Hi all, it’s great to see such a healthy discussion going on around this video. It was always going to be difficult to condense such a meaty subject into a short form piece for the web. Getting people to think about and discuss these issues was part of the objective.
If you have any specific questions you’d like to put to Professor Humphrey, I’ll be making a follow up piece with him in which we’ll pull together a collection of questions for him to answer on camera.
Cheers,
Ed
I disagree with this conclusion. I think we overestimate the importance of consciousness to a huge variety of tasks. Sleepwalking people have gotten dressed, driven cars successfully to particular destinations, and done other things that we normally think that only conscious people can do. I have a friend who, in university, successfully convinced me he was awake and getting ready to go to his exam by talking to me while asleep.
I think consciousness is a pretty large and energy hungry thing that our brains do and I really doubt that insects have the processing power to pull it off. Some of the examples in that article strike me as analogous to coin sorter. We can build devices that, by simply being the right shape, can sort various objects but I don’t think it makes sense to talk about them being aware of any property those objects have. The elephant/tree example, for instance - there’s nothing about that that suggests to me anything more than basically mechanical responses.
We’ve built artificial neural networks that are better at guessing whether faces are male or female than average humans are, but with only a few hundred neurons, I think it’s a stretch to say that they have any awareness of what they are doing. Slime mold shows some of the same decision making processes we do when finding food, but that’s no more conscious than flowers leaning towards the sun.
I wouldn’t claim to know how much brain power it takes to be conscious or where the cut-off is, but I would be surprised if it went as far down as ants or cockroaches. Still, it would likewise surprise me if cats and dogs weren’t conscious, or octopoedes.
At the same time, I’m speaking as if consciousness is an on/off switch and that doesn’t seem like it could be right if consciousness evolved. We should probably be talking about it in degrees.
Also, I don’t think we know enough about consciousness to know that it only occurs in brains. In the video the professor agrees with critics of brain-consciousness equivalence by saying that the brain just doesn’t seem like the right sort of thing to make consciousness. But since evidence suggests that the brain is exactly the sort of thing that makes consciousness, we should probably drop our notion that other complex arrangements of matter are also not the sorts of things that make consciousness. It wouldn’t come as a big surprise if there was already consciousness in the internet - though I guess it would be a big surprise if we could somehow know about it.
Not that you are saying this IS the case, but building off this idea, does it then follow that there could also be a consciousness of society? Of the earth? Of the universe?
I know this is moving into mystical New Agey territory, but I that is sort of my point. Personally I think that consciousness can only be one of two things: Perhaps, it is unique in the universe to the point of being called “supernatural.” It’s the only phenomenon that has will, can make decisions, can alter its course. This is significant because it is anti-deterministic, or at least, supposes a universe that is deterministic up to the point where consciousness deviates.
Or else, consciousness is something of an illusion. We appear to feel love, but really that is just a name we give to chemical and biological impulses. We appear to make decisions or have a will, but this is just an illusion of our physical makeup, determined again mechanically by chemical and biological factors, influenced by the collection of our experiences (memory itself being a purely mechanical).
If the latter be the case, then can’t we then apply this “illusory” definition of consciousness to all sorts of things, such as the internet, society, the ecosystem of planet earth, and the universe itself? All no less conscious then you yourselves?
Just some armchair philosophizing here.
I wonder about this. I think speculating about the internet is not that far fetched because it has a fantastic number of processors attached to it. How many neurons does it take to look at a donut and think you want to eat it? I don’t know the actual answer but if that’s all going through conscious thought and making your little mental theater of the donut then I suspect the answer is “a hell of a lot”.
I also suspect the time it takes makes a big difference. If the communication slows down too much then its hard to make the analogy to the brain. If it weren’t for relativity I would think it could just scale up and down without much problem, but because relativity is for real, it’s hard to imagine consciousness getting too large.
Anyway, that’s why I think it’s a safer guess that large computer networks might experience things rather than betting on galaxies or even society. But on the other hand, there are billions of people on Earth and the speed at which information travels around the globe (even without satellites and whatnot) seems like it is only six or seven orders of magnitude slower than the rate it travels through our brains. Consciousness of a society seems plausible to me.
To me this is a question of fact. I can’t imagine any possible way we could test for this at the moment, but obviously you can’t go checking if some weird collection of objects has an alien kind of consciousness when you don’t even know what consciousness is in yourself or in other people.
