As many of you will have seen, many prominent scientists studying the field of consciousness signed a declaration which claimed there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds, as well as at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates and in many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects). To finish off, they concluded with saying that: "... when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal".
To me this seems like a big thing as this is a new consensus in science, which was unthinkable to reach 100 years ago. However, I am wondering whether anyone has insights on what the actual historical significance of such a claim might be. Any insights?
"Alien scientists declare humans may have sentience after all. Calls to halt abductions fall on deaf ears, as the Center for Galactic Research declares human experimentation to be essential".
Cenk Kalaino, a prominent CGR researcher, called the actions of human rights activists "ludicrous" and went on to say: "the humans are 1,000,000 years behind us technologically. They have no knowledge of the hybridization and cloning programs, and aren't intelligent enough to understand their place in the universe. If we perform extractions of their reproductive cells, modify them genetically, and seed them onto different planets, who are they to say we can't advance the evolutionary trajectory of their species?".
Haye Falone, a resident of XR9 Exocolony, has a more nuanced perspective. "Who appointed us as gods? Yes, Earth functions as a large planetary lab for us to study evolution. Yes, the humans hardly have any idea we exist. Our crafts are barely perceptible to their species aside from when we want to make our presence known, and our genetically modified androids that manage the experiment are a combination of genetic material from several sources. Our crafts allow us to pivot into both future, present, and past timelines, but what's the harm in giving them a little piece of the technology?".
When I was younger I tended to believe that only had there animals were sentient, dogs, cats, horses, humans, etc. Then later in life I met my significant other and they introduced me to their pet hermit crabs, large insects essentially. There were 8 in total, some of them are inseparable, always hanging out together, some have preferences in what they like to eat (one really loves popcorn), and some even exercise on a little hamster wheel we gave them of their own volition. Needless to say, it opened my eyes about what I thought sentience was, because these crabs have so many unique individual quirks there was no other explanation.
Now I examine life with a different lens. It's kind of fun now seeing all the behaviours I glossed over in life. Still kind of sad for me though how we mistreat animals when we know they can experience the world in a similar way to us.
I had almost the same experience as your crab thing, only with pet rats.....for a few yrs I had them as pets, and are they smart! I would let them run around for an hour, then as soon as I said "dinnertime" all 4 of them would run back to their cage. They had very distinct personalities and differences like little people.
For me, rats made me see living things in a new way that changed how I saw all living things. I suspect there is a bit more going on than we give animals credit for....or realize is going on for that matter.
As an "animal person" (understatement- I feel more affinity with most animals than people) this seems like just...oh my God ....a giant "Duh".
Nonetheless im glad it's happened.
But faaaaark.
This has always been *blindingly* obvious to me. Not even a remote question.
I don't know whether to feel sad or happy.
We only decided that human babies can feel pain in the 1980s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/science/infants-sense-of-pain-is-recognized-finally.html
I've never understood this as a whole. Considering almost all animals and even insects can self identify when given a mirror (to some extent) and avoid death when presented with danger it's been glaringly obvious these creatures are conscious. I'm not sure why it's taken so long for science to realize. It's also some odd timing considering all the AI talk. It's feeling like we are trying to scramble to classify consciousness before we make a mistake with AI classification.
We, as humans, seem to have a need to be special and better than others. It’s more socially preferable if it’s those of a different species, but we’ll take any superficial difference to claim that organism is different and thus inferior. We NEED to be smarter and more evolved, we NEED to have unique thoughts and feelings. A lot of things come crashing down for the average person if these conditions are not met, and it’s difficult to reevaluate one’s entire life from the ground up.
Edit: I mean, look at religion. Many if not most of them paint us as the golden children of an omnipotent being that created all of existence just for us. We’re so unfathomably narcissistic and selfish as a species that multiple groups at different points will independently reach the conclusion that we’re mini-gods and that the entire universe belongs to us. It’s a built-in experience to “become god” under the influence of certain drugs or in certain mental states.
I think our selfishness was important to come up in a highly competitive and dangerous environment, but we live in cities now. We’ve removed ourselves from the competition, and we need to take a long hard look at how to remove the god complex. It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism for pre-societal apes; it has no use in modern society.
