If I had to wager money on what future societies would condemn us for, I'd bet a lot on our treatment of animals.
Even if other highly-encephalized animals aren't conscious, they are still open to a wide range of experiences that we can empathize with. They can learn and play. They feel hunger and pain. Some species can even form friendships and mourn the passing of their kin.
Despite all indications that our treatment of these creatures is reprehensible, cultural inertia and the tastiness of meat are enough to prevent us from changing our behavior. To treat even 1% of humans the way we treat animals would be to perpetuate the greatest war crime in history. But do the same thing to some funny-looking microencephalitic relatives of humans and hardly anyone bats an eye.
Couldn't agree with you more. Upwards of 60 billion animals are slaughtered for human consumption each year[1]. The scale of it is mind-boggling. We just recently agreed on vegetarian team lunches at my startup to do our small part.
There is almost nothing that could happen which would make me feel poorly for eating cows, chickens, pigs, and fish.
The assumption here is that simply because a being is conscious, it is therefore special. Let's take away that assumption, and then work forwards. Of what significance is consciousness?
I think that there is a difference between entities with consciousness and those without, in that you can't cause pain and suffering to an entity without consciousness. In that sense, they are "special". But that doesn't mean we shouldn't eat them, just that we shouldn't be cruel to them.
That actually sounds like a low figure to me - there are 7 billion people, so on average only 10 animals per person? Sure, cows are big, but fowl aren't.
But 'slaughtering' misses the point. Nature is constant slaughter. Despite what we think of nature as being a cuddly, friendly thing, the animals in nature are locked in a literally deadly battle. The reasons why herbivores generally startle so easily is because if they don't, they die, and die horribly. We think it's cute, but it's literally there to keep them alive.
The issue isn't 'slaughtering' as far as I can see - since that is an exceptionally natural state for an animal - it's how the animals are treated up until they're slaughtered.
Not to mention that if we're talking about sheer numbers of organisms, the ones that are slaughtered for actual consumptions are a drop in the ocean compared to all the animals that are slaughtered in farming. Mice plague? Hell, just normal mice, no plague? You rarely hear the vegetarian protestors complaining about the huge numbers of rodents killed in farming. It increases in magnitude as you go down, too (snails etc, and increase again for insects). I think it's funny that above we have a complaint about 'not eating the cute rabbit', yet no-one champions the rights of vermin, despite them dying in far greater numbers. Generally no-one cares about them, because they die 'over there' and don't end up in line of sight.
So yeah, treat meat animals humanely, that's a tenable goal, but 'stop the slaughter'? It requires wilfully turning a blind eye.
I'm not sure that we necessarily need to become vegetarians in order to condemn the poor treatment of animals. It's perfectly possible (albeit more expensive) to raise and kill animals in a humane manner.
Personally I have no problem with humans eating meat, in my view it's part of our nature, but I do have a problem with raising them in battery farms and people kicking their pets etc.
'If I had to wager money on what future societies would condemn us for, I'd bet a lot on our treatment of animals.'
This. Times a thousand.
Paul Graham's article "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" has this quote, which I love:
"One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations. And I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer."
When I look to the future and imagine what will seem backwards, two of the big things in my mind are what PG mentions and what you mention.
The worst thing I find is the "I'll eat a sausage but I couldn't possibly eat a cute bunny wabbit". The sausage in its natural form is capable of being a valuable and loyal human companion.
I haven't eaten meat since I was at university in the distant past after I got addicted to a combination of ramen noodles, mushrooms and home made pepper sauce. The ethical dilemma made it hard to go back to eating meat so I didn't bother.
Regarding tastiness, Indian vegetarian food (particular aloo, gobi is far tastier than anything with meat in and you can grow ALL the ingredients yourself if you want without having to shovel a single turd.
If your problem is with hypocrisy, then there are two solutions. One is the path you took, to be a vegetarian, and the other is to simply not have a problem with eating a cute bunny wabbit.
