The article mentions the Portia jumping spider. Children of Time is a novel that explores descendants of Portia spiders who evolve to become a complex technological society and it’s a really enjoyable read :)
I know its not that much of a coincidence, but on reading the summary of this book on goodreads I looked up to see a jumping spider staring at me from the curtain.
This is all fascinating, and I learned quite a bit from this article, but it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly. It isn't at all clear to me why the former implies the latter.
The only reason we think animals are stupid automatons is because in our culture we don't observe them very closely.
Like the article says, every time we bother to look we are _surrpised_ to find abilities in all sorts of animals.
Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious, that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and intelligent.
My opinion: Intelligence is not rare, we are surrounded by it. Animals communicate with each other all day in say a forest, but we just hear it as random noises because we've stopped listening hundreds of years ago.
I do a lot of spearfishing. It's very obvious when hunting that creatures like fish are a lot more intelligent than one would expect without those experiences. Until you are in their environment trying to carry out similar tasks their behaviors are just not legible to our understanding.
I struggle with whether to call the behavior I see consciousness since I can't really come up with a good definition. The best I can think of makes a lot of assumptions about how much of our own behavior we actually control and perceive... which isn't exactly an objective truth.
Somewhere in his writings he calls it a "user illusion". I _think_ what he means is that nature selects for the creatures that attach a lot of "weight" to their sensory inputs. In other words, if we perceived our thought processes as they really are (as a purely material computation by our brains), our evolutionary fitness would be lower.
I personally am with Noam Chomsky on this one: I think it is absurd to conclude that consciousness is an illusion, it is one of two phenomena in the universe that every human being can prove to themselves exists through experimentation, in part ocular using Descartes' evil demon thought experiment. We can all directly observe that it exists.
Proving that "consciousness" exists by introspection strikes me as being a bit like proving phlogiston exists by burning something. No one questions our surface experience, but is "consciousness" (whatever that means) a good framework for understanding that, or even a coherent concept?
Practitioners of meditation often describe a process of silencing a chorus of inner voices, one by one, and being faced with an existential crisis upon realizing that there is no singular "self" or "I" - a concept that "consciousness" implicitly relies on, because if there is no "I" then what is the thing that is conscious? So the idea that consciousness is an illusory phenomenon is also something you can directly experience.
It isn't simple introspection. It is a rigorous scientific experiment, Descartes' evil demon thought experiment.
Additionally, you can only prove your own consciousness exists, not consciousness in general. But that's OK, classic materialism will suffice to determine that the world probably isn't an illusion and other beings like you probably experience similar phenomena.
Meditation is not a rigorous experiment, if someone can formulate a reproducible experiment like Descartes' thought experiments that produces this phenomenon then there's something. Further, there's no requirement that a voice be a singular one for the self or consciousness to exist. We can deduce that they exist, how they work or what exactly they are is not known.
Consciousness is all of your inner experience. It's not about control or perception, that is it's not about what you can control and how you perceive things but that you can control and perceive things.
I don't think there is any reason to doubt that fish and insects for that matter are conscious in that sense.
> Maybe we should just cut to the chase and admit the obvious, that ants, bees, octopi, monkeys and fishes are both conscious (whatever that word even means for humans is up for grabs) and intelligent.
The irony is that "intelligence" seems to be this constantly-receding goalpost (especially in AI) while consciousness gets identified with more and more basic processes.
Proving animals are conscious isn't just about breaking down the history of prejudice and treating other animals with dignity or something, it's about figuring out exactly where that line comes in evolutionarily, so we can study simple animals to help someday figure out how the hell this mystery of consciousness works in humans.
There seems to be a trend recently to push consciousness “down the stack” of intelligent behaviours and consider it to be fundamental. As has been pointed out in another comment though, our own experience as humans is that we often perform highly complex tasks requiring intelligent behaviour unconsciously. Driving, or reading for example. Sometimes I’ll drive a route, or read a chapter, but afterwards I won’t be able to tell you what happened on the route, and won’t remember anything I read, because I was thinking about something else at the time, or maybe was just ‘zoned out’.