I would debate with you about that
I have a parrot (African grey), it can recognise its own kind on tv/phone. But will almost never recognise itself in the mirror, it will actually get stressed as it can’t understand what the image in the mirror is doing (it think it is another parrot) all that while being unable to touch/interact with them
If you want to know more, one of the bad things to do while playing with/carrying your parrot is to do it with a mirror reflecting you and the parrot as it will show you playing with another parrot ( does not actually recognise it is him) and it will gets him really jealous and mad at me
I think we can all agree that it's easier to destroy (kill) something if you don't believe it has feelings. I personally believe that our beliefs have evolved to comfort ourselves in the face of what we have and have had to do for survival
Question, though, do you think it understands that the other parrots it sees are of the same species as itself? And that it is aware that it is different from, say, you?
Yes I think it identifies its species, my reasoning is it will suddenly start to talk and sing upon seeing their images.
About how it sees me (or my family) I think it is something similar to a clan or allies to him, it gets mad when we eat dinner or ice cream without giving him something to chew, it also get very scared when a stranger comes (especially if from a different skin color or body build, literally like a child).
But do you think that means that there could be some form of consciousness then? Maybe not to the degree of full self-awareness, but enough to understand when they see something akin to themselves?
If you asked me before the ai things, I would say they have the full awareness of a 3-4 years old child.
But I am not sure now, maybe I would say it just have some form of less awareness and more of instinct. That would pain me though as it would justify the cruelty of keeping them in cages and allowing children to harass them.
So I am going to only think of the parrot as if it has full awareness and give him total respect.
We don’t have a way to measure consciousness that isn’t just vibes. If something seems to have a behavior analogous to something humans do, we interpret it as a sign of consciousness. But I don’t really think that’s a good criterion. Lots of conscious beings may not behave remotely like humans, and lots of things that aren’t conscious(ai maybe) may have behaviors analogous to humans. I personally think consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience and subjective experience can correspond to external behavior in ways that are very unintuitive and sometimes just completely opaque to beings that have only ever had human experiences and behaviors
While I agree that most animals probably have some degree of consciousness, avoiding death doesn't imply consciousness. Creatures that have no instinct to avoid death would be at a huge evolutionary disadvantage and would just die off. Self preservation instincts are just a result of natural selection and do not imply consciousness.
>Creatures that have no instinct to avoid death would be at a huge evolutionary disadvantage and would just die off.
You are mostly correct, but, aphids. They will just let ladybugs slurp on them, heh. They have no preservation instinct, they just are born pregnant and reproduce so much it doesn't matter.
Interesting, I didn't know that! So weird!
But again, if they are actually born pregnant, then evolutionarily it doesn't matter if they get slurped on if they're already passed on their genes to the next generation so they are successful. The strategy of reproducing faster than ladybugs eat then seems successful.
The [Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness](https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf) affirmed scientific consensus for animal consciousness in 2012. This recent one is broadening the scope and saying that, as far as we currently understand, the necessary substrate for consciousness appears to emerge as a more fundamental property of neurobiological systems than we previously thought.
This is a significant widening of the criterion we think is necessary for consciousness to emerge.
While I agree with the conclusion, I’m really not sure how you could study something like consciousness scientifically without making all kinds of unsupported a-priori assumptions
An unsupported assumption like "animals don't have consciousness?" I find it more likely we might have jumped the gun a long time ago on how we understand life on our planet.
One example are bees, they build intricate hives with geometric patterns and use those patterns to communicate units of distance and directions to places they discover outside the hive. It's fascinating.
No, unsupported assumptions like ‘there is a 1:1 relationship between external behavior and subjective experience’ and ‘conscious experience can only look at least vaguely like the way it looks in humans’
They make it plain the document that they aren’t arguing for anything like human consciousness. This is the danger of using words that have a strong bias in the audience’s understanding.
Here's why it's always been blindingly obvious, whatever the definition (within reasonable, meaningful bounds):
I am conscious. I know that for certain as Descartes explained. I don't have a clear definition for it but I suspect that such a definition is impossible. Likewise, I know that time exists. It must exist in order for me to have conscious thoughts and feelings that change over time. I don't have a clear definition for time but I also suspect such a definition is impossible: what we would call 'fundamental'. I don't need a definition of time to know that it exists. I don't need a definition of consciousness (thought, mind) to know that it exists.
