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

[Consul]

QUOTE>
"Each species manifests its own exquisite form of adaptation that made it possible for it to survive in its own unique way. Some animals may have the ability to be conscious of what they are sensing and doing, and even feeling, in given situations. But can we really ever know this with confidence scientifically without lowering the bar for what counts as a genuine conscious experience?

It’s hard for us to imagine complicated behaviors being carried out nonconsciously, since we are usually conscious when we do such things ourselves. But this should not be the basis for the conclusion that consciousness was involved in a given behavior in another organism. The scientific question in an experiment is not whether animals might be conscious in some general sense, but instead whether consciousness specifically accounts for the behavior that was studied. If this is not tested, the statement that consciousness was involved is not warranted scientifically."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 319)
<QUOTE

Nonhuman (phenomenal) consciousness is a theoretical posit in science, the justification of which depends on its explanatory power or value. If an organism's behavior can as well be fully explained without any appeal to subjective experience, then its additional postulation is explanatorily idle and hence scientifically unjustified. Of course, if the epiphenomenalists about P-consciousness are right, then it is never a relevant part of any explanations of organismic behavior, including human actions, because it doesn't play any causal role in the generation of behavior or action.

[Kaz_1983]

It really depends what the moral status we give animals?

[Sy Borg]

Yes, but experiences cannot (literally) be small or large.

What of greater or lesser intensity, range of sensory input and constancy?

Such differences exist; but the crucial question concerns the capacity for any sort of experience at all, no matter how intense it is.

I suggest that the difference between the most complex reflex and the most tepid and transitory of experiences may be unclear, unlike the difference between humans' usual mental "mountains" and the "deep valleys" of slow-wave sleep, where our huge level of awareness metaphorically drops off a cliff. For minuscule beings, no such "cliff" exists, only a "great plain" of raw senses with scattered tiny "mounds" of experience.

[Consul]

I suggest that the difference between the most complex reflex and the most tepid and transitory of experiences may be unclear, unlike the difference between humans' usual mental "mountains" and the "deep valleys" of slow-wave sleep, where our huge level of awareness metaphorically drops off a cliff. For minuscule beings, no such "cliff" exists, only a "great plain" of raw senses with scattered tiny "mounds" of experience.

"The simplest form of behavior in animals is a reflex, an innate stimulus-response reaction that occurs by way of nerves that directly connect sensory input systems with muscles. Reflexes are automatically elicited by certain stimuli and are not dependent on volitional control."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 29)

Such direct connections of sensory input and motor output don't require any experiential intermediaries.

Given what LeDoux writes, I'm asking myself if the biological concept of a reflex can be applied to nonanimal organisms. I think I need to do some googling…

"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)

Taxic responses are found in bacteria, and tropisms are found in plants; but are these forms of stimulus-induced reactive behavior reflexes?

[Sy Borg]

I suggest that the difference between the most complex reflex and the most tepid and transitory of experiences may be unclear, unlike the difference between humans' usual mental "mountains" and the "deep valleys" of slow-wave sleep, where our huge level of awareness metaphorically drops off a cliff. For minuscule beings, no such "cliff" exists, only a "great plain" of raw senses with scattered tiny "mounds" of experience.

"The simplest form of behavior in animals is a reflex, an innate stimulus-response reaction that occurs by way of nerves that directly connect sensory input systems with muscles. Reflexes are automatically elicited by certain stimuli and are not dependent on volitional control."

(LeDoux, Joseph. The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York: Viking, 2019. p. 29)

Such direct connections of sensory input and motor output don't require any experiential intermediaries.

Given what LeDoux writes, I'm asking myself if the biological concept of a reflex can be applied to nonanimal organisms. I think I need to do some googling…

"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)

Taxic responses are found in bacteria, and tropisms are found in plants; but are these forms of stimulus-induced reactive behavior reflexes?

By "reflex", I refer to automatic responses. It's not important to me in context whether the inputs are via neurons, ion channels or whatever.

Ultimately, any understanding of this means noting the similarities and differences between the simplest possible experiences versus the most complex non-experiences.

