mammals have dozens of millions. Dogs have billions. Humans, elephants, dolphins have 1 to 2 dozen billion.

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.

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It may be a stretch but since we don’t know the exact criteria for the kind of consciousness the article and scientists refer to, it seems rash to dismiss it out of hand. And quite the leap to call it “absurd behavior”

The criteria they used is phenomenal consciousness, but it doesn't matter what criteria you use because with these gigantic differences in brain sizes it's just not meaningful to compare experiences of any kind.

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.

Not to be rude, but isn’t that just, like, your opinion, man? That brain sizes correlate with consciousness in the way you state? At least some scientists, these, seem to disagree so at the very least it may not be quite so cut and dry as you make it out.

You're right, it's "just my opinion", but that applies to everyone here. There is no science beyond the basic observations of behaviour which can be interpreted in any number of ways.

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.

> You're right, it's "just my opinion", but that applies to everyone here.

This too is an opinion though.

Humans have 100 billion https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4689008/

don't underestimate insect behavior they do a lot with what they have. nonetheless, one really hopes that their experience of the world is, uh, commensurately smaller than ours

>Most insects have hundreds of thousands of neurons

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?

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