If my radio plays music, do you say that the radio generated, created, or originated the music? Of course not: the radio is merely receiving and outputting. It is a transmitter.
Similarly, the human brain is not the origination of consciousness, but a mere transmitter.
If you are an atheist materialist who does not believe in a soul, then I see no reason why you should waste our time debunking animal rights activists.
However, if you believe that consciousness does not originate within the human brain, but that the brain is merely a vessel of consciousness, then we should take seriously the question of the origin of consciousness.
If the brain was the originator of consciousness, this is the nominalist position. I am an idealist, meaning that I don't think we invent consciousness anew every time a human is born, or that we invent numbers anew when we write them down. They pre-exist humanity; humanity merely instantiates or represents these phenomena in the material world.
Without a serious confrontation with idealism, any definition of consciousness is going to be hand-wavy and imprecise at best. Which you admit.
The problem is that without that prior definite grounding, we're wasting our time looking at the number of neurons of such and such an animal. It is simply irrelevant if we have not first defined the concept we are discussing. It would be like discussing the number of votes achieved by a winning candidate without knowing his positions -- pedantry at best. Not useful or relevant.
When you accept idealism, then panpsychism becomes realistic. I propose that all electrons have souls.
Now, to your question, "if electrons have souls, why aren't we electrons?"
The reason for this is that while electrons have souls, they do not have the self awareness to ask such a question.
Babies do not have self-awareness. Should we abuse them? No.
A corpse does not have self-awareness. Should we beat it with a baseball bat? No.
A painting does not have self-awareness. Should we burn it? No.
The reason why we should refrain from harming beings without self-awareness is because such an act is undignified, because each act we take carries with it intentionality.
If you intend to hurt shrimp, you are acting with a sadistic intent. If you don't care, you are negligent.
The amount of time that people spend "refuting" shrimp pain is worthless. The question is not whether shrimp are conscious, but whether or not they are deserving of dignity.
>If my radio plays music, do you say that the radio generated, created, or originated the music? Of course not: the radio is merely receiving and outputting. It is a transmitter. Similarly, the human brain is not the origination of consciousness, but a mere transmitter.
I'm open to the idea that the brain might 'receive' consciousness from elsewhere, but it feels like a distinction without a difference. Either way, there is still a certain configuration of matter required for our conscious experience to manifest.
>If you are an atheist materialist who does not believe in a soul, then I see no reason why you should waste our time debunking animal rights activists.
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable signing onto materialism when things like consciousness and the laws of nature seem to go beyond it. Neither would I be comfortable dismissing them as illusory. I don't see how God, materialism, or souls determine whether or not this is a waste of time though. Debunking animal rights activists wasn't the primary goal btw, but the topic does intersect with current debates around that so I thought I'd touch on it briefly.
>Without a serious confrontation with idealism, any definition of consciousness is going to be hand-wavy and imprecise at best. Which you admit.
Does idealism offer a more precise definition? I'm all ears.
>The problem is that without that prior definite grounding, we're wasting our time looking at the number of neurons of such and such an animal. It is simply irrelevant if we have not first defined the concept we are discussing.
I think we have a workable enough idea of what it means to be a conscious subject for the question of who or what possesses that quality to be worth asking.
It's relevant because intelligence is often thought to be correlated with consciousness, and the anthropic argument I presented can be seen as reinforcing that assumption even if the exact mechanism remains unknown.
>When you accept idealism, then panpsychism becomes realistic. I propose that all electrons have souls. Now, to your question, "if electrons have souls, why aren't we electrons?" The reason for this is that while electrons have souls, they do not have the self awareness to ask such a question.
Right; this was one of the potential rebuttals to the argument I mentioned. Whether or not it works depends on whether phenomenal consciousness can exist without self-awareness. Or are these souls merely instances of 'proto-consciousness'? That version of panpsychism seems at least plausible: particles themselves aren't having conscious experiences, but their proto-consciousness could be activated under the right configuration.
