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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:21
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@ mods: this isn't a troll thread. About six or seven months ago, IIRC, Spiffor and I were engaged in a pretty good discussion on animal rights that boiled down to an argument about consciousness. We never finished, and rather than resurrect the thread (which is probably in the archives now) I'm just starting it off again, principally because I've arrived at a somewhat different (and simpler) argument than previously. While I know that there is a general rule against threads mentioning a specific poster, as I understand it this thread does not violate the spirit of the rule, it being an honest request for a serious discussion. I'm sorry if I've misunderstood the intent behind the rule.
[/disclaimer]
Ultimately, my case is that humans are sentient/self-aware/conscious (terms which I will use interchangeably) and that animals are not, except maybe our very close primate relatives. I'm going to lay down a number of axioms about the nature of consciousness and the nature of reality which seem reasonable to me.
First, I'd like to make a specific distinction between sensation and feeling, as I will use them. Sensation is simply what we call stimulus to some object that acts as if it performed some sort of logical computation on its stimuli to determine its response; thus, a flower senses light but an electron does not sense an electric field. Fundamentally there is no difference between those two, to me, but it's a useful distinction for practical purposes. Feeling is what resutls when a conscious being senses things - for instance, your eyes don't merely sense light; you feel (or rather see) it as an actual image, in your mind. Unfortanetly, it is extremely difficult or impossible to describe feeling and consciousness without talking in circles, but since (hopefully) you are also self-aware you should understand what I mean.
Pain is a sensation. When we sense pain, we also feel it, and since we dislike it strongly we attribute (in general) a negative moral value to it. However, at a basic level pain is merely one stimulus among many, one that happens to be a signal that some part of the body is damaged or in danger of becoming damaged. A robot, which had internal sensors to measure stress on its components, could be said to sense pain when those sensors were triggered, but we would not attribute any negative moral value to it - in fact, I doubt anyone would have a problem if we "tortured" several of these robots to death in order to test that the pain sensors functioned properly and that the robots responded properly to them, because they're not self-aware. There is no negative moral value to pain in a nonsentient being - we routinely, constantly genocide millions or billions of beings in a horrific way, by causing them to implode, but no one cares because they're bacteria.
My first assumption is that consciousness is observable. The point of this is that if we *cannot* observe, even indirectly (especially since there is no direct way to observe consciousness like one can measure an electric field), that something is conscious, then we must conclude that it is not. While there's no particular reason why an electron couldn't be self-aware, there's no more reason to believe that electrons are self-aware than to believe that their surfaces harbor entire clans of dancing leprechauns (or the existance of God  ). If we do observe whatever particular criteria we determine to be sufficient evidence of consciousness, then we must conclude that the being is self-aware. My criterion for this is that *any* being that communicates the concept of sentience, without having had the concept imparted to it by another sentient being (such as in the case of an intelligent but nonsentient being that has read about consciousness), must be sentient. This is because I do not see any way an intelligent but nonsentient being could come up with the concept of sentience.
My second assumption is that consciousness arises solely from the emergent behavior of the fundamental particles that make up our brains. By this I don't mean that we are the only possible conscious beings, but that reality is not dualist, there is no ethereal soul from another plane that decides to attach itself to our bodies. Effectively, we too are just machines, and it is some fantastic property of matter that somehow consciousness sometimes arises from its interactions.
My third assumption is that any physical system can be modelled with a Turing machine - the important result of this being that the behavior of any physical system can be predicted with arbitrary precision by an electronic computer with sufficient size and power (the specific requisite amounts of each being dependent on the particular system being modelled).
The first conclusion is from the first and second assumptions: human beings (in general; I will address the particular limits and exceptions later) are sentient. I know I am sentient. In addition, I know that there are other sentient humans, because of all the philosophers in the past who talked about it. Knowing from my second assumption that my sentience and theirs is the result of the construction of our brains, I begin to suspect that human brains are all fundamentally similar, in such a way as to make humans sentient. This is, I believe, reasonable.
