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

We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.

They say "because of similar structure and behavior" we infer others are also conscious. But that is a copout, we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.

Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.

Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.

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HarHarVeryFunny 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious. You can only tell you are conscious yourself, not others. The whole field of consciousness is based on analyzing something for which we have sample size n=1.

That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term to refer to all of the above (which is the problem with discussing consciousness - it's an overloaded ill-defined word, and people don't typically define what they are actually talking about).

If we make this distinction between consciousness, defined as ability to self-observe, and subjective qualia (what something feels like), then it seems there is little reason to doubt that others reporting conscious awareness really are aware of what they are reporting, and anyways given common genetics and brain anatomy it'd be massively unexpected if one (healthy) person had access to parts of their internal state and others didn't.

> Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?" - we can't imagine non-experience, or define it without negation. We are supposed to use consciousness to prove consciousness while we can't even imagine non-consciousness except in an abstract, negation-based manner.

Perhaps the medical condition of "blindsight" gives some insight - where damage to the visual cortex can result in people having some proven visual ability but no conscious awareness of it. They report themselves as blind, but can be tasked with walking down a cluttered corridor and manage to navigate the obstacles nonetheless. They have lost visual consciousness due to brain damage, but retain at least some level of vision.

	▲	glenstein 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		>That sounds like you are talking about subjective experience, qualia of senses and being, rather than consciousness (ability to self-observe), unless you are using "consciousness" as catch-all term While I have a lot of problems with their comment (which I elaborated on in a reply of my own), I don't think that using it as a catch-all term is a problem (to the extent that they would agree with that characterization). In fact, I think it's truer to the spirit of the problem than the definition that you're offering. I think a lot of times when people make the objection that we haven't defined it, they're not just saying we haven't selected from one of several available permutations, I take it to mean that there's a fundamental sense in which the idea itself hasn't agreeably crystallized into a definition, which among other things, is a meta question about which of the competing definitions is the right one to use. I do think there is a tension in that position, because it creates a chicken and egg problem where you can't research it until you define it, but you can't define it until you research it. But I think there's a way out of it by treating them in as integrally related, and taking a practical attitude of believing in the possibility of progress without yet having a final answer in hand. I understand that this notion of self-reflecting for some people is key, but I think choosing to prioritize other things can be for good reasons rather than, as you seem to be contending, having accidentally skipped the step of selecting a preferred definition from a handful of alternatives, and not having selected the best one. My feeling is much closer to that of the article, at least in a certain way, which is about the fact that there's "something it's like to be" at all, prior to the question of whether there's self-reflection. In fact, I'd be curious to know what you call the mental state of being for such things as creatures with a kind of outwardly directed awareness of world, with qualia, with "something it's like to be", but which fall short of having self-reflective mental states. Because if your term for such things is that they don't involve consciousness I think it's not the GP who is departing from appropriate definitions. And if self-reflection is necessarily implied in the having of such things as qualia, then you could say it's implicitly accounted for by someone who wants to talk about qualia.

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glenstein 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>We have not proven "to a level of absolutely provable certainty" that other humans are also conscious

Sure, it's not proven, it just has overwhelmingly strong empirical and intuitive reasons for being most likely true, which is the most we can say while still showing necessary humility about limits of knowledge.

You seem to treat this like it presents a crisis of uncertainty, wheras I think it's exactly the opposite, and in fact already said as much with respect to bats. Restating the case in human terms, from my perspective, is reaffirming that there's no problem here.

>we are supposed to reject behavioral and structural arguments (from 3rd person) in discussion about consciousness.

Says who? That presupposes that consciousness is already of a specific character before the investigation is even started, which is not an empirical attitude. And as I noted in a different comment, we have mountains of empirical evidence from the outside about necessary physical conditions for consciousness to the point of being able to successfully predict internal mental states. Everything from psychedelic drugs to sleep to concussions to brain to machine interfaces to hearing aides to lobotomies to face recognition research gives us evidence of the empirical world interfacing with conscious states in important ways that rely on physical mechanisms.

Similarity in structure and behavior are excellent reasons for having a provisional attitude in favor of consciousness of other creatures for all the usual reasons empirical attitudes work and are capable of being predictive that we're familiar with from their application in

"But consciousness is different" you say. Well it could be, that that's a matter for investigating, not something to be definitionally pre-supposed based on vibes.

>Not only that, but what would be an alternative to "it feels like something?"

It not feeling like something, for one. So, inert objects that aren't alive, possibly vegetative states, blackouts from concussions or drugs, p-zombies, notions of mind that attempt to define away qualia and say it's all "information processing" (with no specific commitments to that feeling like something), possibly some variations of psychedelic feeling that emphasize transcendent sense of oneness with the universe. But fundamentally, it's an affirmative assertion of it feeling like something, in contrast to noncommital positions on the question, which is a meaningful point rather than something trivially true due to a definitional necessity.

>Another issue I have with the qualia framing is that nobody talks about costs. It costs oxygen and glucose to run the brain. It costs work, time, energy, materials, opportunity and social debt to run it. It does not sit in a platonic world.

That would seem to run contrary to the point you were making above about it not being inferrable from phenomena characterized in the third person. You can't argue that third person descriptions of structures that seem necessary for consciousness are a "cop out" and then turn around and say you know it "costs" things expressed in those same third person terms. Like you said before, your position seems to be that you only know you are conscious, so you don't even know if other people are conscious at all let alone that they need such things as work, time, oxygen, or glucose. Pointing to those is a cop-out, right?