[Belindi]

If ' moral status' means treating others with respect due to their being centres of experience, then all plants, each of which is a unique centre of experience, should be treated with respect. Pest -killing chemicals that indiscriminately kill all plants and pollinating insects are now promoted only by faceless agribusinesses and overly- tidy householders. It's now common knowledge that we must respect all wild things both plant and animal.

Centuries of bad education and indoctrination have drowned most people's natural sympathy for what is regarded as other than themselves. Academia and popular culture are now firmly on the side of respect for animals and plants, and consciousness is risen.

[Consul]

Ultimately, any understanding of this means noting the similarities and differences between the simplest possible experiences versus the most complex non-experiences.

How can experiences be similar to nonexperiences? If experiences are neural processes, they can be neurally but not experientially similar to nonexperiential neural processes. If they aren't, they can't even be neurally similar to nonexperiences.

[Sy Borg]

Ultimately, any understanding of this means noting the similarities and differences between the simplest possible experiences versus the most complex non-experiences.

How can experiences be similar to nonexperiences? If experiences are neural processes, they can be neurally but not experientially similar to nonexperiential neural processes. If they aren't, they can't even be neurally similar to nonexperiences.

Presumably, if experiencing matter emerged from non-experiencing matter - as you and neuroscientists posit - then at some stage there logically would have been the first ever experience in the biosphere. Thus, there must have been a state that was on the verge of experiencing and a state of newly emerged experience.

Of course, if you find that problematic, then you must be a proponent of panpsychism! Either there was an interesting nexus between the experiencing and non-experiencing parts of the Earth at some stage, or there is a general gradation of consciousness in all parts of reality.

[Consul]

Presumably, if experiencing matter emerged from non-experiencing matter - as you and neuroscientists posit - then at some stage there logically would have been the first ever experience in the biosphere. Thus, there must have been a state that was on the verge of experiencing and a state of newly emerged experience.
Of course, if you find that problematic, then you must be a proponent of panpsychism! Either there was an interesting nexus between the experiencing and non-experiencing parts of the Earth at some stage, or there is a general gradation of consciousness in all parts of reality.

If, as I believe, experiences are complex neural processes, then there must have been protoexperiential ("proto-" = "relating to a precursor") patterns of neural activity which got closer and closer to the threshold of experience without crossing it. And one day in the evolutionary past, a brained animal was born which became the first subject of experience on Earth. The brains of its parents weren't yet capable of realizing consciousness; but thanks to some random genetic mutation its brain was somehow neurally different from those of its parents, such that novel neural patterns occurred therein suddenly which constituted the first subjective sensation.

But if the neural "ignition" of consciousness in the brain is like a phase transition, then there is an abrupt and radical global-state change, and the pre-ignition neural dynamics is very different from the post-ignition one.

QUOTE>
"Igniting the Conscious Brain:
Whenever we become aware of an unexpected piece of information, the brain suddenly seems to burst into a large-scale activity pattern. My colleagues and I have called this property “global ignition.” We were inspired by the Canadian neurophysiologist Donald Hebb, who first analyzed the behavior of collective assemblies of neurons in his 1949 best seller The Organization of Behavior. Hebb explained, in very intuitive terms, how a network of neurons that excite one another can quickly fall into a global pattern of synchronized activity—much as an audience, after the first few handclaps, suddenly bursts into broad applause. Like the enthusiastic spectators who stand up after a concert and contagiously spread the applause, the large pyramidal neurons in the upper layers of cortex broadcast their excitation to a large audience of receiving neurons. Global ignition, my colleagues and I have suggested, occurs when this broadcast excitation exceeds a threshold and becomes self-reinforcing: some neurons excite others that, in turn, return the excitation. The net result is an explosion of activity: the neurons that are strongly interconnected burst into a self-sustained state of high-level activity, a reverberating “cell assembly,“ as Hebb called it.

