Not hard to create something that says it has a favorite color, obviously. But the experience of it? Qualia, to use the usual term.
John Scalzi has an interesting idea in one of his SF books: a species (called the Obin) which are intelligent, communicative and rational. But are not actually conscious unless they engage an external ‘consciousness harness’ mechanism…
Sharing with gift link a NYT article of relevance here. At what developmental point do humans become “conscious”? When verbal? As newborns? Somewhere around 27 weeks gestation? And IF we can agree on how we know, does it in any way inform on how we judge the presence and degree of consciousness in a form of intelligence based on something other than the human brain?
With humans, the obvious issue it that the debate is clouded by the abortion debate. That naturally leads to a “what is the earliest possible age when a human might become conscious” discussion rather than a “at what age is it most likely that humans become conscious” discussion. I suspect most literature would focus on the first standard, making discussions / studies on the latter more difficult to find.
Not the take presented in the article:
Scientists generally agree that consciousness cannot emerge before the fetal brain has matured enough to receive signals from the senses, and then integrate them into a unified experience. Before about 26 weeks of gestation, those neural connections don’t exist.
How soon afterward these connections develop, scientists can only guess at. In a survey of experts by Dr. Passos-Ferreira, most estimated that infants have some consciousness by the time they are born.
“There are still some skeptics about infant consciousness who think that it emerges later,” Dr. Passos-Ferreira said. “It’s a minority, but they’re still there.”
I don’t think the abortion (anti choice) folk are in this. For them it is the soul and that is at conception.
I am not sure consciousness requires sensory input. I am not even comfortable labeling dream state as not consciousness. I agree with this bit:
We tend to think of consciousness along a single line, on a gradient from unconscious to fully conscious. It’s the road we travel each day as we wake, and sleep. But what if consciousness has more dimensions, more ways of being?
But it doesn’t exactly help answer the questions.
I know this isn’t you making this claim, DSeid.
I quote it because this is precisely the type of pseudo-scientific nonsense that makes me want to throw objects into corners of the room.
Actually I endorse it but frame it differently as expressed in a previous post:
Defining the aspects of the different modules/dimensions and recognizing that one module can be further developed than another at any specific developmental point in an organism and between different sorts of intelligences is not pseudoscientific to me. It opens up to understanding how consciousness may not be only the narrative self that our brains create, and that non human consciousness may be different but still a consciousness.
The novel Blindisght presents the scenario where sapience is actually disadvantageous and it’s just a fluke that humanity is sapient. And when we run into an alien that’s not sapient, the lack of sapience turns out to be an advantage.
Unless you subscribe to the Meat is Magic school of thought, there should be no point at which you cease to be conscious. Your brain is already made up of billions of nanomachines.
Technically true, of course. And for physically observable behaviour, very likely.
But this is sort of a category mismatch: the metaphysical point.
Why am I me, looking out of my eyes and not yours?
Because you are physically connected to your eyes and not theirs.
Ah, Scalzi’s Obin, for example, not conscious without the ‘harness’. But in a sense this seems to be a distinction without a difference (like all the various ‘interpretations’ of quantum mechanics.) If the result is the same, does it matter?
You are still thinking in terms of physics, rather than phenomenology.
Do you experience my consciousness? I doubt it, unless telepathy exists.
Maybe it does. Perhaps the fact that I personally do not have direct experience of other minds is a curious failing on my part… a defect. There’s probably a science fiction story about this. The Last Solipsist, or something like that…?
But is the result the same? We don’t have any examples of a non-conscious human-level intelligence to do a comparison (even assuming one is possible). There’s the Blindsight scenario, where consciousness is a human aberration, a defect that will eventually be out-competed and eliminated.
Accurate phenomenology is based on physics. We do, in fact know why we see out of our own eyes and not somebody else’s.
We do, in physiological terms of why optic nerves are connected to a particular brain, obviously.
But I think you are still making a category error.
Right now, do you experience my consciousness?
Maybe. I don’t experience yours.
We use language in a way that establishes a consensus world which appears to be reproducible, stable and comprehensible.
But the actual experience of being conscious is… what it is. I don’t know WHAT it is, but I experience it. I’m not postulating any sort of religious interpretation like a ‘soul’, that seems like handwaving and doesn’t explain anything.
No, because that’s a function of your brain; not mine.
There is a lot of literature about this, of course. Maybe I am the only conscious being that does not experience other minds. Or maybe I am THE only conscious mind, and everything else is automata. Or, the idea that God was bored and split itself into many fragments to experience the universe in different ways… perhaps to recombine in some end state?
I don’t think you are quite getting the point. You are looking at things from the point of view of materialist physics, and from that view you are quite correct.
But I think you are still missing a major category mistake.
Right now, I am conscious. I experience being conscious.
This is something I can talk about in a way that other language users understand, and they, like you, agree, yes, I’m conscious too, of course.
But the actual, real, right now, experience of being me now is not transmissible.
And yes, I know there is a lot of neuroscience talking about how the ‘sense of self’ is an illusion. And in its way that is good science with reproducible results.
But ultimately: who is experiencing this sense of self?
I do not claim to know. I am quite prepared to believe that everything going on in my brain is explicable by physics and chemistry in those terms.
And I’m not religious at all, don’t believe in anything supernatural like a soul bestowed by a Higher Power.
But… I AM conscious. I have no idea why.
If I’m being fooled into thinking I am sentient, I must already be me in order to be fooled.
I am a materialist; I don’t actually believe anything but “materialist physics” exists.
I’m fooled, therefore I am?