Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is it like to be a crab?

aeon.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 81 posts

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#2

Post by gryfft »

> A majority of philosophers accept (or lean toward accepting) consciousness in adult humans (95.15 per cent),

I laughed aloud.

> The Declaration points to five consciousness markers that are the results of scientific research: homologous brain circuits; artificial stimulation of brain regions causing similar behaviours and emotional expressions in humans and other animals; neural circuits supporting behavioural/electrophysical states of attentiveness, sleep and decision-making; mirror self-recognition; and similar impacts of hallucinogenic drugs across species.

...awesome. This is a really fun article.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#4

Post by timeagain »

Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty.

In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “right” since I’m just a tube? What would being cut in half and becoming two separate organisms feel like? Sensing vibrations with no ear drums? Do I have a “plan” or are my actions more passive responses?

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#6

Post by rubslopes »

annexrichmond wrote: post #3

Completely unrelated to the article: but what a refreshing website (on mobile at least). Fast, fluid, beautiful. Just its design made me feel compelled to check out and read other articles.

Aeon is a gem. Beautiful and fluid site, lots of interesting articles.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#7

Post by ForHackernews »

It's interesting to me that on the one hand, many AI researchers either try to sidestep the hard problem of consciousness ("well, once it has 100 trillion parameters and quacks like a duck, we'll have to accept it's a duck") or refuse to acknowledge that it's a problem at all, and then on the other hand you have folks like that google engineer who readily accept that an LLM is experiencing consciousness because it outputs some text about consciousness.

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#8

Post by Etheryte »

timeagain wrote: post #4

Somehow I find it harder to imagine what it “would be like” to be even simpler creatures. As a crab I can kind of imagine having more legs and probably having a great sense of smell. I can imagine the excitement and urgency of spawning. How it would feel to think that a sea floor carcass would be tasty. In the other hand, what the hell would it feel like to be a worm? Would I have an inherent sense of “left” and “rig…

And most important of all, would she still love you if you were a worm?

Re: What is it like to be a crab?

#9

Post by bave8672 »

Solving conciousness feels similarly futile to "solving" the number 42.

There are infinite scenarios (what is the square root of 1764? How many mushrooms are in my vegetable box? ...) which yield the sought result.

What suggests it wouldn't be the same for conciousness (neurons in a cortex, vectors in a GPU, alien biology we have yet to discover...)?

Post reply on HN