This collective phenomenon resembles what physicists call a “phase transition,” or mathematicians a “bifurcation”: a sudden, nearly discontinuous change in the state of a physical system. Water that freezes into an ice cube epitomizes the phase transition from liquid to solid. Early on in our thinking about consciousness, my colleagues and I noted that the concept of phase transition captures many properties of conscious perception. Like freezing, consciousness exhibits a threshold: a brief stimulus remains subliminal, while an incrementally longer one becomes fully visible. Most physical self-amplifying systems possess a tipping point where global change happens or fails depending on minute impurities or noise. The brain, we reasoned, may be no exception."

(Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin, 2014. pp. 130-1)
<QUOTE

[Sy Borg]

Presumably, if experiencing matter emerged from non-experiencing matter - as you and neuroscientists posit - then at some stage there logically would have been the first ever experience in the biosphere. Thus, there must have been a state that was on the verge of experiencing and a state of newly emerged experience.
Of course, if you find that problematic, then you must be a proponent of panpsychism! Either there was an interesting nexus between the experiencing and non-experiencing parts of the Earth at some stage, or there is a general gradation of consciousness in all parts of reality.

If, as I believe, experiences are complex neural processes, then there must have been protoexperiential ("proto-" = "relating to a precursor") patterns of neural activity which got closer and closer to the threshold of experience without crossing it. And one day in the evolutionary past, a brained animal was born which became the first subject of experience on Earth. The brains of its parents weren't yet capable of realizing consciousness; but thanks to some random genetic mutation its brain was somehow neurally different from those of its parents, such that novel neural patterns occurred therein suddenly which constituted the first subjective sensation.

But if the neural "ignition" of consciousness in the brain is like a phase transition, then there is an abrupt and radical global-state change, and the pre-ignition neural dynamics is very different from the post-ignition one.

QUOTE>
"Igniting the Conscious Brain:
Whenever we become aware of an unexpected piece of information, the brain suddenly seems to burst into a large-scale activity pattern. My colleagues and I have called this property “global ignition.” We were inspired by the Canadian neurophysiologist Donald Hebb, who first analyzed the behavior of collective assemblies of neurons in his 1949 best seller The Organization of Behavior. Hebb explained, in very intuitive terms, how a network of neurons that excite one another can quickly fall into a global pattern of synchronized activity—much as an audience, after the first few handclaps, suddenly bursts into broad applause. Like the enthusiastic spectators who stand up after a concert and contagiously spread the applause, the large pyramidal neurons in the upper layers of cortex broadcast their excitation to a large audience of receiving neurons. Global ignition, my colleagues and I have suggested, occurs when this broadcast excitation exceeds a threshold and becomes self-reinforcing: some neurons excite others that, in turn, return the excitation. The net result is an explosion of activity: the neurons that are strongly interconnected burst into a self-sustained state of high-level activity, a reverberating “cell assembly,“ as Hebb called it.

This collective phenomenon resembles what physicists call a “phase transition,” or mathematicians a “bifurcation”: a sudden, nearly discontinuous change in the state of a physical system. Water that freezes into an ice cube epitomizes the phase transition from liquid to solid. Early on in our thinking about consciousness, my colleagues and I noted that the concept of phase transition captures many properties of conscious perception. Like freezing, consciousness exhibits a threshold: a brief stimulus remains subliminal, while an incrementally longer one becomes fully visible. Most physical self-amplifying systems possess a tipping point where global change happens or fails depending on minute impurities or noise. The brain, we reasoned, may be no exception."

(Dehaene, Stanislas. Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts. New York: Penguin, 2014. pp. 130-1)
<QUOTE

1. As always, you make an assumption - that brains are necessary for any type or level of consciousness, as if it's impossible for differing structures in nature to perform equivalent functions.

In evolution, different functions can be performed by variant structures. Convergent evolution is more the norm than the exception, resulting in all functions evolving via variant pathways, depending on scale and morphology. Why would the brain be the only unique organ when other all organ functions have equivalent structures? Small and simple organisms use ion channels to sense their environments instead of neurons. While ion channels are not as effective as neurons, they still play a role of simple organisms' sensory experiences.

It seems to me that brain-centric cognitive bias is pervasive. Humans have long assumed that brains are the only "game in town" and so they never apply similar rigour in testing brainless organisms.