Well, the video brings up that idea that consciousness is an illusion, but that really doesn’t answer the question of what consciousness is. “I think therefore I am” is specifically meant to address that - even if everything we experience is an illusion, what is the thing experiencing the illusion? I don’t really think “I think therefore I am” works the way Descartes wanted it to, but it still feels like a powerful point that brings into question whether there is even a difference between consciousness-as-illusion and consciousness-as-real-thing. That’s not to say that consciousness might not be an illusion, but its to say that I can’t tell you what “consciousness is an illusion” would actually mean.
It’s turtles all the way down, I’m afraid. We can (and should!) try to measure and observe ever more detailed neural phenomena, but we can never directly get at consciousness itself that way. We’re just left with more subtle and nuanced physical phenomena which are probably related to consciousness - but we’ll never be able to prove it. Even if we can take neural activity in one brain and reproduce it in another, and even if the owners of the respective brains describe their experiences similarly, how can you know that their conscious experience is actually the same? Again, you can’t because consciousness is by definition totally subjective. Each of the two are the only person who can observe their own consciousness, so there’s no scientific way to find out.
Now, you could take the behaviorist approach and say “Who cares if we’re truly experiencing the same thing, what’s the difference?”. And that’s a reasonable and useful stance to take, most of the time. But that’s basically dismissing the mystery of consciousness as irrelevant, rather than explaining it.
I just disagree. I mean, that’s what people are going to say. But at some point I don’t see how we can draw any conclusion other than that the brain state is the consciousness (if that’s what consciousness is).
If we completely discount any objective evidence of consciousness then basically we are saying that there is no reason to believe that anyone has consciousness at all. We are saying that the world would be exactly the same if they did or if they didn’t. I don’t think that a world where I am the only conscious thing would be completely identical to a world where I am not. The closer we get to understanding how consciousness arises from phenomena we can observe, the more we’ll be able to form hypotheses about exactly how the world would be different if there was no consciousness but our own.
Something tells me you just aren’t a fan of insects. All right, I’ll discuss spiders.
Just because something doesn’t think like you do, doesn’t mean it isn’t conscious. It’s kind of important that you have more than passing knowledge about insects and arachnids before you just cross them off your list of “conscious” creatures. First, you should know that, much like octopuses (which you seem think are not only conscious, but intelligent), insects and arachnids have ganglia running through their bodies to control various parts - those “mini-brains” are actually wired to the central brain, and that’s what you find in the head (in two parts). That’s why an insect might keep twitching even if you squish its head. It isn’t because you haven’t destroyed its brain, it’s the ganglia firing without instruction. They’ve got more brain power than you think.
Please keep in mind that although I work in graphics, I spent a year working as the Graphics Specialist for a university’s Entomology Extension department. I’m pretty well-versed in basic insect and arachnid information, and I wasn’t personally referring to things like “sleepwalking”. I was referring to conscious thought.
The jumping spider is actually a powerhouse of tiny intelligence. The Portia is a jumping spider that feeds on other spiders. Because of this, it has developed the ability to trick other spiders by mimicking their prey. It hunts directly in other spiders’ webs. That’s not all. When introduced to a new type of web that it would not have experienced in the wild, a Portia can learn how to manipulate it, and still catch the other spider.
Jumping spiders are modern spiders - you would expect them to be intelligent. That said, it isn’t just modern spiders that show intelligence in the form of problem-solving. Here’s a video of a tarantula that has learned to open its cage to escape. This is not a unique skill to this one spider - other tarantulas have been seen doing this in captivity, but it’s problem-solving skill they have to learn in that type of cage.
So that’s two examples of arachnids showing problem-solving in a new situation. If intelligence is a determining factor for consciousness, that should probably make you wonder a bit. I’ll leave it at that.
I’ve got nothing against insects. As I said, the theories I’ve heard are that consciousness is a big operation. Recent studies suggest the key to consciousness may be in the Claustrum which, in humans, has about 50 times as many neurons as there are in an entire ant. It’s a piece of brain matter larger than the entire bodies of many insects. I can’t run my web browser on a Commodore 64 and I’m not sure you can run consciousness with the brain power available to insects.
But maybe you can. This isn’t a problem I have with insects, I just wouldn’t put my money down that they are conscious. But as I said, it’s probably something that we should talk about in degrees, rather than an all or nothing property.
The reason I bring up sleepwalking is because it isn’t consciousness. The point is that organisms can accomplish seemingly very complex things without needing consciousness to do it. When it comes to problem solving, I don’t have a really good reason to think that consciousness is terribly important. It could be that the majority of problem solving we do we do without the aid of conscious thought and our conscious thought gets filled in after the fact (and takes all the credit).