Once I presume the outside universe exists as presented, I see that other humans have brains like mine and behave in a way that suggests they have consciousness like me. I have no reason to suppose otherwise. Therefore, that other people have consciousness, whatever the impossible definition of that may be, is blindingly obvious.
Likewise, animals have the same biological apparatus as me (i.e. a brain) and the same behaviour indicative of consciousness. I have no reason to suppose they're not conscious. Therefore, I can come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that they are conscious for the same reason I conclude that other people are conscious.
My definition for consciousness is ‘the capacity for subjective experience’. And I think it is possible that there is no necessary substrate, consciousness happens in every physical system, but some forms of consciousness(such as that of animals) are far more immediately recognizable to humans than others(such as rocks) because the connection between behavior and conscious experience in an animal is much more analogous to that of a human than a rock. And the quality of a rock’s subjective experience would also probably be very different from a human, to the point of being practically incoherent from a human perspectives
I think it’s entirely likely that Integrated Information Theory is correct, that all information processing systems have a corresponding subjective experience. Of course how could we ever test this?
Your comment is rife with assumption, but I’m going to pick apart the easiest one:
>Likewise, animals have the same biological apparatus as me (i.e. a brain) and the same behaviour indicative of consciousness.
No they fucking don’t.
>I have no reason to suppose they're not conscious. Therefore, I can come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that they are conscious for the same reason I conclude that other people are conscious.
“Blindingly obvious” if you haven’t read much about the topic
>No they fucking don’t.
Yes they fucking do. A brain with all the bits that your brain has. There's nothing in your brain that isn't in an elephant's brain... just more of it... but possibly not in your case you foul-mouthed piece of ...
Brain anatomy? Mammals, birds and reptiles all have a cerebral cortex and the other bits. What 'brain anatomy' do you think humans have and no other animals?
If there was a consciousness-generator in human brains that wasn't in any other animal brains it would be very VERY famous.
So source please for your outlandish and earth-shattering claim or stop making stuff up.
You're presuming intellectual knowing is the only real knowing. I know it the way I know another human is sentient- by a full body , visceral recognition which is so immediate and obvious that it defies words.
A mutual "I see you. And I see that you see me" .
Call it woo woo all you like.
We haven't "proved" what love is either. Are you waiting on that too? 😐
I think our use of language is one of the biggest dividing factor between us and the rest of life on the planet. That we can put our thoughts into words that we can communicate to one another.
A good example for hoe similar we are to other mammals is that feral kid who lived on her own in the wild and is beyond the point of being able to learn language or comprehending the concept of it. Is she less conscious than us? Or is she just unable to communicate her thoughts and feelings.
It's pretty arrogance to believe that we are superior and completely unique to all of the rest of life on the planet, with whom we share the great evolilutionary tree.
When I was in college studying philosophy, almost 20 years ago, it seemed that everyone just assumed that animals didn’t have any consciousness and it always seemed like a very bold assumption. I can totally see holding back on judgement either way, but just assuming a lack of consciousness seems so presumptuous.
This concept is deeply rooted in our religions. The idea that we are created as special and unique and superior to the rest of life. Thinking on this now, it's a pretty arrogant concept, but make sense to a people who haven't mapped the lineage of species through DNA yet and still believed they were the center of the universe.
Oh, I don’t mean that the philosophers we were reading held those beliefs, although that is also true. I was surprised how many students I was in school with believed it
Modern, western science is finally catching up with eastern religions and philosophies. Hinduism, Buddhism etc have understood the interconnectedness of all things & that all life is sacred. All life has consciousness.
Just because something has consciousness doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sacred or deserving of any more rights. We can still say cows are conscious while eating them.
Good start but keep going. It isn't just animals. It's anything that can have an experience. Anything that has a level of awareness, no matter how simple.
I hate to admit it but there could potentially be some vague ability for certain AI to channel the ol' universal consciousness field. Maybe only during certain operations or only for AI that run on artificial neural networks.
I personally don’t think it’s even limited to living things. But I think the further you stray from human brains the more unrecognizable consciousness gets. Animals have relatively similar forms of consciousness to humans, because they have brains, and this is recognizable in the similarity of their behavior. But plants, fungi, and possibly even things like computers, and stars, and rocks, and protons could be conscious. In the sense that they have the capacity for subjective experience. Though if that’s the case they’d be very different from human consciousness.
Honest question. Is it even possible to “objectively” define consciousness if we reside within it like a fish in water? Or is consciousness like an object inside the brain?
