Such good news. A large chunk of the continuum of life is getting some recognition as having consciousness. The rest will follow. Then I guess we will hve to tackle non living things.
Great post!
Consciousness: what it is, where it comes from, do machines can have it and why do we care?
- Thread starter Samson
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Great post!
Exactly! No more eating them without written permission from the motherload!
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.
Warm weather is one signal that guides the masting of beech trees, but now it appears that day length does more to determine the precise timing of the fruit release among European beeches.
Across a Continent, Trees Sync Their Fruiting to the Sun | Quanta Magazine
European beech trees more than 1,500 kilometers apart all drop their fruit at the same time in a grand synchronization event now linked to the summer solstice.www.quantamagazine.org
The obvious answer IMNSHO is trees have some level of consciousness that may even synchronize with their neighbors.near and far.
Narz
keeping it real
All life responds and adapts, how 'conscious' they are in the anthropomorphic sense who knows but clearly they have some awareness (you can't react without awareness)
Planetary rights!
Pluto should have had a chance to defend itself before Neil deGrasse Tyson took away its planetary status.
Ants perform life-saving amputations
Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) bite off injured nest mates’ limbs to save them from deadly infections. It’s the first example of animals other than humans performing such life-saving amputations. “The ant presents its injured leg and calmly sits there while another ant gnaws it off,” explains animal ecologist and study co-author Erik Frank. “As soon as the leg drops off, the ant presents the newly amputated wound and the other ant finishes the job by cleaning it.”
Video of amputation
Video of wound care
Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) bite off injured nest mates’ limbs to save them from deadly infections. It’s the first example of animals other than humans performing such life-saving amputations. “The ant presents its injured leg and calmly sits there while another ant gnaws it off,” explains animal ecologist and study co-author Erik Frank. “As soon as the leg drops off, the ant presents the newly amputated wound and the other ant finishes the job by cleaning it.”
Video of amputation
Video of wound care
What happens when either side of the body has lost at least two limbs or any central one?
Also, is there video of an ant moving with lost limb(s)? I am aware of the phase movement so it'd be interesting to see if they change the flow (central leg of one side moves together with the non-central legs of the other, in something approximating a 180 degree angle iirc). Maybe it'd be fluid movement if they lost symmetrically positioned limbs?
Ant Hellraiser: The ant doctor recommends symmetrical amputation.
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consciousness moves to insects....Awareness of self and others as individuals is pretty evident here. The continuum of consciousness is complex and all embracing. We are slowly mapping it.
I have thought that we underestimate the intelligence of communal insects, but I have always considered it a "hive" intelligence. This seems to indicate a extent of individual problem solving that looks quite like intelligence. How that related to consciousness is a whole other question.
Awareness of self and others as individuals is pretty evident here. The continuum of consciousness is complex and all embracing. We are slowly mapping it.
Does intelligence require consciousness?
Does consciousness require intelligence?
Could they be completely independent of one another?
What role does self-awareness play in consciousness, if any?
If consciousness is a continuum of increasing complexity how does that impact the development of cognitive capabilities?
There have been some models of ants as formal logic systems. Not that they are rigorous, but ultimately they present the colony as a system that uses its parts to materialize theorems (useful ant actions) out of axioms (ant biological programming).
Narz
keeping it real
Doesn't prove individual consciousness particularly. The cells in the human body interact with each other also but they're not conscious themselves.
Note : not saying ants aren't individually conscious but we can't say they are for sure either.
In before Birdjaguar comes along and claims the individual cells in your body are conscious ;P
Narz
keeping it real
The fact that an ant can causally present a limb to be gnawed off if anything leans me more towards automated like cells.
Or conscious but way tougher than me.
Or conscious but way tougher than me.
warpus
In pork I trust
This is how consciousness seems to be defined:
Some dogs seem to be aware of internal and external existence, as do many other species of animal.. or am I completely off on that? If I'm not, the bar for consciousness seems rather low. All you need is a complex enough neural processing pattern recognition thingy that we call the brain. Not all complex brains will lead to consciousness, but many will.
Where does it come from? Surely from our biological brains, in some capacity. Have you ever seen something conscious that doesn't have a brain? There seems to be a strict 1-to-1 correspondence between consciousness and a complex neural processing thingy. If you have that thingy, you can have consciousness. If you don't, you can't. Yeah, I get that this doesn't really answer the question of where exactly consciousness comes from. We don't understand the process and all the nuances of consciousness. But nevertheless, the neural-processing meatsack known as the brain sems to be the source.
No machines have consciousness yet. The "AI" you see in use today are just language processing models. They are not aware of anything, whether it's the external or internal.
Can machines have consciousness? Sure, I don't see why not. We are biological machines after all, are we not? There doesn't appear to be anything inherent to carbon-based biological constructs that a silicon-based or whatever-based machine couldn't replicate, in theory, assuming the chemistry and physics work and no natural laws get in the way. Could some natural law get in the way, something with the way chemistry works in our bodies that a machine couldn't replicate? Sure, but all you have to do then is build a machine brain out of the same parts that our brains are made of. So machines having a consciousness seems a possibility, assuming we can figure out how to construct such a thing. I suspect we will get there one day.
