Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sy Borg]

The analogy is that there is electrial signaling both in plants and in (phenomenally) conscious animals; but this fact doesn't give us any reasons to jump to the conclusion that plants are or can be (phenomenally) conscious too, because it's a long evolutionary way from the nonconscious/noncognitive processing of asemantic signal-information to the semantic information-processing involved in cognition and P-consciousness.

See the figure in this post of mine: viewtopic.php?p=389721#p389721

There are four levels of information-processing:

1. technological information-processing (artificial)
2. biological information-processing (natural)
3. neurological information-processing (natural)
4. psychological information-processing (natural)

Genuine cognition and P-consciousness presuppose and depend on levels 2+3, but they are realized only on level 4!

There appears to be one type of information processing in the universe - physical processing. Information is being processed constantly and those categories blur enormously. The four categories are so weakly defined that they are rendered abstract.

If I use my phone, I fulfil all four of those categories. The boundaries are more apparent (to human senses), being only weakly ontic.

[Sy Borg]

Consul, there was a time in my life when I never argued with the scientific consensus. I simply assumed that scientists knew much more than me, so they must be closer to the truth.

How my attitude changed was almost amusingly trivial. A number of years ago a study came out, "proving" that dental flossing makes no significant difference to dental health. That did not make sense to me, since material that is not removed must surely decompose. Still, I figured that the scientists knew best. At the time, I had not had a cavity for ten years.

$10,000 later, with two root canal therapies, one removed tooth, half a dozen lesser cavities and multiple antibiotics courses (including one that I am on now), I decided that I would never unquestioningly believe studies again, if the ideas intuitively don't make sense. And, to me, the idea that organisms spend their lives hunting, hiding, mating, fighting and finding safe places to hide experience absolutely nothing of their lives does not make sense to me.

[Consul]

There are four levels of information-processing:

1. technological information-processing (artificial)
2. biological information-processing (natural)
3. neurological information-processing (natural)
4. psychological information-processing (natural)

Genuine cognition and P-consciousness presuppose and depend on levels 2+3, but they are realized only on level 4!

There appears to be one type of information processing in the universe - physical processing. Information is being processed constantly and those categories blur enormously. The four categories are so weakly defined that they are rendered abstract.

If I use my phone, I fulfil all four of those categories. The boundaries are more apparent (to human senses), being only weakly ontic.

I didn't mean to say that levels 2-4 are ontologically irreducible in the sense of involving ontologically emergent nonphysical entities, but there are still relevant differences and disanalogies that spoil panpsychistic speculations—especially the informational difference between mere signals and meaningful signs (representations). For it is not the case that any old information processing is properly called psychological. Cognitive or conscious information-processing is certainly a kind of information-processing, but it is not the case that there is cognitive or conscious processing wherever there is information-processing.

By the way, the panpsychistic implications of the integrated-information theory of consciousness are part of what makes it implausible.

[Consul]

OK, but my question still stands:
Such a significant assertion must be associated with something to back it up, maybe some evidence, or some logically-argued theory? Where is that backup, please?

I think I've done that already, so please help yourself by using the search function!

[Consul]

$10,000 later, with two root canal therapies, one removed tooth, half a dozen lesser cavities and multiple antibiotics courses (including one that I am on now), I decided that I would never unquestioningly believe studies again, if the ideas intuitively don't make sense. And, to me, the idea that organisms spend their lives hunting, hiding, mating, fighting and finding safe places to hide experience absolutely nothing of their lives does not make sense to me.

Why not? What's nonsensical about nonconscious life?

[Consul]

What makes no sense to me is to postulate consciousness in nonanimal organisms that don't possess any identifiable physiological organ of consciousness.

[Consul]

Why not? What's nonsensical about nonconscious life?

Even in human organisms most information-processing takes place nonconsciously. Conscious processing is just the tip of the iceberg!

[Pattern-chaser]

OK, but my question still stands:
Such a significant assertion must be associated with something to back it up, maybe some evidence, or some logically-argued theory? Where is that backup, please?