So, after exhaustively testing brained things and ignoring the brainless, humans declare that only brained things experience their lives and all other life - no matter how complex their behaviours and responses - remains utterly black inside, completely inert subjectively.

Simple organisms are posited to be internally more akin to a grain of sand than to their close evolutionary brained relatives. I find that most unlikely, and that it's more likely that there are transitional states that are not being considered.


2. The state change idea is also an assumption. What of the transitional states?

Let's take a classic example of phase transition - the change from protostar to main sequence star. One might say that there's a hard line between them at the point of stellar ignition, when the temperature and pressure in the core sets off the fusion of hydrogen atoms.

That's not a hard line either. Pre-main sequence stars still fuse deuterium (as do some brown dwarf stars) before they fuse hydrogen. Nature always has transitions, even when change is exponential.

Again, I am not positing that simple animals, plants and microbes experience their lives, just that we have insufficient evidence to make that assumption on their behalf, and it seems to me that some avenues are simply not being considered because, as with other species, humans only care about themselves, so the lion's share of research will be aimed at humanlike dynamics.

[Pattern-chaser]

Presumably, if experiencing matter emerged from non-experiencing matter - as you and neuroscientists posit - then at some stage there logically would have been the first ever experience in the biosphere. Thus, there must have been a state that was on the verge of experiencing and a state of newly emerged experience.
Of course, if you find that problematic, then you must be a proponent of panpsychism! Either there was an interesting nexus between the experiencing and non-experiencing parts of the Earth at some stage, or there is a general gradation of consciousness in all parts of reality.

If, as I believe, experiences are complex neural processes, then there must have been protoexperiential ("proto-" = "relating to a precursor") patterns of neural activity which got closer and closer to the threshold of experience without crossing it. And one day in the evolutionary past, a brained animal was born which became the first subject of experience on Earth. The brains of its parents weren't yet capable of realizing consciousness; but thanks to some random genetic mutation its brain was somehow neurally different from those of its parents, such that novel neural patterns occurred therein suddenly which constituted the first subjective sensation.

Consul, this is an interesting and absorbing discussion. But I think we need to be quite careful. You have apparently offered "experience", "consciousness" and "sensation" as synonyms, or so your usage indicates. I assume this was not your intention?

[Consul]

1. As always, you make an assumption - that brains are necessary for any type or level of consciousness, as if it's impossible for differing structures in nature to perform equivalent functions.

In evolution, different functions can be performed by variant structures. Convergent evolution is more the norm than the exception, resulting in all functions evolving via variant pathways, depending on scale and morphology. Why would the brain be the only unique organ when other all organ functions have equivalent structures? Small and simple organisms use ion channels to sense their environments instead of neurons. While ion channels are not as effective as neurons, they still play a role of simple organisms' sensory experiences.

It seems to me that brain-centric cognitive bias is pervasive. Humans have long assumed that brains are the only "game in town" and so they never apply similar rigour in testing brainless organisms.

So, after exhaustively testing brained things and ignoring the brainless, humans declare that only brained things experience their lives and all other life - no matter how complex their behaviours and responses - remains utterly black inside, completely inert subjectively.

Simple organisms are posited to be internally more akin to a grain of sand than to their close evolutionary brained relatives. I find that most unlikely, and that it's more likely that there are transitional states that are not being considered.

Nonanimal organisms are very different from grains of sand, but they are also very different from animals with central nervous systems.

It is not the case that any material structure can perform any function. For example, your heart cannot function as an alternative stomach.

Consciousness is a high-level function, and high-level functions require high-level structures. I'm not only talking about human consciousness, but about all natural forms of it. Even primitive, primary phenomenal consciousness is a high-level function! It's a mistake to suppose that introspectively simple-seeming sensory qualia require nothing more than simple corporeal structures below the level of neural ones.

2. The state change idea is also an assumption. What of the transitional states?

Let's take a classic example of phase transition - the change from protostar to main sequence star. One might say that there's a hard line between them at the point of stellar ignition, when the temperature and pressure in the core sets off the fusion of hydrogen atoms.

