Are only animals likely conscious?

Yohan

Consciousness is not observable. It can only be inferred.
We generally assume that other humans are conscious because we relate to the similar shape of their bodies and their actions.
Most of us believe other animals possess consciousness as well, but to perhaps a lesser degree of refinement.
Most of us, I guess, don't consider non-animals, nor Nature as a whole, to possess consciousness.

Is this only because non-animals are so different than us? Isn't that almost a kind of prejudice? You don't act like us, so you must be a mere object or a mechanical undirected process?

Especially when considering Nature as a whole, how vast, complex. How little we know and understand it. We can't know it possesses consciousness, but it seems to me like a fair guess that it possesses is, or is directed by it. Especially when we use induction to suppose that, since animals are less complex than us in behavior (at least in our opinion) they are probably less refined in their consciousness... well, then isn't it fair to induce that Nature as a whole being far more complex than us, is likely to be more conscious than us?

Good night.

Thunderballs

Especially when considering Nature as a whole, how vast, complex. How little we know and understand it. We can't know it possesses consciousness — Yohan

I like your humility. We now little of Nature indeed (though science paints a nice picture with quantum fields brushes, colors, and forms). It's a fact though that animals are conscious. When bitch Bo cries out her small lungs she is truly in pain (or just jealous maybe...). Is there panpsychism present? There has to be! How else can the hard problem (of consciousness) be explained?

Down The Rabbit Hole

↪Yohan

I don't think it is because of prejudice that we believe animals to be conscious but not the rest of nature. It's the evidence, that non-human animals have brains which we know are used for thinking, we observe that non-human animals plan, become anxious, and depressed. This evidence isn't there for the rest of nature.

Thunderballs

It's the evidence, that non-human animals have brains which we know are used for thinking, we observe that non-human animals plan, become anxious, and depressed. This evidence isn't there for the rest of nature. — Down The Rabbit Hole

:100:

Bylaw

↪Down The Rabbit Hole

There's a difference between consciousness and behavior and we can't measure consciousness (yet at least) but we look at behavior. The prejudice cuts to thinking that those things that behave like us may be conscious and there has been tremendous resistance to every acknowledgement of cognition/consciousness each step further from humans to other other primates to other mammals to birds, with the scientific consensus being No, the default as no, until overwhelmed with evidence. In recent decades a lot of evidence is coming in related to plants: plant intelligence, plant communication, plant decisions, plants having painlike reactions, some but not all of this at slower speeds than animals, but in the end not that different. This anthropomorphic bias has been almost greatest within science, while laypeople who work with animals, for example, have long known that science had an extreme bias. Only in the 70s did it begin to dissolve and a scientist could openly as a professional speak about animal decisions, cognition, desires and consciousness without causing him or herself problems.

Bylaw

Isn't that almost a kind of prejudice? You don't act like us, so you must be a mere object or a mechanical undirected process? — Yohan

Yes, and that's a definite bias.

Down The Rabbit Hole

↪Bylaw

There's a difference between consciousness and behavior and we can't measure consciousness (yet at least) but we look at behavior. The prejudice cuts to thinking that those things that behave like us may be conscious and there has been tremendous resistance to every acknowledgement of cognition/consciousness each step further from humans to other other primates to other mammals to birds, with the scientific consensus being No, the default as no, until overwhelmed with evidence. — Bylaw

The planning and introspective type behaviour is evidence of consciousness, especially in light of the fact non-human animals have brains which are used for thinking, just-like-us. It doesn't make sense to say these non-human animals are by default not conscious, and we certainly shouldn't wait until we are overwhelmed by evidence to treat them as such.

In recent decades a lot of evidence is coming in related to plants: plant intelligence, plant communication, plant decisions, plants having painlike reactions, some but not all of this at slower speeds than animals, but in the end not that different. — Bylaw

Plants don't have brains for introspection, or nerves to transmit pain signals. The more a brain develops the more it is conscious of its own thoughts and feelings, and the world it inhabits.

Thunderballs

. It doesn't make sense to say these non-human animals are by default not conscious, and we certainly shouldn't wait until we are overwhelmed by evidence to treat them as such. — Down The Rabbit Hole

Again: :100:

Don't get too smart! :smile:

Tanner Lloyd

Plants don't have brains for introspection, or nerves to transmit pain signals. The more a brain develops the more it is conscious of its own thoughts and feelings, and the world it inhabits.

— Down The Rabbit Hole

Plants may generate consciousness differently. The complex nuanced features of their experience may have evolved in parallel, like flight in bats and birds.