> Regarding tastiness, Indian vegetarian food (particular aloo, gobi is far tastier than anything with meat in and you can grow ALL the ingredients yourself if you want without having to shovel a single turd.
The worst thing I find is the "I'll eat a sausage but I couldn't possibly eat a cute bunny wabbit". The sausage in its natural form is capable of being a valuable and loyal human companion.
"Those who like sausage and respect the law should inquire into the making of neither."
Little kids are cute and cuddly, so killing (and eating) anything cute and cuddly ought to be at least somewhat distasteful. If you recognize that logically this association doesn't make sense, you can either desensitize yourself or take advantage of your natural tendency to "out of sight, out of mind" and deliberately not think about what that venison steak looked like before it was a steak.
What you describe isn't about consciousness on the part of the eaten, it's about psychological interaction on the part of the eater. Most westerners aren't going to be happy eating moss they've seen you scrape off a wall either.
If future societies are condemning our behavior now, then we would not have progressed that far.
This isn't about kindness and cruelty, this is about awareness. As long as we perceive other living beings as The Other, we're not truly aware -- we can't empathize, we can't be compassionate, we can't be a complete human being. Condemning people for barbarism is a subtler form of separation, of saying "those people are not us." But they are, just as we're growing as a species and society to be aware of non-human awareness.
There's another part to this story. We have brought animals back from the brink of extinction purely because someone realised they were really tasty. A lot of our domestic animals, in particular, wouldn't even be able to survive without us ... but they're tasty, so we make them live, breed them in large numbers, feed them, etc.
Wolves do fairly well without humans, bees as well. Which animals did we bring back from the brink of extinction? I'll admit that new subspecies have emerged thanks to humans, but we hardly need to keep e.g. 1.3 billion cows (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle#Population) just to save the species from extinction.
Buffalos are a good example. Red Panda as well if I'm not mistaken.
The sad part is, we've also made species extinct just because they weren't tasty. Dodos for instance. Taste bad, so we just killed them for fun. Then they went extinct.
To treat even 1% of humans the way we treat animals would be to perpetuate the greatest war crime in history.
If you want to start treating animals with the same sanctity as humans, you need to watch out. Countries that use the death penalty should be executing all the carnivores for mass murder.
And what does "the way we treat animals" mean anyway? Plenty of pets are doted on and loved to bits. Plenty of wild animals are left alone, ignored, or even unknown. Plenty of animals are treated inhumanely. Overgeneralisations are an enemy to progress.
Sure, the US too. But they don't put hundreds of thousands of citizens in jail just for voicing decent, and then work/starve them to death. NK is my go-to example of an evil government, doesn't mean there aren't other ones.
I'd add to the people replying to this comment, about US citizens' responsibility, they have more responsibility than the average North Korean citizen, but not much. From what I understand, challenging the status quo in the USA is pretty difficult!
There are other ways to suppress when you control the mass media, and as far I know they do put lots of people temporarily in jail for voicing decent / showing up to peaceful protests.
They are not responsible for the actions of the military. Just because they are born in US doesn't make them responsible for the actions of the US military any more than someoe born in Canada, Brazil or Japan.
People who have power over the actions taken are responsible, pretty much the person itself and also the higher chain of command for the said person who commits whatever act to be held responsible for.
Not to delve too deeply into a political debate, but I think a counter-point is fair:
1. Those elected officials are not elected by everyone - in the case of GWB's first term (which many probably think of in this military context) it wasn't even a majority that elected him.
2. Those that do elect officials have a very small choice (lets say 2-3 people who could practically be elected). Further, I'd argue that most only vote on a few key issues, while the elected official has dominion over a vast number of issues.
I don't hold citizens as not at all responsible, but I think its at least fair to argue (in the above context) that the elected officials bear more responsibility - and blame - than the everyday citizen.
