Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google? And he leads an AI research team?

His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh).

Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed.

This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality.

I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.

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D-Machine a day ago | parent | next [-]

You can conclude the author is a completely unserious thinker because he doesn't even take a second to talk about the definitions, or even show he has ever read any actual proper philosophical writing on consciousness at all. Like, literally all you have to do is read the Wikipedia entry to see that definitions are essential for meaningful discussion on consciousness.

So anyone that starts going on about AI and consciousness without at least a sentence or two clarifying some basic definitions is basically either intellectually incompetent or attempting to use the emotional salience (and brain-numbing effect, it would seem) of the word to push some agenda. But they certainly don't care at all about understanding consciousness.

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calf 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I care about the fennel I grew in my backyard. Then one day I made fennel salad.

	▲	rmunn 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Even the word "care" can have multiple meanings, as you have kindly demonstrated for us. :-) It's no wonder that serious philosophers spend the first 2-3 chapters of a 20-chapter book carefully defining their terms, and only launch into their actual argument in chapter 3 or 4.

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jayGlow 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the belief that animals are conscious is a somewhat recent development isn't it? being able to feel hunger or pain doesn't make something conscious at least not in the same way humans are. a fly is capable of being hungry and will react to pain but I don't think it's capable of self reflection.

there might be some merit to his point though I doubt anyone considering that whales might be highly intelligent and conscious beings while they were being hunted for oil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness

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scotty79 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument

His whole point is that there's insight in inverting the "common sense" (aka sense of the commoners) about consciousness.

And I can see it. Some people cared for animals even though the religion and past state of knowledge told them explicitly that animals aren't conscious. But still some people treated them and perceived them as if they were.

You don't choose to be kind based on whether it can feel pain. You choose it because of your character and what you are willing to believe about reality.

Belief in consciousness is a result of an observation and since there is not strict definition this observation is interpreted subjectively and culturally. And in a sense, it's easier to both make the observations and decide they indicate consciousness after you started to care about something.

Obvious things aren't always true.

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empath75 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would argue that most people are kind to animals not because we believe in general that _they_ feel pain -- we can't know that and lots of people who are kind to animals don't believe that animals are conscious -- but because watching animals suffer makes _us_ feel pain, sympathetically.

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ordu a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's just utterly and completely backwards.

Yes, he says exactly that explicitly, that in his view we should look backwards.

> We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain.

I can agree that we say that we care because of consciousness, but still I'm not convinced, to me it looks very much like a rationalization.

Some people care about animals and to that end they claim that animals possess consciousness, because if they do everyone should care about animal welfare. These animal welfare activists do not start with some insight about animal consciousness, they start with caring about animals, and then they invent an argument that can persuade others. It is exactly as the author of the article says: caring comes first, declaration of consciousness comes second.

Honestly, I do not know what consciousness is, I'm in doubt, but playing a devil's advocate, it looks very much like a concept that was invented to prove that Homo Sapience is something special, more than a mere animal. To demarcate animals and humans, so when we denied animals any rights we had a great sounding excuse for that: "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't".

> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions?

Exactly. Animal welfare activists care about animals' feelings and emotions and therefore they claim that animals possess consciousness. Meat eaters don't want to be inconvenienced by thoughts of suffering animals, so they claim that animals do not possess consciousness. Both claims have little to do with actual consciousness, it is just a political game. I care about my pets, and it doesn't matter whether they possess consciousness or not, I would care about them in any case. I don't need any great sounding excuses to care about them. But at the same time I don't need to talk others into caring about my pets, if I needed it, probably I'd start talking about animal consciousness too.

> This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite.

That guy may be wrong, but if I'm allowed to give advice, I'd suggest you to stop and try to understand what he says. I'm really worried a bit about how consciousness debates unfold sometimes. They tend to slip into a political side and people mostly don't notice it. People saying "consciousness" while implying "human/animal rights" or obligations. It is just muddying the water.

If we want these debates to progress constructively, we have to be very careful with references to consciousness, maybe just forbid them completely in these debates. One can't measure consciousness, one can't even state clearly what consciousness is, but still they say "consciousness" to make their words sound more objective. And the worst part of it: it often works.

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rmunn a day ago | parent [-]

You're definitely right that it's important to be careful how we refer to terms like "consciousness", and your response actually illustrates part of the problem. Because people use the same term to mean two (or more) completely different things, and can therefore end up talking past each other.

For example: what I wrote was using the term "consciousness" as "being able to experience sensations", i.e. the most shallow definition of the term. Self-awareness and other "higher" mental abilities don't enter it. Almost nobody would deny that animals can experience sensations: pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, and so on. And that shallow definition of consciousness, the one that almost nobody denies animals possess, is what I meant, and what I tried to use throughout my post. Whereas when you wrote "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't", that's a completely different meaning of the word. It's what I would call "self-awareness". And it is indeed what many (probably most) people argue differentiates animals from humans. But that's not what I was talking about. So even in a short response to a short comment, we were partly talking past each other because of attributing different meanings to the term.