I wonder this about this about computers and electronics. We spend all this time worrying about a future robot revolution, but I suspect all of our gadgets may already be conscious. They have a camera lens, they compute, they're structured on logic, et cetera.

On this, I myself am caught in between a quasi-solipsistic question and the question of "What is consciousness itself?"

Daemon

Plants may generate consciousness differently. — Tanner Lloyd

People say somebody is a vegetable, or in a vegetative state, when they have no conscious awareness, generally because of injury or disease. If you are knocked out or if you are given a general anaesthetic, you lose consciousness. So that's what consciousness is. You know what it is.

It's produced by highly specific and exceptionally complex mechanisms and processes in the brain (and body). We know an astonishing amount about those mechanisms and processes.

Neuroscientists in France have implanted false memories into the brains of sleeping mice. Using electrodes to directly stimulate and record the activity of nerve cells, they created artificial associative memories that persisted while the animals snoozed and then influenced their behaviour when they awoke.

Manipulating memories by tinkering with brain cells is becoming routine in neuroscience labs. Last year, one team of researchers used a technique called optogenetics to label the cells encoding fearful memories in the mouse brain and to switch the memories on and off, and another used it to identify the cells encoding positive and negative emotional memories, so that they could convert positive memories into negative ones, and vice versa. — https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2015/mar/09/false-memories-implanted-into-the-brains-of-sleeping-mice

The mechanisms and processes in humans and animals are very similar.

The mechanisms and processes in plants are not very similar. We know an astonishing amount about those mechanisms and processes. Plants grow towards the light. We know why this happens:

The phototropic response occurs because greater quantities of auxin are distributed to the side away from the light than to the side toward it, causing the shaded side to elongate more strongly and thus curve the stem toward the light. — https://www.britannica.com/science/auxin#ref1279053

So a plant doesn't need to be able to see light in order to respond to it. And it doesn't have the kind of mechanisms and processes you have, the ones that make you conscious. So there isn't any good reason to think that plants are conscious.

Computers even less so!

Thunderballs

We know an astonishing amount about those mechanisms and processes. — Daemon

But the major part, especially in the living brain, body, and world, we don't know.

Daemon

Do you think that makes a difference to what I said? How?

bert1

If you are knocked out or if you are given a general anaesthetic, you lose consciousness. — Daemon

You lose identity. No consciousness (in the relevant sense of the word) is lost.

bert1

It's produced by highly specific and exceptionally complex mechanisms and processes in the brain (and body). — Daemon

The content of consciousness in a human is indeed determined by the structure and function of that human body. Just as the content of the consciousness of a rock is determined by its structure and function.

bert1

Is this only because non-animals are so different than us? Isn't that almost a kind of prejudice? You don't act like us, so you must be a mere object or a mechanical undirected process? — Yohan

Yes, I think the unwillingness to carry the inference further is sometimes due to anthropocentrism, but it depends on the philosopher.

Daemon

Speaking from personal experience, when I have a general anaesthetic or hit myself on the forehead with a pick axe, I lose consciousness. Before and after the anaesthetic or pick axe incident I see things, feel things, immediately after the anaesthetic or the pick axe hit I don't feel or see anything. I'm very confident that if I had had more anaesthetic or hit myself harder with the pick axe, I wouldn't have recovered consciousness. This is in fact why people don't want to be dead.

Yohan

Speaking from personal experience, when I have a general anaesthetic or hit myself on the forehead with a pick axe, I lose consciousness. Before and after the anaesthetic or pick axe incident I see things, feel things, immediately after the anaesthetic or the pick axe hit I don't feel or see anything. I'm very confident that if I had had more anaesthetic or hit myself harder with the pick axe, I wouldn't have recovered consciousness. This is in fact why people don't want to be dead. — Daemon

People with Multiple Personality Disorder, when they switch to another personality, they forget the memories of the other personalities. Most of us don't remember being babies or in the womb. We have to develop alternate personalities in order to adapt with the biological changes. We revert to our baby and pre-birth states or "personalities" when we go to sleep. The sleep state is similar to the in the womb state.
One of the reasons we get so tired when we are awake is it takes a lot of energy to repress our old traumatic memories from baby-hood.
Some meditators have developed the ability to maintain a sort of detached awareness even while their body and brain enter the sleep state.

Thunderballs

Speaking from personal experience, when I have a general anaesthetic or hit myself — Daemon

Personal experience? Hitting yourself with an axe?