I think I've done that already, so please help yourself by using the search function!

I confess I have no idea how to use the search function to find a post that I missed.



But I find it hard to believe that you have justified your opinion in any way. I see it like this:

In everyday terms, describing consciousness is easy. It means something pretty much like 'awake and aware'.

But as soon as we try to make this description more precise, we fall apart. We cannot even define consciousness precisely and clearly.

Therefore, it is difficult to see how anyone could be sure that consciousness requires an animal brain in order to exist. The first criticism of this sentiment is: what is consciousness, that it requires an animal brain as its foundation? Other criticisms follow on, of course, but this seems to be the fundamental one. When discussing something we cannot define, should we not be somewhat more circumspect concerning the criteria necessary for its existence?

[Consul]

I see it like this:

In everyday terms, describing consciousness is easy. It means something pretty much like 'awake and aware'.

But as soon as we try to make this description more precise, we fall apart. We cannot even define consciousness precisely and clearly.

Therefore, it is difficult to see how anyone could be sure that consciousness requires an animal brain in order to exist. The first criticism of this sentiment is: what is consciousness, that it requires an animal brain as its foundation? Other criticisms follow on, of course, but this seems to be the fundamental one. When discussing something we cannot define, should we not be somewhat more circumspect concerning the criteria necessary for its existence?

We certainly need to disambiguate the concept of consciousness (and related psychological concepts) so as to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. Awareness qua perceptual or cognitional consciousness (perception or cognition) and awakeness qua waking consciousness are both conceptually different from phenomenal consciousness qua inner, subjective experience—particularly with regard to the question as to whether there are (nonbinary) degrees of consciousness. There surely are different (nonbinary) degrees of awareness (of oneself or one's environment) and also different (nonbinary) degrees of wakefulness or alertness, but it doesn't follow that there are more than two degrees of phenomenal consciousness, viz. off and on.

Moreover, other psychological concepts such as "cognition", "intelligence", and (of course) "mind" need to be clarified too.

We need both a sufficiently clear definition of "consciousness" and a philosophico-scientific theory of consciousness (stating necessary and sufficient conditions for it) before we can answer the question of its distribution in nature.

[Sy Borg]

$10,000 later, with two root canal therapies, one removed tooth, half a dozen lesser cavities and multiple antibiotics courses (including one that I am on now), I decided that I would never unquestioningly believe studies again, if the ideas intuitively don't make sense. And, to me, the idea that organisms spend their lives hunting, hiding, mating, fighting and finding safe places to hide experience absolutely nothing of their lives does not make sense to me.

Why not? What's nonsensical about nonconscious life?

Because it seems to me that it takes some awareness of surroundings for an organism that hunts, mates, fights and hides - to respond to stimuli in complex and variable ways. By the same token, it seems to me that flossing debris from between your teeth reduces the risk of cavities, regardless of what some "experts" claim.

While all organisms engage in ostensibly nonconscious processing, intense stimuli is most likely to evoke conscious responses. As always I make no claims but question the capacity of others the make confident calls, doubting the sentience of other organisms.

I remember how adamant people were that dogs and other mammals were not conscious, that they just engaged in nonconscious processing. That is exactly the claim, and one that stood for many years. And it was profoundly wrong. I can't find great sources for this online but I do remember that the prevailing view was that non-human animals were not conscious. You may remember the childhood incident I described earlier, seeing a seller at a market wrapping a living, panicked and squawking chicken in a newspaper to give to a customer.

Certainly Skinner and the behaviourists absolutely rejected any thought of animals experiencing mental states, and it seems that their behavioural focus was increasingly interpreted as ontic rather than epistemic.

[Sy Borg]

Moreover, other psychological concepts such as "cognition", "intelligence", and (of course) "mind" need to be clarified too.

We need both a sufficiently clear definition of "consciousness" and a philosophico-scientific theory of consciousness (stating necessary and sufficient conditions for it) before we can answer the question of its distribution in nature.