The second conclusion is from the previous conclusion and all three assumptions: a computer can be sentient. Since a computer of sufficient size and power can simulate the behavior of a physical system containing a human being, it can simulate the behavior of that human being, and since consciousness is due only to the physical constitution of the human brain, it can simulate sentience. But then it would satisfy the criterion in the first assumption. The computer would, in effect, be a human being.
(Actually, I forget how I was going to use that conclusion in my argument  )
Finally, I conclude that animals, except possibly our close primate relatives, are not sentient, simply because there's no reason to believe that they share the fundamental similarity that human brains have, and because I've never had the concept of consciousness communicated to me in any way by them.
It may be objected that certain emotional displays of animals, especially mammals, suggest that they are sentient, but I see no necessary connection, either way, between sentience and such displays, especially given that it would be possible to create a relatively simple robot that would be furry and such and make identical displays while being incontrovertibly nonsentient. (This isn't currently possible mostly because we don't have access to quite as good motors and servos as nature has designed over millions of years.)
It may also be objected that certain animals recognize themselves in a mirror, and therefore must be self-aware. If the term self-awareness is used so literally, it is not interchangeable with sentience, since there is no necessary or even plausible connection between image recognition and sentience. For example, a program could be written that identifies an object in a camera view based on images and 3D data provided to the program at the beginning ("look for this"), and then this program could be loaded onto a robot which is also the object the program is set to recognize. However, the same program would recognize something else as self if one simply gave it the data of another robot. In addition, I think it's just generally absurd to claim that any good image-recognition software is by definition sentient.
It has been objected in the past that sentience can sentience could have evolved gradually, but I don't even understand what the heck it means to be, say, "half sentient", and I don't think sentience is something on a continuum. In response to this, the question has been raised "how did humans suddenly magically get it"? This is why I'm willing to concede that some primate relatives may be sentient; I think sentience may have evolved as an aid to empathy, allowing primates to create larger and stronger social organizations, and ultimately giving people the ability to form arbitrarily large social organizations even to the concept of the human race. Such organizations are formed from the extension of the concept of self onto a ever-larger bodies - my family, my tribe, my city, my nation, my race... and once you consider others as part of yourself, you consider their self-interest as part of your own, which is a very good trait for a society in evolutionary terms.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:21
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Kuci:
Actually, I have just read your essay. Your argument didn't change much since the last time, IIRC.
Your argument is consistent, but I think its fundamental weakness lies in the first assumption. Your criteria to measure sentience are a being that can express "I am sentient", but it has two terrible limitations:
1. The being must express its conciousness in a fashion that you understand. Considering we are talking about animals, this is very difficult. The science of animal behaviour may shed more light on the issue in the future, but you are very wary of this science, and you didn't develop alternative ways to understand the animal world (with you being a student and not a full-time animal behavioralist)
2. The being that expresses conciousness must be a being that you trust to be concious in the first place. That's because you want the being not to know about conciousness beforehand.
In short, with your definition, you are pretty much doomed to come to a conclusion that reinforces your anthropocentric opinion, that only humans (and their near primate cousins) are concious. The main reason why you think humans are concious is because you assume that the similarity between brain structures means that all other humans (or at least all the normal ones) are as concious as you.
The problem with this argument is that nobody here can provide facts to shed light about it. That's because we have no idea of what part of the brain creates conciousness, because we have no idea whether this part of the brain is universally shared among humans, and because we don't know the animal brains enough to be able to say "this animal has the conciousness brain-part", "this animal doesn't".
In short, the "let's look at them brains" approach cannot begin to answer the question in this day and age, because of the lack of human knowledge in the matter.
With today's knowledge, we humans can try to shed more light on the matter by trying to have a precise definition of conciousness, which will lead to a precise definition of the external signs of concsiousness. This could allow for a comparison between the behaviour of different species, to see which ones have a behaviour that matches the standard of the "sentient behaviour".