You're quite right in your counter-point. And besides it's not always clear beforehand what the key issues are going to be during a politician's term. I reacted more to the wording "Just because they are born in US doesn't make them responsible for the actions of the US military any more than someoe born in Canada, Brazil or Japan." I'd say US citizens are more responsible for US military actions than Canadians, however this definitely does not make the ordinary citizen responsible in the same way as an army general or prominent politician.
US citizens(as citizens everywhere) vote for whatever the media feeds them, and media is at least to some extent controlled by the US government(as in every country) or other political influence.
I would also disagree with politicians controlling the military -- perhaps the people in charge do have political power too, but I would argue that the political power and power over the military are rather indirect, it's not the same entity controlling the two, there are multiple people and entities with indirect relationships.
Funding someone does not make one responsile a single bit.
I am not responsible for an act you do with the knife I sold you last week, unless I did it in consent of you commiting the act. My parents aren't responsible for the acts I do.
Only when there's power, there's responsibility. Taxpayer does not have power over military, hence why taxpayer has no responsibility.
I see it differently. Without the tax money, the military could not operate. When I choose to pay our taxes, I am choosing to give money in support of the military's operations. I may disagree with the military's actions, but I choose supporting them (a little bit) over putting my life at risk by not paying. In that case it is a lose-lose situation.
So what do you propose as an alternative to this? Not paying isn't really an option. Move and renounce citizenship? (Remember, US has global taxation for citizen.) Not really a viable option to affect change, as you lose your right to vote, etc.
I do not think there is a nice alternative. I think we should accept that we share some responsibility for the actions of our home countries. If a political group could organize enough people to withhold their tax payments as part of a protest against a certain military action, that might cause enough of a disruption to stop it. Alternatively, it might just get everyone involved thrown in prison.
I don't find this argument compelling. Why is 'consciousness', or the ability to suffer or feel pain in a way comparable to us, important?
I don't eat or kill other humans, not just because I know they would dislike it, but because if we didn't all generally keep to that rule of not doing so, I run a higher risk of being eaten or killed myself. It's a behavioural contract, not some innate universal rule that suffering is bad.
For me, the question of what to eat is solely one of sustainability. Under that line of reasoning, veganism is better than vegetarianism which is approximately equivalent to eating no red meat, which are both better than eating red meat. How sentient the animal is doesn't factor into the decision.
Come on! We just recently sort of came to agree that watching people getting tortured is not the best kind of fun. Give us few centuries to manufacture something tastier.
This is great news. Now that we've proven the animals are conscious, we can put more resources into communicating and reasoning with them, and convince them to stop maiming, killing and eating each other. Peace on Earth, maybe within our lifetimes!
Literally nobody has ever done that. Try understanding his comment a different way. Like, say, that the human protections against violence preclude humans who chose to act violently, ergo if we extend that protection to animals, many of them would lose that protection as soon as it was extended to them.
To clarify, mtowle means 'them' as in 'the humans,' i.e. omnis will go to prison, be killed or endure some other form of violent punishment if caught eating meat.
Good luck with that. Maybe it happens, but I'm not holding my breath.
There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful predictions and the definitions employed are only means to this end. In fact there are operational definitions of consciousness and I think they certainly deserve to be called "scientific", see for example:
The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful. One that can be just as easily applied to a recording device, modulo the explicit mention of neurons.
It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider candidates for consciousness, other than to reaffirm our prejudices.
In other words, there's no such thing as a good scientific definition without the philosophical context. You can have as accurate an arbitrary measure as you like, but that doesn't imbue it equally arbitrarily with your desired meaning.
The problem is that multiple times in the history of science the search for somehow philosophically sound underpinnings led to stagnation and not to progress, that was in fact what Aristotle did to a large extent and was the main obstacle to development of science altogether. The recent example of this is the search of aether. In the end the way that science has progressed is by dropping too much "whys" and sticking to "hows".
There might never be a philosophically satisfactory definition of consciousness. Our subjective experience that we call consciousness might be an amalgamate of very different things happening at the brain level and a single definition might just not do. Meanwhile the operational definitions like the ones I mentioned allow us to make useful predictions and draw conclusions, for example that the brain activity that happens when we experience states most people would describe as consciousness also happens in certain animals. It is not perfect philosophically, but again, you could also have a long philosophical debate about what gravity is and you would never go anywhere scientifically - that's precisely what people did before the scientific revolution.
