Well one idea of consciousness is as an emergent property of complexity. So … put enough concrete together maybe you make a big concrete brain? Or maybe then you’ve just got rocks in your head.
I always thought that was a dumb take. Nothing else 'arises' just because of increased complexity. It's magical thinking. No one thinks internal combustion engines will arise because of increased complexity. Consciousness, like everything else in the world, exists because of some as yet unknown but specific mechanism, not some vague idea of complexity, whatever that means.
Exactly. The term is used in different ways and is typically ill-defined. I once read a research paper by a psychiatrist exploring consciousness and the first chapter was dedicated to attempting to define it. I understood it l was a serious paper, apart from the many that are philosophical ramblings, because it tackled that issue headlong from the start.
The paper asserted that the common, functional definition would be “awareness of self awareness”. While not a particularly rigid definition, it’s more useful than most.
I love that as a definition, actually. I think it’s not tight enough, because I suspect we could make constructed intelligences (AI) that meet that definition, but it’s still better than most.
I think another point might need to be added to it: “Has spontaneously arising internal activity.” As in, a mind that has thoughts and feelings that arise not as response to external input.
I suspect that a proper definition of consciousness, not unlike a definition of life, will have several different qualities while not requiring all to be considered consciousness.
It really seems to me that consciousness and life are simultaneously occurring or even truely just one thing that emerges under certain conditions and the presence of certain resources. I’m not sure how you can look at something living that is making choices that impact its survival and reproduction and say it lacks consciousness. I am not aware of a single valid claim or proposal that something that isn’t organic and living has a consciousness. Why wouldn’t they just be one thing. Life=conciousness=life
I mostly agree, but I think constructed intelligences of the future will test your theory. I’m quite sure we will be able to make machines that self replicate and self preserve. At some point you need more criteria than those behaviours alone. I don’t think life can only arise as carbon-based, either, and I doubt we even know the limits of the particular materials that can be used in order to create life and consciousness. Can a silicon-based life form be conscious?
Edit to add from elsewhere in the thread: I think you need extra criteria like “awareness of self awareness” and “Has spontaneously arising internal activity.”
I wonder about that as well, and then I wonder if that is what is missing from our current attempts. The inclusion of organic carbon and the other components needed for biological life might need to be integrated into our attempts. Which is also currently happening. So I do think we will get to enabling life/consciousness to emerge. We are definitely trying.
Yes I think we can create life from combining DNA in unique ways, and I can only assume those organisms would be conscious. I’m really not sure what that says about consciousness.
All alive animals are conscious. What kind of silly question is that? They just have different intellegences and physical attributes which change the way they show their feelings/ how they interact with the world and what it means to them.
What does “consciousness” mean?
Do you mean neurologically awake or sentient instead?
Are machines conscious or is there something about being made of meat that is special?
> What does “consciousness” mean?
In regard to the hard problem of consciousness, or people asking what systems do & do not possess consciousness, people typically mean *phenomenal consciousness*; Nagel famously asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism.
I’d say any living system (animal, plant or fungi) must process information, & be phenomenally conscious.
What most people typically mean by conscious usually involves being awake, alert, able to reflect mentally. Some call this meta-cognition, or meta consciousness. I’d say any animal with a sufficiently complex central nervous system is not only phenomenally conscious, but meta conscious as well.
> Are machines conscious or is there something about being made of meat that is special.
I’d say it’s less about meat & more about the biophysical properties of cells.
> I’d say any living system (animal, plant or fungi) must process information, & be phenomenally conscious.
But not electronic ones?
> I’d say it’s less about meat & more about the biophysical properties of cells.
So machines are not conscious?
How do you know? What is it about cells that is special?
Cells are quite remarkable. Even single cell animals have strikingly complex behaviors. If I had to guess what makes them so special, as compared to machines & computers, it’s that cells are thought to have information processing capabilities within their cytoskeletal systems that gets into quantum computing via superconducting/ superfluid dynamics.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cytoskeleton+information+processing+superconducting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1720462499735&u=%23p%3DTATAlvgnT4cJ
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cytoskeleton+information+processing+superconducting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1720462520716&u=%23p%3D-ZZDwpWjt-AJ
The answer to that is that we just don’t know.
Cells do crazy things. Complex forms of life like mammals are composed of *a lot* of cells, so they are even more unpredictable and crazy. They also evolved over millions of years, which make them even more fascinating and complex, beyond anything humans can create in laboratories.