I suspect that the self reflective aspect of consciousness evolved to help us learn and develop new skills. It’s at least partly for responding to entirely novel situations using new behaviours. But once a new behaviour is embedded we can often do it largely unconsciously. So I don’t see complex behaviours performed instinctively or by rote as indicating conscious thought.
I imagine the author of the article would say you are still conscious while zoned out, just not necessarily self-aware about it. Your mind contains an internal representation of the world and your place in it, just not also a high-order self-reflective representation of your own thought processes at the time. There's a lot of ways people divide consciousness into levels of low vs high order, cortical vs sub-cortical, or whatever to capture such nuances.
I think it is very interesting in terms of creating an artificial conscious program. Obviously we can reduce the definition so much it seems absurd to call it conscious, at least to me. But there may be some basic level of ability to form meta-representations that is the key.
Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe.
With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons.
Usually when observing and experimenting animals closely, especially insects, they are just state machines. Very complex sequences are often executed from start to finish blindly. You can reveal how ants, bees or flies are automatons by making little changes to their environment. They do the sequence from start to finish. If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start.
This is interesting but it is not in the least bit philosophically satisfying as an attempt to answer the question of whether beings are "automatons" or "conscious".
To begin with, it is not at all clear that those form a valid dichotomy, as is evidenced by the debate over free will. If we have no free will, we too are automatons, but we still can assert that we are conscious. Can we be both? I'm pretty sure the jury is out on all of this.
Is a bed-ridden, non-communicative human patient non-conscious because they follow strict patterns? We frankly don't know, but it is widely regarded as unsafe to assume they are not. Are there philosophical zombies out there? It's unknown. Does the universe exist beyond our own perception? Again, sadly, no one can be completely sure.
So, your cat's behaviour might be on rails, but we know nothing of its true internal experience, let alone whether that experience meets any arbitrary bar we wish to claim is special or privileged, especially on the mere basis of it appearing to be similar to our own.
I was not taking about consciousness, just intelligence.
There is no reason to assume that intelligence and consciousness are strongly related. Why automaton can't be conscious. One may require another but I don't see why if one is more intelligent one has more consciousness. Or reflective etc.
> If we have no free will, we too are automatons,
In deepest philosophical sense free will not well defined or it's nonsensical statement. Albert Einstein said it well:
“Honestly, I cannot understand what people mean when they talk about the freedom of the human will. I have a feeling, for instance, that I will something or other; but what relation this has with freedom I cannot understand at all. I feel that I will to light my pipe and I do it; but how can I connect this up with the idea of freedom? What is behind the act of willing to light the pipe? Another act of willing? Schopenhauer once said: Der Mensch kann was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will (Man can do what he will but he cannot will what he wills).”
I don't understand at all who is downvoting you here! I appreciate the thoughtful and wonderful response you've put in, so thank you. I wish so much that people wouldn't use votes to express mild disagreement.
I thought you were suggesting that animals are not conscious, and saying that you believe so because they are not detectably intelligent, suggesting a direct correspondence between the two. Instead it seems like you and I more or less agree on the matter: no correlation, and even an automaton could be conscious.
Thanks also for the interesting Einstein quote. I don't agree that free will is nonsensical to such a degree that it cannot be discussed, but I do agree it is not well defined.
I hoped to sidestep the vagueness of free will by discussing it in the meta sense of 'what broad philosophical consensus is held about it', i.e. that there is rather little to say for certain, but even what most people hold to be true doesn't seem to rule out the idea of an automaton being conscious.
I hazard that some people find attacks on the idea of free will to be philosophically or even politically threatening. If our behavior is deterministic, at any level, how can anything be anyone's fault? Ideas like "justice" and "accountability" are forced into crisis. "That criminal doesn't "deserve" prison, they had a bad childhood!" And maybe this is correct and proper at some level. But powerful evolutionary forces have shaped us not to think this way. It is adaptive to become angry, to punish those who wrong you or your tribe; to treat people as agents rather than phenomena.