I think you're confused. I'm not asking for philosophical proofs end-to-end, I'm asking for the framing.
If you look at the formulation it starts out as a magical-seeming property, yet the definitions and processes do nothing to demystify that property. If you look at that process carefully you'll find the deceit: this is not an answer to the question of consciousness as asked. With the right philosophical treatment there might be hope of reconciliation, but without it the concept is just going to remain magical, without meaningful conclusions.
Aether is a great example, one I had in mind. Consciousness is very much like aether in some ways. It may well be that the only useful scientific thing to say about it at the end of the day is: it is not a useful concept to science. Much better than the contrivances offered up with no compelling connection to the subject.
The last word in TFA is 'qualia'. This is the problem. Canonical definitions of that term describe it as impossible to measure, or simply ineffable, which effectively puts it off the table for a scientific treatment. Regardless of what you think of what should constitute a scientific concept, the implication that these measurements alone elucidate an ineffable phenomenon is exactly the kind of thing that stinks of bullshit.
The problem is that the answers you are looking for are of philosophical nature and not of scientific one (you talk about "demystifying" consciousness, "elucidating it"). The neural correlates might not clarify what consciousness is, but they might yield answers to precise scientific questions, such as: what brain activity is necessary and sufficient for a person to be able demonstrate self- or world- awareness. We might need to first answer to such questions before we gain any new insights of more philosophical nature. I am not saying this method is the silver bullet, but certainly I cannot agree the results are meaningless or "only reaffirm our prejudices".
My only point is really that the lack of a great definition of consciousness doesn't diminish the value of research like the one cited here.
The neural correlates might not clarify what consciousness is, but they might yield answers to precise scientific questions
I don't deny that at all, in fact it is quite precisely what I endorse. Notice that the term consciousness lies on the left side, the excluded part. On the right side, you use the better-defined term, awareness. A definition that comes with better philosophical understanding. TFA, however, talks of qualia.
We might need to first answer to such questions before we gain any new insights of more philosophical nature.
I would say "different" rather than "more." Philosophy doesn't mean "weird stuff we don't really understand" and it can often be as boring as the implications of simple arithmetic or even the logic used in scientific endeavors. I wouldn't want to throw that out in the name of progress either.
I cannot agree the results are meaningless or "only reaffirm our prejudices".
The results described by the article and supported here are of the form "consciousness is X" where no question was asked that is answerable directly in terms of X, and no reconciliation has been made. That is the sense of meaninglessness I'm talking about. If you're still in doubt, or think that's somehow unimportant, grab the bull by the horns and deal with the implication that this is somehow ultimately a measure of qualia.
My only point is really that the lack of a great definition of consciousness doesn't diminish the value of research like the one cited here.
In that phrasing I am almost in agreement, if it wasn't for some of the claims made. Some very interesting things are being measured, but to go from these measurements to things like qualia is a leap I can't justify. A correlation between these measures and alertness, intelligence and kinds of awareness are easy to establish or contradict, and better yet: given those connections who is going to say "yeah but what are these results over here? it looks like manifest experience!"—?
What's "philosophical backup"? Scientists normally get by without any help from philosophers, so why do they need to get philosophers' imprimatur before they can use the concept of 'consciousness'?
Why doesn't the concept of, say, 'the gene' also need this backup? Or maybe all of those geneticists are also stumbling around in the dark without philosophers to guide them...
The gene does, just as everything else, but we don't ascribe magical properties to the gene which are not readily accessible and coherent with the philosophical context. If you tried to use the gene to define God, then you would have the philosophical disconnect I'm talking about.
> The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful.
Gravity is arguably a more compelling concept to someone falling off a ladder than to a student in a high school physics class. But, so? Does gravity lose meaning on a scale that is too large or too small to fit human experience?