You may object: "But if I make a robot that whirrs painfully when we inflict physical damage to it (or to behave like any other criterion that you define as 'sentient behaviour'), it will not mean that it's sentient, just like it looks like it".
This argument is valid (you may want to check Descartes and his clock analogy - it's basically the same argument). This is why the process to determine if an animal is sentient isn't finished yet:
We must then try to understand why these animals are displaying such "sentient behaviour": whether it is due to mere stimuli, or whether it is due to a genuine consciousness that we didn't understand before. In the case of your robot, the reason is fairly straightforward: the robot had an Intelligent Designer that had this behaviour in mind from the beginning. In the case of animals, it is obviously not the same There's little to no reason that the seemingly sentient animals are the pawns of an elaborate hoax: who would have masterminded the hoax in the first place?
Obviously, we're not psychozoologists, so we won't be able to test anything of the sort in this thread. We can only think of what would be an appropriate process to test whether animals are concious or not.
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
Kuci:
Actually, I have just read your essay. Your argument didn't change much since the last time, IIRC.
Your argument is consistent, but I think its fundamental weakness lies in the first assumption. Your criteria to measure sentience are a being that can express "I am sentient", but it has two terrible limitations:
1. The being must express its conciousness in a fashion that you understand. Considering we are talking about animals, this is very difficult. The science of animal behaviour may shed more light on the issue in the future, but you are very wary of this science, and you didn't develop alternative ways to understand the animal world (with you being a student and not a full-time animal behavioralist) |
True. However, given how extraordinary sentience is, I can't help but be naturally on the sceptical side of any claim.
quote:
2. The being that expresses conciousness must be a being that you trust to be concious in the first place. That's because you want the being not to know about conciousness beforehand. |
However, as long as a being basically similar to it has been shown to be conscious, I don't require proof for this specific individual.
quote:
With today's knowledge, we humans can try to shed more light on the matter by trying to have a precise definition of conciousness, which will lead to a precise definition of the external signs of concsiousness. This could allow for a comparison between the behaviour of different species, to see which ones have a behaviour that matches the standard of the "sentient behaviour". |
I'm not sure a precise definition of consciousness is possible.
quote:
You may object: "But if I make a robot that whirrs painfully when we inflict physical damage to it (or to behave like any other criterion that you define as 'sentient behaviour'), it will not mean that it's sentient, just like it looks like it".
This argument is valid (you may want to check Descartes and his clock analogy - it's basically the same argument). This is why the process to determine if an animal is sentient isn't finished yet:
We must then try to understand why these animals are displaying such "sentient behaviour": whether it is due to mere stimuli, or whether it is due to a genuine consciousness that we didn't understand before. In the case of your robot, the reason is fairly straightforward: the robot had an Intelligent Designer that had this behaviour in mind from the beginning. In the case of animals, it is obviously not the same There's little to no reason that the seemingly sentient animals are the pawns of an elaborate hoax: who would have masterminded the hoax in the first place? |
My objection to that sort of behavioral determination is deeper than that: I don't see any reason why such behavior has any relation to sentience at all. I don't see a reason why emotions would require sentience - they would serve their evolutionary function just fine in its absense, as far as I can tell. Beyond the (rather tenuous) connection I made to empathy in the OP, I don't really understand why it would necessarily have evolved at all, though obviously it did.
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Odin
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Biology Nerd at Minnesota State University Moorhead
Sep 2000
time: 23:21
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Oh, sh*t, not Kuci's "sentience vs. non-sentience is black and white" argument again. From an evolutionary point of view, the only possible way sentience could of evolved is through stages. Starting whith the sense of self, which is only found in humans, our fellow apes, and some dolphins. From there, in the human lineage starting with early Homo you have rudimentary language (probably based on a kind of sign language) and brain organization that alowed the making of tools (Chimps use objects as tools, but don't modify them). Then in H. Heidelbergensis (aka Archaic H. sapiens, the common ancestor of us and Neandertals), we see rudimentary symbolic thinking and better language, probably with true spoken speech. Finally, with modern humans we have full symbolic thinking: art, complex religious beliefs, complex language, etc.