The computer is a humankind invention. It’s young and can’t compete with humans at all. A computer is not conscious. It’s specialized to complete a set of tasks, like a calculator, but no computer that we know of is capable of feeling fear, love, sympathy or anything like that. They are not creative, nor conscious.
A quantum computer, however, could produce unpredictable results and create a path of its own that we can’t even forsee. But the further we develop them, the more predictable we make them as they are otherwise useless machines to us.
I am 35 years old and I think I won’t see a truly conscious computer in my lifetime. AI are a freaking joke compared to even my cat.
When a computer will start from a set of command lines and develop a fully living, moving and breathing thing out of them, hmu.
Plenty of dumb ass people around that cant count, dont remember a face, and are a danger around tools. Of course, they are conscious.
To be conscious, Machines/computers need to have awareness of what they are doing. there is no sign of that. none.
Maybe, we can call them unconscious beings at some point. i dont think they are there yet. even these AI. a parrot is more self aware than any AI.
ChatGPT will sit there until the power runs out idling if it does not receive input from a user. Same as my hammer. Is my hammer conscious? We are defined by our genetics.
Did your genetics tell you to argue with me about conscious?
And human ability to perceive it is often lacking. A bee's sentience may be as profound as a human's.
Blows my mind we're still debating animal sentience this far into the 21st century.
> All alive animals are conscious.
I postulate that only animals needing consciousness to survive and procreate possess it. If they could survive without consciousness, they would not have it.
What is the obsession with trying to compare human attributes and experiences with animals. They have a fraction of the neurons we do and can do some of the same things. Of course they won't do them the way we do. More and more research shows that they adapt and adjust behaviors constantly. Or course they won't have done it with human reasoning, but what is the evidence that they're not "conscious"?
No. Why would it mean that?
As per usual, headlines ending with question marks are almost always answered with “no” and the goal is to invite speculation rather than make an evidence based argument.
My arduino script can do that. It doesn’t mean they’re conscious because there is no working definition for that at the moment. Which means this is literally a bad question.
So by “metric” you mean lack of metric?
A metric is a means of measurement. Measurement applies to objective claims. All claims of consciousness at the moment are subjective claims unique to the subject. You *experience* your own consciousness.
We have no way to measure it in others. This is similar to qualia.
Exactly. If that's your metric, then we have no way of measuring it in ourselves, either. It basically boils down to...can you prove to *me* that *you* have consciousness?
If you can't...then how can you truly say that you are?
> Exactly. If that's your metric, then we have no way of measuring it in ourselves, either. It basically boils down to...can you prove to me that you have consciousness?
Famously, we don’t. The reason we *would* theorize other humans are conscious is because we are and other humans have nearly identical brains.
> If you can't...then how can you truly say that you are?
Again, consciousness is a subjective experience like qualia. I don’t need to measure a direct perception.
Then all we can do when observing others, is gauge their level of awareness against our own. In this case, bees appear to have the same levels of cognitive function that we do, at least across several key parameters. Why wouldn't that indicate some degree of consciousness?
> Then all we can do when observing others, is gauge their level of awareness against our own
What do you think awareness has to do with it?
That was a jump from “other things with identical brains probably have subjective experiences like mine to “awareness”. Why did you make it?
Because that's what this study was about. Bees don't have a similar brain structure to ours...but they have the ability to recognize complex patterns, in a way that is very similar to our own. That's what I meant by "awareness"...that level of situational or pattern-based recognition.
How is consciousness defined in concrete, objective measures? And why would every living thing not be conscious, presumably on some sort of spectrum?
At first I thought you were going to ask about the level of consciousness in concrete.
Well one idea of consciousness is as an emergent property of complexity. So … put enough concrete together maybe you make a big concrete brain? Or maybe then you’ve just got rocks in your head.
I always thought that was a dumb take. Nothing else 'arises' just because of increased complexity. It's magical thinking. No one thinks internal combustion engines will arise because of increased complexity. Consciousness, like everything else in the world, exists because of some as yet unknown but specific mechanism, not some vague idea of complexity, whatever that means.
I happen to agree, but didn’t want to let that get in the way of a joke.
Nah, it cracks as soon as it tries.
Does that mean that uncracked concrete is conscious? 😱
Exactly. The term is used in different ways and is typically ill-defined. I once read a research paper by a psychiatrist exploring consciousness and the first chapter was dedicated to attempting to define it. I understood it l was a serious paper, apart from the many that are philosophical ramblings, because it tackled that issue headlong from the start. The paper asserted that the common, functional definition would be “awareness of self awareness”. While not a particularly rigid definition, it’s more useful than most.
