The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
1–10 of 51 posts
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#2Whaaaaat... bs
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#3In other news, academia is coming to accept that "consciousness" can have no objective definition. Users of outlying definitions that appear useful in their field thus have no need to invent a new word for their particular choice. In some cases the entire lack of any meaningful definition is the whole point of using the word.
Lack of a definition, or agreement on a definition, has never been seen to be an impediment to publication, and that is ultimately what matters.
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#4I got paywalled, can someone share an archive or outline link?
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#5I think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated and have some degree of nervous system to be conscious. A rock is not concious, but a tree might be. A fly is less concious than a dog. A robot may be concious if it has enough sensors to react and significantly change it’s behavior due to processing (rather than simple bump or range sensors acting as limiters).
But really at the end of the day, it’s sort of a bullshit word people tend to use to imply that humans are somehow special beyond just having an insane number of neurons pound for pound.
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#6I got paywalled, can someone share an archive or outline link?
https://outline.com/8z79aN
though the article isn't really anything more than a description of panpsychism, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Arguments_in_favor... and the Arguments Against section below that are basically a better version of the article
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#7Seems they're playing fast and loose with the word "credibility".
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#8I think it’s important to think of consciousness as a spectrum. Having studied artificial life, the conclusion I came to is that something needs to be situated and have some degree of nervous system to be conscious. A rock is not concious, but a tree might be. A fly is less concious than a dog. A robot may be concious if it has enough sensors to react and significantly change it’s behavior due to processing (rather t…
Reminds me of Gaia from Asimov's Foundation.
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#9Wrong ideas can often hold academic credibility. Not saying this particular idea is right or wrong, just that academic credibility may not mean much when it comes to matters of mind of which we may never really know much about.
A rock could very well be conscious, or not. Let us say that (by someone's definition) it is, what then? Someone else is not going to agree that it is.
Is there an objective definition? Can it be experimentally verified?
Uncertainty is the only certainty.
Re: The idea that everything is conscious is gaining academic credibility (2018)
#10Discussed, rather poorly, at the time:
The idea that all things are conscious is gaining academic credibility - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16251441 - Jan 2018 (17 comments)