> With the exception of octopi, primates, birds and cetaceans, animals that do extremely intelligent actions turn out to be automatons.
[a lot of citations needed]
Yes, some invertebrates have been found to execute fairly rigidly preprogrammed behavior patterns, and some reptiles as well, IIRC. But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors. And mammals? Exactly what evidence do we have that cats and dogs and horses and elephants are just mindless automata? To make such a claim certainly requires extraordinary evidence.
Cats really aren't that intelligent in all cases, unfortunately. They are very picky eaters because of instincts about food poisoning, and if something scares them once in the presence of a food they might just associate them and refuse to eat that food ever again.
I think dogs are a bit smarter, but my aunt's dog checks behind the TV every single time there's an animal on screen.
I used to love eating meatball sandwiches as a kid. Ate them once while I had the flu, threw up, still can't eat them without gagging today years later. That doesn't particularly say much about my intelligence. Humans have phobias too.
Will you refuse to eat unless someone guards you during dinner in an otherwise empty house? Attack your roommate cat because you saw a strange cat out the window and now think your roommate is that cat?
Humans think dogs are not conscious because they don't recognize themselves in a mirror, and if the roles were reversed dogs would probably conclude the same about us since we don't even recognize our own pee.
As humans we tend to hold other animals only to our own standards, even if we often wouldn't score that well by theirs.
> But others seem to be capable of much more adaptive behaviors.
Examples? I'm really interested for finding at least one example of complex intelligent behavior of insects (that is actually studied and not just conjecture).
"Visual signals of individual identity in the wasp Polistes fuscatus" (Tibbetts, 2002) establishes recognition of individual nestmates by facial markings.
Now it's your turn. You've made a lot of assertions here, and substantiated none of them. Would you like to do so, or are you instead comfortable being regarded as no more closely abreast of the current state of the field than Fabre was when he published on spider wasps, a century and a half ago?
I find conversations like this difficult. I don’t think anyone here will change your mind. If your position is that intelligence must rival a humans to be worthy of “being intelligent”, you are free to do so.
I think the bar is much lower, and intelligence is simply a measure of ability to learn. And from that perspective, a simple automaton does not learn. But insects DO learn.
> by making little changes to their environment. [...] If you interrupt them, they can't start from where they ended. They start the sequence from the start.
Who says we do any different?
Also there's a huge difference between proving something scientifically, and 'knowing' something. It is a hugely useful distinction, but science operates in it's own domain.
To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism.
Scientifically, even if we met face to face, you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious. It's just a bias that we consider ourselves to be these things and not other animals.
Experiments. You are taking this too philosophically.
>To insist that only scientific knowledge is true knowledge is a form of solipsism.
I don't insist. It's just that there has not been demonstrated any other form of knowledge that could be accepted as evidence that things are different.
> you couldn't 'prove' that I am intelligent, or conscious.
Proving is *never* natural science. Science never proves outside "formal sciences" like mathematics. Science can only show that hypothesis is wrong conditionally. In science you can only say you have evidence supporting hypothesis and evidence falsifying it.
> Scientists have spend enormous amount of time and effort studying animal communication and behavior and it mostly contradicts what you believe.
Source? Plus how does the amount of time spent studying something matter? What if they're studying the wrong things or making faulty assumptions? Scientist spent an enormous amount of time studying humorism and blood-letting even as recent as 150 years ago..
> it seems to conflate intelligence and consciousness repeatedly
It seems to consider them to be the same thing. Which is a common viewpoint. Basically, the idea appears to be that, in order to display all those intelligent behaviors, the animal must be aware of them just as we are (or think we are) aware of what we're doing when we display such behaviors.