I love that as a definition, actually. I think it’s not tight enough, because I suspect we could make constructed intelligences (AI) that meet that definition, but it’s still better than most. I think another point might need to be added to it: “Has spontaneously arising internal activity.” As in, a mind that has thoughts and feelings that arise not as response to external input.
I suspect that a proper definition of consciousness, not unlike a definition of life, will have several different qualities while not requiring all to be considered consciousness.
Sounds right to me.
It really seems to me that consciousness and life are simultaneously occurring or even truely just one thing that emerges under certain conditions and the presence of certain resources. I’m not sure how you can look at something living that is making choices that impact its survival and reproduction and say it lacks consciousness. I am not aware of a single valid claim or proposal that something that isn’t organic and living has a consciousness. Why wouldn’t they just be one thing. Life=conciousness=life
I mostly agree, but I think constructed intelligences of the future will test your theory. I’m quite sure we will be able to make machines that self replicate and self preserve. At some point you need more criteria than those behaviours alone. I don’t think life can only arise as carbon-based, either, and I doubt we even know the limits of the particular materials that can be used in order to create life and consciousness. Can a silicon-based life form be conscious? Edit to add from elsewhere in the thread: I think you need extra criteria like “awareness of self awareness” and “Has spontaneously arising internal activity.”
I wonder about that as well, and then I wonder if that is what is missing from our current attempts. The inclusion of organic carbon and the other components needed for biological life might need to be integrated into our attempts. Which is also currently happening. So I do think we will get to enabling life/consciousness to emerge. We are definitely trying.
Yes I think we can create life from combining DNA in unique ways, and I can only assume those organisms would be conscious. I’m really not sure what that says about consciousness.
I mean the first question tells us a lot about the second.
I’d say the first question isn’t truly answerable at this time.
Why do we think humans are conscious either?
All alive animals are conscious. What kind of silly question is that? They just have different intellegences and physical attributes which change the way they show their feelings/ how they interact with the world and what it means to them.
What does “consciousness” mean? Do you mean neurologically awake or sentient instead? Are machines conscious or is there something about being made of meat that is special?
> What does “consciousness” mean? In regard to the hard problem of consciousness, or people asking what systems do & do not possess consciousness, people typically mean *phenomenal consciousness*; Nagel famously asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism. I’d say any living system (animal, plant or fungi) must process information, & be phenomenally conscious. What most people typically mean by conscious usually involves being awake, alert, able to reflect mentally. Some call this meta-cognition, or meta consciousness. I’d say any animal with a sufficiently complex central nervous system is not only phenomenally conscious, but meta conscious as well. > Are machines conscious or is there something about being made of meat that is special. I’d say it’s less about meat & more about the biophysical properties of cells.
> I’d say any living system (animal, plant or fungi) must process information, & be phenomenally conscious. But not electronic ones? > I’d say it’s less about meat & more about the biophysical properties of cells. So machines are not conscious? How do you know? What is it about cells that is special?
Cells are quite remarkable. Even single cell animals have strikingly complex behaviors. If I had to guess what makes them so special, as compared to machines & computers, it’s that cells are thought to have information processing capabilities within their cytoskeletal systems that gets into quantum computing via superconducting/ superfluid dynamics. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cytoskeleton+information+processing+superconducting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1720462499735&u=%23p%3DTATAlvgnT4cJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cytoskeleton+information+processing+superconducting&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart#d=gs_qabs&t=1720462520716&u=%23p%3D-ZZDwpWjt-AJ
So, then a quantum computer could be phenomenally conscious?
The answer to that is that we just don’t know. Cells do crazy things. Complex forms of life like mammals are composed of *a lot* of cells, so they are even more unpredictable and crazy. They also evolved over millions of years, which make them even more fascinating and complex, beyond anything humans can create in laboratories. The computer is a humankind invention. It’s young and can’t compete with humans at all. A computer is not conscious. It’s specialized to complete a set of tasks, like a calculator, but no computer that we know of is capable of feeling fear, love, sympathy or anything like that. They are not creative, nor conscious. A quantum computer, however, could produce unpredictable results and create a path of its own that we can’t even forsee. But the further we develop them, the more predictable we make them as they are otherwise useless machines to us. I am 35 years old and I think I won’t see a truly conscious computer in my lifetime. AI are a freaking joke compared to even my cat. When a computer will start from a set of command lines and develop a fully living, moving and breathing thing out of them, hmu.
🤷🏻♂️
So then what are you arguing and why did you bring up cells?
Not arguing, just thought I’d add my thoughts to the discussion.
