Kristin Andrews, the York Research Chair in Animal Minds and a professor of philosophy at York University in Toronto, has penned a piece at Aeon on consciousness in what we often call 'lower' animals. (The title is a play on a famous piece by Thomas Nagel).
What she is describing is not particularly new: in 2018 we discussed it here in the context of birds. Their brains are not structured like ours very much, lacking things like grey matter, yet there are clear examples that we might recognize as proof of consciousness. I suggested that points to panpsychism, a theory I have embraced since at least 2011: that the world is conscious, and the brain is only a receiver of rather than the generator of consciousness. The "new law of nature" that has come about this year also points in that direction.
Her work is noteworthy in part for the formalization by scientists of Sebastian Rödl's suggestion that we would know that a being participates in the Order of Reason by recognizing that it is acting according to a rational chain of causality. In other words, we can see that it is doing things for reasons that are intelligible to us. Rödl, who wrote his English-language book from scratch because it was easier for him than trying to translate his work from the German originals, argues that consciousness is a necessary condition for reason. The scientists may or may not know his name -- I imagine that Dr. Andrews does -- but they are following his frame.
As she points out, "If future AI systems are anything like current AI systems, they will not have neurons, but they will closely resemble us in terms of linguistic behaviour." Would they also experience consciousness? The famous Turing test -- similar actually to Rödl's suggestion as well -- suggests only that we would have no reason to treat them as if they were not conscious, and every reason to assume that they might be. If the view I hold to is right, the only question is whether or not the things that AIs are made of are the kinds of things that could receive and interpret consciousness.
Many kinds of organic structures, which are living beings, can do so. Can a purely artificial one, one that is not alive nor made of living things? That's harder to say.
15 comments:
...we would know that a being participates in the Order of Reason by recognizing that it is acting according to a rational chain of causality. In other words, we can see that it is doing things for reasons that are intelligible to us.
That's certainly an Earth-centric view of consciousness. But what about creatures of other planets? They won't at all think like us, if only because they won't be biochemically organized like Earth life--might not even be organized around carbon/nitrogen/hydrogen/oxygen biochemistry.
That also has implications closer to home--whether AI can be conscious, or more basically, how would we know? AI isn't even organic.
Eric Hines
“They won't at all think like us, if only because they won't be biochemically organized like…”
That’s what we thought about birds, too. I’m suggesting that the order of reason may be universal regardless of how you tap into it. Consciousness can be received by at least several different organic structures.
AI is an interesting question. Can inorganics tap into it too, or only be trained to mimic it? How would we know, as you say?
Rödl, who wrote his English-language book from scratch because it was easier for him than trying to translate his work from the German originals ...
I met an American once who had written a bunch of articles in Japanese and a publishing house decided it wanted to publish a collection of them in English. He made them hire a translator because it is apparently quite a pain to translate your own stuff like that. I suspect one of the traps is that you start re-writing it (as opposed to translating it) in English (or the new target language) and inevitably it evolves from your original work, but I don't know that from first-hand experience.
That's an interesting article. Something odd was the survey of philosophers that found: "A majority of philosophers accept (or lean toward accepting) consciousness in adult humans (95.15 per cent), in cats (88.55 per cent), in newborn babies (84.34 per cent) ..."
So, 4.85% of philosophers don't think adult humans have consciousness? And more think cats have consciousness than newborn humans? Ok ...
I'm okay with at least considering the question of consciousness in living things of any kind. Why not? But I cannot see how non-living matter could even potentially be conscious. That said, I don't know what to think about AI ...
I do not really understand panpsychism. I guess I would ask what "world" and "consciousness" mean in that definition, for starters.
To expand a little, here's the introductory paragraph from Wikipedia: "In the philosophy of mind, panpsychism (/pænˈsaɪkɪzəm/) is the view that the mind or a mindlike aspect is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality. It is also described as a theory that 'the mind is a fundamental feature of the world which exists throughout the universe'."
Mind for me seems to depend on consciousness, so a rock could not have a mind. I don't know what "mindlike aspect" means, really, but it wouldn't seem that a rock could have any meaningful feature of the mind.
The second description, that mind is a fundamental feature of the world, doesn't make sense to me for much the same reason. If the world is not itself conscious, how can it have a mind?
OK. One more. From the Wikipedia article, it seems panpsychism was the default in Western philosophy in the 19th century. I also know that pantheism was common in the West at the same time.
So, they would seem to be connected. How do you see the relationship between them?
The next couple of days will be pretty busy, so I may not be back until Saturday to catch up on this thread.
"So, 4.85% of philosophers don't think adult humans have consciousness?"
The debate on the Zombie problem is what I think is going on here; it's that they've accepted the argument that we can't be sure.
"And more think cats have consciousness than newborn humans?"
This is a product of the abortion debate, which would like to hold (on one side) that it's OK to kill things that aren't conscious (well, babies; not so much people in comas, though some euthenasia advocates argue for that too).
So it's helpful to believe that 'consciousness' arises later in the process. An adult cat? Sure. A newborn? Well, they were a fetus five minutes ago.