>Babies do not have self-awareness. Should we abuse them? No. A corpse does not have self-awareness. Should we beat it with a baseball bat? No. A painting does not have self-awareness. Should we burn it? No. The reason why we should refrain from harming beings without self-awareness is because such an act is undignified, because each act we take carries with it intentionality. If you intend to hurt shrimp, you are acting with a sadistic intent. If you don't care, you are negligent.
The baby will and the corpse once did possess self-awareness; that's arguably a good enough basis to grant them some degree of personhood. They also matter to self-aware people who care about them. I would agree that it would be wrong to take someone's pet shrimp and tear it apart in front of them.
If paintings were edible, abundant, and replaced themselves rapidly, I don't see why consuming them and doing with them whatever was necessary to facilitate that process would be morally objectionable.
If you made a painting you ended up hating, would there be anything wrong with throwing it into a fire, aside from potential health risks from toxic fumes?
I agree that going out of your way to deliberately harm a creature may signal an underlying pathology, and could also foster more antisocial behaviour, but killing something isn't inherently sadistic. Otherwise should we also oppose using disinfectant to kill bacteria? Deliberate shrimp torture isn't the concern.
>The amount of time that people spend "refuting" shrimp pain is worthless. The question is not whether shrimp are conscious, but whether or not they are deserving of dignity.
I definitely think consciousness is a relevant factor in questions of dignity. I'm also interested in the consciousness status of things regardless of ethical implications. Do you not think that boiling shrimp to death would be a more pressing issue if they were capable of experiencing agonising suffering though? Or does suffering play no role in your moral framework?
I am not promoting vegetarianism or veganism, or the idea that we shouldn’t kill animals, but that we should make that process as dignified as possible, which is what the shrimp stunning machines are for. Are you under the impression that shrimp stunning machines are being advocated for to prevent shrimp from being killed? There’s a difference between killing and torturing.
I enjoyed your article, and it's clear that you've been reading a lot of the relevant philosophy. That being said, I don't think you properly explained your argument that the quantity of simpler organisms should modify our assessment of whether (or to what degree) they are conscious. It seemed as though you were going to deploy some version of the anthropic argument to make your point, but you never did (as far as I could tell).
I thought I did; apologies if it wasn't explicit enough. But the argument is fairly simple really. If there are multiple species, with some vastly outnumbering others, then all else equal, finding oneself in a smaller species is evidence against consciousness being present among the larger ones. You can also do the same thing using intelligence instead of population size.
The issue I've always had with anthropic arguments and their cousins is that they depend on reifying probabilities, where probabilities are themselves constructions of human mental activity.
I can build a fun-house in my imagination, let's say by writing a series of stories and novels, and then ask what the probability is of my fun-house existing across a range of probabilities that I conveniently provide to myself.
It might be a fun creative exercise and a test of mathematical reasoning. But I wouldn't want to conclude that I'd proven anything interesting about the nature or contents of what exists.
It doesn't require us to reify probability in any metaphysical sense; only to condition our expectations on our status as conscious observers. It's not fundamentally different from ordinary Bayesian reasoning.
In the case of the Doomsday argument, do you agree that it's simply the case that for 95% of humans, they will correctly estimate that they will have been among the middle 95% after all is said and done? That's all it's saying.
Of course it won't be correct for everyone, otherwise it would no longer be a probabilistic argument. Similarly, this argument doesn't claim to 'prove' anything. I get that this kind of argument is controversial, but I still haven't seen a good reason to reject it.
Of course, but I'm not interested in metaphysical reifications as such. I'm interested in how these probabilities confuse human constructions with accurate depictions of reality, however you want to cash that out. Epistemological and scientific constructs just as suspect when presented as Serious Stuff, as they often are.
As far as "it's simply the case that for 95% of humans, they will correctly estimate that they will have been among the middle 95% after all is said and done"
I'm not sure 95% of humans would ever entertain the thought, or that many are even capable of doing so in any meaningful way.
Setting aside the cognitive incapacities and incuriosity of "most people", I'm not convinced there's any meaning to these statements outside the angels dancing on Bostrom's pinheads. A "middle 95%" of what? A hazy concept with no clear boundaries. It's a cute model and thought experiment, but that's all it is.
