It seems to me that the properties of consciousness would naturally follow from any generally intelligent system. An intelligent agent must be aware of phenomena in its environment, it must be able to distinguish phenomena (qualia), its experience is subjective to the extent of the limitations of its connectivity.
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.
I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.
To me it seems obvious that any intelligent living thing that has some level of intelligence would be conscious... as in take in sensory data, is aware of it's environment, and can make decisions based on that.
But I would even argue that most living things above a certain neuron count are conscious. I think it's really flawed to assume that only we as humans have an awareness of self and are "conscious".
I don't see the distinction between my awareness of myself and my environment, and that of my dog for example. He is aware of himself, has ideas and acts on them, interacts with his world consciously. It's as if humans are grasping for some sort of uniqueness in nature. If you were a robot with sensors and cameras fed into a generally intelligent neural network. You wouldn't see a display of the data on a hud. You would be consciously immersed in the data. You would be the neural network. You would have an awareness of your environment, and you would be conscious of your existence in it.
I think consciousness is evolutionary. It allows living things to want to survive and preserve what they are. I think without consciousness a creature wouldn't have the strong drive for survival. In my opinion, it's what makes you long to continue your existence.
This is almost exactly what I would have written so thanks. It too me a lifetime while to combat my childhood bias to arrive at this point. And now I feel like a lot of people have to similarly overcome their own internal bias and realize that consciousness isn't all that special. We search for intelligent life with out in space but intelligent conscious life surrounds us.
I would actually argue the opposite using your same argument. It would take more assumptions to assume that, we, a single species on the tree of life, experience life differently from all other animals.
What evidence do you have that that other animals don't experience life in the same way we do? Why would we be any different from them?
Whoa, slow down :) I have no idea if anyone other than me is conscious. So no assumptions about humans v. animals.
It’s like playing a video game. Some of the other characters insist the game is multiplayer, but how can i know they’re not just bots pretending to be players?
I think the particular shape of normal human consciousness is a product of evolution, but I don't think consciousness itself is. People can experience altered states of consciousness which can be detrimental to their survival such as psychosis, disassociation, alexithymia (inability to perceive emotions of oneself and others), and aphantasia (inability to create mental imagery). Additionally some psychologists theorise that consciousness / intelligence is in fact a liability to survival because it allows us to ideate suicide as a solution to negative feelings, and that we have had to evolve mitigations to prevent this.
The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.
Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
The atoms in one pocket of the sun's chaotic fusion reaction might randomly and momentarily behave like an intelligent quantum computer - does that mean the sun is momentarily conscious from time to time?
Your comment got me thinking so I'm going to ramble a bit. The sun being conscious makes sense to me. Not as we are, but then again nothing is as we are. Cats communicate with each other, cleverly explore and learn about their environment but they aren't conscience like us.
Growing up, my vocabulary advanced waaay faster than my experience. I learned what the word "nostalgia" was well before I first felt nostalgic. In fact, I remember feeling it a few times about summers with friends that had moved before connecting the feeling with the word. It was a slap on forehead moment. I concluded that nostalgia was an inbuilt "thing", everyone else probably experienced it in the same way. It's easy for me to consider nostalgia as just an inbuilt reaction to a certain kind of signal. (Something periodic that makes you feel good, then it stops. Recalling the period creates a bittersweet feeling).
The space between consciousness and inanimate intuitively feels to me like a gradient. Various levels of brain damage might yield someone unresponsive to speech but responsive to pain. Then there are people who feel no pain, but otherwise are completely normal.
Therefore, I'd put on the lower end of the consciousness scale "reacting to changes" the more changes something reacts to, and the more varied their reactions, the more conscious it is. We're talking things between the sun and single celled organisms. Single cells don't seem to do much rumination, but they get hungry.
Advanced consciousness seems to require heritable lessons and skills. A feral human that somehow survived alone on an island from birth wouldn't be conscious like the rest of us are, but I bet it would still feel nostalgia if its favorite berry went extinct.
I'm comfortable ascribing feelings to things with full knowledge they aren't feeling it like we are. I bet red giant stars feel fat and old.
> Create a turing machine out of marbles and levers, and it's suddenly "conscious" with the right configuration. You really believe that given enough space, a bunch of marbles running along tracks bouncing off levers can become aware that it is a giant marble machine?
This is just defamiliarization. It's an excessively common belief that a computer with the right inputs, outputs, and software could realize that it is itself a computer program. The same software on a marble machine would be a lot harder to hook up to useful sensors, and would be too large to be at all practical, but it's the same thing.
Since you happened to use marbles as the analogy, I think you may find "I am a strange loop"[1] and the concept of simmballs and the careenium[2] interesting.
> The problem I have with this is that you can then claim that anything and everything is conscious.
The thing would have to have correlates of consciousness; mechanisms which perform the properties which constitute conscious thought. I see no reason why such a mechanism could not be created by such general machinery as a marble run, albeit a very large one. The sun however is a chaotic ball of plasma, so I can't see how it could play home to an arbitrary complex mechanism.
Consciousness is something separate from environmental awareness. Consciousness is what you have that lets you observe yourself carrying out the actions you are all while thinking yourself to be the one running the show, even though its entirely possible your behavior is not really "yours" to control, but the processes of your body and mind. In other words the 'thing' inside of you that's along for the ride of one quite immersive movie, is what consciousness is.
When you write a program to determine a pseudo-random number, I doubt there's any person that would seriously indulge the possibility that in that moment some entity puffs into existence, imagines itself picking a number, and then puffs back out of existence. But if this is true it makes any path towards artificial consciousness require some rather extensive handwaving and speculation that is not logically justifiable based on what we currently know.
> The problem is that there could conceivably be brains that perform all the same sensory and decision-making functions as ours but in which there is no conscious experience.
I think before this can be said to be a problem, it should be explained how such a brain (with human-like intelligence) can exist without mechanisms corresponding to the properties of consciousness.