Of course my parenthetical qualifier there is the key point: actually, we humans are often not aware of what we're doing when we display behaviors that, to an outside observer, would appear to be intelligent. We perform all kinds of complex tasks on autopilot, while our conscious awareness is elsewhere. If we can do it, we should expect that other animals can do it, too.
And that at once raises the question, how do we know when we are consciously aware of intelligent things we are doing? The only answer we have, at least at our current level of understanding, is that we can talk about the things we are consciously aware of. We can report what we did and why we did it, and can answer questions about it. Which, if we take this at face value, means that without such evidence from animals, the default assumption should be that they do all their intelligent behaviors on autopilot--they are never consciously aware of what they are doing.
I think that claim, as it stands, is too strong--for example, anyone who has cats or dogs as pets would probably say that their cats or dogs give plenty of nonverbal evidence of being aware of things they are doing (and I include myself in this category)--but it should at least make clear that intelligent behavior and consciousness are not the same thing and do not have to go together. Which in turn means that our scientific efforts should be focused on figuring out what kinds of nonverbal evidence would count as indicating, not just intelligent behavior, but consciousness.
Thanks for that. It's exactly what I've been looking for. My mind has been on this whole topic for the last year. Even the name is a big hint I'll like it as blindsight is fascinating.
Strongly seconding the recommendation. You'll probably also like the references to scientific studies included at the end of the book.
The book has a sequel, Echopraxia, which I also recommend. It's a novel based around the argument that consciousness is not only unnecessary, it's actually an evolutionary disadvantage.
It seems to be possible to be in a conscious state without consciously thinking about anything at all. Presumably consciousness is created by a subconscious process. I can't say much more than that it's possible for information-processing systems (such as the human brain) to be conscious. My guess is that consciousness is a non-physical, emergent property, that only exists while a certain component of the information processing system is operating in a particular way.
Yeah, I think it has something to do with a brain that has enough complexity that it can begin to model itself and others' brains, allowing self reflection.
A dog can think, I think, but I don't think it can think about its own thoughts. But this may be unknowable.
> I had just seen with a common assumption that flies are nothing more than robotic automatons, with no experience, no awareness.
Think very long and hard and you might agree you fall into that (minus the "no awareness"). Cannabis is a trigger for me to think about this stuff as I can just relax and get stuck in my head and deeply think about things. At least for me through extra free time during Covid lockdowns I've come to believe I have no free will. Through daily interaction with my family I've come to believe we are automatons too. People you know very well are very predictable because their "code" doesn't change very fast, especially with the lack of new experiences. Which made me remember that's how I used to view all other animals and creatures. It's given me a new appreciation for other animals/life.
Seriously how often do you wonder why you just remembered, said or did something? You aren't going to choose to think of that time in 4th grade you did something stupid unless something prompts you to think of it. Cause and effect. We are trained by all of our experiences to behave and respond in certain ways when certain events happen. When someone says "hello" you might say "hello" back because you've been trained to do it. This goes all the way down to everything we do. It's the reason learning involves so much repetition. Everything is conditioning.
What is awareness but simply processing of our inputs/senses?
What even is consciousnesses then?
And yeah our brains are far more intelligent than other life forms giving us far more abilities and abstract thought, etc. As another comment mentioned though that's not a consciousness thing. We give ourselves far too much credit.
Found this confusing to read because consciousness is never defined but then the author starts giving examples of behaviour that indicate consciousness.
Does consciousness mean “can solve a variety of tricky tasks?”
Is it having emotions?
Is it self-awareness?
Googling the definition I get “the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.”
If I have a computer with a camera running image recognition that can detect itself in a mirror is that consciousness?
Consciousness has no definition outside of our interpretation that certain behaviors indicate its activity.
That is perfectly OK.
When people suggest atoms and planets exhibit consciousness, that stretches the patience of many observers, but it is a matter of convention: here's what I mean by consciousness, and these things I observe have interesting consequences for it.
Nothing wrong with that, either.
But insisting that both refer to the same phenomenon gets nobody anywhere.
