Suppose a dog is unconscious. For what purpose does it sleep and what is the difference between its sleeping and waking state? And between those and human sleeping and waking states?
Are animals conscious? New research
161–170 of 544 posts
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
The evidence: animals exhibit numerous behaviors that resemble our emotional responses in various ways. Anyone who has ever had a pet dog or a cat will have countless anecdotes. The explanation with the fewest moving parts is that our brain and hormonal systems look an awful lot like the brain and hormonal systems of a cat or a dog and therefore the simplest explanation is that cats and dogs have emotions and thought…
Are you sure that is not just mimicry of mechanisms left by evolution? Is like saying ChatGPT has conscience because it can talk or "think" like us...are we missing something here? I am not opposing your view, just trying to understand the logic - perplexed by downvotes on a simple question...
It is still possible that it is just mimicry. But same for Homo sapiens.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#163> 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…
Humans seem pretty categorically different to me based on their behavior alone.
Agree. Humans, unlike other animals, film themselves mating.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#164> 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…
Projecting human traits, feelings and behaviors onto other people has no scientific basis, because there is no way of testing what's going on in their minds (assuming they even have minds).
The dismissal of the idea that animals could be conscious is a form of solipsism.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#165> 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…
Consciousness and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are. Intelligence is the ability to abstractly reason and adapt to novel stimulus. Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain. Given we're all in the same evolutionary line, there nothing to make me believe that a Dog d…
> It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are.
Why not?
> Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain.
The more complex and detailed the model, the more conscious. Why not?
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediat…
> Easy example. As currently drunk person, I admit that my senses are impaired. But doubting my consciousness makes me doubt yours. Yes there can be scale of drunkness so is different scale of thinking. Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense.
"Idea that one mammal has unrelated thinking/sensing from other mammals does not makes sense."
Sure it does, you can see it all around you. It's so incredibly apparent that its actually possible to miss it. It's like a fish denying the existence of water.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#167Humans that are blackout drunk are emotional but non-conscious. They can carry on full conversations without a sense of being. Basically every animal exists in this state continuously. It's why human behavior is vastly different from animal behavior. Self-referential consciousness is as much of a curse as it is a blessing. It's spoken about in this way by basically every human religion for a reason. This article is m…
Blackout drunks are barely emotional - it is just level of how much they are sedated.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#168What Ghosh chose to include and not include in this leaves some really weird gaps. He mentions Descartes, and the "cogito", but quotes Seth in attributing to Descartes an "unholy trinity, of language, intelligence and consciousness", and then links that "trinity" to behaviorism.
This would make one think that until "recently", most scientists were in the same boat as Descartes, but I think this is really misleading. Descartes believed that mental stuff and physical stuff were categorically different ("cartesian dualism"), whereas almost all scientists would subscribe to some form of monism / physicalism. But the reason for the cogito, which has persisted until at least "recently" is that subjective phenomena are intrinsically not accessible for objective observation. At best, we can capture the "correlates" of consciousness, whether those be behaviors, fMRI BOLD signals, EEG readings, etc, none of which directly shows that there's an inner subjective experience. There's still maybe the possibility of a philosophical zombie, who has the right objectively available signals but doesn't have any internal experience.
But scientists have all the while been working under the operational assumption that animals have something like our experiences. When we study aggression or stress or motivation or whatever else in animal models, and draw parallels between the brains of mice or monkeys and humans, we're assuming that their emotional states feel at least somewhat like ours do. A classic protocol for rodents, relevant in testing anti-depressants (where the whole point is to change some aspect of our subjective experience) is the "forced swim", where you drop a mouse in water in a vessel with smooth vertical sides, and time how long it takes for them to stop struggling. This is taken to be a measure of "despair". If scientists decades ago didn't believe animals experienced anything, they wouldn't do this research.
Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was the minimal statement he could make with absolute certainty -- but we all operate with at least a smidge less solipsism if we assume that other humans are conscious. And it's of course only a small extension to guess that other primates, who have rich social relations and brains similar to ours have a lot of overlapping experiences. And that other mammals, like rodents, who have a bunch of stuff in their brains like ours, have overlapping experiences. And then suddenly you're open to this landscape of different kinds of creates with different kinds of mental experiences.
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#169> 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…
Consciousness and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. It's not the case that the more "intelligent" human is, the more "conscious" they are. Intelligence is the ability to abstractly reason and adapt to novel stimulus. Consciousness is the individual experience of the "interiority" of a world model constructed in the brain. Given we're all in the same evolutionary line, there nothing to make me believe that a Dog d…
I do think that in a kind of way intelligence and “interiority” are related. I might have the same “amount” of consciousness as a worm but my ability to investigate my experience is (I think) undoubtedly greater.
“A dog can miss his master, but he can’t expect him to return on Wednesday”
Re: Are animals conscious? New research
#170What's with the title on this post?