I agree with much of what you say but I am not sure it implies for cousin_it’s position what you think it does.
I’m sure it’s true that, as you put it elsewhere in the thread, consciousness is “extrapolated”: calling something conscious means that it resembles an awake normal human and not a rock, a human in a coma, etc., and there is no fact of the matter as to exactly how this should be extrapolated to (say) aliens or intelligent robots.
But this falls short of saying that at best, calling something conscious equals saying something about its externally observable behaviours.
For instance: suppose technology advances enough that we can (1) make exact duplicates of human beings, which (initially) exactly match the memories, personalities, capabilities, etc., of their originals, and (2) reversibly cause total paralysis in a human being, so that their mind no longer has any ability to produce externally observable effects, and (3) destroy a human being’s capacity for conscious thought while leaving autonomic functions like breathing normal.
(We can do #2 and #3 pretty well already, apart from reversibility. I want reversibility so that we can confirm later that the person was conscious while paralysed.)
So now we take a normal human being (clearly conscious). We duplicate them (#1). We paralyse them both (#2). Then we scramble the brain of one of them (#3). Then we observe them as much as you like.
I claim these two entities have exactly the same observable behaviours, past and present, but that we can reasonably consider one of them conscious and the other not. We can verify that one of them was conscious by reversing the paralysis. Verifying that the other wasn’t depends on our confidence that by mashing up most of their cerebral cortex (or whatever horrible thing we did in #3) really destroys consciousness, but this seems like a thing we could reasonably be quite confident of.
You might say that our judgement that one of these (ex-?) human beings is conscious is dependent on our ability to reverse the paralysis and check. But, given enough evidence that the induction of paralysis is harmlessly reversible, I claim we could be very confident even if we knew that after (say) a week both would be killed without the paralysis ever being reversed.
Indeed, we can always make two things seem indistinguishable, if we eliminate all of our abilities to distinguish them. The two bodies in your case could still be distinguished with an fmri scan, or similar tool. This might not count as “behavior”, but then I never wanted “behavior” to literally mean “hand movements”.
I think you could remove that by putting the two people into magical impenetrable boxes and then randomly killing one of them, through some schrodinger’s cat-like process. But I wouldn’t find that very interesting either. Yes, you can hide information, but it’s not just information about consciousness you’re hiding, but also about “ability to do arithmetic” and many other things. Now, if you could remove consciousness without removing anything else, that would be very interesting.
OK, so what did you mean by “behaviour” if it includes things you can only discover with an fMRI scan? (Possible “extreme” case: you simply mean that consciousness is something that happens in the physical world and supervenes on arrangements of atoms and fields and whatnot; I don’t think many here would disagree with that.)
If the criteria for consciousness include things you can’t observe “normally” but need fMRI scans and the like for (for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that they do) then you no longer have any excuse for answering “yes” to that last question.
My point wasn’t about hiding information; it was that much of the relevant information is already hidden, which you seemed to be denying when you said consciousness is just a matter of “behaviours”. It now seems like you weren’t intending to deny that at all; but in that case I no longer understand how what you’re saying is relevant to the OP.
The word behavior doesn’t really feature much in the ongoing discussions I have. My first post was an answer to OP, not meant as a stand-alone truth. But obviously, If “consciousness” means anything, it’s a thing that happens in the brain—I’d say it’s the thing that makes complex and human-like behaviors possible.
If the criteria for consciousness include things you can’t observe “normally” <...>
Normally is the key word here. There is nothing normal about your scenario. I need an fmri can for it, because there is nothing else that I can observe. Compared to that, the human in a box communicating through speech is very normal and quite sufficient. Unless the human is mute or malicious. Then I might need more complex tools.
much of the relevant information is already hidden
It’s obscured, sure. But truly hiding information is hard. Speech isn’t that narrow of a window, by the way. Now, if I had to communicate with the agent in the box by sending one bit of information back and forth, that would be more of a problem.