Why do we care? It helps us understand who and what we are. That's sort of an integral aspect of the human experience, it seems - analyzing our existence and the world we find ourselves in, what it all means, if anything, what we are, where we came from, where we're going, etc. Also the question of: "Are we unique, and if so, in which ways?". That's something philosophers and stoners have been asking for centuries.
Some dogs seem to be aware of internal and external existence, as do many other species of animal.. or am I completely off on that? If I'm not, the bar for consciousness seems rather low. All you need is a complex enough neural processing pattern recognition thingy that we call the brain. Not all complex brains will lead to consciousness, but many will.
Where does it come from? Surely from our biological brains, in some capacity. Have you ever seen something conscious that doesn't have a brain? There seems to be a strict 1-to-1 correspondence between consciousness and a complex neural processing thingy. If you have that thingy, you can have consciousness. If you don't, you can't. Yeah, I get that this doesn't really answer the question of where exactly consciousness comes from. We don't understand the process and all the nuances of consciousness. But nevertheless, the neural-processing meatsack known as the brain sems to be the source.
No machines have consciousness yet. The "AI" you see in use today are just language processing models. They are not aware of anything, whether it's the external or internal.
Can machines have consciousness? Sure, I don't see why not. We are biological machines after all, are we not? There doesn't appear to be anything inherent to carbon-based biological constructs that a silicon-based or whatever-based machine couldn't replicate, in theory, assuming the chemistry and physics work and no natural laws get in the way. Could some natural law get in the way, something with the way chemistry works in our bodies that a machine couldn't replicate? Sure, but all you have to do then is build a machine brain out of the same parts that our brains are made of. So machines having a consciousness seems a possibility, assuming we can figure out how to construct such a thing. I suspect we will get there one day.
Why do we care? It helps us understand who and what we are. That's sort of an integral aspect of the human experience, it seems - analyzing our existence and the world we find ourselves in, what it all means, if anything, what we are, where we came from, where we're going, etc. Also the question of: "Are we unique, and if so, in which ways?". That's something philosophers and stoners have been asking for centuries.
Those would be biological parts. For all we know, consciousness does require such. There's also the issue of whether you can effectively model the mind on a digital machine; all matter has the continuum as its property by default but a digital machine's lower level is based on distinct states.
Great post, and I may come back to more of it later, but to start at the top:
> Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence
It kind of seems to be just pushing the problem around a bit, or turning it into a circular argument. How do you define awareness such that it excludes the computers that run our lives without using some idea like consciousness?
warpus
In pork I trust
If consciousness requires biology, then it's feasible to imagine a future in which we have figured out how to assemble a biological being that's conscious. The proof that such a feat is possible is us (or a dog or dolphin or whatever conscious being you want to point to). All those beings are born and grow based on instructions embedded in DNA. A complex process to be sure, but it's possible to imagine a future in which we have perfected the technology to duplicate and/or control such a process to some degree. The main thing in the way appears to be complexity and the absurd scale at which this would have to be done (i.e. not just working with one molecule or a million molecules but a much grander process than that)
Personally I don't think the answer is modelling the mind. That's starting from the top and working down. I don't think that's going to work. We'd want to start at the bottom and work up - build something that will grow into a brain, using similar processes to how we grow as infants, and how our brains grow from 1 cell to what it ends up being.
Well, we know how computer programs work. They are not aware of anything, internal or external. They "understand" data that's fed into them, as defined by some set of parameters that's also fed into them. That isn't awareness, the same way a motion sensor isn't aware, it's simply detecting motion and turning on a light, based on some set of algorithms that define motion thresholds. There is nothing there that's internally thinking or wondering "Hey, I think that's a house over there, a stationary object" or "Hey, I'm thinking about myself, a motion detection system". None of that happens, there's no awareness. Contrast that with humans - we are constantly aware of external and internal existence, we think about it, we wonder about it, and we make decision based on this continued awareness.
"AI" systems we have in place today aren't aware the same way a motion detection system isn't aware. These are language processing systems that statistically figure out the right thing to say or draw. There's nothing there wondering: "I wonder what I am?" or "Hey look over there, a tree. I know what trees are, and that's one of them". It's just statistical language tricks, but no awareness.
One day the line between an actual general AI system being aware of its own internal existence and what that means might get a bit blurry. And that's the more interesting part of the conversation for me.. Where is that line? How would we know where to draw it? But as of now such AI systems or computer systems don't exist.
At this point I am not talking about AI, but more about the processing capacity of say an automated light house. It has sensory inputs, data storage and decision making. From the outside that would look very like a lighthouse with a human lighthouse keeper. How does the definition of "awareness" that the automated light house lacks usefully different from the "consciousness" it lacks?
Both are these fuzzy concepts that I cannot easily turn into objective definitions that can be applied to real world objects. In the OP there are at least one or two concepts that do manage that, but they seem to kind of define themselves out of usefulness. For example one required the ability to alter the world we live in on a global scale. That basically means nothing else can be consciousness until it has displaced us as the dominant entity on the planet, by which point our definition will be a mute point.
For example, sperm whales have a language complexity that rivals or exceeds our own, elephants have names for each other, ants do amputations and computers can past the Turing test. How does the definition of "awareness" vs. "consciousness" help us in saying how relevant any of those factors are?
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