The physics has obvious relevance to the experience and leaves no experiential questions unanswered. There's no problem with gravity.
I'm not looking for a why—the common complaint about gravity—I just want all the whats to match up. The meaninglessness is in reference to the question of consciousness. If you supply this to the asker, they could rightly ask, "sure, but what about my question?" Perhaps there is no reconciliation and you might want to complain that the question is nonsense—that complaint would make a better answer than a collection of irrelevant facts.
You are right. I should have gone straight to the heart of the matter: An intelligence arising in machines or in an exobiological system (or, for that matter, in a sufficiently different animal) seems very unlikely to function like human intelligence. Does that mean the only philosophically valid intelligence is human, or maybe in a genetically manipulated primate?
There's no definition of consciousness that is 1) not subjective (= is scientific) 2) matches our intuitive understanding of consciousness 3) doesn't contain logical inconsistencies or circular reasoning.
And there are good argumnts suggesting that there'll never be such definition (summary: consciousness is inherently subjective).
No they are not. Omitting qualia disqualifies almost all existing models of consciousness. One of the only ones I know that attempt an explanation of this phenomenon may be Tononi's IIT [1], but it is of course criticised for being too broad a definition.
There aren't any scientific definitions of consciousness that don't derive completely from the empirical study of people who have been declared conscious (philosophically.)
But too many people can't tell the difference between supporting an idea and publishing a repeatable experiment to test a falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal.
What has this to do with anything? They issued the declaration to put to attention conclusions exactly from "repeatable experiments testing falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal".
The experiment should be blind, which would be quite hard to design. At least, the robot designers wouldn't know that the mirror test would be the test, but ideally they would never have heard of the mirror test, indeed, they should have no good grasp of what a mirror even is.
Why is "self concept" equated to consciousness? When a split-brain patient's self-reported notion of "self" makes up a story to cover for not knowing why they performed some action, what part of their mind actually made the decision to act?
The difference is that the second is science and the first is every thing else. They are signing it to give the idea greater credence outside of their community, not within it. Obviously they hope to influence the world at large.
Machine learning might be a useful model of what happens in the brain but just like the map isn't the territory this doesn't make us robots, what would that even mean? Everything aside, biological systems are completely different than everything we have ever built and so far it seems current machine learning techniques not necessarily have to have much to do with what happens in the brain.
Pain is a feedback sensor which indicates that something's gone wrong. You could build a machine with pressure sensitive grippers. You could even place a threshold on that, above which the machine reacted by moving in the opposite direction. Biological pain is just a complicated version of that. Pain is just our minds interpretation of damage signals.
At what point do you draw the line. "This machine doesn't feel pain, it just responds to damage signals." could apply to a simple robot or a cockroach. At some point, biological computers become complicated enough that we deem pain to have arrived, but that point is fairly arbitrary. Why aren't we just biological machines?
There's a huge difference between feeling pain and reacting to demage. Humans can react to injury in a very complex ways without feeling pain. And buildings too - when you crash with an airplane into a building, the building reacts in a complex way. Does it feel pain? Feeling pain is something fundamentally different than reacting to demage.
If feel only fits your narrow, human centric definition of it, then of course machines can't feel pain. There isn't much point in having a discussion if the discussion is about your understanding of a word though.
If you go by the broader definition of feel, which includes "to have a sensation of something", then I'd argue that the line is far more blurred.
If you accept that a rat is capable of feeling pain, then surely you must accept that a functionally identical machine with a neural network functionally the same as a rat's brain can also feel pain? There's no real fundamental physical reason stopping us constructing a computer which functions in the same way as a rat's brain does. Does the computer we constructed suddenly stop being a machine?
My understanding of "feel" is purely subjective. I think it's impossible to create an objective definition. That's the problem
"To have a senseation of something" isn't really helpful definition, because "have a sensation" is just another word for "feel". It's like saying that the definition of "to buy" is "to purchase".