Not pseudo-scientific, but an admission that current science is still struggling to deal with subjectivity. After all, the whole point of science is to eliminate subjectivity. This is a key point in any such debate, that scientists have worked assiduously to avoid all notions of subjectivity so as to maintain objectivity. For many years, to even consider animal consciousness was to be considered pseudo-scientific woo.

Of course, the range of organisms admitted to the fold of conscious entities has been steadily expanding, and it continues to expand, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So I see no reason to treat today's assumptions as final.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorr ... 57a69d76dc

“My work is not about metaphors at all,” says Monica Gagliano. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.” Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist, is talking about plants. She's adopted methods from behavioral experiments used to test animal intelligence and found that plants respond in a similar manner. The results of her research suggest plants might possess intelligence, memory and learning, although the mechanisms at play may be fundamentally different from those of humans and animals.

[Consul]

Why not? What's nonsensical about nonconscious life?

Because it seems to me that it takes some awareness of surroundings for an organism that hunts, mates, fights and hides - to respond to stimuli in complex and variable ways. By the same token, it seems to me that flossing debris from between your teeth reduces the risk of cavities, regardless of what some "experts" claim.

Awareness or perceptual consciousness of oneself or one's environment is not the same as and doesn't even entail phenomenal consciousness. If all organisms are capable of sensory perception, it doesn't follow that they are all also capable of phenomenal consciousness.

While all organisms engage in ostensibly nonconscious processing, intense stimuli is most likely to evoke conscious responses. As always I make no claims but question the capacity of others the make confident calls, doubting the sentience of other organisms.

If an organism isn't capable of P-consciousness in the first place, it doesn't matter how intense a stimulus is, because it will never cause any experience.

I remember how adamant people were that dogs and other mammals were not conscious, that they just engaged in nonconscious processing. That is exactly the claim, and one that stood for many years. And it was profoundly wrong. I can't find great sources for this online but I do remember that the prevailing view was that non-human animals were not conscious. You may remember the childhood incident I described earlier, seeing a seller at a market wrapping a living, panicked and squawking chicken in a newspaper to give to a customer.

The analogical reasoning at work here is: the same behavioral effects have the same mental causes. So if a form of human behavior is known to be (partly) caused by subjective experience, then the same form of nonhuman behavior is (partly) caused by subjective experience too. But this line of reasoning is defeasible by theories which can explain the form of nonhuman behavior in question without any appeal to subjective experience.

Certainly Skinner and the behaviourists absolutely rejected any thought of animals experiencing mental states, and it seems that their behavioural focus was increasingly interpreted as ontic rather than epistemic.

Behaviorism regards mental states as "black boxes" between stimuli and behavioral responses, and as mere forms of or dispositions to overt behavior. Behaviorism reduces psychology to ethology, and its antimentalistic stance makes no difference between human and nonhuman organisms.

[Consul]

Not pseudo-scientific, but an admission that current science is still struggling to deal with subjectivity. After all, the whole point of science is to eliminate subjectivity. This is a key point in any such debate, that scientists have worked assiduously to avoid all notions of subjectivity so as to maintain objectivity. For many years, to even consider animal consciousness was to be considered pseudo-scientific woo.

Some think a science of P-consciousness is impossible in principle because of its special epistemological and methodological problems in the light of the privacy and subjectivity of experience. But it seems the majority of contemporary scientists isn't that pessimistic.

By the way, as John Searle never tires of pointing out, there's a relevant distinction between ontological objectivity/subjectivity and epistemological objectivity/subjectivity:

QUOTE>
"The fact that conscious states are ontologically subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a human or animal subject, does not imply that there cannot be a scientifically objective study of conscious states. …The mode of existence of conscious states is indeed ontologically subjective, but ontological subjectivity of the subject matter does not preclude an epistemically objective science of that very subject matter. Indeed, the whole science of neurology requires that we try to seek an epistemically objective scientific account of pains, anxieties, and other afflictions that patients suffer from in order that we can treat these with medical techniques. Whenever I hear philosophers and neurobiologists say that science cannot deal with subjective experiences I always want to show them textbooks in neurology where the scientists and doctors who write and use the books have no choice but to try to give a scientific account of people’s subjective feelings, because they are trying to help actual patients who are suffering."