I agree with much of what you say but I am not sure it implies for cousin_it’s position what you think it does.
I’m sure it’s true that, as you put it elsewhere in the thread, consciousness is “extrapolated”: calling something conscious means that it resembles an awake normal human and not a rock, a human in a coma, etc., and there is no fact of the matter as to exactly how this should be extrapolated to (say) aliens or intelligent robots.
But this falls short of saying that at best, calling something conscious equals saying something about its externally observable behaviours.
For instance: suppose technology advances enough that we can (1) make exact duplicates of human beings, which (initially) exactly match the memories, personalities, capabilities, etc., of their originals, and (2) reversibly cause total paralysis in a human being, so that their mind no longer has any ability to produce externally observable effects, and (3) destroy a human being’s capacity for conscious thought while leaving autonomic functions like breathing normal.
(We can do #2 and #3 pretty well already, apart from reversibility. I want reversibility so that we can confirm later that the person was conscious while paralysed.)
So now we take a normal human being (clearly conscious). We duplicate them (#1). We paralyse them both (#2). Then we scramble the brain of one of them (#3). Then we observe them as much as you like.
I claim these two entities have exactly the same observable behaviours, past and present, but that we can reasonably consider one of them conscious and the other not. We can verify that one of them was conscious by reversing the paralysis. Verifying that the other wasn’t depends on our confidence that by mashing up most of their cerebral cortex (or whatever horrible thing we did in #3) really destroys consciousness, but this seems like a thing we could reasonably be quite confident of.
You might say that our judgement that one of these (ex-?) human beings is conscious is dependent on our ability to reverse the paralysis and check. But, given enough evidence that the induction of paralysis is harmlessly reversible, I claim we could be very confident even if we knew that after (say) a week both would be killed without the paralysis ever being reversed.
Indeed, we can always make two things seem indistinguishable, if we eliminate all of our abilities to distinguish them. The two bodies in your case could still be distinguished with an fmri scan, or similar tool. This might not count as “behavior”, but then I never wanted “behavior” to literally mean “hand movements”.
I think you could remove that by putting the two people into magical impenetrable boxes and then randomly killing one of them, through some schrodinger’s cat-like process. But I wouldn’t find that very interesting either. Yes, you can hide information, but it’s not just information about consciousness you’re hiding, but also about “ability to do arithmetic” and many other things. Now, if you could remove consciousness without removing anything else, that would be very interesting.
OK, so what did you mean by “behaviour” if it includes things you can only discover with an fMRI scan? (Possible “extreme” case: you simply mean that consciousness is something that happens in the physical world and supervenes on arrangements of atoms and fields and whatnot; I don’t think many here would disagree with that.)
If the criteria for consciousness include things you can’t observe “normally” but need fMRI scans and the like for (for the avoidance of doubt, I agree that they do) then you no longer have any excuse for answering “yes” to that last question.
My point wasn’t about hiding information; it was that much of the relevant information is already hidden, which you seemed to be denying when you said consciousness is just a matter of “behaviours”. It now seems like you weren’t intending to deny that at all; but in that case I no longer understand how what you’re saying is relevant to the OP.
The word behavior doesn’t really feature much in the ongoing discussions I have. My first post was an answer to OP, not meant as a stand-alone truth. But obviously, If “consciousness” means anything, it’s a thing that happens in the brain—I’d say it’s the thing that makes complex and human-like behaviors possible.
Normally is the key word here. There is nothing normal about your scenario. I need an fmri can for it, because there is nothing else that I can observe. Compared to that, the human in a box communicating through speech is very normal and quite sufficient. Unless the human is mute or malicious. Then I might need more complex tools.
It’s obscured, sure. But truly hiding information is hard. Speech isn’t that narrow of a window, by the way. Now, if I had to communicate with the agent in the box by sending one bit of information back and forth, that would be more of a problem.