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Are animals conscious? New research

bbc.com

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Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#101

Post by lolinder »

jemmyw wrote: post #100
lolinder wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the downvotes, I couldn't even downvote you if I wanted to because you replied to me. I'm operating on the assumption that evolution happened as Darwin described it. As another reply to you notes, darwinian evolution precludes sharp divides between species in favor of a gradual development of complexity over time. A believer in darwinian evolution should expect consciousness and emotions and other…

Not that I believe this, but there could be an intelligence cliff where you get to a certain level and suddenly consciousness and self awareness appear. That is a mechanism where gradual change could lead to stepped differences.

Right, but barring evidence against the simpler model we should prefer it to a more complex one.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#102

Post by qingcharles »

klyrs wrote: post #37

> Prof Chittka’s experiments showed that bees ... seemed to be able to play, rolling small wooden balls, which he says they appeared to enjoy as an activity. But can they understand the offside rule?

I heard a rumor from a guy on Twitter that GPT5 can explain it...

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#103

Post by antisthenes »

lolinder wrote: post #66

> Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in animals’ minds. What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly rational world the default as…

> And yet we see countless secular scientists clinging to that perspective when even a cursory glance at the evidence and a basic application of Occam's razor would suggest the opposite.

That's not a reason to distrust scientists, or science in general (although it does display that a fraction of "scientists" had very poor observation skills).

It IS a reason to look for religious dogma, oust it whenever possible, and dismantle it systematically until it no longer exists.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#104

Post by DangitBobby »

epgui wrote: post #94
DangitBobby wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think we "didn't always have this capacity"? Or that other animals don't have it? We have it from a very young age, children like animals, want them as pets, and cry when they see them hurt or killed. We've had at the very least a desire to commune with animals for 100,000 years or we wouldn't have dogs in their current form.

I haven't claimed that animals don't have it. In general, empathy can be either an evolved behaviour, a learned behaviour, or both. In humans this is largely-but-probably-not-exclusively socialized behaviour. Most cases of (human and non-abused) feral children exhibit behaviour that is not particularly compatible with empathy. I shared my rationale for why we "haven't always had this capacity" a few comments up this…

If you think I'm contradicting myself, then I didn't know what "abstraction" was referring to in "sophisticated abstraction". (FWIW, it's pretty difficult to review the conversation and formulate good responses on mobile, since all I can see easily without switching back and forth is the comment I am replying to). I think it's "sophisticated" to have the language and philosophy required to follow a moral system that you prioritize over your own instincts—in this case, the prioritization of members of your species. I don't think it's "sophisticated" to not attempt to maximally exploit everything around me for even the most modest benefit to the deteriment of all else. Maybe I have too high an opinion of people. Maybe it's just a consequence of scale.

I see empathy alone as being much more basic, requiring only a very low-level "theory of mind", likely arising from the type of evolutionary pressure that leads to social species. I would be surprised to learn that was a recent adaptation in our evolutionary line. Maybe most species have it "off by default", if you consider the "default" to be a constant state of duress and resource scarcity.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#105

Post by Jensson »

lolinder wrote: post #96
robwwilliams wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it has been controversial for at least one other major reason discussed in the BBC article and by Anil Seth—-the near equivalence made between language and consciousness that goes back to Descartes. Descartes viewed the body as machinery, the mind as imbued and linked in a nebulous way to the body, but distinct at some fundamental level. This split enabled the behaviorist tradition to dominate animal psychology f…

But that reason relies on a presupposition that human language is categorically different than animal language, which is also a claim that relies on presupposing a categorical distinction which must be disproven, rather than starting from the assumption that human and animal communication exists along an evolutionary spectrum. And how did we arrive at this categorical distinction becoming axiomatic? As you say, by wa…

Animal language is obviously on the same level as human laughter and cries and whimpers. Animals don't teach language to each other like humans do.

But I don't see what that has to do with consciousness, to me animal language is much closer to consciousness than human language. Consciousness is all about emotions, not language, and animal language that humans also has is directly tied to emotional expression. Our ML models managed to mimic human language before animal language, human language is more robotic.

Sci-fi shows tend to also do this, robots talk with voices that lacks the animal components of humans and instead just do the human language. So the popular view is that animal language is the conscious parts and human language is the computational/intelligence part.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#106

Post by Jensson »

albertopv wrote: post #48
throwup238 wrote: post #38

> We now know that bees can count, recognise human faces and learn how to use tools. I was curious what that means in this context and found this research (co-authored by Prof Chittka mentioned in the article): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by…

"Apparently only a small minority of bumble bees can figure out how to pull a string to access a reward, but then other bees adopt the behavior by mimicry." Replace bumble bees with human beigns and "pull a string" with an engineering task and you'll find we are not so different. /sarcasm, but not too much, average human being is quite dumb, tbh.

> average human being is quite dumb

Compared to what? Average human beings are geniuses compared to animals.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#107

Post by Jensson »

DangitBobby wrote: post #92
epgui wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think we're somehow "empathetic by default", but that's something I'd disagree with. Our primal instinct is one of tribalism and auto-centrism, but over long periods of time we've developed a (fragile) capacity to empathize with 1) other people that look like us, and 2) other people that don't look like us, and 3) perhaps animals. But we didn't always have this capacity, and we see it break down all the t…

What makes you think we "didn't always have this capacity"? Or that other animals don't have it? We have it from a very young age, children like animals, want them as pets, and cry when they see them hurt or killed. We've had at the very least a desire to commune with animals for 100,000 years or we wouldn't have dogs in their current form.

> children like animals, want them as pets

It was very recently evolution wise that humans started to keep animals as pets, before then we just hunted and ate animals. We would empathize as much with those animals as cats did with mice.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#108

Post by librasteve »

the article illustrates the low level of achievement in cognitive science (particularly in the light of the investment being poured into so called AGI / FSD right now) … we clearly need a scientific definition of consciousness that can capture what (birds(cats(dogs(humans)))) have in common and the incremental distinctions … literacy, spoken language, non verbal modelling, predictive ability, causation/reasoning, dimensions (physical, emotional), pain, emotions, empathy, initiation and so on. with a research framework that can hypothesize and test the neuronal services and mapping.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#109

Post by illuminant »

apantel wrote: post #71
illuminant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. Literally life technology animating the quantum sieve within our neurons. Consciousness isn't a complex deck of cards, it is the singularity inside the quantum sieve. Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty. If it does not mitigate uncertainty it is not intelligence. All that other stuff about more or faster or sophisticated is something e…

Even an LLM couldn’t generate this.

Information is the removal of uncertainty, if it does not remove uncertainty it is not information.

Uncertainty is the soft synonym for entropy.

Entropy is the distribution of potential over negative potential.

It is not that Truth is impossible to find, it is that undeceiving the self is difficult.

Undeceive yourself of your own words if you will find something you have not anticipated.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#110

Post by delecti »

panarky wrote: post #97
delecti wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but believe that people who think animals aren't conscious are starting from that assumption. If you start from the belief that there's some inherent "human-ness" (soul, etc), then nothing you see will convince you that animals have it too.

Could you prove that another person is conscious? Could you prove that you are conscious?

I can prove that I am conscious, at least to my satisfaction, because I can think the thought "I am conscious". Outward behavior of other humans also proves to my satisfaction that they're conscious. And when interacting with animals, I see many of the same qualities that lead me to believe other people are conscious, with the difference largely being a matter of degree.
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