Literally. It’s something that we all experience, but there is no scientific definition, measure, or framework to study it.
We assume it is a function of our brains, but we could be wrong. Are intelligent birds, apes, and dolphins conscious? What about lizards? Flatworms? Trees? Yeast?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, search “what’s it like to be a bat?” or “the hard problem.”
If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
Although I think it’s probably not a bad idea to think about it this way, it does create the next unhelpful question of “when is something conscious enough?”, so it kinda dodges the hard question. So it simultaneously is useful and useless to think about it in this way.
I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?
There are often things in nature that have natural “division points” along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don’t find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It’s possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we’ll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that’s putting the cart before the horse, we don’t know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.
Yeah but that’s exactly what I mean when I say that defining consciousness as a scale brings us no closer to the (poorly defined) questions we have about these things. We don’t even know if we should define it as a one-dimensional number.
“When is something conscious?”
“Well it’s a scale so once it has a high enough consciousness number”
“Okay, so at what point in the scale do we consider it conscious?”
“Well that depends on how you want to define ‘conscious’”
So you get stuck with essentially the same question. And I think that expressing it as a scale also runs into the problem of “how do you measure it then?” which basically requires answering the original consciousness-question again.
Consciousness or whatever we want to call “it” doesn’t have a a threshold. It’s not like there’s an easy answer for it. It’s not a “you’re outside, step though the door, now you’re inside” kind of thing.
It’s a spectrum. So yeah. That tapeworm is on the spectrum, but very low down. (Probably consistent with artificial narrow intelligence, maybe,)
We have no idea what consciousness is.
Literally. It’s something that we all experience, but there is no scientific definition, measure, or framework to study it.
We assume it is a function of our brains, but we could be wrong. Are intelligent birds, apes, and dolphins conscious? What about lizards? Flatworms? Trees? Yeast?
If you want to go down that rabbit hole, search “what’s it like to be a bat?” or “the hard problem.”
That’s true. Every living organism could be conscious on some level if you think about it.
If you’d like to go all the way down this rabbit hole there’s panpsychism, which posits that consciousness is a continuous scale with “zero” literally being down in the elementary particles. So even a single molecule is not quite zero on the scale, having an extremely minuscule degree of consciousness to it.
I actually kind of like this because it means we don’t have to try to put that zero point at some other arbitrary location.
Although I think it’s probably not a bad idea to think about it this way, it does create the next unhelpful question of “when is something conscious enough?”, so it kinda dodges the hard question. So it simultaneously is useful and useless to think about it in this way.
I think your question is equally poorly defined regardless of where the zero point is placed. Enough for what? What is this threshold for?
There are often things in nature that have natural “division points” along some particular spectrum, where conditions abruptly change (phase changes in chemicals when they pass through transition temperatures, for example) or where you have natural gaps where you don’t find many examples because of dynamic feedback effects (the gap between planets and dwarf planets when it comes to their ability to clear their orbital neighborhoods, for example). It’s possible that once we can actually measure consciousness and put a number to it we’ll find that there are similar gaps, for whatever reason. That would be a very interesting and useful thing to know about. But that’s putting the cart before the horse, we don’t know how to measure consciousness in a numeric way yet. So any such patterns in the results are purely hypothetical.
Yeah but that’s exactly what I mean when I say that defining consciousness as a scale brings us no closer to the (poorly defined) questions we have about these things. We don’t even know if we should define it as a one-dimensional number.
“When is something conscious?”
“Well it’s a scale so once it has a high enough consciousness number”
“Okay, so at what point in the scale do we consider it conscious?”
“Well that depends on how you want to define ‘conscious’”
So you get stuck with essentially the same question. And I think that expressing it as a scale also runs into the problem of “how do you measure it then?” which basically requires answering the original consciousness-question again.
This would imply that Pando is more conscious than we are.
Mass and complexity are not equivalent. I doubt that a mountain is more conscious than either.
Consciousness or whatever we want to call “it” doesn’t have a a threshold. It’s not like there’s an easy answer for it. It’s not a “you’re outside, step though the door, now you’re inside” kind of thing.
It’s a spectrum. So yeah. That tapeworm is on the spectrum, but very low down. (Probably consistent with artificial narrow intelligence, maybe,)
It’d be great if any part of that were testable.