Are animals conscious? New research • Hacker News Board

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#521

Post by echoangle » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 10:00 AM UTC

lkdfjlkdfjlg wrote: post #518

echoangle wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not saying that this is the case, but all the mentioned behaviors are only indicators and could also be reflexive actions which the dog is genetically programmed to do because they work. If a beetle is flipped, it also has a “program” to get upright again, but that doesn’t mean it’s aware of its situation and is actively deciding something. I’m pretty sure dogs are conscious, but you can’t really tell from the ou…

My entire point wasn't that animals are or aren't conscious, but to ask: Why is it that people make this argument > I'm pretty sure dogs are conscious, but you can’t really tell from the outside. when talking about dogs, but not when talking about people? Maybe you're not conscious, I can't tell from the outside.

You’re right, you also can’t tell for other people. You can make an assumption because they are very similar to you and you yourself appear to be conscious to yourself. But you can’t really disprove solipsism as far as I know.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#522

Post by notnaut » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 11:02 AM UTC

mr_toad wrote: post #481

nkoren wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine had two kittens -- siblings, who were very close to each other. One of them was hit by a car and killed. I had adored this kitten, so in memory of her I did a chalk drawing portrait of the kitten, and brought it over to my friend as gift, about a week after the kitten had died. The surviving sibling had, during that time, seemed somewhat morose and unresponsive, but also kind of cryptic in the way th…

Cats seem far more likely to react to hearing a cat on TV than seeing it.

We turn the tv on muted with birds vids flying around for our cats. 2 are obsessed. 2 don’t respond at all.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#523

Post by notnaut » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 11:06 AM UTC

wruza wrote: post #414

InDubioProRubio wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ability to reflect non-heuristically on stimuli and not fall back into stress-reflex behaviour like schizophrenia. A animal that things god/the government/everyone is after them like a mice, is less concious then somebody able test that hypothesis and leave that fear filled fever dream. Its a scale though, and in my opinion, with considerable overlap, depending on situation and adaption.

Afaict, you are describing intelligence, not consciousness.

We sure there’s a strong actual difference between the things? If consciousness is a spectrum, it seems likely connected to intelligence at a sort of fundamental level. The more intelligent, the more obvious it is that consciousness is there, at least.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#524

Post by Saturdays » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 1:53 PM UTC

moi2388 wrote: post #250

I’ve never understood these questions. “Are animals conscious?” Well, could you give me the definition of consciousness? No you can’t. So now you’re asking me both to define it and show if animals have it or not. Are animals aware of their surroundings? Yes. Are animals showing the behavioural signs of pain when you hurt them? Yes. Can animals direct attention? Yes. Can animals remember? Yes. Can animals learn? Yes.…

I'm reading this book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and it's quite fascinating to think deeply about what is Consciousness. I think the book does a good job of defining and explaining Consciousness.

Highly recommend it to think critically about the subject, but I think your point is valid, consciousness occurs for many things, and then it doesn't have to many other things. You don't need consciousness to nearly instantly detect that b comes after a sequence of {a,b,a,b,a,?}. You need consciousness to think about _why_ b comes after though. When you go for a swim and then recall the event, you most likely recall it in an objective or third person way mentally - the image or visual in your memory is that third person view.. but that's not actually how you experienced it.

I wonder how much of that applies to animals, and I wonder if we can ever get that answer.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#525

Post by cupcakecommons » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 5:05 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #490

cupcakecommons wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is someone under twilight anesthesia or in a deep k-hole approaching the state of being a p-zombie? I would think so. Maybe I misunderstand the definition of p-zombie?

A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.

I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there, but it's radically different from what is normally considered subjective experience. The person can have consciousness clinically (as in they show external signs of consciousness) - but their self is not there and their subjective sense is in discontinuity.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#526

Post by cupcakecommons » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 5:19 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #480

taneq wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? You can absolutely have long in-depth discussions with a blackout drunk person about their current experiences. Are you claiming there’s some level of inebriation where you become a p-zombie? Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.