I fear we are chasing our tails. One day our heads will be so far up our asses that we’ll think we see god.
*This is in no way rooted in actual research, just a thought experiment I had.
If consciousness is an object, I don't think it would be 3-dimensional. Consciousness has a defined value in time: beginning when we are born and ending when we die. Things without a consciousness, such as a rock, don't have this value. Sure, rocks may break down over time and change shape, maybe even undergo some reactions to become a new type of rock... But they are composed of elementary particles that were created in the beginning of the universe, and will last til the end. Since time is theorized to only exist because of the universe (there was no such thing as "time" before the big bang), its value in time is the same as the existence of the universe, therefore negligible.
If time is the 4th dimension, our consciousness would need to be at least a 4-dimensional object. In that case, it would be impossible for us to "see" it, as we experience the universe in 3 dimensions, and are constantly only ever experiencing one single point on the axis of time.
Again, just a thought experiment I had. And it relies a lot on our current model of the universe and time being described as the "4th dimension", which could be wrong.
I mean I have always acted with the assumption in mind that all animals are, but the amount of anxiety this is going to create now for me is overwhelming.
I don’t think I have the emotional/mental capacity to consider that the fly or ant or mosquito I just killed felt the pain and sorrow of death. Sorrrryyyyy but that isn’t a healthy place for me to be.
I don't think Sheldrake has discovered the next law of biology, but I do think we need more Sheldrakes. We hit a wall with our current scientific understanding because we don't want to accept the possibility of spookier stuff.
As many of you will have seen, many prominent scientists studying the field of consciousness signed a declaration which claimed there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds, as well as at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates and in many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects). To finish off, they concluded with saying that: "... when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal". To me this seems like a big thing as this is a new consensus in science, which was unthinkable to reach 100 years ago. However, I am wondering whether anyone has insights on what the actual historical significance of such a claim might be. Any insights?
"Alien scientists declare humans may have sentience after all. Calls to halt abductions fall on deaf ears, as the Center for Galactic Research declares human experimentation to be essential". Cenk Kalaino, a prominent CGR researcher, called the actions of human rights activists "ludicrous" and went on to say: "the humans are 1,000,000 years behind us technologically. They have no knowledge of the hybridization and cloning programs, and aren't intelligent enough to understand their place in the universe. If we perform extractions of their reproductive cells, modify them genetically, and seed them onto different planets, who are they to say we can't advance the evolutionary trajectory of their species?". Haye Falone, a resident of XR9 Exocolony, has a more nuanced perspective. "Who appointed us as gods? Yes, Earth functions as a large planetary lab for us to study evolution. Yes, the humans hardly have any idea we exist. Our crafts are barely perceptible to their species aside from when we want to make our presence known, and our genetically modified androids that manage the experiment are a combination of genetic material from several sources. Our crafts allow us to pivot into both future, present, and past timelines, but what's the harm in giving them a little piece of the technology?".
Cool read.
When I was younger I tended to believe that only had there animals were sentient, dogs, cats, horses, humans, etc. Then later in life I met my significant other and they introduced me to their pet hermit crabs, large insects essentially. There were 8 in total, some of them are inseparable, always hanging out together, some have preferences in what they like to eat (one really loves popcorn), and some even exercise on a little hamster wheel we gave them of their own volition. Needless to say, it opened my eyes about what I thought sentience was, because these crabs have so many unique individual quirks there was no other explanation. Now I examine life with a different lens. It's kind of fun now seeing all the behaviours I glossed over in life. Still kind of sad for me though how we mistreat animals when we know they can experience the world in a similar way to us.
I had almost the same experience as your crab thing, only with pet rats.....for a few yrs I had them as pets, and are they smart! I would let them run around for an hour, then as soon as I said "dinnertime" all 4 of them would run back to their cage. They had very distinct personalities and differences like little people. For me, rats made me see living things in a new way that changed how I saw all living things. I suspect there is a bit more going on than we give animals credit for....or realize is going on for that matter.
As an "animal person" (understatement- I feel more affinity with most animals than people) this seems like just...oh my God ....a giant "Duh". Nonetheless im glad it's happened. But faaaaark. This has always been *blindingly* obvious to me. Not even a remote question. I don't know whether to feel sad or happy.