The neural network I mentioned that was better at differentiating sex in human faces than humans were had only a few hundred artificial neurons. You can do a lot of thinking with not that many neurons. But I don’t think we know if you can do that thinking consciously with so few neurons.
At any rate, let’s drop it down a little more. I feel fairly safe saying roundworms and jellyfish probably aren’t conscious (though I don’t discount the possibility that there are jellyfish with big brains that I don’t know about).
We’ll probably just have to agree to disagree. I am talking about conscious choice.
Mandler suggested these three roles for consciousness in 1983:
Learning. People typically concentrate their awareness on something when trying to learn it. Not until a skill is well practiced does it become automatic.
Making judgments. People think consciously about alternatives and choices.
Troubleshooting. People use conscious mental processes when dealing with an unexpected situation that cannot be handled with automatic, well-learned routines.
The spiders I wrote about displayed all three, because they displayed the ability to adapt to a new situation. The Portia has the basic skill to do web-tapping, but each spider responds to different web signals, so a Portia, on encountering a new type of web, will just sit at the edge and feel the vibrations for long enough to what the web vibrates like. Only when the spider is sure it can successfully mimic will it travel into the web to catch its prey.
The tarantula was bought from a store where it was kept in a different type of cage, and then brought home to that cage, it then learned how the cage was opening when it was being fed or handled. If you watch the vid, you’ll notice that the spider actually pushes against the far wall to slide the lid open. It checks to see if the opening is large enough, and if it isn’t - it goes back to the far side to push some more.
Well, I disagree with Mandler, it seems (and really, 1983 is a very long time ago for consciousness). I think the video expresses the fact that we really don’t have an accepted idea of what consciousness does or what it is for. That list seems to suggest that Mandler thought consciousness was primarily for dealing with unfamiliar situations and things.
I don’t think that’s right. I think we problem solve by constructing mental models of the world. But those models are built primarily out of an unconscious understanding of how the world works and can be executed unconsciously. I remember the first time I hit a baseball. The key really was to “keep my eye on the ball” and just let my body solve the complex physical problem. There are plenty of children’s toys I’ve opened for the first time by just feeling them and letting my hand do whatever feels like the thing that would work. I’m conscious of it, but I don’t see how that’s helping.
I don’t think we need to be conscious to make judgements. Experiments with slime mold demonstrate that it’s grow-to-food actions mimic some human decision making patterns despite it, presumably, having no cognition at all, let alone consciousness.
Anyway, I guess if I were putting together a “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” for brain function, It would look something like this:
Can I infer that you’re using a computer?
When you use a computer, you typically have the experience of clicking buttons, sliding sliders, watching videos, reading text. But none of that stuff you’re seeing is actually physical.
And yet the computer is absolutely a physical system.
A theory would be nice I suppose but we already have a proof of concept.
It’s not quite ineffable. Cognitive science researchers have demonstrated pretty soundly that consciousness has structure and that structure can be delineated. For example, willpower seems like magic but it’s been pretty well established through experiment that willpower correlates with blood sugar (all things equal, better fed = more willpower).
Modern computers would look like magic to any society that predates the 20th century but in principle, anyone with enough dedication and intelligence is capable of determining that the user experience provided by a given computer can be mapped to data structures embedded in the structure of the machine (including the magnetic bits on a hard drive as part of the structure of the machine).
I can imagine at least part of it. You have a phenomena that generates data on a continuous distribution. The brain maps that data onto a discrete distribution. For example, frequency of light is a continuous distribution – if I asked you to draw a border between “blue” and “green” on a color map you would have to pick an essentially arbitrary point where it seems more green than blue to you. “Blue” and “green” aren’t actually discrete but humans (most modern humans, anyway) consider them to be discrete.
Phonemes are similar. The waveform produced by the human vocal apparatus can vary continuously – “v” sounds can slur into “w” sounds with the borderline between “v” and “w” being essentially arbitrary. And yet English speakers hear them as two discrete sounds. Speakers of Russian, Pakistani, and the various Indian languages do not hear them as two distinct sounds, hence “nuclear wessels.” Other languages draw the (arbitrary) borders between phonemes differently than in English, hence accents in general.
This is all part of the “structure” stuff I mentioned above.
There’s plenty of reason to believe that others are conscious, but no way to prove it. It’s disconcerting, but that’s just something you have to take on faith. Well, I guess you don’t have to, but it’s better than the alternative.
