I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?
That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, even if people will wind up treating it similarly though
Humans have consciousness whether or not anyone believes we do
Or at least I do. I don't really know about the rest of you. I prefer to believe that you all have consciousness too though
Otherwise don't be stupid. Come on.
If it isn't that, then we're talking about some non-practical definition, in which case, does that even matter?
I think Occam's razor is sufficient to reject this as a concept. Panpsychism would introduce a lot of complexity into our understanding of the world without really increasing our ability to explain any of it
I don't feel the need to make a stronger case than that because frankly it strikes me as more like mysticism woo than any sort of real serious philosophy
It seems more likely to me that e.g. the individual fibers of the teddy bear are conscious than that there is a consciousness associated with the teddy bear as a whole. And I don’t find it particularly likely that the fibers do.
Like, by what mechanism is the teddy bear “one thing” in a way relevant for consciousness to be associated with that thing.
When people have stuff happen to their brain, this has an effect on their conscious experience in a way that isn’t true of e.g. their hair being cut, or their nails being clipped. In this way, the consciousness of a person seems associated more with their brain than to parts of their hair or nails. But, the way that a persons hair and nails is related to the rest of a person’s body (including their brain) seems more similar to how one bit of fluff is related to the rest of a teddy bear, than the way a part of someone’s brain is related to the rest of their body (including the rest of their brain).
Like, [bit of fluff]:[rest of bear]::[bit of hair or nail]:[rest of body (including brain)] is a better analogy than [bit of fluff]:[rest of bear]::[bit of brain]:[rest of body (including rest of brain)] is, and so, in the same way that removing a bit of someone’s hair or nail in a way that they don’t notice does not seem to alter that person’s conscious experience, while removing or altering a bit of their brain very much can alter their conscious experience, I would expect that removing a bit of a teddy bear would have no impact on any conscious experience it might have, and this goes for, every part of it? Like, any way that you cut it in a (n/(2n+1)), ((n+1)/(2n+1)) split, I would expect that to be more like the “removing some hair” to whatever conscious experience it might have, and so, I expect that it probably has no overall conscious experience?
I find the idea that a single thread has an overall conscious experience to be a little more likely than a teddy bear having one. Like, if you cut a thread, that’s always a pretty fundamental change.. idk. Again, I don’t think that’s like either.
It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.
[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.
If you modify the teddy bear enough that's a totally different situation, so let's not confuse the two. In the modification case we don't even need to worry about simulacra, we can stretch it into pajama shape and use an entire human as the stuffing of the teddy bear.
That seems relevant to building The Existifier. [0]
I think it's more that consciousness can be _ignored_ in subjects that you don't care about, rather than that you consciousness can be realistically attributed to subjects that you do care about, but even then people attribute consciousness to "nature" or even the universe as a whole, or if you want to stretch the argument, quite a lot of religious belief is exactly attributing consciousness to abstract entities.
(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any concrete definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration, and morality is complicated, murky, and generally emotionally driven in a way that most concrete definitions struggle to adequately describe)
And there's a blurry line here. Obviously slavery is abhorrent, and animal abuse is bad, and factory farming often crosses the line into animal abuse and we should accept that chicken will cost ~25% more per pound to have the chickens be able to walk around a little bit... but how do we decide when a computer system is worthy of respect? Convenient not to think about that.
At what precise level of complexity is a computer conscious? That's the blurry line.
Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either
At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.
To look at it another way: this form of social construction answers the question of "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" with an emphatic "no". It is a sillier version of solipsism.
I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true
I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof
So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not I'm a brain in a jar because the very thing I would use to evaluate the evidence is the thing that is potentially being manipulated.
However, slapping a solipsist sees them abandoning their philosophy rather quickly.
But I agree with you. We can't prove it, but "other people are as real and conscious as I" is a reasonable assumption to make
Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this.
While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical changes to the brain visibly influencing personality and behavior meets a reasonable criterion without getting too pedantic.
I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely.
Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat.
And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.
Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.
My statement is not that a type of proof is impossible. All proof is impossible. This is a fact of science. Proof is only possible in mathematics which is a made up game of axioms and theorems. Proof in reality is impossible.
But humans go about believing in many things without proof. We believe in physics without proof because it’s relatively consistent though unproven. And I am saying that things like brain damage, brain surgery and electrodes and the physical changes those things do to the personality is ALSO relatively consistent.
Consistent enough that we can know that the souls doesn’t exist that the personality the ego is a manifestation of the physical brain. Proof is not needed because we can’t prove anything anyway and the criterion is met in this aspect because it is the baseline of how we believe all things without proof.
For example:
We know that conscious experience and personality are manifestations of the physical brain rather than a non-physical soul because targeted changes to brain tissue directly alter a person's core identity, memories, and behaviors. The most famous historical example of this is Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker who survived an iron rod blasting through his frontal lobe; while his body healed, his polite, reliable personality vanished, replacing him with an impulsive and erratic stranger. Similarly, modern medical cases of patients suffering from severe Alzheimer's disease or traumatic brain injuries show how the physical erosion of brain matter systematically erases lifelong memories, moral reasoning, and the emotional bonds that define a person's character. Furthermore, patients who undergo "split-brain" surgery to treat epilepsy—where the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres is severed—effectively develop two separate streams of consciousness inside one head, with one half of the brain holding beliefs or desires that the other half is completely unaware of. If a unified, spiritual soul were the true source of our character, choices, and consciousness, physical damage, tissue erosion, or surgical separation would leave those abstract traits unharmed. Instead, because changing the physical structure and chemistry of the brain completely rewrites or splits who a person is, modern neuroscience concludes that the mind is entirely a product of the physical brain.
> Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
we can't prove, in this mathematics sense, that other people are conscious just as we can't prove that the sun will rise again tomorrow, or that my food will nourish me instead of killing me, or that everything is still there when you're not looking. for questions of this type we normally content ourselves with empirical evidence instead. and the empirical evidence for the consciousness of other humans (and, taking it further, other animals) for me would be the facts (1) that i am conscious, and that (2) i am a human like other humans: same anatomy, same behaviors, same story. indeed, empirically, it'd be absurd to think that i'd be so profoundly different from other humans in this particular aspect.
i guess what i'm saying is for me the real existential horror is the problem of induction.
Take the radical skepticism pill and embrace epistemological monism - the idea that the only real truth is that all things are interpretations.