"I do not really understand panpsychism. I guess I would ask what 'world' and 'consciousness' mean in that definition, for starters."
You'll have advanced a long way in your understanding by the time you grasp the answers. The Neoplatonists in particular will stretch your mind quite a bit by the time you've worked through even their most basic arguments. It's fairly dense philosophy.
But you don't need to do that to get the basic idea, because it's what everyone believes when they are a child (cf. Chesterton on the wisdom of children in grasping metaphysical points). Children talk to the trees, they talk to the sky, they talk to the rocks, they talk to little animals. They believe these conversations are worth having because they're engaging with things that are aware in some sense, and it's a way of showing respect and friendship to creation.
There's a lot of more advanced work to do (e.g., is 'the sky' an entity in the same way that an organism like 'a tree' is, or indeed in any sense at all?). Starting there gives you enough to go along with.
"From the Wikipedia article, it seems panpsychism was the default in Western philosophy in the 19th century. I also know that pantheism was common in the West at the same time. So, they would seem to be connected. How do you see the relationship between them?"
There is no necessary relationship between them. You needn't believe that a tree is a god in order to believe that it has some sort of consciousness. You could of course decide to worship the tree, but there's no special reason that you should.
Perhaps you were thinking of panenthism, though: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panentheism/
CS Lewis tried to imagine what consciousness might be like for a nonhuman animal, specifically a tame bear:
"Mr Bultitude's mind was as furry and unhuman in shape as his body. He did not remember, as a man in his situation would have remembered, the provincial zoo from which he had escaped during a fire, nor his first snarling and terrified arrival at the Manor, nor the slow stages whereby he had learned to love and trust its inhabitants. He did not know that he loved and trusted them now. He did not know that they were people, nor that he was a bear...everything that is represented by the words I and Me and Thou was absent from his mind. When Mrs Maggs gave him a tin of golden syrup, as she did every Sunday morning, he did not recognize either a giver or a recipient. Goodness occurred and he tasted it. And that was all. Hence his loves might, if you wished, all be described as cupboard loves: food and warmth, hands that caressed, voices tha reassured, were their objects. But if by a cupboard love you meant something cold or calculating you would be quite misunderstanding the real quality of the beast's sensations. He was no more like a human egoist than he was like a human altruist. There was no prose in his life. The appetencies which a human mind might disdain as cupboard loves were for him quivering and ecstatic aspirations which absorbed his whole being, infinite yearnings, stabbed with the threat of tragedy and shot through with the colours of Paradise. One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the Absolute...Sometimes there returns to us from infancy the memory of a nameless delight or terror, attached to any dlightful or dreadful thing, a potent adjective floating in a nounless void, a pure quality. At such moments we have experience of the shallows of that pool. But fathoms deeper than any memory can take us, right down in the central warmth and dimness, the bear lived all its life."
I've been letting this percolate over the weekend, but I don't have any insights. I have no time to do the reading necessary to really understand this, so I have to let the larger understanding go.
I like your 'wisdom of children' idea; that's helpful. The point that doesn't make sense for me is how non-living things could have minds or participate in some grand Mind. But I can let that go. For what it's worth, I remember talking to animals and trees as a child, but not rocks or the sky, so maybe this is a longstanding defect in my character.
With pantheism, my understanding is that a tree is not seen as a god, but rather that the material world as a whole is God. So, a tree is one aspect of God, but not a separate god. We hear this whenever people talk about the universe wanting or doing something, although they probably are not intellectually pantheistic. To some extent, it's become a figure of speech, I think.
I didn't really mean panentheism. The similarity I saw was in "everything is X" - everything is God / everything is mind. Seems similar, and, knowing that pantheism was common among 19th century Western intellectuals and reading that panpsychism was common among 19th century Western philosophers, I thought there might be a connection.
David, that's very interesting. I'd like to read the rest of what Lewis wrote on that.
“With pantheism, my understanding is that a tree is not seen as a god, but rather that the material world as a whole is God.”
I think that is panentheism: not a belief in many gods, but a belief that God is in all things.
Generally the distinction between that and both Christian theology and Neoplatonic metaphysics — which is panpsychic — is the transcendence of God (or the One, in pagan Neoplatonism; but St Augustine was a Neoplatonist in his early years as well). God isn’t in all things, nor are all things part of God; rather, God produces a world that is distinct from Himself, though he is necessary to its production and sustenance.
There are a number of forms of both, but I think in pantheism, the universe is God - there is no distinction between the two, while in panentheism, God is in the universe, but still maintains a distinct identity.
From the SEP article you linked on panentheism:
"Panentheism considers God and the world to be inter-related with the world being in God and God being in the world. While panentheism offers an increasingly popular alternative to classical theism, both panentheism and classical theistic systems affirm divine transcendence and immanence. But, classical theistic systems by prioritizing the difference between God and the world reject any influence by the world upon God while panentheism affirms the world’s influence upon God."
From the SEP article on pantheism:
"At its most general, pantheism may be understood either (a) positively, as the view that God is identical with the cosmos (i.e., the view that there exists nothing which is outside of God), or (b) negatively, as the rejection of any view that considers God as distinct from the universe."
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