I do think that part of the difficulty is that we don’t have, as far as I know, any definition more coherent than ‘Well I know that I am!’
(having looked at the end of that sentence again after typing it, I see it can be taken two ways. And on consideration, I conclude that I mean both of them.)
I saw no evidence that mine was conscious. I saw plenty of evidence that he was smarter than me, though.
How would you propose testing for consciousness? It is easy to test for intelligence.
We don’t know which mutation caused consciousness, and when it happened. I didn’t use apes as an example because it could well have happened before we diverged from our common ancestor. (No proof, just a suspicion.)
And of course thinking an animal is not conscious does not mean you are excused from treating it well.
Define ‘conscious’ in this context. Is a computer program conscious if it has memory, states and state triggers? Because it appears to me that at least lower insects are exactly that - state machines with defined behaviours for each state and a collection of triggers for flipping them from state to state.
Take ants again. An ant in a ‘forager’ state has a trigger that flips states when it comes across food pheromones from other ants. Then suddenly it becomes a different kind of ant with different behaviours. There is no room in there for individual ant choice, other than a certain amount of randomness…
If we can’t perfectly define consciousness, another way to attack the problem is to ask why we evolved consciousness in the first place. What good is it? A place to start would be in rationalizing choices and integrating information to enabke complex individual behaviour, If an animal behaves purely on instinct there is no need for it to be conscious, and consciousness in that case would be an evolutionary disadvantage as it takes energy to be conscious and can slow down decision-making.
So my first assumption is that consciousness is a spectrum, with purely instinctive animals having none at all, and other animals having varying levels of consciousness as the ratio of choice to instinct grows. For example, my Border Collies have extremely agile brains and can solve all kinds of problems. They have emotions, people they like more than others, toys they like more than others, they love playing games etc. They are also very different individuals. One dog loves watching TV and can recognize dogs even in cartoons (an amazing ability to generalize, if you ask me). The other dog couldn’t care less about TV, even though they are equally ‘smart’.
But they are still more driven by instinct than people are. For example, food treats can be used to train them in exactly the same way. And once trained, they’ll do the same behaviour again and again, as long as you keep rewarding them. Ther are a lot of little things that appear to be instinctive to them that are matters of conscious thiught for us. So their ‘consciousness’ exists, but is of lesser scope.
Subconscious thought clearly exists. If I see my dog, I didn’t see what my eyes saw - a bunch of EM waves of various frequencies. My eyes fed all that stuff to my visual cortex, then my subconscious mind pattern-matched it and served up ‘dog’ without me having to do any conscious processing of the data. Likewise, after you learn to read it is almost impossible to see a word as a collection of line strokes without seeing the word itself. That’s because the word is served ip to your conscious mind before you have a chance to perceive it in a different way.
Throwing a ball requires complex calculations for ball weight, wind, gravity, distance, etc. To throw it accurately requires those calculatiins to be incredibly exact. And yet, we don’t do them. Our subdonsciius mind takes care of all the details.
I once did a calculation for an article on pool, figuring out how much angular accuracy is required to make a ‘spot shot’ (cueball behind the headstring, ball to pocket on the foot spot, to be cut into the corner pocket). The number was astoundingly small - much smaller than I could even see, let alone be able to shoot. And yet, I could make the shot without thinking. In fact, I could make the shot better by not thinking. When my consciius mind gets involved, I get worse, When I’m ‘in the zone’ I can shoot the lights out, but I’m not consciously thinking about the shot much at all.
I play Rock Band for fun. There are times when I’ll get 100% on a song, and realize I had been thinking about something else completely and playing the game on autopilot and didn’t remember what I did. And doing better that way, with my conscious mind completely disconnected.
@Voyager: can you explain how you’re defining “conscious”?
If we’re talking about knowing that oneself is oneself: maybe it’s a side effect of being able to guess the intentions of others. For which it seems to me to be very likely to be necessary to be able to recognize that they are others; and I don’t see how to do that without also having a sense of not-other, that is, of self.
And being able to guess the intentions of others is a massively useful ability for any creature that is prey; and/or that is a predator; and/or that lives in social groups.
My thoughts being able to examine my thoughts. The feedback loop in my mind which allows me to know myself as an entity.
An example: I do British cryptic crosswords, one part of which is doing anagrams. If I do them with my conscious mind, I can see myself trying different first letters, etc. But if I move to another clue my subconscious takes over, and all I get is the result without seeing how I went through the steps.
BTW I think your tying consciousness to theory of mind is interesting. It would certainly be an advantage. Learning how to think better, which you can do with feedback, is another.Certainly we learn how to do things like driving consciously and then somehow the subconscious learns it.
BTW here is what the great Lord Buckley says about it
If there is not a subconscious mind, I’d really like to know who’s in the driver’s seat when I’m sleepwalking. Even though I’ve accomplished some pretty complex tasks when sleepwalking, I’m not consciously aware of any of it, so it must whatever we describe as the subconscious. It would be very disturbing to find out that whatever is doing these things isn’t part of me.
Maybe. You assume that sleep is simply a matter of turning off some functions. But it need not be, and there is good reason to say it isn’t. Sleepwalking probably has the same thing in control as your dreaming brain. Just missing the usual sleeping paralysis that stops you doing stuff physically.
Sleep is a set of different states of consciousness, not a lack of them. Deep sleep seems to shut down more higher functions, but we neither dream nor sleepwalk in deep sleep.
We very rarely remember dreams either. Freud of course ascribed dreams to the subconscious. But again with no useful evidence.
Another weird phenomenon is mentally ill people hearing voices. I mean, from what I understand, sometimes the voices take on a personality all their own. Is that the subconscious mind (that they come from, i.e.)? 