That's not a hard line either. Pre-main sequence stars still fuse deuterium (as do some brown dwarf stars) before they fuse hydrogen. Nature always has transitions, even when change is exponential.

Again, I am not positing that simple animals, plants and microbes experience their lives, just that we have insufficient evidence to make that assumption on their behalf, and it seems to me that some avenues are simply not being considered because, as with other species, humans only care about themselves, so the lion's share of research will be aimed at humanlike dynamics.

Once again, the big problem with postulating a non-instantaneous evolutionary transition from phenomenally nonconscious states to phenomenally conscious ones is that we have no consistently intelligible concept of intermediate states between the absence of phenomenal consciousness and its presence.

Moreover, even if there were such "semiconscious" states, what about the transitions from nonconscious states to semiconscious ones, and from semiconscious ones to conscious ones? Would those transitions be instantaneous, or would there be additional intermediate states such as "semi-semiconscious" ones?
The only way to stop an infinite regress of (non-instantaneous) transitory stages is to assert that there has never been an evolutionary transition from nonconscious states to conscious ones, because there have always been conscious states, such that their evolution doesn't involve any true creation but just an amplification and complexification of primordial consciousness. There was no time when there were no conscious states or only semiconscious ones—says the panpsychist. But panpsychism is a silly theory that cannot be taken seriously!

[Consul]

But panpsychism is a silly theory that cannot be taken seriously!

Well, of course, it's psychologically possible to take a silly theory seriously; and there are in fact people who do take panpsychism seriously. So I should have written "…a silly theory that ought not to be taken seriously!"

[Consul]

If, as I believe, experiences are complex neural processes, then there must have been protoexperiential ("proto-" = "relating to a precursor") patterns of neural activity which got closer and closer to the threshold of experience without crossing it. And one day in the evolutionary past, a brained animal was born which became the first subject of experience on Earth. The brains of its parents weren't yet capable of realizing consciousness; but thanks to some random genetic mutation its brain was somehow neurally different from those of its parents, such that novel neural patterns occurred therein suddenly which constituted the first subjective sensation.

Consul, this is an interesting and absorbing discussion. But I think we need to be quite careful. You have apparently offered "experience", "consciousness" and "sensation" as synonyms, or so your usage indicates. I assume this was not your intention?

Above, by "consciousness" I mean "phenomenal consciousness", by "experience" I mean "subjective experience"; and phenomenal consciousness = subjective experience. By "sensation" I mean "subjective sensation", and all subjective sensations are subjective experiences. However, if emotions and mental images are different from sensations, then not all experiences are sensations; but I've tacitly presupposed that the evolutionarily first kind of experiences are sensations. So consciousness/experience entered the stage of evolution in the form of sensations (sense-impressions).

[Sy Borg]

1. As always, you make an assumption - that brains are necessary for any type or level of consciousness, as if it's impossible for differing structures in nature to perform equivalent functions.

In evolution, different functions can be performed by variant structures. Convergent evolution is more the norm than the exception, resulting in all functions evolving via variant pathways, depending on scale and morphology. Why would the brain be the only unique organ when other all organ functions have equivalent structures? Small and simple organisms use ion channels to sense their environments instead of neurons. While ion channels are not as effective as neurons, they still play a role of simple organisms' sensory experiences.

It seems to me that brain-centric cognitive bias is pervasive. Humans have long assumed that brains are the only "game in town" and so they never apply similar rigour in testing brainless organisms.

So, after exhaustively testing brained things and ignoring the brainless, humans declare that only brained things experience their lives and all other life - no matter how complex their behaviours and responses - remains utterly black inside, completely inert subjectively.

Simple organisms are posited to be internally more akin to a grain of sand than to their close evolutionary brained relatives. I find that most unlikely, and that it's more likely that there are transitional states that are not being considered.

Nonanimal organisms are very different from grains of sand, but they are also very different from animals with central nervous systems.

That is not your prior claim.

In terms of subjectively your claim is that microbes and plants are completely identical to grains of sand but utterly different to brained animals.