Physics cannot, even in theory, explain my subjective experience of pain. Why do I feel pain, when my brain's atoms are in specific positions?
The answer to your problems are not something you can resolve so tritely. The answers here are the responses to unanswerable questions - the spaces that religions have retreated to, in order to survive against science. These questions have no such answer that can be suitably determined.
Do you reckon a machine could have a sensor that made it feel emotional pain when it thought about other machines feeling emotional pain, because they lost a machine that they were close to through an extreme level of physical pain?
If you had a processor communicating with other processors by some protocol (I2C, wifi, doesn't matter), you could build out a feedback loop where one processor's output becomes the other's input...and have one processor output audio when the other processor receives specific input...
Given that we are biological machines, I'd say I do. Saying "machines don't feel pain" suggests that pain is something more than a complex process happening in a biological machine. It's not.
I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more conscious system because there's no reason to believe that evolution that gave us consciousness we recognize is capped in any way by some objective limit. It's more likely that our level of consciousness is just accidental value nowhere near theoretical upper limits.
At this stage of our knowledge saying "computation X will be conscious" is just a statement of belief or a simple definition as there is no consciouness-meter that I can use to test it. Such statements are unfalsifiable.
It seems that conciousness is just eventual function of any adaptive system that's complex and poweful enough.
Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.
Is a city containing a million humans conscious? If not, what is the criteria which rules out that city is not adaptive or complex and powerful enough?
Human to human link is too narrow for the whole city to be conscious. Same way ant colony is not conscious. I have no idea what is the threshold but my guess is that conciousness requires more connectivity by at least few orders of magnitude higher that any city can provide. Also there is a factor of time. For being that lives and observes human brain for 1 ns it's not concious mind. It's just elaborate bit of architecture.
Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation. Even if we are able to simulate the brains of lesser beings, doesnt necessarily mean that there will be self awareness in the simulation. I think this is one area where we still have a lot of catching up to do.
12 months ago I would have strongly disagreed with your first sentence, but after a load of reading on Physics, Philosophy, and Neuroscience, my views have changed.
I am still unable to reconcile my "internal" conscious experience with our current understanding of Physics. I'm a materialist, however I'm trending towards the believe that consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems; that is, our "internal" conscious experience is part of the "fabric of reality" and simply comes into being once matter is of a certain level of interconnectedness.
In essence, all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience. However, only groupings of matter that have massive interconnectedness (i.e. animal brains) experience what we would typically describe as consciousness. Perhaps, at a global scale, the internet is weakly "conscious". Perhaps, once we forge ahead with bio-mimetic arrays of neural networks, we'll start to induce artificial conscious experience in "dumb" matter.
Christof Koch has an excellent book "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" along these lines.
I also concur that "consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems". But "all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience" is really a philosophical question. Internet can be considered as a living being with different people acting as different components and communicating with each other the way neurons do. But is the internet as a whole, not its participants, conscious as a whole? That is a tough question.
I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.
I just looked back through parts of Koch's book. He was indeed talking about IIT. The wiki article on IIT is interesting, I didn't realise IIT had such a rigorous mathematical definition! I'll read further.
Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.
It doesn't matter what the brain is made of. Or would you say that if there are alien lifeforms, with their brains certainly made out of another matter than our brains, have no conscience?
I didn't mean that brain made up of silicon cannot be conscious. We are trying to simulate whatever we have learned about the brain. And that understanding is not complete. So implementing that in silicon (circuit) will not be conscious until we figure how to implement it.
Lots of what we know about the brain is implementation detail. For example brain architecture. Which part processes what. It's insignificant because when brain is young enough you can cut out whole hemisphere and end up with completely functioning individual.
When babys brain grows up it reassimilates most of the neurons that it grew. Architecture of the brain is shaped by funcion during development. The brain begins as generic structure that undegoes optimisations for the sole purpose of probably energy efficiency.
I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.
> Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.
That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.
