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Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

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Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#81

Post by alokm »

Zigurd wrote: post #80
alokm wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation. Even if we are able to simulate the brains of lesser beings, doesnt necessarily mean that there will be self awareness in the simulation. I think this is one area where we still have a lot of catching up to do.

What process takes place in your cranium that does not take place in a petri dish containing some of your brain cells?

Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#82

Post by Zigurd »

regal wrote: post #21
mseebach wrote: post #8

That's nice. But too many people can't tell the difference between supporting an idea and publishing a repeatable experiment to test a falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

Why is "self concept" equated to consciousness? When a split-brain patient's self-reported notion of "self" makes up a story to cover for not knowing why they performed some action, what part of their mind actually made the decision to act?

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#83

Post by kryten »

ggreer wrote: post #42

If I had to wager money on what future societies would condemn us for, I'd bet a lot on our treatment of animals. Even if other highly-encephalized animals aren't conscious, they are still open to a wide range of experiences that we can empathize with. They can learn and play. They feel hunger and pain. Some species can even form friendships and mourn the passing of their kin. Despite all indications that our treatme…

Spot on.

This is typical human hypocrisy at work.

The worst thing I find is the "I'll eat a sausage but I couldn't possibly eat a cute bunny wabbit". The sausage in its natural form is capable of being a valuable and loyal human companion.

I haven't eaten meat since I was at university in the distant past after I got addicted to a combination of ramen noodles, mushrooms and home made pepper sauce. The ethical dilemma made it hard to go back to eating meat so I didn't bother.

Regarding tastiness, Indian vegetarian food (particular aloo, gobi is far tastier than anything with meat in and you can grow ALL the ingredients yourself if you want without having to shovel a single turd.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#84

Post by kryten »

stiff wrote: post #75
scotty79 wrote: post #64

I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more…

I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon. It would be nice if you presented at least one reason for believing this.

Ray Kurzweil said so!

That was sarcastic for reference - I think the guy is a crackpot.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#85

Post by smosher »

martingoodson wrote: post #71
smosher wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful. One that can be just as easily applied to a recording device, modulo the explicit mention of neurons. It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider…

What's "philosophical backup"? Scientists normally get by without any help from philosophers, so why do they need to get philosophers' imprimatur before they can use the concept of 'consciousness'? Why doesn't the concept of, say, 'the gene' also need this backup? Or maybe all of those geneticists are also stumbling around in the dark without philosophers to guide them...

The gene does, just as everything else, but we don't ascribe magical properties to the gene which are not readily accessible and coherent with the philosophical context. If you tried to use the gene to define God, then you would have the philosophical disconnect I'm talking about.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#86

Post by RivieraKid »

leoedin wrote: post #76
RivieraKid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, machines cannot feel pain.

Pain is a feedback sensor which indicates that something's gone wrong. You could build a machine with pressure sensitive grippers. You could even place a threshold on that, above which the machine reacted by moving in the opposite direction. Biological pain is just a complicated version of that. Pain is just our minds interpretation of damage signals. At what point do you draw the line. "This machine doesn't feel pai…

There's a huge difference between feeling pain and reacting to demage. Humans can react to injury in a very complex ways without feeling pain. And buildings too - when you crash with an airplane into a building, the building reacts in a complex way. Does it feel pain? Feeling pain is something fundamentally different than reacting to demage.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#87

Post by Zigurd »

smosher wrote: post #60
stiff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no philosophical definition of consciousness, but there is none of gravity either, in the sense of "what gravity really is". Science doesn't examine what things "really are", but tries to make useful predictions and the definitions employed are only means to this end. In fact there are operational definitions of consciousness and I think they certainly deserve to be called "scientific", see for example: http…

The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful. One that can be just as easily applied to a recording device, modulo the explicit mention of neurons. It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider…

> The problem is without any philosophical backup the neural correlate is entirely uncompelling—it's merely a clinical definition of a measure of... nothing meaningful.

Gravity is arguably a more compelling concept to someone falling off a ladder than to a student in a high school physics class. But, so? Does gravity lose meaning on a scale that is too large or too small to fit human experience?

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#88

Post by kretor »

alokm wrote: post #81
Zigurd wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What process takes place in your cranium that does not take place in a petri dish containing some of your brain cells?

Its not a petri dish he is referring to. He is talking about a brain implemented in silicon or graphene, i.e, a brain simulated on electronic hardware.

It doesn't matter what the brain is made of. Or would you say that if there are alien lifeforms, with their brains certainly made out of another matter than our brains, have no conscience?

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#89

Post by brotchie »

alokm wrote: post #66
scotty79 wrote: post #64

I think we are fairly close to achieving consciousness in silicon (graphene or whatever). We will improve algorithms, increase computing power and achieve system of consciousness of a mouse, then just by tossing in more computing power and optimizing speed of algorithms one of consciousness of a dog, then monkey, then human and then we'll be surprised that when we toss in even more computing power we'll get even more…

Consciousness is not solely a matter of computation. Even if we are able to simulate the brains of lesser beings, doesnt necessarily mean that there will be self awareness in the simulation. I think this is one area where we still have a lot of catching up to do.

12 months ago I would have strongly disagreed with your first sentence, but after a load of reading on Physics, Philosophy, and Neuroscience, my views have changed.

I am still unable to reconcile my "internal" conscious experience with our current understanding of Physics. I'm a materialist, however I'm trending towards the believe that consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems; that is, our "internal" conscious experience is part of the "fabric of reality" and simply comes into being once matter is of a certain level of interconnectedness.

In essence, all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience. However, only groupings of matter that have massive interconnectedness (i.e. animal brains) experience what we would typically describe as consciousness. Perhaps, at a global scale, the internet is weakly "conscious". Perhaps, once we forge ahead with bio-mimetic arrays of neural networks, we'll start to induce artificial conscious experience in "dumb" matter.

Christof Koch has an excellent book "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" along these lines.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#90

Post by GotAnyMegadeth »

leoedin wrote: post #76
RivieraKid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, machines cannot feel pain.

Pain is a feedback sensor which indicates that something's gone wrong. You could build a machine with pressure sensitive grippers. You could even place a threshold on that, above which the machine reacted by moving in the opposite direction. Biological pain is just a complicated version of that. Pain is just our minds interpretation of damage signals. At what point do you draw the line. "This machine doesn't feel pai…

Do you reckon a machine could have a sensor that made it feel emotional pain when it thought about other machines feeling emotional pain, because they lost a machine that they were close to through an extreme level of physical pain?
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