rick said:
the way I see it.. there is no difference between the consciousness of a human and that of an animal (well, higher intelligence animals) aside from the level of which they are conscious.
The way I see it, discussants in this thread are not actually in disagreement. I don't think that anyone's arguing that all non-human animals lack any sort of experience of the world. We're likely only in disagreement over at which points consciousness develops to what degree, and over what distinguishes human consciousness as unique (even those who argue that there is no qualitative break will have to concede that that the raw quantitative differences in informational processing will lead to at least minor qualitative phenomena).
I see what you're saying but I'd say yeah a dog will know food is food.. not just from conditioning.. and if it isn't.. neither are we.
You state this, but I don't think that you establish it through argument. What suggests that classical conditioning in dogs leads to particular subjective experiences (let alone those similar to humans')? While I would be very surprised if dogs lacked an experience of the world entirely, I would also be very surprised if it were remotely similar to ours. I think that your extension of the description of classical conditioning to humans is wrong-headed as well, as classical conditioning does not always produce subjective experience of this conditioning in humans. If you were to send me through the same training procedure linking the ringing of a bell to presentation of (desirable) food, it's likely that I would be unaware of subsequent salivation occurring in response to a ringed bell, let alone having an experience linking this salivation to the training entailed. So when looking for the conditions undergirding consciousness, we'll have to look beyond classical conditioning.
We are nothing more than a machine wired to survive, learning almost everything from outside stimuli.. this database of the world around us that we have been exposed to is what leads to every thought, feeling, desire, dream, whatever you may have.
Right, but different machines operate in different ways toward different ends, engaging different types of information, processing it in different ways. So we have to ask, what type of processing results in the emergence of consciousness of this processing and why?
A telling example might be the internet: as of now, the volume at which it processes information is roughly equivalent to or greater than that of the human brain (this is taking on assumption current theories about how the nervous system codes information). Would we expect the internet to possess consciousness? Why or why not?
Taking great apes as an example.. they have just as much consciousness as a child, maybe a bit more maybe a bit less.
How would we know? I find it a parsimonious hypothesis to expect apes trained in language to possess conscious states
resembling that of humans with moderate developmental delay (remember, Koko's lexicon held a bit over a thousand signs, IIRC (lol, were her trainers even native-level proficient speakers of ASL?
)), but this is an ape that has been socialized to become partly human--she had access to the wider social framework which plays a key role in imbuing us with human intelligence.
Foreigner said:
In a nutshell... I find this discussion arrogant. It doesn't matter how many experiments we do on animals, we will never have the first-person view of animal consciousness as we do our own.
True, but I also lack a first-person account of anyone's consciousness other than my own, yet is seems a bit odd to deem myself the only conscious being. So we have to again ask, what processes produce consciousness? In line with I said, I would be really surprised if consciousness arose in all life, as some beings (indeed, probably some beings with some degree of neural centralization) likely lack sufficient faculties of informational processing. At the same time, I would also be very surprised if consciousness only arose in humans, as some animals even posses sufficient cultural variation to produce what we would call meanings. Indeed, I'm certain enough in this assumption to have adopted vegetarianism out of ethical concerns.
GodAndLove said:
Who speaks like this in real life?
Indeed, I do.
What is the point of over complicating simple constructs?
Er...this is a rather complicated matter, to the point of precluding us to having come to any definitive conclusions in thousands of years of engaging the question.
ebola
