That’s true of lots of animals though. What makes humans more conscious?
I liked the article in general, but I experienced this line as sort of “coming out of left field”.
It is not clear to me that humans as a class are categorically “more conscious” than animals if we drop the definitional assumption that consciousness is largely “what it feels like to be a human from the inside” and try to give it a more cybernetic basis in arrangements of computational modules or data flows.
It seems to me like an empirical question whether there are some animals that are “more conscious” than some humans, and it seems to me that very very little of the necessary science that would need to be done to answer the question has actually been published. I can imagine science being done after we have better cognitive neuroscience on the subject of consciousness and discovering the existence of a kind of animal (octopus? crow? bee hive? orca? dog?) that has “more consciousness” than many reasonably normal humans do.
In the meantime, when I talk with people about the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, I notice over and over how people conflate the capacity for consciousness with something like “higher levels of brain-mediated efficacy” and also conflate the capacity of consciousness with something like “moral status as a agent with interests”. The “animals don’t count” content comes up over and over, and has come up over and over in philosophic musings for thousands of years, and I rarely see evidence based justification for the claim.
Irene Pepperberg has a theory (which seems plausible to me) that humans use animals to such an extent that we have deeply engrained tendencies to see them as edible/trainable/killable rather than friend-able. It would actually be surprising if it were otherwise, considering the positive glee dogs and cats take from the torture and dismemberment of smaller animals. If Pepperberg is right, then there is an enormous amount of confabulated hooey in our culture basically “justifying the predation of animals by people who do not want to think of themselves as evil just because they love bacon”. I’m not trying to take a position here, so much as pointing out an area of known confusion and dispute where the real answer is not obvious to many otherwise clear-thinking people.
If I saw a vegan arguing against animal consciousness or an omnivore arguing in favor of it, I would tend to suspect that they were arguing based on more detailed local knowledge of the actual neuroscience… rather than due to cached moral justifications for their personal dietary choices. Most people are omnivores and most people think animals are not conscious or morally important, so most people trigger my confabulation detecting heuristic in this respect… as you just did.
It is probably worth pointing out that I’m an omnivore I’m not trying to start a big ole debate on vegetarianism. What I’m hoping to do is simply to encourage the separation of conclusions and data about animal minds that I’ve marked as “40% likely to be garbage” so it doesn’t contaminate very pragmatically worthwhile theoretical thinking about the nature of consciousness, morality, cognitive efficacy, and self-reflective or inter-subjective assessments of agency. I think you can say a lot that is very worthwhile in this area without ever mentioning animals. If you need to talk about animals then it is better to do so with care and citations, rather than casually in the concluding remarks.
I’m starting to think that not splitting up the word consciousness was a big mistake. I think that there are lots of very qualia-laden Animals that it’s very mean to hurt, but that said Animals probably wouldn’t talk about being conscious for reasons other than the fact that they don’t talk.
Conscious, but not self-aware. Humans do more things related to consciousness, which I’m going to talk about later.
I really like the term “qualia-laden” for picking out a specific property of an agent. Did you make that up?
My current guess is that with “human self-awareness” you’re trying to talk about whatever it is that the mirror test aims to measure. My guess would be that in the biological world all mirror-test-passers are qualia-laden, and that human intelligence (and possible future machine intelligences) do (or will) involve both of these properties but also many other things as well (like symbolic communication, etc). Is mirror-test-passing a helpful term, or does the fact that magpies pass the mirror test mean that it’s not what you’re trying to talk about?
I think I read in Daniel Gilbert’s Book “Stumbling on Happiness” a very good approximation to what I always thought an animal “thinks” like:
Imagine you’re reading a long text and your mind starts wandering and gets lost in shallow feelings like the warm weather or the sounds of the birds, while your eyes keep reading the letters. Suddenly you’re at the end of the paragraph and you realize that you can’t remember anything you just read… or did you actually read it at all? You look over it again and the words sure look familiar, but you simply can’t say for sure if you actually read the text. You were in fact reading it, but you weren’t consciously aware of the fact that you were reading it.
Being a dog is probably like letting your mind wander and never snapping out of that state, everything you do is as if it’s on autopilot without having to first pass the “semi-control” of a conscious observer/inhibitor/decision-maker who has a concept of a future that goes on beyond a few moments.
Not sure if that is really a fair caricature of an animal mind, but it’s my current model of how an animal mind functions.
I’m an omnivore who considers animals probably concious, but I also don’t understand the problem (other than medical with prions and such) with eating humans so I might not count.
