Ok, but how does it do so? How does dopamine resorption equate to a pleasurable feeling, or any feeling at all? Lots of complex chemical stuff goes on in your body, and even in your brain, without feeling like anything at all. All of your immune system’s activity goes on essentially in the dark, with you at best feeling the knock-on effects of a fever or runny nose. ATP synthesis in cells throughout the body elicits not a blip of experience. The cerebellum contains four fifths of all brain neurons and carries out complex processing that never enters into awareness. The vast majority of all physiological processes, some of which are of staggering complexity, are performed without any spark of consciousness, and it would seem entirely unremarkable if all of them were. But that’s not the case.
So what is it that makes some of those processes light up the world and make it appear on the stage of experience?
That’s one hypothesis among many, and not in any sense of the word something we ‘know’. Panpsychism provides an alternative in which consciousness is a fundamental property of the world.
Consciousness generally refers to an awareness of one’s surroundings, but self-awareness takes it further—recognizing oneself as distinct from the environment and an understanding of one’s own individuality. Qualia describes the deeply personal facets of experience—those sensations that make perception uniquely “felt.”
The mirror test is often used to assess self-awareness, measuring whether an organism can identify its reflection as “self” rather than another being. But, while many creatures exhibit consciousness, true self-awareness appears much more rare. That said, I believe the mirror test underestimates this trait, as it likely fails to capture the full scope of self-recognition across species (i.e. many false negatives). For example, cats fail the mirror test, but I have no doubt that my cats are self-aware—they just don’t give a damn about their reflection. Plus, cats are very smell-oriented, so they may think: that dude looks like me, but he doesn’t smell like me, so he ain’t me.
It does not. My question was “what are qualia”, not “how might some qualia function biologically”. What are the unique definitional characteristics of qualia? How might I know I am “having a quale”, as it were?
Wow, opinions are all over the map here. It seems like TriPolar and I kind of represent opposite ends of the spectrum. TruPolar says we do know what consciousness is, and it is this:
TriPolar also said:
Whereas I said we do not know what consciousness is, but if I was to take a stab at it, I took a bit of a hard stance that humans are the only truly conscious creatures, due to the fact that only humans have the abstract reasoning abilities to not only have an experience of existence, but reflect back upon it and ask the big questions, such as “why are we here?” and the big one “what’s the meaning of life?”
I’m not making an example of TriPolar to argue with them-- as I said, I don’t know what consciousness is, so TriPolar may very well be right and I am wrong. Or, we are both right if you think there are different interpretations or levels of ‘consciousness’ (man, I really need to put that word on a macro key- getting sick of typing it out). I’m just using TriPolar’s argument as a contrast to mine, since as I said we seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum.
In its simplest terms, consciousness = awareness. But awareness of what? And what constitutes ‘awareness’? It’s more than just processing external stimuli and producing an appropriate or useful response. As has been mentioned, smoke detectors and pathway lights that turn on at night do that, but few would argue that they are ‘aware’ of the smoke or the darkness.
What about sunflowers? They turn toward the sun. But are they ‘aware’ of the sun?
Simpler creatures such as fish, or even insects, are aware of their environment. At least to the point that they are aware of predators, prey, mating partners, etc., and take appropriate actions with each.
Higher animals may be self-aware: they understand that they are individual creatures separate from other living creatures.
Dogs are very clever animals. They can be trained to do extremely useful things, like drug / bomb sniffing, or finding survivors after earthquakes. But they are not aware of what they are doing, or why they are doing it (other than maybe an atavistic understanding that they are doing something useful). They are mostly doing it to please their trainers.
Then there are humans, which I’ve argued are the only creatures who are truly conscious, not for some esoteric reasons, such as because we have a ‘soul’ or whatever, but because we are existentially aware. We understand that we live for a limited time and that we will die. We reflect back upon our existence and ask philosophical questions about it. We are, I believe, the only animals that create art.
So at what point on this spectrum of ‘complexity of awareness’ does consciousness emerge? Or are there different levels of consciousness?
There is no internal screen. When I close my eyes I cannot reconstruct what I am currently viewing. I can however describe it in detail. And, I can sketch it on paper as a projection of my mental description. There is no screen or viewer only a projector and a projectionist.