I am a physicist by training and I was a hard core reductionist. But then, reduction to physics is just another philosophical stance and not an inductively generated statement like the laws of physics. Also, induction (empirical not mathematical) is not fool proof like deduction.
Even if we arrive at a TOE, how do we justify that the universe will always obey those laws in the future? Physical reductionism is easy to understand but upon closer inspection seems to lack a strong foundation.
Also, the laws of physics have zero consequence on logic and mathematics upon which the enterprise of physics rests on along with empirical data.
Just to put such claims in perspective, people are currently struggling a lot to build reasonably accurate models of single neurons. We are at least decades away from simulations of any value even of rats. People who claim otherwise are the ones that haven't seen any actual biology...
The day we stop kidnapping, murdering and eating animals will be the day we stop kidnapping and murdering each other?
I honestly don't think the "animals have conscious thought" is the most effective way to change agriculture, but I will struggle to deny that gorilla whose eyes I looked into at Aspinalls was not looking back at me with the same understanding and knowledge.
Yes they are as conscious and thoughtful as humans, but humans are as unthinking and hard-wired as animals
We are animals certainly but there is strong evidence that complex vertebrates (humans, big cats, etc) can adapt behavior from prior experience. It's a pretty big stretch to claim that we are unthinking and hard-wired.
>Also, this is a ridiculous justification for meat eating, since lions cannot reason about morality.
I'm unclear what level of moral justification is needed. I want to survive. There are weaker animals for me to eat. My gut can process their meat. My teeth can rip their flesh.
I guess I haven't transcended nature and evolution the way vegetarians have.
>> I'm unclear what level of moral justification is needed. I want to survive. There are weaker animals for me to eat.
These two statements do not have a direct and necessary relationship, since "eating weaker animals" is not required for our survival or health. Also, you must be a nihilist if you think your actions do not require moral justification. Ethical vegetarians have not and do not claim to have "transcended" anything, and are simply following the dictates of their consciences. Most people, I think, believe that it is wrong to cause unprovoked suffering in another being (who can suffer); ethical vegetarians are just a subset of this group who are more consistent in keeping their actions true to this moral axiom.
Only the slaughter needs to be ethically managed; no excessive, prolonged nor unnecessary pain. Animal cruelty is usually an indicator of sociopathy, and its presentation in other humans is likely a danger signal to the rest of us; as the person probably lacks, or has low, empathy.
If both lions and gazelles have conscious awareness, and we do not condemn the lion for eating a fellow conscious awareness holder, then why should we hold ourselves to higher standards? If we believe that the taking of any conscious life is wrong, then we should see that the lion is wrong, and punish him. Lion prison anyone?
However, please note that there have been a few individuals in human history who did have complete understanding of consciousness. The story of this world is that nobody wanted to learn from those people when they were alive.
The reasons that modern scientists do not understand consciousness is that
1. they do not apply a specific principle to their research (In math, when we want to solve a question, we apply the equality to operate the question.) and because
2. their research only investigates half of the set of existent relevant phenomena - that which can be seen with the naked eye.
Once a human recognizes the simple law that governs natural phenomena it is simple to recognize what consciousness is.
I am fairly certain that a large percentage of the human population still operates regularly without the consciousness as described by Jaynes.
At the very least, the genetically built neural machinery that our species would've had 3000 years ago is still likely to reward behaviors such as assuming gods and spirits in almost everything, enthralling oneself in crowd dynamics, and yielding to charismatic authorities.
A computer can easily know right from wrong to the degree most humans are capable of (and too often they aren't very sophisticated at that) even today. But it's safe to assume that that ARM processor has no conscious awareness. Conscious awareness is simply the feeling of observing things, a feeling we assume the machines we've built do not have, for example.
Humans adapt to the moral system of their society. There is no set of "universal morals" that all humans have.
But do realise this, since I'm not a moral relativity apologist. I'm going to say that moral systems are not equal and some backward societies need to get their systems fixed.