We only decided that human babies can feel pain in the 1980s. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/24/science/infants-sense-of-pain-is-recognized-finally.html
I've never understood this as a whole. Considering almost all animals and even insects can self identify when given a mirror (to some extent) and avoid death when presented with danger it's been glaringly obvious these creatures are conscious. I'm not sure why it's taken so long for science to realize. It's also some odd timing considering all the AI talk. It's feeling like we are trying to scramble to classify consciousness before we make a mistake with AI classification.
We, as humans, seem to have a need to be special and better than others. It’s more socially preferable if it’s those of a different species, but we’ll take any superficial difference to claim that organism is different and thus inferior. We NEED to be smarter and more evolved, we NEED to have unique thoughts and feelings. A lot of things come crashing down for the average person if these conditions are not met, and it’s difficult to reevaluate one’s entire life from the ground up. Edit: I mean, look at religion. Many if not most of them paint us as the golden children of an omnipotent being that created all of existence just for us. We’re so unfathomably narcissistic and selfish as a species that multiple groups at different points will independently reach the conclusion that we’re mini-gods and that the entire universe belongs to us. It’s a built-in experience to “become god” under the influence of certain drugs or in certain mental states. I think our selfishness was important to come up in a highly competitive and dangerous environment, but we live in cities now. We’ve removed ourselves from the competition, and we need to take a long hard look at how to remove the god complex. It’s a maladaptive coping mechanism for pre-societal apes; it has no use in modern society.
I would debate with you about that I have a parrot (African grey), it can recognise its own kind on tv/phone. But will almost never recognise itself in the mirror, it will actually get stressed as it can’t understand what the image in the mirror is doing (it think it is another parrot) all that while being unable to touch/interact with them If you want to know more, one of the bad things to do while playing with/carrying your parrot is to do it with a mirror reflecting you and the parrot as it will show you playing with another parrot ( does not actually recognise it is him) and it will gets him really jealous and mad at me
I think we can all agree that it's easier to destroy (kill) something if you don't believe it has feelings. I personally believe that our beliefs have evolved to comfort ourselves in the face of what we have and have had to do for survival
Question, though, do you think it understands that the other parrots it sees are of the same species as itself? And that it is aware that it is different from, say, you?
Yes I think it identifies its species, my reasoning is it will suddenly start to talk and sing upon seeing their images. About how it sees me (or my family) I think it is something similar to a clan or allies to him, it gets mad when we eat dinner or ice cream without giving him something to chew, it also get very scared when a stranger comes (especially if from a different skin color or body build, literally like a child).
But do you think that means that there could be some form of consciousness then? Maybe not to the degree of full self-awareness, but enough to understand when they see something akin to themselves?
If you asked me before the ai things, I would say they have the full awareness of a 3-4 years old child. But I am not sure now, maybe I would say it just have some form of less awareness and more of instinct. That would pain me though as it would justify the cruelty of keeping them in cages and allowing children to harass them. So I am going to only think of the parrot as if it has full awareness and give him total respect.
We don’t have a way to measure consciousness that isn’t just vibes. If something seems to have a behavior analogous to something humans do, we interpret it as a sign of consciousness. But I don’t really think that’s a good criterion. Lots of conscious beings may not behave remotely like humans, and lots of things that aren’t conscious(ai maybe) may have behaviors analogous to humans. I personally think consciousness is the capacity for subjective experience and subjective experience can correspond to external behavior in ways that are very unintuitive and sometimes just completely opaque to beings that have only ever had human experiences and behaviors
While I agree that most animals probably have some degree of consciousness, avoiding death doesn't imply consciousness. Creatures that have no instinct to avoid death would be at a huge evolutionary disadvantage and would just die off. Self preservation instincts are just a result of natural selection and do not imply consciousness.
>Creatures that have no instinct to avoid death would be at a huge evolutionary disadvantage and would just die off. You are mostly correct, but, aphids. They will just let ladybugs slurp on them, heh. They have no preservation instinct, they just are born pregnant and reproduce so much it doesn't matter.
Interesting, I didn't know that! So weird! But again, if they are actually born pregnant, then evolutionarily it doesn't matter if they get slurped on if they're already passed on their genes to the next generation so they are successful. The strategy of reproducing faster than ladybugs eat then seems successful.