If my radio plays music, do you say that the radio generated, created, or originated the music? Of course not: the radio is merely receiving and outputting. It is a transmitter.
Similarly, the human brain is not the origination of consciousness, but a mere transmitter.
If you are an atheist materialist who does not believe in a soul, then I see no reason why you should waste our time debunking animal rights activists.
However, if you believe that consciousness does not originate within the human brain, but that the brain is merely a vessel of consciousness, then we should take seriously the question of the origin of consciousness.
If the brain was the originator of consciousness, this is the nominalist position. I am an idealist, meaning that I don't think we invent consciousness anew every time a human is born, or that we invent numbers anew when we write them down. They pre-exist humanity; humanity merely instantiates or represents these phenomena in the material world.
Without a serious confrontation with idealism, any definition of consciousness is going to be hand-wavy and imprecise at best. Which you admit.
The problem is that without that prior definite grounding, we're wasting our time looking at the number of neurons of such and such an animal. It is simply irrelevant if we have not first defined the concept we are discussing. It would be like discussing the number of votes achieved by a winning candidate without knowing his positions -- pedantry at best. Not useful or relevant.
When you accept idealism, then panpsychism becomes realistic. I propose that all electrons have souls.
Now, to your question, "if electrons have souls, why aren't we electrons?"
The reason for this is that while electrons have souls, they do not have the self awareness to ask such a question.
Babies do not have self-awareness. Should we abuse them? No.
A corpse does not have self-awareness. Should we beat it with a baseball bat? No.
A painting does not have self-awareness. Should we burn it? No.
The reason why we should refrain from harming beings without self-awareness is because such an act is undignified, because each act we take carries with it intentionality.
If you intend to hurt shrimp, you are acting with a sadistic intent. If you don't care, you are negligent.
The amount of time that people spend "refuting" shrimp pain is worthless. The question is not whether shrimp are conscious, but whether or not they are deserving of dignity.
>If my radio plays music, do you say that the radio generated, created, or originated the music? Of course not: the radio is merely receiving and outputting. It is a transmitter. Similarly, the human brain is not the origination of consciousness, but a mere transmitter.
I'm open to the idea that the brain might 'receive' consciousness from elsewhere, but it feels like a distinction without a difference. Either way, there is still a certain configuration of matter required for our conscious experience to manifest.
>If you are an atheist materialist who does not believe in a soul, then I see no reason why you should waste our time debunking animal rights activists.
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable signing onto materialism when things like consciousness and the laws of nature seem to go beyond it. Neither would I be comfortable dismissing them as illusory. I don't see how God, materialism, or souls determine whether or not this is a waste of time though. Debunking animal rights activists wasn't the primary goal btw, but the topic does intersect with current debates around that so I thought I'd touch on it briefly.
>Without a serious confrontation with idealism, any definition of consciousness is going to be hand-wavy and imprecise at best. Which you admit.
Does idealism offer a more precise definition? I'm all ears.
>The problem is that without that prior definite grounding, we're wasting our time looking at the number of neurons of such and such an animal. It is simply irrelevant if we have not first defined the concept we are discussing.
I think we have a workable enough idea of what it means to be a conscious subject for the question of who or what possesses that quality to be worth asking.
It's relevant because intelligence is often thought to be correlated with consciousness, and the anthropic argument I presented can be seen as reinforcing that assumption even if the exact mechanism remains unknown.
>When you accept idealism, then panpsychism becomes realistic. I propose that all electrons have souls. Now, to your question, "if electrons have souls, why aren't we electrons?" The reason for this is that while electrons have souls, they do not have the self awareness to ask such a question.
Right; this was one of the potential rebuttals to the argument I mentioned. Whether or not it works depends on whether phenomenal consciousness can exist without self-awareness. Or are these souls merely instances of 'proto-consciousness'? That version of panpsychism seems at least plausible: particles themselves aren't having conscious experiences, but their proto-consciousness could be activated under the right configuration.