Based on some of your other comments though, I think we just mean different things when we say “consciousness”, which is the reason for the disconnect.
You’re mocking a probabilistic argument because it doesn’t logically imply the conclusion. That’s not how probabilistic arguments work. They provide evidence for a conclusion by establishing that a particular conclusion is more likely for whatever reason, not because it is definitely true.
Munchausen’s trilemma neatly prevents any knowledge from being established on the basis of a rigorous logical argument like your strawman. Logical arguments can only be established on the basis of premises which can be disputed and which must therefore be established ad infinitum. Such arguments must be one of: axiomatic, circular, or infinite regress.
Probabilistic arguments are more useful in the real world. Here is the probabilistic argument actually being made:
Making a reasonable hypothesis is not quite the same as “begging the question”, agreed?
We all have experience with physical phenomena. It’s well-established that physical phenomena pertain to our world of shared experience.
Some people are quite sure that there are such things as non-physical phenomena. Others are rather skeptical. It seems to be an open question.
Under these conditions, it seems reasonable to me to hypothesize that there is no “non-physical” (unless you’re talking about information theoretic/entropic phenomena, but even then I’ve never experienced one that wasn’t instantiated in some kind of physical system; this makes sense because my sensory organs are physical systems and presumably non-physical information theoretic phenomena can’t interact with them) and that we should look for a physicalist explanation before concluding that such an explanation is impossible.
Heck, the hypothesis could be wrong (like any hypothesis could be). If we can find good evidence that the hypothesis is wrong then we’ve learned something valuable and probably have a good avenue to begin a new line of consciousness research.
Mandler is still taught, and still considered a cornerstone of the resurgence of interest in consciousness. Pythagoras got it right, and he died in 495 b.c.e. Until someone proves you wrong, the date when figured something out doesn’t really matter.
I already said:
I was also already VERY clear about the limitations of the types of learning that require conscious choice. They require that the subject be presented with wholly new challenges. Children’s toys are designed (much like video games) to be intuitive. They present a terrible example.
I’m guessing you would agree that, although you do speak and read English, learning a wholly new language (particularly one using a different alphabet) would be a conscious task requiring focused thought (not something you could do on autopilot). That’s the type of challenge that is presented for the Portia spider when it encounters a web owned by a previously unknown spider. It has to learn a new “language” to tap out the codes to cross safely. It requires active learning.
Not only that:
Mandler was discussing the roles of consciousness, not the definition of consciousness.
Your pyramid is trying to define consciousness, and there’s a problem with doing that.
You really can’t know as, an outside observer, that any other being you communicate with is personally conscious. You can only observe their actions, and see if those actions reflect the supposed actions of conscious choice.
You can’t know that I am a conscious being, and that I am currently aware. Even if you did meet me, you still wouldn’t know. Your own sleepwalker story demonstrates that.) The best you could do was guess that other beings have a life experience similar to your own. The more different a being is, the harder is for us to empathize, and assume that they have a life experience that is in any way similar to our own, and that’s the problem here.
Now, I’m going to walk away. Have a last word if you feel a need.
Yeah, it’s a tough discussion just because “consciousness” is really tough to define and a lot of people have a lot of different notions about what the word means. I think @anon50609448 is conflating a bunch of different concepts together to talk about consciousness based on what I’ve seen so far.
I think most people who find the topic really interesting/baffling, though, are thinking of something like veridical experience – the fact that individuals experience things. In that sense, I do agree that insects/spiders/worms are probably conscious. At the very least, worms seem to be able to smell (sense gradients of particular chemical compounds) and feel pain. While a lot of people seem to think consciousness as a really recent evolutionary addition, I think that the sense of consciousness as simply experiencing some sort of internal life is actually probably pretty primitive and pretty ancient. Humans just have a particular complicated, high-resolution internal life.
Pythagoras* was right about a mathematical theorem that is true on the basis of purely logical arguments once certain axioms have been established.
We’re talking about the physical phenomena of brains, which aren’t purely theoretical entities (as right triangles are). Conclusions about brains must be drawn on the basis of evidence. Given the advances in brain imaging, etc. since 1983, the evidence upon which Mandler’s conclusions are probably not quite as solid as the mathematical axioms on which the Pythagorean theorem is predicated.
That said, I think Mandler’s hypotheses are quite plausible. They should be taken as tentative hypotheses made on the basis of very limited evidence, though.