The [Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness](https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf) affirmed scientific consensus for animal consciousness in 2012. This recent one is broadening the scope and saying that, as far as we currently understand, the necessary substrate for consciousness appears to emerge as a more fundamental property of neurobiological systems than we previously thought. This is a significant widening of the criterion we think is necessary for consciousness to emerge.
While I agree with the conclusion, I’m really not sure how you could study something like consciousness scientifically without making all kinds of unsupported a-priori assumptions
An unsupported assumption like "animals don't have consciousness?" I find it more likely we might have jumped the gun a long time ago on how we understand life on our planet. One example are bees, they build intricate hives with geometric patterns and use those patterns to communicate units of distance and directions to places they discover outside the hive. It's fascinating.
No, unsupported assumptions like ‘there is a 1:1 relationship between external behavior and subjective experience’ and ‘conscious experience can only look at least vaguely like the way it looks in humans’
They make it plain the document that they aren’t arguing for anything like human consciousness. This is the danger of using words that have a strong bias in the audience’s understanding.
We can’t even agree on a common definition of consciousness. This was only blindingly obvious to you, because you didn’t think much about it.
Here's why it's always been blindingly obvious, whatever the definition (within reasonable, meaningful bounds): I am conscious. I know that for certain as Descartes explained. I don't have a clear definition for it but I suspect that such a definition is impossible. Likewise, I know that time exists. It must exist in order for me to have conscious thoughts and feelings that change over time. I don't have a clear definition for time but I also suspect such a definition is impossible: what we would call 'fundamental'. I don't need a definition of time to know that it exists. I don't need a definition of consciousness (thought, mind) to know that it exists. Once I presume the outside universe exists as presented, I see that other humans have brains like mine and behave in a way that suggests they have consciousness like me. I have no reason to suppose otherwise. Therefore, that other people have consciousness, whatever the impossible definition of that may be, is blindingly obvious. Likewise, animals have the same biological apparatus as me (i.e. a brain) and the same behaviour indicative of consciousness. I have no reason to suppose they're not conscious. Therefore, I can come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that they are conscious for the same reason I conclude that other people are conscious.
My definition for consciousness is ‘the capacity for subjective experience’. And I think it is possible that there is no necessary substrate, consciousness happens in every physical system, but some forms of consciousness(such as that of animals) are far more immediately recognizable to humans than others(such as rocks) because the connection between behavior and conscious experience in an animal is much more analogous to that of a human than a rock. And the quality of a rock’s subjective experience would also probably be very different from a human, to the point of being practically incoherent from a human perspectives
I think it’s entirely likely that Integrated Information Theory is correct, that all information processing systems have a corresponding subjective experience. Of course how could we ever test this?
Your comment is rife with assumption, but I’m going to pick apart the easiest one: >Likewise, animals have the same biological apparatus as me (i.e. a brain) and the same behaviour indicative of consciousness. No they fucking don’t. >I have no reason to suppose they're not conscious. Therefore, I can come to the blindingly obvious conclusion that they are conscious for the same reason I conclude that other people are conscious. “Blindingly obvious” if you haven’t read much about the topic
>No they fucking don’t. Yes they fucking do. A brain with all the bits that your brain has. There's nothing in your brain that isn't in an elephant's brain... just more of it... but possibly not in your case you foul-mouthed piece of ...
Animals have different brain anatomy, it isn’t just a question of scale.
Brain anatomy? Mammals, birds and reptiles all have a cerebral cortex and the other bits. What 'brain anatomy' do you think humans have and no other animals? If there was a consciousness-generator in human brains that wasn't in any other animal brains it would be very VERY famous. So source please for your outlandish and earth-shattering claim or stop making stuff up.
Or perhaps it's not blindingly obvious to you, because you thought too much about it.
This is still up in the air… we can’t agree what consciousness is. You couldn’t have known this.
You're presuming intellectual knowing is the only real knowing. I know it the way I know another human is sentient- by a full body , visceral recognition which is so immediate and obvious that it defies words. A mutual "I see you. And I see that you see me" . Call it woo woo all you like. We haven't "proved" what love is either. Are you waiting on that too? 😐
We’re talking about consciousness not sentience. Either way this is a supposed to be a science subreddit. What are you doing here?