I personally think the distinction is agency, that is, the ability to act in some way, however small. A rock in space has it's orbit, this cannot change. The sun is a very very complex system, but it is all deterministic (unless there's some profound thing going on in it we have yet to comprehend). But a plant bends itself to face the sunlight. You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.
I am personally of the opinion that consciousness is something fundamental, not some emergent result of complexity or some evolved trait that exists only because it is a fitness benefit, and that all living creatures have it to some degree. What exactly it is or why or how it exists is beyond me, and I'd love to know, but I think it is plainly obvious on it's face that it exists, is not an illusion, and that something very strange is going on here.
>You can show all sorts of chemical and biological explanations for the behavior, but it is still "behavior." It can be predictable, but it is not deterministic.
What makes it non-deterministic? A neural network is a system with a huge number of parameters and therefore a wildly chaotic output, but the output is still deterministic. Even if you introduce a number of environmental confounders.
To claim that brains are (more) non-deterministic (than other kinds of macroscopical physical processes) you would have to show that quantum effects have a (more) significant impact on their outcomes.
Well, let's start at the foundation of reason and what it means to reason. Descartes demonstrated that the only two things that any observer can verify with certainty on his own are the existence of his own consciousness and free will. Everything else can be reliably ascertained but not known with certainty, due to the nature of interpretation.
This is in stark contrast to modern materialism, the view that what's real are the observations and measurements of the world around you. But to me, to question the existence of consciousness and free will, things every one of us can verify we have with simple thought experiments, while holding our external observations as true, even knowing full well we can never verify them with certainty, is a bit absurd. And if there is free will, that is, capacity for a living creature to decide a course of action on it's own, then there is necessarily some nondeterministic element to it's behavior. And that is what we observe when we look at living creatures, and one defining distinction between living and non living things.
Again, to chock something we experience directly up to illusion while holding things we don't experience directly as truths is a bit absurd. So I do think there's something very interesting going on with the whole consciousness and free will thing, one that we don't understand, and I think those phenomena are intimately tied to the phenomenon of life as well as the phenomenon of evolution.
I said nothing of qualia. Science has no tools to even begin trying to model, describe or explain them. All I am saying is that from a physical perspective, a mind is just as deterministic as an orbit. So far nobody has discovered anything to suggest otherwise. You're taking a concept that exists outside the conceptual space of physics and using it to make statements about physical systems.
No, 'things outside' are only known to us as mediated through (what we perceive as) the body. The object of which you estimate your degree of belief lies within our experience. There is no sense in which you can say that you know something outside the means of perception. You cannot have degrees of belief about whether you are experiencing something in the first place.
That our perception mediates our access to the outside world does not undermine our ability to deduce the existence of the outside world. We can't have 100% certainty that the outside world exists, but we don't need 100% certainty for knowledge. The question is which model do we give higher credence to: the one where all the structure inherent in our perception that suggests an external world is coincidental or internally generated, or the model where there actually is an external world and we perceive it through our senses. The latter model is more likely given various criteria, e.g. parsimony.
What I'm arguing about is that there is a big assumption made prior to any judgement about models of any kind.
At any given point all you have is your singular experiential point of view -- you're reading this comment, coding, chewing your food, remembering a childhood memory, having sex or whatever. That any of this has any correspondence to anything beyond the fact that you are experiencing it at that moment is an assumption. Only then you might start reasoning about the contents. And the contents are of course subject to any brain-in-a-vat objections you might make.
Obviously you cannot live at all if you start questioning your experience at that level. But the point I'm trying to make is that that singular point of view, whatever you are experiencing, is literally all there is. Nothing ever happens, as far as you (or anyone) is concerned, that is different from a personal experience.
To continue to exist at all of course, I don't think there is any other way than what you describe, to start acting based on whatever it is that you are experiencing. But you have to take that initial step and I think being aware of it can lead to a somewhat different understanding of why you feel what you feel and in particular how culture works.