I am an experienced technician. Based on my experience I can describe mechanisms I want to build, but I have no internal screen. I can only visualize them by making sketches on paper, bringing fuzzy descriptions into sharp images projected on an external screen. There is the temporal problem that my thoughts are immediate and operation of the mechanism consists of a sequence of events that occur in microseconds and years intermixed. I solve this by projecting a series of images, each capturing a snap shot in time. And I internalize this as a story that I constantly rerun and modify mentally recording the modifications as changes to the projections.
The projections could take the form of a mechanical drawing (my case) or an equation or a poem or a novel or a painting or a business plan. The common elements are the projector (perhaps intentionality), the story , the external projection and the recursion. Being conscious is simply constant repetition of the story. The external projection provides a stable referent that is constantly refined.
Of course that does not explain the mental mechanism. I believe it is more like the base ball than a digital computer. The base ball is an analog computer sensing and responding to it’s environment, the digital computer is a list of that attempt to make everything deterministic.
I have to come back later for more discussion, and to respond to others. I won’t deny I’m taking the extreme view on this. I think human consciousness is based on the same concepts of consciousness in other animals, but greatly more complex and based on much better hardware. I think people often focus only on human consciousness as if arose out of nothing in humans. I certainly disagree with that. Some aspects of human consciousness are not found in any other animals to the extent of our knowledge, but most of them are. I also think we’ll have machines that display consciousness comparable to humans, though probably quite different to begin with. And not all at once either, it will evolve over time.
As am I, to the other extreme, so that’s why I quoted you-- again, not to call you out or argue with you; I just thought it was interesting that we did seem to kind of be on opposite ends of the ‘consciousness’ spectrum.
It raises the question of where in the ‘complexity of awareness’ spectrum, as I called it, does consciousness emerge? Most people would say something more than a bacterium or a bug, but less than a human.
While monitoring the progress of my pitcher plants, I noticed a tiny spider that climbed up on to a leaf and took up residence in a convenient fold. After a day or two it captured a fly and sucked out its’ nutrients. Then it carried the fly to the edge of the leaf (photo) dropped it off, and returned to its’ lair. I believe all this required consciousness.
Yes, the screen is just metaphorical, standing for anything that has some form or representational content—words, sounds, images, thoughts, signs, what have you. Anything that re-presents something else, such as the word ‘dog’ represents a dog. The trouble is that such accounts—representational theories of mental content—generally run into the homunculus fallacy: there is some form of internal representation (the ‘screen’) that is then appraised by some internal agency, the ‘self’, the locus of consciousness, whatever it is that interprets the signs it consumes as signifiers for anything. As soon as we’re on that track, we’re already lost, since there, the entire accounts degenerates into an infinite regress, for if our understanding works by means of the understanding of some central interpreter, how does the understanding of that homunculus work, in turn?
I think this is actually one of the most important philosophical errors, to the extent that my avatar is a representation of it.
I don’t think that’s really true, certainly not among those thinking about these things for a living. The default assumption is that human consciousness is just more of the same, perhaps with some added bells and whistles, like language or a greater capacity for abstraction. In fact, one of the most famous works in the philosophy of mind, Thomas Nagel’s What Is It Like to Be a Bat? explicitly makes its point, the inscrutability of conscious experience, by comparing human consciousness to bat consciousness, which he argues is fundamentally unknowable to us, but just as much a kind of consciousness.
Descartes may have considered animals to be mere automata, but I think we’ve come a long way since then, and few hold that there is an essential difference between human and animal consciousness, at least not regarding its fundamental features. It’s just that consciousness is just as puzzling in apes, or octopusses, or bats, or gnats, as it is in humans.
And in my opinion, the most difficult aspect of consciousness to explain is qualia, which we don’t even know how to ascertain if animals experience. Probably animals do (IMO) so for me the hard problem of consciousness has nothing to do with humans or sentience.
And for those that disagree with my opinion that animals feel qualia, that position is also unverified. So, even for them, the hard problem of consciousness has not been demonstrated to be uniquely human, and can’t be claimed as a premise.
Right.
