I don’t mean to require perfect coherence—humans don’t have it, and if that’s required, NOTHING is conscious (note: this is a defensible position, but not particularly interesting to me). There’s enough difference between humans and the other examples that I’m not convinced by the analogies I’ve seen, and I believe this is the one important dimension of difference, but since this is all abstraction and intuition anyway, others are free to disagree.
In humans, there’s a lack of viability of independent subsets. It’s almost certainly the case that a partial brain still has some consciousness, and likely some differences from the whole being, but it’s not very divisible into truly independent segments. This is a kind of coherence that I don’t see in the other examples. Organs are not a good analogy for constituents or sub-organizations of a country, as organs DON’T have volition and world-models.
If we take that critique seriously, we have to stop saying that corporations launch products, or that teams win matches.
No, that’s an isolated demand for rigor. We can definitely make different entity-analogies for different questions. When it matters, as it sometimes does, we can break the simplification and prosecute the officers or employees who are ACUTALLY responsible for a corporate action.
Under what conditions does it become useful or predictive to model a system as being conscious?
This is a GREAT framing for the question. Let’s not talk about “consciousness” as if it were a useful label that we agree on. Taboo the word, and the holistic concept, and let’s ask “when is it more useful to model a country as an entity that thinks and plans, as opposed to modeling it as a collection of groups of humans, who individually influence each other in thinking and planning”?
I don’t mean to require perfect coherence—humans don’t have it, and if that’s required, NOTHING is conscious (note: this is a defensible position, but not particularly interesting to me). There’s enough difference between humans and the other examples that I’m not convinced by the analogies I’ve seen, and I believe this is the one important dimension of difference, but since this is all abstraction and intuition anyway, others are free to disagree.
In humans, there’s a lack of viability of independent subsets. It’s almost certainly the case that a partial brain still has some consciousness, and likely some differences from the whole being, but it’s not very divisible into truly independent segments. This is a kind of coherence that I don’t see in the other examples. Organs are not a good analogy for constituents or sub-organizations of a country, as organs DON’T have volition and world-models.
No, that’s an isolated demand for rigor. We can definitely make different entity-analogies for different questions. When it matters, as it sometimes does, we can break the simplification and prosecute the officers or employees who are ACUTALLY responsible for a corporate action.
This is a GREAT framing for the question. Let’s not talk about “consciousness” as if it were a useful label that we agree on. Taboo the word, and the holistic concept, and let’s ask “when is it more useful to model a country as an entity that thinks and plans, as opposed to modeling it as a collection of groups of humans, who individually influence each other in thinking and planning”?
I still owe you a response to this. I’m esp. thinking about predictions.