Daemon

↪Thunderballs

I accidentally hit myself with a pickaxe, it knocked me out. Have you got anything useful to say?

Thunderballs

Have you got anything useful to say? — Daemon

As a matter of fact... I just walked with our dog. She sniffed around a car unusually long. And found a small animal hiding beneath it quietly. Likely my dog and the animal are conscious beings like us. How would it be to smell like that? Would be great! How would it be to hide in fear? Not so great I guess.

Daemon

↪Thunderballs

Researchers had humans search like dogs, on hands and knees, and their performance finding stuff by smell was not greatly inferior to a dog’s!

Thunderballs

Researchers had humans search like dogs, on hands and knees, and their performance finding stuff by smell was not greatly inferior to a dog’s! — Daemon

I know what they let them sniff firstly... And then set them loose on hands and feet, but I don't dare to write it...

Bylaw

The planning and introspective type behaviour is evidence of consciousness, especially in light of the fact non-human animals have brains which are used for thinking, just-like-us. It doesn't make sense to say these non-human animals are by default not conscious, and we certainly shouldn't wait until we are overwhelmed by evidence to treat them as such. — Down The Rabbit Hole

I agree, though strangely it was scientific practice to do precisely that until the 70s within science. Not doing it could cause you problems professionally.

TheMadFool

It can only be inferred — Yohan

Therein lies the rub. A true blue skeptic can haul in almost anything through that gap between truth and inference, one being doubts about consciousness itself (the problem of other minds).

Nature as a whole being far more complex than us, is likely to be more conscious than us? — Yohan

I don't quite buy that argument. Goldilocks zone? Consciousness might be a property of medium complexity and may not exist in either the less/more complex kinda like a downward-facing parabola (with consciousness on the y-axis and complexity on the x-axis).

Thunderballs

Nature as a whole being far more complex than us, is likely to be more conscious than us?
— Yohan — TheMadFool

Nature is not far more complex than we are. Bigger yes, that She is.

TheMadFool

Nature is not far more complex than we are. Bigger yes, that She is. — Thunderballs

:ok:

Thunderballs

↪TheMadFool

:smile:

Bylaw

↪Daemon

Can you link to the research? That would be odd given that dogs have about 300 million scent receptors and we have around 6. But perhaps there was some other kind of search, one not involving smell.

Yohan

Nature is not far more complex than we are. Bigger yes, that She is. — Thunderballs

Is this a confident intuition?

Yohan

I don't quite buy that argument. Goldilocks zone? Consciousness might be a property of medium complexity and may not exist in either the less/more complex kinda like a downward-facing parabola (with consciousness on the y-axis and complexity on the x-axis). — TheMadFool

No idea what you said.
Thanks though, It's too out of my element for now for me to try to understand goldilocks zone, parabola with the axes
Edit: Except I get that you consciousness might be a property of medium complexity. I would agree with that if we are talking about where humanity en masse is at evolutionarily, as having a distinct ego identity

Bylaw

People say somebody is a vegetable, or in a vegetative state, when they have no conscious awareness, generally because of injury or disease. — Daemon

That's hardly evidence about plant conscoiusness. It could simply be bias, just as we used to, in science for exmaple, have a bias against animal consciousness.

It's produced by highly specific and exceptionally complex mechanisms and processes in the brain (and body). We know an astonishing amount about those mechanisms and processes. — Daemon

Actually we don't. We don't know the mechanism that causes conssciousness. We know a lot of about mechanisms that cause various cognitive functions, but we know little about awareness itself. About why some matter experiences, that we know nothing about?

YOu examples of affecting mice memories is precisely humans affecting memory. Which is a cognitive function. It may or may not have anything at all to do with being aware. That some (or all) matter is aware. That it experiences.

The phototropic response occurs because greater quantities of auxin are distributed to the side away from the light than to the side toward it, causing the shaded side to elongate more strongly and thus curve the stem toward the light. — https://www.britannica.com/science/auxin#ref1279053

So a plant doesn't need to be able to see light in order to respond to it. And it doesn't have the kind of mechanisms and processes you have, the ones that make you conscious. So there isn't any good reason to think that plants are conscious.

This debunking would work on humans also. The only reason it doesn't is because each of us experiences. It would work on debunking animal consciousness, since one could reduce an animals seeing to a mechanistic process and throw in chemical names. But we no longer assume that animals are not conscious. You have demonstrated nothing with this reduction.

Are only animals likely conscious?

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