(Searle, John. Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 135-6)
<QUOTE

Of course, the range of organisms admitted to the fold of conscious entities has been steadily expanding, and it continues to expand, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So I see no reason to treat today's assumptions as final.

I'll give you various CNS- or even NS-independent forms of organismic behavior and behavior-guiding "informationing" (information-processing, -storing, etc.), but no (C)NS-independent forms of subjective experiencing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorr ... 57a69d76dc

“My work is not about metaphors at all,” says Monica Gagliano. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.” Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist, is talking about plants. She's adopted methods from behavioral experiments used to test animal intelligence and found that plants respond in a similar manner. The results of her research suggest plants might possess intelligence, memory and learning, although the mechanisms at play may be fundamentally different from those of humans and animals.

It depends on how broadly psychological concepts such as "intelligence", "memory" and "learning" are defined. They can be defined in purely behavioral-informational terms in such a way that those concepts can be applied to non-neuronal physiological mechanisms as well. However, this means lowering the criteria for mentality to a point where the term "psychology" had better be replaced by the term "behavioral-informational physiology".

By the way, there are what LeDoux calls "behavioral categories" that correspond to different levels or stages of the evolutionary development of organisms:

QUOTE>
"I will therefore use the following behavioral categories: taxic responses, tropisms, reflexes, fixed actions, habits, outcome-dependent instrumental actions, and cognition-dependent responses. We can then call upon these as we track how features of behavior emerged as single-cell organisms were transformed into the great variety of multicellular ones that followed."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 38)
<QUOTE

"A brain is a blobby mass of electrochemical impulses and there are all of these other cells which are very specialized at their job. They transfer chemicals and, in particular, electrical signals and that's how the information goes through the body. So in that sense, we shouldn’t focus so much on saying ‘it's the brain doing things, it's the nervous system doing things,’ but actually look at the functional aspect of the story. For example, plants are amazing electrical beings and all life really is electrical as well. So again, there are commonalities that if you bring it to a deeper layer, you can see we do it with electricity, plants do it with electricity, animals do it with electricity, bacteria do it with electricity. So basically electricity might be one of the things that we should look at if we want to understand something more about the essence of life."
—Monica Gagliano

Yea, but it's not the case that any old form of electricity or electrical signaling in organisms is sufficient for cognition (qua internal representation on the level of semantic information) and (phenomenal) consciousness.

QUOTE>
"In the nineteenth century, biologists such as Darwin and Jacques Loeb described the behavioral responses of plants to external light or chemicals. The well-known ability of a sunflower to bend to follow the passage of the sun is one such example. Primitive, stimulus-induced behaviors of nonmobile organisms such as plants are called tropisms. Plant “behavior” is a thriving area of research.

For example, in What a Plant Knows, the biologist Daniel Chamovitz describes sophisticated information-processing capacities that plants use to control their movements in response to stimulation. Plants not only “follow the sun” by bending their stems, they also align their leaves in such a way as to maximize exposure to light and thereby promote growth. Some plants actually anticipate sunrise from “memory,” and even when deprived of solar signals retain this information for several days. In Brilliant Green, Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola argue that plants possess not only the senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing, but more than a dozen other sensory capacities that humans lack (including the ability to detect minerals, moisture, magnetic signals, and gravitational pull). For example, the roots of plants sense the mineral and water content of the soil and alter their direction of growth accordingly. Some plants also capture prey by sensing their presence—the most famous example is the Venus flytrap.

Some are reluctant to label plant movements as behaviors, since they lack nerves and muscles. But just as they are able to breathe without lungs and digest nutrients without a stomach, plants have the ability to move (behave). We should not dismiss the existence of behavioral capacities in an organism simply because it lacks the physiological mechanism that is responsible for the behavior in animals.