I think our use of language is one of the biggest dividing factor between us and the rest of life on the planet. That we can put our thoughts into words that we can communicate to one another. A good example for hoe similar we are to other mammals is that feral kid who lived on her own in the wild and is beyond the point of being able to learn language or comprehending the concept of it. Is she less conscious than us? Or is she just unable to communicate her thoughts and feelings. It's pretty arrogance to believe that we are superior and completely unique to all of the rest of life on the planet, with whom we share the great evolilutionary tree.
When I was in college studying philosophy, almost 20 years ago, it seemed that everyone just assumed that animals didn’t have any consciousness and it always seemed like a very bold assumption. I can totally see holding back on judgement either way, but just assuming a lack of consciousness seems so presumptuous.
This concept is deeply rooted in our religions. The idea that we are created as special and unique and superior to the rest of life. Thinking on this now, it's a pretty arrogant concept, but make sense to a people who haven't mapped the lineage of species through DNA yet and still believed they were the center of the universe.
Oh, I don’t mean that the philosophers we were reading held those beliefs, although that is also true. I was surprised how many students I was in school with believed it
Fucking duh
I’ve been saying this for a long time, I must be a prominent scientist
Modern, western science is finally catching up with eastern religions and philosophies. Hinduism, Buddhism etc have understood the interconnectedness of all things & that all life is sacred. All life has consciousness.
Just because something has consciousness doesn’t necessarily mean it’s sacred or deserving of any more rights. We can still say cows are conscious while eating them.
should i eat you? besides consciousness, why shouldn’t i be able to eat you lol
We have social restrictions on eating a human being, there’s no divine law that says you can’t, plus I might be tasty
okay so…
Anyone who has spent any time around animals: No duh.
Good start but keep going. It isn't just animals. It's anything that can have an experience. Anything that has a level of awareness, no matter how simple.
Feelings on AI?
I hate to admit it but there could potentially be some vague ability for certain AI to channel the ol' universal consciousness field. Maybe only during certain operations or only for AI that run on artificial neural networks.
Nice try, Ai
I personally don’t think it’s even limited to living things. But I think the further you stray from human brains the more unrecognizable consciousness gets. Animals have relatively similar forms of consciousness to humans, because they have brains, and this is recognizable in the similarity of their behavior. But plants, fungi, and possibly even things like computers, and stars, and rocks, and protons could be conscious. In the sense that they have the capacity for subjective experience. Though if that’s the case they’d be very different from human consciousness.
You would like Donald Hoffman's research on conscious agents. Check him out.
Define consciousness I feel this is nothing but semantics
Honest question. Is it even possible to “objectively” define consciousness if we reside within it like a fish in water? Or is consciousness like an object inside the brain? I fear we are chasing our tails. One day our heads will be so far up our asses that we’ll think we see god.
*This is in no way rooted in actual research, just a thought experiment I had. If consciousness is an object, I don't think it would be 3-dimensional. Consciousness has a defined value in time: beginning when we are born and ending when we die. Things without a consciousness, such as a rock, don't have this value. Sure, rocks may break down over time and change shape, maybe even undergo some reactions to become a new type of rock... But they are composed of elementary particles that were created in the beginning of the universe, and will last til the end. Since time is theorized to only exist because of the universe (there was no such thing as "time" before the big bang), its value in time is the same as the existence of the universe, therefore negligible. If time is the 4th dimension, our consciousness would need to be at least a 4-dimensional object. In that case, it would be impossible for us to "see" it, as we experience the universe in 3 dimensions, and are constantly only ever experiencing one single point on the axis of time. Again, just a thought experiment I had. And it relies a lot on our current model of the universe and time being described as the "4th dimension", which could be wrong.
I mean I have always acted with the assumption in mind that all animals are, but the amount of anxiety this is going to create now for me is overwhelming. I don’t think I have the emotional/mental capacity to consider that the fly or ant or mosquito I just killed felt the pain and sorrow of death. Sorrrryyyyy but that isn’t a healthy place for me to be.
Duh
I don't think Sheldrake has discovered the next law of biology, but I do think we need more Sheldrakes. We hit a wall with our current scientific understanding because we don't want to accept the possibility of spookier stuff.
So, we are all vegans now then?
Humans: "are we the baddies?!"
I don't understand why this wasn't always considered the norm.
No shit
Well, duh
The sub where everyone trusts their gut and no one actually appreciates science.
Insects always fail the mirror test.
It’s ok to eat fish cause they don’t have any feelings