>Babies do not have self-awareness. Should we abuse them? No. A corpse does not have self-awareness. Should we beat it with a baseball bat? No. A painting does not have self-awareness. Should we burn it? No. The reason why we should refrain from harming beings without self-awareness is because such an act is undignified, because each act we take carries with it intentionality. If you intend to hurt shrimp, you are acting with a sadistic intent. If you don't care, you are negligent.
The baby will and the corpse once did possess self-awareness; that's arguably a good enough basis to grant them some degree of personhood. They also matter to self-aware people who care about them. I would agree that it would be wrong to take someone's pet shrimp and tear it apart in front of them.
If paintings were edible, abundant, and replaced themselves rapidly, I don't see why consuming them and doing with them whatever was necessary to facilitate that process would be morally objectionable.
If you made a painting you ended up hating, would there be anything wrong with throwing it into a fire, aside from potential health risks from toxic fumes?
I agree that going out of your way to deliberately harm a creature may signal an underlying pathology, and could also foster more antisocial behaviour, but killing something isn't inherently sadistic. Otherwise should we also oppose using disinfectant to kill bacteria? Deliberate shrimp torture isn't the concern.
>The amount of time that people spend "refuting" shrimp pain is worthless. The question is not whether shrimp are conscious, but whether or not they are deserving of dignity.
I definitely think consciousness is a relevant factor in questions of dignity. I'm also interested in the consciousness status of things regardless of ethical implications. Do you not think that boiling shrimp to death would be a more pressing issue if they were capable of experiencing agonising suffering though? Or does suffering play no role in your moral framework?
I am not promoting vegetarianism or veganism, or the idea that we shouldn’t kill animals, but that we should make that process as dignified as possible, which is what the shrimp stunning machines are for. Are you under the impression that shrimp stunning machines are being advocated for to prevent shrimp from being killed? There’s a difference between killing and torturing.
I enjoyed your article, and it's clear that you've been reading a lot of the relevant philosophy. That being said, I don't think you properly explained your argument that the quantity of simpler organisms should modify our assessment of whether (or to what degree) they are conscious. It seemed as though you were going to deploy some version of the anthropic argument to make your point, but you never did (as far as I could tell).
I thought I did; apologies if it wasn't explicit enough. But the argument is fairly simple really. If there are multiple species, with some vastly outnumbering others, then all else equal, finding oneself in a smaller species is evidence against consciousness being present among the larger ones. You can also do the same thing using intelligence instead of population size.
The issue I've always had with anthropic arguments and their cousins is that they depend on reifying probabilities, where probabilities are themselves constructions of human mental activity.
I can build a fun-house in my imagination, let's say by writing a series of stories and novels, and then ask what the probability is of my fun-house existing across a range of probabilities that I conveniently provide to myself.
It might be a fun creative exercise and a test of mathematical reasoning. But I wouldn't want to conclude that I'd proven anything interesting about the nature or contents of what exists.
It doesn't require us to reify probability in any metaphysical sense; only to condition our expectations on our status as conscious observers. It's not fundamentally different from ordinary Bayesian reasoning.
In the case of the Doomsday argument, do you agree that it's simply the case that for 95% of humans, they will correctly estimate that they will have been among the middle 95% after all is said and done? That's all it's saying.
Of course it won't be correct for everyone, otherwise it would no longer be a probabilistic argument. Similarly, this argument doesn't claim to 'prove' anything. I get that this kind of argument is controversial, but I still haven't seen a good reason to reject it.
Of course, but I'm not interested in metaphysical reifications as such. I'm interested in how these probabilities confuse human constructions with accurate depictions of reality, however you want to cash that out. Epistemological and scientific constructs just as suspect when presented as Serious Stuff, as they often are.
As far as "it's simply the case that for 95% of humans, they will correctly estimate that they will have been among the middle 95% after all is said and done"
I'm not sure 95% of humans would ever entertain the thought, or that many are even capable of doing so in any meaningful way.
Setting aside the cognitive incapacities and incuriosity of "most people", I'm not convinced there's any meaning to these statements outside the angels dancing on Bostrom's pinheads. A "middle 95%" of what? A hazy concept with no clear boundaries. It's a cute model and thought experiment, but that's all it is.