Plants clearly sense the environment, learn, store information, and use that information to guide movements; they behave. One might say that there is certain “intelligence” to their behavior. This is true as long as intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to solve problems through behavioral interactions with the environment, rather than with respect to mental capacity."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. pp. 35-6)
<QUOTE

Fine, let's regard plants and all the other nonanimal organisms (fungi, chromista, protozoa, bacteria) as behavioral-informational systems of some type or other; but let's not make the mistake of projecting the highest mental level of phenomenal consciousness/subjective experience into them!

By the way, what exactly is behavior? If it is what organisms do, what do organisms do that makes them behave in some way or other? – "Plants have the ability to move (behave)." – LeDoux. Does this mean that behavior is nothing more than organismal movement or motion? I don't think that's an adequate definition of "behavior", since e.g. when a branch of a tree is moved by the wind we don't call that behavior, do we? So it seems organismal movement or motion must have an inner, internal cause in order to be properly called behavior. How about this definition: Behavior is organismal movement or motion caused by internal information-involving processes? – Well, there is still a conceptual problem, because there are forms of behavior which consist in the absence of movement or motion such as "playing dead": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_death. What are we doing now with our definition of "behavior"?

[Consul]

By the way, what exactly is behavior?…

Colin McGinn: Behavior

[Sy Borg]

Not pseudo-scientific, but an admission that current science is still struggling to deal with subjectivity. After all, the whole point of science is to eliminate subjectivity. This is a key point in any such debate, that scientists have worked assiduously to avoid all notions of subjectivity so as to maintain objectivity. For many years, to even consider animal consciousness was to be considered pseudo-scientific woo.

Some think a science of P-consciousness is impossible in principle because of its special epistemological and methodological problems in the light of the privacy and subjectivity of experience. But it seems the majority of contemporary scientists isn't that pessimistic.

By the way, as John Searle never tires of pointing out, there's a relevant distinction between ontological objectivity/subjectivity and epistemological objectivity/subjectivity:

QUOTE>
"The fact that conscious states are ontologically subjective, in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a human or animal subject, does not imply that there cannot be a scientifically objective study of conscious states. …The mode of existence of conscious states is indeed ontologically subjective, but ontological subjectivity of the subject matter does not preclude an epistemically objective science of that very subject matter. Indeed, the whole science of neurology requires that we try to seek an epistemically objective scientific account of pains, anxieties, and other afflictions that patients suffer from in order that we can treat these with medical techniques. Whenever I hear philosophers and neurobiologists say that science cannot deal with subjective experiences I always want to show them textbooks in neurology where the scientists and doctors who write and use the books have no choice but to try to give a scientific account of people’s subjective feelings, because they are trying to help actual patients who are suffering."

(Searle, John. Mind: A Brief Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. pp. 135-6)

There is a huge disconnect between the consideration of patients' feelings and research into the nature of subjective experience.

Again, and as always, when considering consciousness, we just consider human consciousness. That's where the important jobs and the big paying jobs are.

Of course, the range of organisms admitted to the fold of conscious entities has been steadily expanding, and it continues to expand, both quantitatively and qualitatively. So I see no reason to treat today's assumptions as final.

I'll give you various CNS- or even NS-independent forms of organismic behavior and behavior-guiding "informationing" (information-processing, -storing, etc.), but no (C)NS-independent forms of subjective experiencing.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamorr ... 57a69d76dc

“My work is not about metaphors at all,” says Monica Gagliano. “When I talk about learning, I mean learning. When I talk about memory, I mean memory.” Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist, is talking about plants. She's adopted methods from behavioral experiments used to test animal intelligence and found that plants respond in a similar manner. The results of her research suggest plants might possess intelligence, memory and learning, although the mechanisms at play may be fundamentally different from those of humans and animals.