And this is one thing I was trying to get at upthread, because it is easy to become convinced we understand something when we don’t. The critical test of whether we understand a phenomenon or not, is what useful* predictions and inferences we can make.
When it comes to consciousness then, we of course have some level of understanding; we can see what can cause particular states, and that it’s a neural phenomenon. And we can model pretty well the evolutionary causes for particular states (e.g. once you have a conscious agent, a feeling of “fear” is pretty easy to explain).
But, there remain many, many questions that I alluded upthread that we cannot begin to answer; not merely explanations that need to be scaled up. And that shows that we have a fair way to go.
* All I mean by this is using our model to know something we would not otherwise know. It can’t be a tautology, or a post-hoc description of established facts.
That is, I very much doubt that dogs understand human drug laws. But I think it’s very likely that they understand finding survivors.
Maybe. That might depend on how we define “art”.
I think it’s quite possible that humans are the only ones who have the sort of discussion we’re having in this thread. Not proven, but quite possible; and if we find out that some other species is having such discussions, I’d say we need either a new word that includes them, or a new definition of “human” that also includes them (along with one to use when we mean only our species).
For me, the nub of the question is: will consciousness arise in any sufficiently-complex system that has to sense the real world, process and react to those senses, make appropriate reactions, etc?
I realise this is philosophically unknowable. I can’t even be sure you guys are conscious or if I’m the only one that really is, but thats the question for me - it is ultimately the same question, because ‘how could we make x?’ pretty much requires us to know ‘what is x?’
I feel like you’re anthropomorphising that spider just a wee bit, as if it’s an eight-legged Mary Poppins making sure everything is just so in its lair area
Not really, the spider was just getting rid of a large object that would be likely to attract another predator. A tidy leaf is a safe leaf. Even a spider knows that.
Terms really need to be defined in this discussion. Some say that consciousness involves symbolic language and you can’t have one without the other. I think that’s reasonable. Others say that consciousness involves a model of external reality involving a synthesis of two or more senses. I also think that’s reasonable. It’s just that those are 2 very different types of consciousness under discussion. The first encompasses humans only (probably) while the second encompasses quite a few insects, probably most. Other definitions might exclude certain insects but include all mammals.
Spiders and ants appear to operate at a higher level than the typical single celled organism. Pigeons operate at a still higher level. The Carnivora order, which includes cats, dogs, bears, and raccoons is at a still higher level. I suspect the 3 levels experience the world differently. I suspect there are a number of ways of experiencing the world even among Carnivora.
Regardless of whether you have an internal screen that continues to work when you close your eyes, you do have an internal screen, because we’re not looking at the real world as though our mind is peering out of the windows of our eyes, we are perceiving a constructed, approximate representation of the world that is based on sense information. Often this representation can be shockingly unfaithful to actual reality, because of the limitations of sight and such. The perceptual system fills in a lot of peripheral detail that you might think you’re seeing firsthand, all of the time, but is being filled in based on fragmentary glimpses.
Good point. My spiders’ consciousness is atuned to spending days anticipating a single event - the right size prey, exactly in range. I have no idea what constitutes spider think but I am sure it has fewer distractions than humans.
Dawkins in “Climbing Mount Improbable” opines that bats hear in color. That would produce a vastly different kind of consciousness than ours.
I’ve always been impressed with the capabilities of hunting spiders, and I’m sure they have the beginnings of consciousness. A hunting spider has numerous alternate hunting strategies, and it choses which one to utilise by observing its prey and predicting what the prey might do next. In short, it models the future behaviour of its quarry.
This requires knowledge, skill and modelling ability, and it would be a remarkable feat if we could reproduce this level of competence faithfully inside a spider-sized robot. We are nowhere near this, and I don’t anticipate that we will be able to replicate this for several decades yet.
If we can’t replicate spider competence and modelling in the near future, we won’t be able to replicate or understand human-level competence, modelling or self-awareness for many decades after that.
In my (admittedly vague) model of consciousness, self-awareness is the ability to model other people and animals amplified and turned back upon oneself. I’m sure that this ability is a naturally-evolved one, and that (eventually) artificial minds will be able to do this too - but we are nowhere near this yet, so all our declarations of ‘this can’t be done’ or ‘this is easy’ are all premature.
