Hacker News Reader

Comment by lumb63 | Hacker News Reader

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

View on HN

You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

> We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us.

Logic doesn't need to be binary. There is no need for the answer to such a question to even be defined.

It doesn't need to be solipsism - for instance, maybe half of us are conscious.

But if we can't even know that, if we don't even have a test to see whether some human or animal is conscious or not, how can we start trying to figure out what makes them conscious? It seems it's impossible to get to something falsifiable without such a test.

Like, you say a rock isn't conscious. But what about a sponge? An amoeba? How can you answer that if you can only guess answer whether your neighbour is?

Solipsism is incoherent because it's not radical skepticism. All of the critique of the external world also apply to belief in the primacy on internal experience. Any good solipsist should just accept the "evil demon" of descartes, embrace radical doubt, and say "I don't even know if I truly exist or not".

"I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm a replicant or not, Deckard!"

well doesn't the argument suggest the only thing you can be certain of is I, or at least some 'experiencing agent' exist, otherwise there would be no subject to do the experiencing

Yeah the first-person subjectivity has to arise before second and third persons can arise. But with some further investigation, one can find that the things they take to be their subject are in fact object to them, too.

It is very relevant to keep analyzing and keep trying to get any other answer to this question, because while "appearing like us in every other way, they also experience like us" applies to other humans, as soon as we want to talk about the consciousness (or lack of it) of other actors, this argument can not be applied and we would very much like to get to any other criteria of consciousness which could be applicable to arbitrary non-human agents.

Even if we axiomatically assume that everyone else is not a p-zombie, trying to find any evidence towards your/mine consciousness other than that axiom is helpful as a candidate for such criteria which can be tested and validated.

Solipsism is emotionally and ethically horrific.

All the people I love the most aren't actually real, only I am – if one seriously believes that, it is going to do a great deal of harm to one's mental health.

Solipsism can ethically justify all kinds of horrors. "Other people only exist in my own mind, so if I murder/torture/etc them, those acts are just figments of my own imagination: there is little ethical difference between murdering someone for real and watching a murder on TV"

If a belief is impossible for a human being to seriously believe while maintaining their health, sanity and humanity, I think that in itself is a good argument that the belief must be false.

Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place? Take for example the babies that had to be left behind by hospital staff in one of the Gaza hospitals when it was occupied by the IOF and when the doctors could come back a few weeks later they found the rotting corpses of these babies who had been left to starve, alone and afraid, by the Israeli soldiers.

If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?

I think so easily dismissing the cruelty and insanity of the world is in itself inhumane.

> Why? Why can't the world be a cruel and indifferent place?

Society runs on faith–that the cruelty and insanity of the world, while undeniable, has its limits. Historically (and even for the majority of the global population today), that faith was most often religious, but it also comes in secular versions – everyone from communists to LGBT activists to the New Atheist movement has a faith that history is "on their side", even if they do not believe in any divine assurance of that. A society in which everyone (or even the clear majority) have given up faith and hope, is a society doomed to wither and die, and be replaced by societies which still retain those things (if there be any other societies retaining that faith left to replace it).

The problem with solipsism, is not that it supposes the world is sometimes cruel and insane, but that it destroys one's faith that said cruelty and insanity has any limits. And without that faith, the continued functioning of society becomes impossible.

Does that have any relevance to the tragic case of a newborn abandoned to starve? They can't constitute a society, so concerns of what beliefs are necessary for society to function aren't relevant to them.

> If you were one of these newborns and somehow con-cious and you had to choose between 'I have been left here to die' and 'Mommy loves me and is coming soon', would you reject the former as obviously false since it's incompatible with health, sanity, and humanity?

If believing that "Mommy loves me and is coming soon" gives comfort to a dying child, and eases (however slightly) the pain of their horrific death, then I would want them to believe it–and if I were them, I would want to believe it too. It is better for a dying child to believe comforting falsehoods than painful truths–truth has no value for them, and falsehoods can do them no harm.

I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what consciousness does. That is,

> Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any more than you can fake intelligence. Basically consciousness might just be what we call the inner workings of the mind of a sufficiently advanced agent, one capable at least of meaningfully interacting with other agents around it.

I'm not saying this is the correct theory, but it's a perfectly valid theory of consciousness, just like all the others.

I really like equating faking intelligence to consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being intelligent'.

In addition to having meaningful interactions with others, i would add consciousness also requires meaningful interaction with its-self.

What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which, personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-typed.

And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge you can get in on, real cheap...

Bit it's useless,its circular. The definition must have something to do with the experience of qualia, that's the hard to explain part.

I somewhat disagree, I feel that the prevailing position is that unlike intelligence (e.g. Legg&Hutter definitions) consciousness can not be easily assumed from mere behavior and relies on certain things happening (or not happening) inside the agent.

This may be a common position among philosophers, or more specifically among philosophers who think concepts like "p-zombies" make any sense. But I think most people in general view any being whose behavior is human-like enough as having some form of consciousness.

For most people, being conscious is proved by things like mourning dead companions, like caring for your babies and showing distress if they are missing/hurt, like being friendly and playful. That's why most people feel that certain animals they interact with more or have seen on TV are conscious (dogs, cats, elephants, whales, chimps and other primates), but that other animals are not (insects, rats, fish). Note that I am not saying that rats are objectively less conscious than dogs by these criteria, just that this is what many people base their beliefs on, and that it of course depends on their knowledge as well.

We define ourselves to be conscious (even if we don't know exactly what that means). We assume that other humans are similar to ourselves, and we (at least sometimes) see mental activity in other humans that we recognize as being similar to our own. Therefore we conclude that other humans are conscious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com