Have you read the god delusion by Dawkins? There he takes on just that myth - there has been a very good body of research in presenting people with the same set of moral conundrums - every race and culture, even "primitive" have indistinguishable moral responses. (Obviously individual variance was high)
That is of course a big philosophical question. But in lieu of diving into that, because Wikipedia says so:
Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgment may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms.[1] The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.[2]
Yeah. Simple single sentence from me which doesn't do your comment justice.
The connection between consciousness as an idea expressed by this declaration, and general extant environment is an interesting philosophical pursuit. I didn't think conscience so much, as an anterior attribute. But apologies if I appeared curt. I need practice.
No offence taken. Sometimes someone (me) is just wrong, and it shouldn't be unacceptable to point that out in so many words. Conscience and consciousness, despite the common root, just doesn't mean the same thing.
I think that argument depends on a certain definition of "objective". A professor of mine argued that there are objective moral values because that there are certain actions that basically all people consider wrong. For example, killing an innocent person for fun. Under his definition, that would be an objectively immoral action.
The notion of objective moral values is that the "right" moral values exist independent of humans and the human mind. (I think.) It is usually a position held by religious types like William Lane Craig.
EDIT: to clarify, the title is very confusing because it makes you think they just signed it. It should be completed by a "2012" in the end. That's why I was disappointed when following the link. Nothing new.
Fuck the news, acquire knowledge. :D The reason it pops up is someone noticed it, posted it online, and it grew viral because it's something people like to hear.
AGain, why not mention its from 2012 in the title then? That's what people do on HN for older contents. and if you f* the news then why do you come on a website that has NEWS in its title?
Hacker News is called Hacker News because it used to be called Startup News. The only mention of the word "news" in the Hacker News guidelines is in the line stating that "If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."
> Consequently, say the signatories, the scientific evidence is increasingly indicating that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.
That's because neurological substrates don't generate consciousness. There is no evidence to the effect that they do. However, when we understand the structure of the system of consciousness it's very easy to see how consciousness is generated and maintained.
The role of all neural systems is
1. to transmit to the consciousness what the body sees, hears, learns, etc., and
2. to express what is in consciousness through the body.
Factual authority does not derive from socially validated papers. The law of nature and all the facts exist in nature itself. The problem is that if you don't try to confirm my words through 'what is' you can not recognize the evidence in front of you.
That is actually the best summary of the current state of consciousness research that I've ever read.
That said, they don't talk much about whether they can prove degrees of conscious awareness. There may be homologous structures, but are they as large as in humans? If they're not, then perhaps you'd expect the animal to have a comparable and yet less-detailed experience.
Agree with them that it is very likely that animals have conscious experience, I believe it to most likely be the case as well.
But it seems irresponsible, and possibly self-serving for the NCC research crowd, to escalate this evidence to the level of proof on consciousness in animals. There is just no way to know what it is like to be any creature other than yourself. It seems reasonable to assume other humans with the same anatomy and physiology, with whom we can communicate extensively, are also likely conscious. But we just can't ever tell what the experience is like to be any other creature.
Signing a such a statement smacks of an attempt at bullying policy with scientific credentials. This is bad because then in other areas, such as global warming, it gives opponents with ulterior motives fodder for claiming scientists shouldn't be trusted since they are prone to the same irrational belief systems as other people.
It would be better to present their story for mainstream consumption with an attitude of Isn't this a compelling story? Maybe even educate people and attract people to the field of neuroscience in the process. But claiming they've figured it out and we all need to get on board will only have negative repercussions.
Even if other highly-encephalized animals aren't conscious, they are still open to a wide range of experiences that we can empathize with. They can learn and play. They feel hunger and pain. Some species can even form friendships and mourn the passing of their kin.
Despite all indications that our treatment of these creatures is reprehensible, cultural inertia and the tastiness of meat are enough to prevent us from changing our behavior. To treat even 1% of humans the way we treat animals would be to perpetuate the greatest war crime in history. But do the same thing to some funny-looking microencephalitic relatives of humans and hardly anyone bats an eye.