It's therefore possible that I've misunderstood this guy's argument, in part. I had been assuming he meant "awareness", i.e. the ability to process sensations into qualia of experience. (Indeed, his paragraph that starts "We may balk at ..." does just that: refer to consciousness as being linked to the "feeling of a stove's heat, or the redness of its glow"). But then, earlier in his article, he says that consciousness is "a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency." Experiences are part of the shallow definition of "consciousness" (that I would call "awareness" for the sake of avoiding ambiguity), which almost nobody would dispute that animals have. But "beliefs" ranges all the way from "if I pull this lever, I will receive food" (which it can be proven that animals have) to "I believe that God exists" (which is the kind of thought that many, though not all, people would deny that animals are capable of). So his definition of "consciousness" appears to be muddy and not pinned down to a single concept.

But even if I've misunderstood what he means by consciousness, it doesn't change my argument that his logic is backwards, and that his "we should reason backwards" assertion is wrong, incorrect, just plain false. The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example. But pretty much everyone who isn't some kind of sociopath reasons as follows: "this animal is conscious" (by which I mean able to experience pain) "therefore I shouldn't hurt it" (unless you have to, e.g., self-defense against an aggressive dog trying to bite you). Or "this person is a human being, self-aware like I am, therefore I shouldn't hurt their feelings" (again, the "unless you have to" exception comes up: it's not always possible to avoid hurting anyone's feelings in some complex social situations, even with the best of good intentions). Either way, whether you use the lower or higher definitions of "consciousness" (and I'm well aware that there are far more definitions than just these two, potentially muddying the waters even more), that reasoning is the correct one, and his "we should reason backwards" one is laughably wrong.

Trying to put the most generous construal I possibly can on his argument, it's possible that he meant "we treat other people as conscious beings because we care for them", i.e. when you interact with the cashier at the supermarket (assuming you're not using a self-checkout lane), you're probably not actually thinking about them as a human being, saying "Hi, how are you" and asking about their day. You're probably ignoring them, focused on paying for your groceries and going home. And they're probably doing the same to you, focused on scanning your groceries quickly to keep the line moving. From your perspective, the cashier could have been replaced by a grocery-scanning robot and your interactions (assuming the robot worked) would have been the same. If he had written that, it might have made some sense.

But what he actually wrote was that we "believe" that others are conscious when we exhibit care for them, and the natural conclusion that follows from that sentence is that when you don't greet the cashier at the supermarket and chat with them, and instead treat them no differently than you would a robot, you don't actually believe that they are a conscious being. Which is a laughably false conclusion that can be easily disproved, by simply asking people who have just finished having a cashier check out their groceries "Does that cashier have thoughts and emotions?". Pretty much everyone will say yes once they actually think about it. They believe the person has emotions. They don't always act on that belief — ask anyone who's worked in retail how many angry customers have yelled at them for something the company did, treating them like a thing rather than a human being who might not like to be yelled at — but even those angry customers, if someone were to stop them and say "Hey, that customer-service rep that you're yelling at. Are they a human being with thoughts and feelings of their own?", they would answer yes. (And some of them would then be shamed into modifying their behavior, because they have realized that their actions were not in line with their beliefs).

No. Even construing his argument in the kindest possible light, I can't find a way for it to be sensible. If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that. What he actually wrote is completely backwards from reality, and shows him not to be a serious thinker.

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ordu 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example.

I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.

I agree, that he misses one thing: to claim that someone/something is conscious we need to believe that they have abilities to feel, maybe to reflect, maybe something else. The exact list of abilities to have is not known for me and different people would propose different lists, but still we can't claim rock to be consciousness just because we care about it.

Still I forgive him for it, because he is talking about LLMs, not about rocks. They have some abilities, and he claims that they are enough, what is missing is us caring for LLMs enough.

> If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that.

No, I don't think he meant to say this. I believe he talked about how society forms social conventions who is conscious and who is not. You see, I don't know the cashier you talk about, but I believe they possess consciousness. Why? Because they are human, and our social conventions say that every (non-sleeping) human is conscious. It is a simple rule of thumb at work, no deep philosophy or psychology involved. But were those social conventions came from? Who and how decided that every human is conscious? Why? But the story didn't just end at that decision, because now people debate about consciousness of animals and LLMs. And these debates make me (and the author of the article) think that "consciousness" in these debates is a buzzword like phlogiston was in thermodynamics before thermodynamics was invented.

	▲	rmunn 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone. I may have phrased my argument poorly, because it seems you misunderstood. I'm not saying that picking that point of view makes you a sociopath. I'm saying that the only people who actually believe that other people are not conscious are the sociopaths of society. Every non-sociopath looks at other people and thinks "those are conscious beings with thoughts and feelings of their own". (Well, not literally that; almost nobody except philosophers goes around thinking like that unprompted. But if you were to ask them, that's what they would answer). I was not trying to claim that the defenders of that view are sociopaths. I was claiming that his assertion was false of just about everyone except sociopaths. I apologize for not phrasing it well enough to get my point across without misunderstanding.