>I understand that we may not have demonstrated to a level of absolutely provable certainty that bats are definitely conscious, but they

We haven't even demonstrated some modest evidence that humans are conscious. No one has bothered to put in any effort to define consciousness in a way that is empirically/objectively testable. It is a null concept.

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goatlover 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Qualia is the philosophical term for subjective sensations and feelings. It's what our experiences consist of. Why must a concept be empirical and objective? Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.

Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example. We know there are animals that have sensory capabilities we don't. But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

>Why must a concept be empirical and objective?

You are an LLM that is gibbering up hallucinations. I have no need for those.

>Nagel's paper deals with the fundamental divide between subjectivity and objectivity. That's the point of the bat example.

There is no point to it. It is devoid of insight. This happens when someone spends too many years in the philosophy department of the university, they're training themselves to believe the absurd proposition that they think profound thoughts. You live in an objective universe and any appearance to the contrary is an illusion caused by imperfect cognition.

>But we don't know what the resulting sensations are for those creatures.

Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds. That's just not insightful. Only a dimwit with little imagination could bother to ask the question "what is it like to be a bat", but it takes a special kind of grandiosity to think that the dimwit question marks them a genius.

	▲	glenstein 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		>Not that it would offer any secret truths, but the ability to "sense" where objects are roughly, in 3d space, with low resolution and large margins of error, and narrow directionality... most of the people reading this comment would agree that they know what that feels like if they thought about it for a few seconds. I don't think that's quite right. It's convenient that bats are the example here, because they build out their spacial sense of the world primarily via echolocation whereas humans (well, with some exceptions), do it visually. Snakes can infer directionality from heat signatures with their forked tongue, and people can do it with a fascinating automatic mechanism built into the brain that compares subtle differences in frequency from the left and right ears, keeping the data to itself but kicking the sense of direction "upstairs" into conscious awareness. There are different sensory paths to the same information, and evolution may be capable of any number of qualitative states unlike the ones we're familiar with. Some people here even seem to think that consciousness is "basic" in a way that maps onto nothing empirical at all, which, if true, opens the pandoras box to any number of modes of being. But the point of the essay is to contrast this idea to other approaches to consciousness that are either (1) non-commital, (2) emphasize something else like "self awareness" or abstract reasoning, or (3) are ambiently appreciative of qualitative states but don't elevate them to fundamental or definitional necessity the way it's argued for in the essay. The whole notion of a "hard" problem probably can be traced to this essay, which stresses that explanations need to be more than pointing to empirical correlates. In a sense I think the point is obvious, but I also think it's a real argument because it's contrasting that necessity to a non-commmital stance that I think is kind of a default attitude.

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scott_w 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Why must a concept be empirical and objective?

Because otherwise it's your word against mine and, since we both probably have different definitions of consciousness, it's hard to have a meaningful debate about whether bats, cats, or AI have consciousness.

I'm reminded of a conversation last year where I was accused of "moving the goalposts" in a discussion on AI because I kept pointing out differences between artificial and human intelligence. Such an accusation is harder to make when we have a clearly defined and measurable understanding of what things like consciousness and intelligence are.

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GoblinSlayer 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>Logical positivism is flawed because the principle of verification cannot be verified.

Why not? It works, thus it verifies itself.

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rcxdude 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

So do an infinite number of sets of statements which include a false one. Circular arguments are obviously not reliable.

	▲	GoblinSlayer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's a hypothesis of a counterexample, though, not a fact of a counterexample.

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goatlover 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not working if it excludes subjective experience by definition. Makes it useless for the consciousness debate.

	▲	GoblinSlayer 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		It doesn't exclude subjective experience.

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phreeza 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are attempts at a quantifitative definition of consciousness, for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

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glenstein 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Said this in a different comment but I want to paste it here as well, since a lot of people seem to think "we don't even have a definition" is a show-stopping smackdown. But it isn't.

You can't, and honestly don't need to start from definitions to be able to do meaningful research and have meaningful conversations about consciousness (though it certainly would be preferable to have one rather than not have one).

There are many research areas where the object of research is to know something well enough that you could converge on such a thing as a definition, e.g. dark matter, intelligence, colony collapse syndrome, SIDS. We nevertheless can progress in our understanding of them in a whole motley of strategic ways, by case studies that best exhibit salient properties, trace the outer boundaries of the problem space, track the central cluster of "family resemblances" that seem to characterize the problem, entertain candidate explanations that are closer or further away, etc. Essentially a practical attitude.

I don't doubt in principle that we could arrive at such a thing as a definition that satisfies most people, but I suspect you're more likely to have that at the end than the beginning.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 4 days ago | parent [-]

Dark matter is easily defined as "mass that cannot be detected by the current technology except that it affects the gravitation of galaxies". It is a detectable phenomenon. It is a measurable phenomenon.

Not having a definition is the show-stopping smackdown you say it is not. You are not a conscious being, there is no such thing as consciousness. You believe in an uninteresting illusion that you cannot detect or measure.

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glenstein 4 days ago | parent [-]

That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for effects downstream of the real thing that isn't yet defined, the very kind of working definition I was talking about to begin with. We still don’t know if it’s WIMPs, axions, modifications of gravity, or something else entirely. If we do figure that out its something like those, that would be the definition, and you would be able to tell the difference between that and the thing you are presently calling a definition.

And, thankfully, a future physicist would not dismiss that out of hand because they would appreciate it's utility as a working definition while research was ongoing.

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NoMoreNicksLeft 2 days ago | parent [-]

>That's not a real definition, that's a placeholder for

Blah blah blah blahblah. If you can give me a definition even as poor as the one I gave for dark matter, that's all we're asking for. We don't need an explanation of the mechanism, we only need a way to measure the phenomenon. But you can't even do that.

	▲	glenstein a day ago \| parent [-]
		Neuroscience denialism is fascinating to me. It flies under the radar because we mostly hear about global warming denial, evolution denial or flat earther denial. But we have mountains of evidence of wakeful mental states being tied to measurable effects. Facial recognition is specific to a particular brain region, clearly tied to a mental event sufficient for working definition of a form of conscious activity, and only active when someone is conscious and picturing or imaging a face. Remarkably, damage to the area responsible for facial recognition can predict faceblindness. That is more than enough for a working definition of conscious activity, and that's just one example from mountains of them. Others include everything from wakefulness under anesthesia (which can be tested for and predicted based on EEGs), as well as which brain activity distinguish locked-in syndrome from persistent vegetative states. Not to mention mountains of evidence for how physical circumstances predict mental states, everything from psychedelics to iron deficiency. You can always retreat to the claim that nothing short of direct access to another's subjectivity "counts" but that's not how science works. We don't directly see dark matter either (or electrons or neutrons or magnetic fields etc), we see its effects and build theories around them.