Mood and agency. I think you’d have a hard time claiming that no non-human could be reasonably described as an agent that works toward goals.
(I think of my cat, a smart and scrappy ex-stray, and how he and the kitten worked out how to get into the fridge: old cat lies down, young cat stands on him and pulls door open. Note that the older cat thoroughly disliked the kitten even as he conceded they were in the same pack. We saw them do the fridge trick and were flabbergasted. We put a lock on the fridge to keep out the cats, not the kid.)
But yeah, argument about this does descend into definition wrangling.
It seems clear to me that most common definitions of consciousness do not lend themselves to precise categorization. There’s a slope from bacteria to the nematode worm to amphibians to mammals and birds to primates and cetaceans, and then humans on top, because we’re clearly better at this than anybody else, for the time being. You can impose a decision boundary on that slope, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the real world.
Well, clearly we’re special enough to take over the world. I’m not sure how we can be sure that chimps or dolphins don’t have something that could be called introspection. (That’s partially an expression of my opinion and partly of my personal ignorance—I welcome enlightenment on the topic.)
Following The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and many other sources, I suspect the dominating differences between chimps and us is abilities we have evolved that greatly enhance the effectiveness of our working together in large groups. The more you enable cooperation, the more things like complex language and cognition suitable for highly specialized (i.e. a specialized cog in a larger machine) production.
It seems to me that introspection is valuable even in a non-cooperative world: if I can fine tune my reactions to prey and my attractiveness to the opposite sex, that is valuable in a band of 20 possibly nearly as much as it is valuable in a band of 20,000.
I love watching the “naturalness” with which female humans game the attractiveness-system. While at a young age I don’t think their instrospectiveness extends to them realizing they are gaming a system, I do think that they spend a lot of time studying themselves and figuring out how to enhance their attractiveness with increasingly well developed skills and clever fashion decisions. Is there anything like this “self-enhancement” in an individually customized (introspective) way among other primates or other animals?
Not “other than neurological”, but which neurological substrate specifically might be responsible for self-awareness. I think the current model is that that it is the prefrontal cortex with some heavy links to the rest of the brain.
Mood and agency. I think you’d have a hard time claiming that no non-human could be reasonably described as an agent that works toward goals.
(I think of my cat, a smart and scrappy ex-stray, and how he and the kitten worked out how to get into the fridge: old cat lies down, young cat stands on him and pulls door open. Note that the older cat thoroughly disliked the kitten even as he conceded they were in the same pack. We saw them do the fridge trick and were flabbergasted. We put a lock on the fridge to keep out the cats, not the kid.)
But yeah, argument about this does descend into definition wrangling.
It seems clear to me that most common definitions of consciousness do not lend themselves to precise categorization. There’s a slope from bacteria to the nematode worm to amphibians to mammals and birds to primates and cetaceans, and then humans on top, because we’re clearly better at this than anybody else, for the time being. You can impose a decision boundary on that slope, but that doesn’t tell you anything about the real world.
I thought that what makes humans somewhat special is self-awareness and introspection. Not sure if there is a “neurological substrate” for that.
Well, clearly we’re special enough to take over the world. I’m not sure how we can be sure that chimps or dolphins don’t have something that could be called introspection. (That’s partially an expression of my opinion and partly of my personal ignorance—I welcome enlightenment on the topic.)
I wonder when and how we started time-binding.
Following The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley and many other sources, I suspect the dominating differences between chimps and us is abilities we have evolved that greatly enhance the effectiveness of our working together in large groups. The more you enable cooperation, the more things like complex language and cognition suitable for highly specialized (i.e. a specialized cog in a larger machine) production.
It seems to me that introspection is valuable even in a non-cooperative world: if I can fine tune my reactions to prey and my attractiveness to the opposite sex, that is valuable in a band of 20 possibly nearly as much as it is valuable in a band of 20,000.
I love watching the “naturalness” with which female humans game the attractiveness-system. While at a young age I don’t think their instrospectiveness extends to them realizing they are gaming a system, I do think that they spend a lot of time studying themselves and figuring out how to enhance their attractiveness with increasingly well developed skills and clever fashion decisions. Is there anything like this “self-enhancement” in an individually customized (introspective) way among other primates or other animals?
In some sense, no one is “sure” of anything. But what might you imagine the substrate might be other than neurological?
Not “other than neurological”, but which neurological substrate specifically might be responsible for self-awareness. I think the current model is that that it is the prefrontal cortex with some heavy links to the rest of the brain.