To summarize my position: (anyone who’s going to answer, please answer before reading this):
Please don’t click this next spoiler if you haven’t replied like Richard did, unless you’re sure you’re not going to reply!
The only A that seems easily defensible to me is the last one, and I would put C for it. Everything else seems like it could quite plausibly have (potentially millionths or trillionths of human brain level) alien consciousness to me, B or better.
My answers:
first list (you answered): F, F, F, D, E, D, D, D, C, D, D, D, C, C
in fact, I left off one thing: a rock. This is, to my intuition, a special case of the “individual molecules” case, but is the only one where I’d put B rather than C—because how can a brain be conscious if individual molecules can’t be conscious? presumably whatever happens to the molecules in the brain that constitutes consciousness, the property still exists at the atomic scale, presumably something to do with either the bare fact of existence (hard problem of consciousness) or the way the molecule is currently interacting (integrated information theory type stuff). so I added a second list to cover this stuff, and here are my answers for it:
second list (added in response to your suggestion): E, E, E, E, E, E, E, C, A, D, D
that goes the other direction, claiming things about the whole because of a claim about a part. I’m claiming something about a part must somehow add up to the behavior of a whole.
To summarize my position: (anyone who’s going to answer, please answer before reading this):
Please don’t click this next spoiler if you haven’t replied like Richard did, unless you’re sure you’re not going to reply!
The only A that seems easily defensible to me is the last one, and I would put C for it. Everything else seems like it could quite plausibly have (potentially millionths or trillionths of human brain level) alien consciousness to me, B or better.
My answers:
first list (you answered): F, F, F, D, E, D, D, D, C, D, D, D, C, C
in fact, I left off one thing: a rock. This is, to my intuition, a special case of the “individual molecules” case, but is the only one where I’d put B rather than C—because how can a brain be conscious if individual molecules can’t be conscious? presumably whatever happens to the molecules in the brain that constitutes consciousness, the property still exists at the atomic scale, presumably something to do with either the bare fact of existence (hard problem of consciousness) or the way the molecule is currently interacting (integrated information theory type stuff). so I added a second list to cover this stuff, and here are my answers for it:
second list (added in response to your suggestion): E, E, E, E, E, E, E, C, A, D, D
There’s a name for that one.
that goes the other direction, claiming things about the whole because of a claim about a part. I’m claiming something about a part must somehow add up to the behavior of a whole.
Splitting hairs. If something true of each part is not true of the whole, then something true of the whole is not true of each part.
No part of a car is a car, yet there is the car. How this can be is not a deep problem.