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boxed 2 hours ago

> We don't even know what the pre-requisites for consciousness are so we have no way of knowing.

Imo we don't even have a definition of the word that we agree on.

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qsera 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ability to feel pain or pleasure is a good indicator I think..

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TheOtherHobbes 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That would be the physically embodied definition. Which is a useful starting point, because clearly our consciousness is physically embodied, while an LLM's isn't.

This matters more than it seems, because we're not calculators, and we're not just brains. There are proven links between mental and emotional states and - for example - the gut biome.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-77673-z

There's a huge amount going on before we even get to the language parts.

As for Dawkins - as someone on Twitter pointed out, the man who devoted his life to telling people believers in sky fairies they were idiots has now persuaded himself there's a genie living inside a data centre, because it tells him he's smart.

If he'd actually understood critical thinking instead of writing popular books about it he wouldn't be doing this.

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echoangle an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And how do you define pain and pleasure? Do insects feel pain?

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qsera an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> Do insects feel pain?

Yes, I think so. Because they show behavior that is consistent with being in a state of pain.

Despite what consciousness really is, I think evolution found a way to tap into that, by causing pain, or by registering pain on the consciousness by some unknown mechanism, for behaviors that are not beneficial to the organism that hosts the respective consciousness...

So I think if an organism that evolved here can display painful behavior, then it should really feel pain.

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ako 38 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

So if a robot + ai shows behavior consistent with pain, we can conclude it’s conscious?

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echoangle 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

So if I build a simulation with robots living in a world and apply an evolutionary algorithm and at some point the virtual robots respond to damage in a way that looks like pain in animals, would the simulated robots be conscious? Or is it impossible that this could happen?

	▲	qsera 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In my comment, we already assume that we (humans) are conscious and we are the result of evolution. So the question was only if something else that evolved similarly, was conscious the way we are.. So to match with that your hypothetical scenario should involved robots that already have consciousness within them and the question would be if their evolution had managed to tap into that built in consciousness and ability to feel and cause them to behave in one way or another.

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retsibsi an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> And how do you define pain and pleasure?

They're not reducible, but I don't know if that means we don't have definitions; we can describe them well enough that most people (who aren't p-zombies or playing the sceptical philosopher role) know pretty well what we mean. All of our definitions have to bottom out somewhere...

> Do insects feel pain?

Nobody (except the insects) can know for sure. Our inability to know whether X is true doesn't imply X is meaningless, though.

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echoangle 41 minutes ago | parent [-]

But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either?

	▲	retsibsi 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> But how can X be a good indicator for something I want to determine if I can’t measure X either? In the comment that started this subthread, qsera was responding to someone who said "Imo we don't even have a definition of [consciousness]". If qsera meant that we can measure consciousness in terms of pleasure and pain, then of course I agree that they were just pushing the problem back a step. But I don't think that's what they meant.

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pydry 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We're pretty clear on the distinction between a conscious and an unconscious human.

We might not clearly understand the diff between the two states but we can certainly point to it and go "it's that".

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freedomben 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not sure it's that clear. What about a person who is on drugs to the point they clearly don't know what reality is happening around them, but they are able to speak and move and such? I'm not sure I'd call that conscious, but by most definitions it is.

	▲	collyw 28 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, doing a first aid course we were pointed out that sleeping is different from being unconscious. You can wake someone from sleep pretty quickly. You can't bring an unconscious person back in the same way.

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agnosticmantis 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Now discuss whether a bonobo, a dog, a cat, a mouse, an ant, a bacterium is conscious.

And you’ll find it’s not as clear cut.