They're conflating episodic memory retainment with consciousness. Consciousness process may result in things to store in memory, but, not being able to store those things long term doesn't necessarily mean consciousness was missing in that moment. After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and pre…

I think the self can be disrupted by significant alterations in memory storage among other things. I think memory is one of many key ingredients in having a self. When your memory is adequately disrupted your self is disrupted. Without a self subjective experience is radically different than with a self. It's radically different in that it's often described by the self (who stops being blackout drunk at some point) as being a discontinuity similar to sleep. The interesting thing here is that people who are blackout drunk continue to do things that a clinically-conscious person does (eat, talk, stumble around). Your experience is really interesting too - you seemed to still have an intact self, just not extended memory beyond 30 seconds. I think maybe we are talking about different things or my view is wrong.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#527

Post by sdenton4 » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 9:26 PM UTC

cupcakecommons wrote: post #525

taneq wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A p-zombie is something that looks and acts indistinguishably from a person, but doesn’t have an internal consciousness, ie. it provides sensory data, remembers past events, and exhibits behaviour, but it doesn’t “feel” or “experience” anything. A heavily sedated person who’s barely conscious is just a regular ol’ zombie.

I would consider people that are blackout drunk to be p-zombies given this definition. The part of the blackout person other people interact with, their self, simply isn't there - but they are still animated (mostly) like other people with selves. If you are truly blackout drunk I don't think you experience the moment in a traditional sense (a moment from the perspective of a self). There might be an experience there…

The definition of blackout drunk is not remembering what happened. This /could/ simply be a failure to form lasting memories, rather than a loss of 'self-ness.' If we imagine a switch which put a person's long-term memory in read-only mode, would flipping that switch necessarily remove consciousness?

Consider also that brains have different mechanisms for short and longterm memory; functionally, I think we're typically using read-only long-term memory combined with read-write short-term memory, and then writing distillations into long-term memory as-needed. Disabling long-term memory writes in this model may be functionally indistinguishable from a normal operation, at least on shorter time scales.

(For my own part, when I was younger I occasionally got extreeeemely drunk, and would actually flip into some hyper-vigilance around whether I would remember things later; I remember a number of these 'will I remember this later?' moments, though I can't say how many I forgot!)

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#528

Post by RoyalHenOil » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 10:49 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #391

jprete wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you mention it, I don't remember any Biblical support for animals not being conscious. Humans being special, yes - animals being unconscious automata, no. A quick Google search suggests the opposite conclusion can very easily be drawn, although I see no reason to elaborate on those arguments here.

Maybe "Biblical Support" as in a strict reading of the bible . But definitely Christians have 'interpreted' the Bible in ways to minimize animals as sub-human, without souls, no spirit, etc... These discussions are ancient times stand-ins for what today we might label 'consciousness'. To say the bible didn't strictly discuss 'consciousness' or 'automata' is ignoring that Christians think 'self' resides in the 'soul'…

Historically, Christians believed that animals had souls. The soul was a necessary requirement for animate life.

This was the idea behind spontaneous generation, for example: souls find their way into rotting meat and maggots are born.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#529

Post by RoyalHenOil » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 11:11 PM UTC

ojosilva wrote: post #388

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…

> humans exist along a spectrum and there isn't a sharp cliff where humans are 100% conscious and empathetic but dogs are 0% I disagree, to a certain extent. In my layman terms, I believe "consciousness" is how humans define and differentiate the human mind, so it's exclusive to humans. Other living beings (or even AI) display human-like traits but they should not be defined as "conscious" because that's our own defi…

This is not a definition I have ever heard anyone use before, and I suspect that's because the definition is so constrained that it's not useful for scientific or philosophical discussion.

If you reserve "consciousness" as a word to be exclusively for humans, what word do you suggest instead when discussing consciousness as experienced by both humans and non-humans? And once you have come up with such a word, how do you plan to convince everyone to give up the common word they have been using for generations and replace it with this new word?

I would suggest, instead, that you co-opt a different, less common word for your unusual use case so as to minimally inconvenience everyone else. "Sapient" seems like a much better option to me, since it is derived from "Homo sapiens" and suggestive of something more unique to humans.

Or, better yet, coin a new word and stop trying to change the definitions of existing words.

Re: Are animals conscious? New research

#530

Post by RoyalHenOil » Thu, Jun 20, 2024, 11:21 PM UTC

User23 wrote: post #348

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…

Humanity observably is in a category of its own. The human authors of the Bible are just some of the many persons who have made this observation. One obvious example is morality. Take climate change. No reasonable person says that the life forms responsible for the Great Oxygenation Event were doing something immoral. On the other hand plenty of people say that humans causing a comparatively trivial shift in atmosphe…

The Great Oxidation Event was caused by cyanobacteria — which are an extremely far cry from the intelligent, multicellular animals that are under discussion here.

Saying that chimpanzee cognition is categorically different from human cognition because cyanobacteria lack a sense of morality is like saying that you and I have categorically different reproductive functions because mushrooms produce spores.