that would include dolphins
This is literally the closest form of consciousness to our own - the easiest and most obvious case. They weren’t actually asking if dolphins would count, they’re asking at what point it counts as consciousness. The ones you need to answer are things like tardigrades, bacteria and viruses, or nonphysical forms of consciousness. After all, you’re seriously claiming that the scientific definition of observation is observation by a conscious mind, not interaction with another aspect of the universe, so why don’t we consider all the nonfalsifiables? Do ghosts collapse the quantum superposition?
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Why it’s weird is because it’s assuming the universe is choosing what level is conscious. As you say, we’re pretty sure they’re conscious. How do we know that? Brain scans and watching their behavior. What happens to something without a brain but still with sensors? Is that somehow conscious? What about a brain but much less complex? Why is the universe deciding how to behave based on this? It’d be really outlandish to expect this behavior from the universe, which isn’t a creature and just following a set of rules.
It’s a much simpler explanation that interactions that require information force that information to collapse. We don’t need any strange justifications or anything deciding what level becomes conscious, which is just a word we made up several hundred years ago and is meaningless to the universe. Consciousness is just a series of impulses in a system, a system which can go wrong in many ways and is not a fundamental thing.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 3 months ago
You can claim that all you want but you can’t really back that up. Nobody has anywhere near a coherent account of how a physical system produces (or equates to) subjective conscious experience. If your answer now is “well science will figure it out one day for sure” then you have a belief system and you aren’t actually thinking scientifically.
Cethin@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
You aren’t conscious when you’re in a coma, correct? That’s a measurable way the system can mess up and we can detect. You also aren’t conscious when you’re dead, right? Yet another measurable thing. We can detect brain activity and see certain regions are used for certain things. We can also detect anomalous behavior in the brain. We can tell when the system isn’t working as expected.
We can easily explain how a physical system produces consciousness. We may not be able to point to exactly what it is, but we can describe it and describe how that can happen. It’s not mystical. It’s just complex. We can’t reproduce it yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t understand how the brain functions.
Because that’s literally a basic requirment of science. It relies on falsafiability. You can believe whatever you want, but science relies on stuff being measurable. It doesn’t mean it’s right, but that’s how it functions.
Also, you call it reductive. I don’t think it’s reductive. I think it’s more reductive to just say “consciousness exists” than to say “consciousness is a complex system that can develop in nature”. Just because it’s physical doesn’t mean it’s reductive. Saying “it just is because it is” seems much more reductive.
space_comrade@hexbear.net 3 months ago
We literally can’t do that at all though, not even close.
How? Science is based on making models from empirical observations about the world and yourself, one of these empirical observations is the observation that your phenomenal consciousness actually exists, seemingly in opposition to the physical world, maybe we should perhaps include that fact in our models?
It’s literally how that category of metaphysical thought is called, it’s an actual philosophical term.