I liked the article in general, but I experienced this line as sort of “coming out of left field”.
It is not clear to me that humans as a class are categorically “more conscious” than animals if we drop the definitional assumption that consciousness is largely “what it feels like to be a human from the inside” and try to give it a more cybernetic basis in arrangements of computational modules or data flows.
It seems to me like an empirical question whether there are some animals that are “more conscious” than some humans, and it seems to me that very very little of the necessary science that would need to be done to answer the question has actually been published. I can imagine science being done after we have better cognitive neuroscience on the subject of consciousness and discovering the existence of a kind of animal (octopus? crow? bee hive? orca? dog?) that has “more consciousness” than many reasonably normal humans do.
In the meantime, when I talk with people about the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, I notice over and over how people conflate the capacity for consciousness with something like “higher levels of brain-mediated efficacy” and also conflate the capacity of consciousness with something like “moral status as a agent with interests”. The “animals don’t count” content comes up over and over, and has come up over and over in philosophic musings for thousands of years, and I rarely see evidence based justification for the claim.
Irene Pepperberg has a theory (which seems plausible to me) that humans use animals to such an extent that we have deeply engrained tendencies to see them as edible/trainable/killable rather than friend-able. It would actually be surprising if it were otherwise, considering the positive glee dogs and cats take from the torture and dismemberment of smaller animals. If Pepperberg is right, then there is an enormous amount of confabulated hooey in our culture basically “justifying the predation of animals by people who do not want to think of themselves as evil just because they love bacon”. I’m not trying to take a position here, so much as pointing out an area of known confusion and dispute where the real answer is not obvious to many otherwise clear-thinking people.
If I saw a vegan arguing against animal consciousness or an omnivore arguing in favor of it, I would tend to suspect that they were arguing based on more detailed local knowledge of the actual neuroscience… rather than due to cached moral justifications for their personal dietary choices. Most people are omnivores and most people think animals are not conscious or morally important, so most people trigger my confabulation detecting heuristic in this respect… as you just did.
It is probably worth pointing out that I’m an omnivore I’m not trying to start a big ole debate on vegetarianism. What I’m hoping to do is simply to encourage the separation of conclusions and data about animal minds that I’ve marked as “40% likely to be garbage” so it doesn’t contaminate very pragmatically worthwhile theoretical thinking about the nature of consciousness, morality, cognitive efficacy, and self-reflective or inter-subjective assessments of agency. I think you can say a lot that is very worthwhile in this area without ever mentioning animals. If you need to talk about animals then it is better to do so with care and citations, rather than casually in the concluding remarks.
I’m starting to think that not splitting up the word consciousness was a big mistake. I think that there are lots of very qualia-laden Animals that it’s very mean to hurt, but that said Animals probably wouldn’t talk about being conscious for reasons other than the fact that they don’t talk.
Conscious, but not self-aware. Humans do more things related to consciousness, which I’m going to talk about later.
I really like the term “qualia-laden” for picking out a specific property of an agent. Did you make that up?
My current guess is that with “human self-awareness” you’re trying to talk about whatever it is that the mirror test aims to measure. My guess would be that in the biological world all mirror-test-passers are qualia-laden, and that human intelligence (and possible future machine intelligences) do (or will) involve both of these properties but also many other things as well (like symbolic communication, etc). Is mirror-test-passing a helpful term, or does the fact that magpies pass the mirror test mean that it’s not what you’re trying to talk about?
I think I read in Daniel Gilbert’s Book “Stumbling on Happiness” a very good approximation to what I always thought an animal “thinks” like:
Imagine you’re reading a long text and your mind starts wandering and gets lost in shallow feelings like the warm weather or the sounds of the birds, while your eyes keep reading the letters. Suddenly you’re at the end of the paragraph and you realize that you can’t remember anything you just read… or did you actually read it at all? You look over it again and the words sure look familiar, but you simply can’t say for sure if you actually read the text. You were in fact reading it, but you weren’t consciously aware of the fact that you were reading it.
Being a dog is probably like letting your mind wander and never snapping out of that state, everything you do is as if it’s on autopilot without having to first pass the “semi-control” of a conscious observer/inhibitor/decision-maker who has a concept of a future that goes on beyond a few moments.
Not sure if that is really a fair caricature of an animal mind, but it’s my current model of how an animal mind functions.
I’m an omnivore who considers animals probably concious, but I also don’t understand the problem (other than medical with prions and such) with eating humans so I might not count.