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In philosophy it literally means "subjective, qualitative experience". It's almost certain that all animals have it, but of course the qualities they experience will be different.
Still begging the question, i.e. assuming that which you need to prove. How would you prove an animal has a "subjective, qualitative experience"?
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> I don't understand what you mean by sleight of hand. He means that it implicitly smuggles in a certain conclusion. For instance, "I think therefore I am" seems logically sound, but actually begs the question in presupposing "I" to then conclude that "I" exists. Or ask an innocent person a question like, "when did you stop beating your wife?" > There are many synonymous ways of phrasing the question: e.g., describe…
I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist.
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I'm afraid this is far too clever for me to understand. I know what I mean by subjective experience, and no amount of linguistic hair-splitting will convince me it doesn't exist.
You mean you think you know. If I put an object in your blind spot, you'll also swear up and down there's nothing in front of you.
I've read this before. That's why I think the question "do animals have consciousness?" is meaningless, because "consciousness" usually implies "like ours." They have something that probably bears some relationship to ours. Some birds have a "theory of mind" where they know what you know, e.g. whether you saw them hide the food. It would be possible (maybe someone's already done it?) to enumerate the N tests of "cons…
Consciousness is only defined in the philosophy of mind as "phenomenological experience", full stop, i.e., "experiencing the color yellow" as something beyond just a certain wavelength incident upon and mechanistic reaction within the organism. "Consciousness" as defined in colloquial settings, such as the one we inhabit now, is usually substantially more elaborate than thae one used by philosophers and includes thin…
(Puts nose up in the air and sniffs contemptuously)
I am increasingly of the opinion that the phrases "what it is like to be a bat", or "there is something it is like to be a bat", are simply a linguistic sleight of hand masking a plain old dualistic standpoint. Just because these sentences make sense in our everyday language, does not mean they are suitable for technical and rigorous philosophical discussions. For one, the "something" in the 2nd formulation (or simpl…
Where would one find the authority to say what is suitable or not for philosophic discussions then? This is where schools of thought arise from, because some are less afraid of the unknowns that arise under various axiomatic constraints.
Every axiom is a mystery of existence itself in any manner.
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Still begging the question, i.e. assuming that which you need to prove. How would you prove an animal has a "subjective, qualitative experience"?
I think you have it backwards: we would need a reason to think they don't have it, given our shared history and similar biology.
How similar is "similar"? Is it just mammals, or just certain orders, or can organisms in the other branches be assumed to have consciousness too?
I've been enjoying Jeffrey Kaplan's YouTube videos on philosophy. He has one on this subject[0], and I recall getting a lot out of it. Might be time to re-watch it. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaZbCctlll4
Nagle discussion starts at 50:00
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> how on earth does consciousness arise from material "meat" Let me try. It is a way to perceive with goals in mind. Nothing special, just perception, future reward prediction conditioned on current state, and learning from outcomes. The whole specialness of consciousness is that it carries inside not just our external world, but also our plans and goals. So in this place where they meet, and where there are conseque…
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I mean, what's it like to be you or me? How do we determine empathic distance and how is it related to phenomenological distance w.r.t. what-is-it-like-to-be-ness? You can partially explore these spaces even within one's own mind, such as "what is it like to be me on DMT?" or "what is it like to be me in a week/month/year?" We can even frame this as a Mary's Room[1] experiment in terms of, "Knowing everything there i…
I think the closest we might get to actually learning what it is like to be a bat is by unsupervised learning + a bit of manual labelling on top. A neural net could learn their states and dynamics, by training on a million hours of bat recordings. These representations will already encode bat states and values, so we just need the bridge to human language, which is easy to build with a pretrained language model. This…
The point is that no amount of external modeling can give you any knowledge of “what it’s like” subjectively.