It depends on how broadly psychological concepts such as "intelligence", "memory" and "learning" are defined. They can be defined in purely behavioral-informational terms in such a way that those concepts can be applied to non-neuronal physiological mechanisms as well. However, this means lowering the criteria for mentality to a point where the term "psychology" had better be replaced by the term "behavioral-informational physiology".

By the way, there are what LeDoux calls "behavioral categories" that correspond to different levels or stages of the evolutionary development of organisms:

QUOTE>
"I will therefore use the following behavioral categories: taxic responses, tropisms, reflexes, fixed actions, habits, outcome-dependent instrumental actions, and cognition-dependent responses. We can then call upon these as we track how features of behavior emerged as single-cell organisms were transformed into the great variety of multicellular ones that followed."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 38)
<QUOTE

"A brain is a blobby mass of electrochemical impulses and there are all of these other cells which are very specialized at their job. They transfer chemicals and, in particular, electrical signals and that's how the information goes through the body. So in that sense, we shouldn’t focus so much on saying ‘it's the brain doing things, it's the nervous system doing things,’ but actually look at the functional aspect of the story. For example, plants are amazing electrical beings and all life really is electrical as well. So again, there are commonalities that if you bring it to a deeper layer, you can see we do it with electricity, plants do it with electricity, animals do it with electricity, bacteria do it with electricity. So basically electricity might be one of the things that we should look at if we want to understand something more about the essence of life."
—Monica Gagliano

Yea, but it's not the case that any old form of electricity or electrical signaling in organisms is sufficient for cognition (qua internal representation on the level of semantic information) and (phenomenal) consciousness.

QUOTE>
"In the nineteenth century, biologists such as Darwin and Jacques Loeb described the behavioral responses of plants to external light or chemicals. The well-known ability of a sunflower to bend to follow the passage of the sun is one such example. Primitive, stimulus-induced behaviors of nonmobile organisms such as plants are called tropisms. Plant “behavior” is a thriving area of research.

For example, in What a Plant Knows, the biologist Daniel Chamovitz describes sophisticated information-processing capacities that plants use to control their movements in response to stimulation. Plants not only “follow the sun” by bending their stems, they also align their leaves in such a way as to maximize exposure to light and thereby promote growth. Some plants actually anticipate sunrise from “memory,” and even when deprived of solar signals retain this information for several days. In Brilliant Green, Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola argue that plants possess not only the senses of sight, touch, smell, and hearing, but more than a dozen other sensory capacities that humans lack (including the ability to detect minerals, moisture, magnetic signals, and gravitational pull). For example, the roots of plants sense the mineral and water content of the soil and alter their direction of growth accordingly. Some plants also capture prey by sensing their presence—the most famous example is the Venus flytrap.

Some are reluctant to label plant movements as behaviors, since they lack nerves and muscles. But just as they are able to breathe without lungs and digest nutrients without a stomach, plants have the ability to move (behave). We should not dismiss the existence of behavioral capacities in an organism simply because it lacks the physiological mechanism that is responsible for the behavior in animals.

Plants clearly sense the environment, learn, store information, and use that information to guide movements; they behave. One might say that there is certain “intelligence” to their behavior. This is true as long as intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to solve problems through behavioral interactions with the environment, rather than with respect to mental capacity."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. pp. 35-6)
<QUOTE

Fine, let's regard plants and all the other nonanimal organisms (fungi, chromista, protozoa, bacteria) as behavioral-informational systems of some type or other; but let's not make the mistake of projecting the highest mental level of phenomenal consciousness/subjective experience into them!

Again, that's just humans - the 'highest mental level". Human consciousness is not relevant in this context. Let the people go!

At no stage have I referred to the "mental capacity" referred to be LeDoux. Nor do I think that mental capacity equals experience, qualia. There are clearly global informational processes in plants that are equivalent to the global informational processes of animals. Do these processes render experience? You and orthodoxy say "no". I and the future say "maybe".

I do not think that assuming function to be exclusively associated with particular organs in all circumstances is logically sound. We have already discussed numerous equivalent structures in plants and microbes that perform an equivalent job to animal organs.