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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:21
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quote:
My objection to that sort of behavioral determination is deeper than that: I don't see any reason why such behavior has any relation to sentience at all. I don't see a reason why emotions would require sentience - they would serve their evolutionary function just fine in its absense, as far as I can tell. Beyond the (rather tenuous) connection I made to empathy in the OP, I don't really understand why it would necessarily have evolved at all, though obviously it did. |
It's not exactly what I meant.
My aim in this thread is not to prove whether some animals are conscious or not. Neither of us has enough zoological knowledge to test whether our speculations are true (due to my scientific background, I consider that nothing can be proven without an adequate empirical test - philosophy is elabrotate specualtion: something useful, but something that connot bring the answers alone)
My aim in this thread is also not to say "animals display a similar behaviour to us when we experience physical damage, ergo they're sentient". I see this statement as likely (because I don't see sentience as something so special), but repeating it until I'm blue in the face won't make it true. And I have no way to prove it.
My aim with this thread is maybe to think about which course of action could be needed in order to find whether animals are conscious, and which ones are conscious.
The first step is to have a precise definition. If we say "consciousness is a concept impossible to grasp. It's the fact that we see the big picture, and that we don't react automatically on a bunch of stimuli", it's not a definition we can work with, and we can't go anywhere with it.
A more precise decision could be (it's on the fly): "a concious organism can react differently to identical stimuli, because of the complex processes occuring in its nervous system". Still, such a definition remains vastly insufficient.
The second step, once you have a working definition of consciousness (and such a definition will be different from the unclear concept of "consciousness" as we use it in everyday language), you need to find a way to observe it. You have to know what are the external signs that can be typically associated with consciousness. Think of them as symptoms, if you want. These external signs could be anything: behaviour, brain structure, genetic code, whatever (I was biased toward behaviour in my previous post, but behaviour need not be the only external aspect of consciousness).
The third step is to observe whether an animal displays the external signs of consciousness, as you defined them at step #2.
If yes, then the 4th step is to look at the reasons why the animal displays such things. It can be chance. It can be that an Intelligent Designer created it just to puzzle our scientists. It can be because the animal is actually conscious.
As you see, declaring whether an animal is conscious or not is not an easy feat. It's no wonder that the scientists couldn't bring a deifnitive answer yet.
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Dr Strangelove
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Animals have the right to be cooked properly and tastefully.
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:21
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
The first step is to have a precise definition. If we say "consciousness is a concept impossible to grasp. It's the fact that we see the big picture, and that we don't react automatically on a bunch of stimuli", it's not a definition we can work with, and we can't go anywhere with it.
A more precise decision could be (it's on the fly): "a concious organism can react differently to identical stimuli, because of the complex processes occuring in its nervous system". Still, such a definition remains vastly insufficient. |
My definition isn't precise, but I have a problem with providing a definition that may not actually define sentient beings at all, but something else. I'm not sure it's possible.
quote:
The second step, once you have a working definition of consciousness (and such a definition will be different from the unclear concept of "consciousness" as we use it in everyday language), you need to find a way to observe it. You have to know what are the external signs that can be typically associated with consciousness. Think of them as symptoms, if you want. These external signs could be anything: behaviour, brain structure, genetic code, whatever (I was biased toward behaviour in my previous post, but behaviour need not be the only external aspect of consciousness). |
In some cases it would be very easy. Say we're visited by aliens, we learn their language, and read some of their literature and discover they have the concept already. They're sentient. Otherwise, I agree that a deep understanding of how consciousness somehow comes out of the interactions in our brain (by looking at where the thought "I am conscious" comes from) is necessary.
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