This has caused my own position, over time, to be a deep agnosticism about what's actually going on.
There are of course other reasons too, with things like religious beliefs and human ego meaning that people come to the discussion with a major bias and fixed views rather than even being open to any rational discussion.
Finally, everyone is conscious and has an opinion, but only a tiny fraction are actually knowledgeable about the brain and have spent any large amount of time thinking about things like evolution and brain development .. they have an opinion, but are just not qualified to discuss it!
If you break down all the different things that people are referring to when they talk about "consciousness", and define them individually with as little wiggle room as the english language and underlying taxonomy of concepts allows, then I really don't think there is much mystery about consciousness at all, but of course those with an agenda who want there to be a mystery will still argue about every part of it including the definitions that remove all the wiggle room.
The nature of consciousness has long been a contentious subject, and one of interest, but it seems that the rise of AI has intensified the discussion with the new question being whether AI is or could be conscious. I do think this can be answered in a principled way (=yes), but in the end you can only PROVE that something, or someone else, is conscious if you accept a functional/testable definition of it in the first place.
You're forgetting that attempting to have a "rational" discussion is itself a bias inherited from the many centuries of intellectual development that occurred between the middle ages and now - the parts that the article conveniently skips over entirely.
The "debate" here doesn't function to generate an answer, but to narrow down the scope of the question into the very constrained domain. When ppl debate "consciousness" they are re-affirming their opinion that humans are inherently rational agents (hence "scire" -> "to know"), rather than agents that can live, feel, think and will, which would require a different term, like "soul".
You're just substituting one ill-defined, and overloaded, word ("consciousness") with a bunch of others ("live", "feel", etc), and asserting that to you they mean something different.
It's impossible to have a discussion on this basis, and I'm sure to many people "soul" is exactly what they mean by "consciousness", or at least part of it. It's no less reasonable that an AI has a soul as that it is conscious - it depends on exactly what you define those words to mean.
Yet, if that is your goal and the definition of "soul" or "consciousness" are entirely arbitrary decisions that you don't care about - then it's worth remembering the adage "you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you".
Yes, but as noted elsewhere in this thread it's a matter of degree. Consciousness is such an ill-defined and overloaded word that it's hard to say it really means anything - it's more of an all-encompassing term for a bunch of largely subjective phenomena.
However, if you move past surface appearances, you can think about what kind of cultural "work" is being done spending effort on this mixup. What's happening is that, in the noosphere, the cloud of concepts around "consciousness" is battling it out with the cloud of concepts around "soul" over which cloud of concepts best describes what it means to be human, with big implications on what it means to be good person. Now we're dealing with a mix of Aquinas and Latour.
Best example is Darwin's "Origin of Species"; here, Darwin didn't rigorously define "species": 'No one definition has as yet satisfied all naturalists; yet every naturalist knows vaguely what he means when he speaks of a species.'
Many in the social sciences fetishize definitions, operating under the false notion that formulating a precise definition is the primary goal of inquiry. In reality, a robust scientific theory is a structured set of hypotheses; when combined with auxiliary theories, it derives a specific set of testable consequences.
Even within this framework, one must remain vigilant against ad hoc explanations. An ad hoc explanation fails to provide genuine systemic insight because it is engineered solely to fit the target phenomenon; it eliminates the explanatory gap by simply re-stating or absorbing the explanandum without offering any independent predictive or falsifiable power.
The trouble with discussion of "consciousness" is the sheer degree of ill-definedness - it is such a hand wavy and multi-facted concept, that it's not possible to even begin any meaningful discussion without defining a better vocabulary and breaking the concept down into pieces. Are you talking about subjective experience, mental awareness, free-will, altered state of consciousness, or what, or more likely simultaneously some mish-mash of all of the above and more!
If 10 different scientists who work at the object level, using the same word but with a different reference, then we have 10 different theories about different phenomena. This is what we need today: more research, not philosophical discussions.
You're right, but that rigorous definition is a significant part of the problem. We have a very difficult time rigorously defining and then debating certain attributes about consciousness or related concepts precisely because the definition and exploration of the definition is what is being debated.
This makes it a very fascinating topic.
For my own pet theory I think consciousness as we like to understand it is an emergent and evolutionary social construct for cooperation amongst humans, and different people may have different levels of conscious thoughts, similar to how mammals are conscious in a different way amongst other species. It's a spectrum. There are, in fact, philosophical zombies.
Are you actually qualified to discuss this by your criteria?
No one is obligated to humor or debate amateurs because no one is obligated to humor or debate anyone[1]. But being an amateur does not mean that the person couldn’t hold a valid or meaningful viewpoint. Dismissing someone’s opinion specifically because they are an amateur is just a special case of appeal to authority. If their opinions are fundamentally flawed, then those can be addressed head on without resorting to insisting that they don’t have the right qualifications to participate in the discussion.
[1] The “faster than light” neutrinos come to mind, too. Scientists involved in the experiments explicitly said they didn’t have time to entertain amateur theories, a valid statement.
> it needs to be backed up with some grounded rationale
This was my point. Address the claim and not the qualifications.
If you feel qualified to add something useful to the discussion, or just to throw your unqualified opinion in for that matter (whichever the case may be), then go ahead. I'm certainly not stopping you.
As may be expected the conversation is already a garbage fire.
Funny enough most people who don't want to meditate or practice mindfulness, also get dissuaded from the dissonance this brings up, and like the old me, just move on to more comfortable conversation.
It's 'one' of the few places? That behaviorism seems to be define almost all modern discourse from politics to health care including about 95% of Hacker News posts as far as I can tell...
For the sake of argument, let's take a particularly long-lived species and say oak trees have some form of awareness. An oak tree's perception of time would be completely out of line with ours, from its perspective it'd be this writhing, visibly expanding thing that can't even register individual humans since we're there for such a short period of its existence. If it were aware on some level, we wouldn't be able to tell either way because we can only really conceive of human-like minds; even though an 'oak tree mind' would look nothing like ours because it would be driven by entirely different evolutionary conditions. I don't think it's possible for us to be entirely objective when it comes to naturalistic theories of consciousness, we cannot avoid being biased by our 'version' of what we're studying.
I think what many people are doing is looking for something that is fundamentally a higher dimensional object (dim>4) which casts a 4D spacetime shadow (our bodies) by shining a torch on _that_ shadow. Still doesn't allow for any satisfying direct observation.
This kind of dimensional analysis is part of the focus of my current research program.
It may not ultimately be very useful to define consciousness so broadly as to include the tree whilst being willing to include mind's unalike our own.
It seems to me that it must necessarily include abstract computation inclusive of the self and volition separate from simple processes taking place in individual cells.
While it may be accurate to describe our own selves as the sum of our individual cells operations it is also possible to look at it top down as accurately.
I'm not sure that the tree grew towards the light or the mold towards moisture is as meaningful a concept as the monkey climbed the tree to eat the fruit and I don't think the distinction is the similarities to self.
I don't believe that the tree had within itself an organized center with a computed symbol for light or growth.
I also don't think it contains any ability to change the fixed computation represented by the system of it's cells or to arrive at different speculative computation of past or future.
Hear a thing and store it and the associated vibe - yay/nay.
Step 2:
Mindlessly repeat stored information and vibe when it feels appropriate.
Step 3:
Wait for somebody else to do the work of refuting/verifying your info + vibe.
Step 4:
Go to step 1.
When you realize this is what all people are doing almost all of the time (and many, all of the time), you are liberated.