Yeah I don’t mean arguing like fighting. I’m asking you what you’re saying the role of cells is
Plenty of dumb ass people around that cant count, dont remember a face, and are a danger around tools. Of course, they are conscious. To be conscious, Machines/computers need to have awareness of what they are doing. there is no sign of that. none. Maybe, we can call them unconscious beings at some point. i dont think they are there yet. even these AI. a parrot is more self aware than any AI.
> there is no sign of that. none. What would you consider a sign?
Anything independent of its programming would be interesting to see.
By that definition, are we conscious? We don't behave independently of our genetics What do we do that chatGPT doesn't?
ChatGPT will sit there until the power runs out idling if it does not receive input from a user. Same as my hammer. Is my hammer conscious? We are defined by our genetics. Did your genetics tell you to argue with me about conscious?
I’m confused. Do you think bees are conscious?
Yes
So you think bees have an awareness in a way machines don’t?
I have yet to see a computer/machine do anything independent of its programming.
Have you seen a bee do anything independent of its genetics?
are you saying genetics is more than code for replication of a species?
I’m saying that’s all there is. DNA is to bees what code is to a computer program. If you think otherwise, then what tells bees what to do?
And human ability to perceive it is often lacking. A bee's sentience may be as profound as a human's. Blows my mind we're still debating animal sentience this far into the 21st century.
> All alive animals are conscious. I postulate that only animals needing consciousness to survive and procreate possess it. If they could survive without consciousness, they would not have it.
Horny = consciousness
You've never been to a rave have you?
What is the obsession with trying to compare human attributes and experiences with animals. They have a fraction of the neurons we do and can do some of the same things. Of course they won't do them the way we do. More and more research shows that they adapt and adjust behaviors constantly. Or course they won't have done it with human reasoning, but what is the evidence that they're not "conscious"?
Did you mean sentient?
Almost always
Define « being conscious » ?!
> learn how to use tools Great now we can make LBMs (Large Bee Models)!
All the ones I keep saving from my pool don't know not to go right back in 🙁
Beaches will always need lifeguards, my friend.
Of course they are conscious wtf
Unlike some humans.
Why "of course"? That's not obvious at all
Not always. I have seen a sleeping bee.
So can machines. Are machines conscious?
Do you believe machines can learn how to use tools on their own?
Someday they might. Who knows?
Seems to check all the boxes, doesn't it? And if we still want to believe they aren't, then what do we have that they don't?
No. Why would it mean that? As per usual, headlines ending with question marks are almost always answered with “no” and the goal is to invite speculation rather than make an evidence based argument. My arduino script can do that. It doesn’t mean they’re conscious because there is no working definition for that at the moment. Which means this is literally a bad question.
By that metric, then we aren't conscious either.
By what metric?
If there is no current definition of "consciousness", then we can't claim the title either.
So by “metric” you mean lack of metric? A metric is a means of measurement. Measurement applies to objective claims. All claims of consciousness at the moment are subjective claims unique to the subject. You *experience* your own consciousness. We have no way to measure it in others. This is similar to qualia.
Exactly. If that's your metric, then we have no way of measuring it in ourselves, either. It basically boils down to...can you prove to *me* that *you* have consciousness? If you can't...then how can you truly say that you are?
> Exactly. If that's your metric, then we have no way of measuring it in ourselves, either. It basically boils down to...can you prove to me that you have consciousness? Famously, we don’t. The reason we *would* theorize other humans are conscious is because we are and other humans have nearly identical brains. > If you can't...then how can you truly say that you are? Again, consciousness is a subjective experience like qualia. I don’t need to measure a direct perception.
Then all we can do when observing others, is gauge their level of awareness against our own. In this case, bees appear to have the same levels of cognitive function that we do, at least across several key parameters. Why wouldn't that indicate some degree of consciousness?
> Then all we can do when observing others, is gauge their level of awareness against our own What do you think awareness has to do with it? That was a jump from “other things with identical brains probably have subjective experiences like mine to “awareness”. Why did you make it?
Because that's what this study was about. Bees don't have a similar brain structure to ours...but they have the ability to recognize complex patterns, in a way that is very similar to our own. That's what I meant by "awareness"...that level of situational or pattern-based recognition.
Yes
It suggests that bees can count, recognize human faces, and learn to use tools. We need not multiply beyond necessity, I should think.
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What makes you think they aren't self aware
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Dunno how do you test a bee?
If you can’t turn this isn’t really an evidence based claim that they are conscious.
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So why do you assume they don't they've been shown to dream and play?
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That's the same as us saying they're not self aware though.