*probably not actually Pythagoras
Quite the opposite, actually. It takes much longer and it is much less effective to learn a new language by taking classes and studying schoolbooks than it is to learn it through immersion – i.e. doing it on autopilot. The human brain is incredibly good at figuring some things out without focused thought and language is one of those things.
Focused thought can help, but I actually think most skills can be learned without very much of it (and that it can even get in the way sometimes). When you practice something – with or without focusing on it – there will be some variation in each attempt. Some of these will lead to better outcomes. If your brain can recognize a better outcome without focused thought (and it usually can, the unconscious brain is pretty powerful) then it will tend to prioritize the more useful variations for further attempts.
We call it “muscle memory.” I’m sure you’ve heard anecdotal reports from musicians, etc. saying that focused thought gets in their way and when they’re making their best performances they’re not thinking at all.
I’m responding ONLY once to you because you’re almost sidetracking with your comment.
You didn’t need your whole top argument, because you ended with:
I had already said that consciousness is something we can’t prove.
Then you went on to argue muscle memory. Slight problem with that, muscle memory only kicks in AFTER you have learned. My example was of a new language - preferably one with a new alphabet. That’s serious code breaking skill, before you can ever relax and start learning vocabulary on autopilot, you need to first develop the code breaking skill to interpret the written code.
Only after you’re partially trained in something does focused thought get in the way - which I was already very, VERY clear about.
That’s all.
True, but that doesn’t get us any closer to, well, experiencing consciousness/qualia of it. At some point, we need to go from organizing information to experiencing it.
I’m not sure that’s true, no. I think someone could write a learning algorithm for a computer that could learn how to translate from one language to another by comparing tracts of text that we would unambiguously agree was not conscious. This gets into what it means to “learn” a language. Obviously to consciously know it, you need consciousness. But to be able to speak it, read it, write it? I don’t think you do.
I feel like this contradicts what you are saying above. If learning a language requires conscious effort then I can know that you are a conscious being because you learned a language (though you may not be conscious at this moment). You’re saying that if I ceased the be conscious then there would be a large number of things that I couldn’t do so it wouldn’t be very hard to test if I was conscious at all. It would be harder for non-humans than for humans, but if we understand these principles then determining what is and what is not a conscious being should be fairly easy rather than impossible.
Sorry, I think I miscommuncated. I didn’t mean to suggest I was defining anything. I was using the analogue of Maslow’s pyramid to show where I think consciousness goes in terms of importance. And just like the hierarchy of needs, we are pretty concerned about self-actualization even though we probably agree that Maslow was right - we don’t do self-actualization if we aren’t fed. I don’t think we’d do consciousnesses if we didn’t have some basic problem solving down.
I keep running up against this point in this thread. I want to be really clear. I totally, 100% understand this point and I don’t think it is necessarily true, in fact I think it is probably completely false. Consciousness is a physical system. It is located in a position in space, it has a volume, it has a mass, it contains energy.
This is no different then realizing that temperature is average kinetic energy of molecules. It makes sense, today, to say that when a person a thousand years ago was talking about something feeling hot, they were describing that thing having a higher temperature (than something) and that meant they were describing a higher average kinetic energy of molecules. If we can figure out what thing in the world corresponds to the concept we are grasping for when we talk about consciousness, and if we can devise a method to measure that thing, then we will absolutely be able to tell if beings are conscious. And that will be extremely, extremely disturbing to generations that grew up with the ideas of consciousness that we grew up with.
I really hope I haven’t offended you in any way. When I suggest things aren’t conscious I’m not belittling them, saying I don’t like them, or saying they aren’t worthy of respect as living things. I just really think there is a good reason to believe that you need a certain amount of brain matter to run the “consciousness” app, and there are plenty of living things that just don’t have that much brain matter to spare (or don’t have that much at all).
I understand that right now there are plenty of people who use “consciousness” as an important fact in ethics. We have to be ethical to conscious beings and we can do whatever we want to non-conscious beings. I think that’s based on the kind of magical thinking about consciousness that I came into this thread to argue against.
I am almost sure I don’t mean a different thing by consciousness than you do. In The Universe in a Single Atom the His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, while talking about his interest in brain scans and what could be learned from them, that even with the best technology, no brain state could be the same as the experience of the colour blue. That experience, that is what I think we both mean when we talk about consciousness. I think the Dalai Lama just plain got it wrong. There is a physical state that is the same as that. It has properties we can learn about and we could learn to recognize it.
I’d be curious to know why you think that.
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