Consciousness

Full Title or Meme

A simple idea of "self aware" well-known by most people, becomes harder to define as digital systems get better at doing things that people do.

Consciousness may become conflated with awareness of the physical environment, which can cause confusion. A person dreaming (either night or day) may not be aware of their environment, but may have a rich Consciousness.

Context

• Descartes declared "I think therefore I am" as his first principle. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist. From this Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."
• John Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to Cartesian philosophy based on pre-existing concepts, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.. This is now known as empiricism. See the wiki page on Identity Continuity.
• Alan Turning proved to have the best definition while claiming not to address the definition of it at all. He described an interrogator, who is given the task of trying to determine which of two players: A or B on the other end of teletypewriter links is a computer and which is a human. The interrogator is limited to using the responses to questions typed into a terminal to make the determination. Turing proposed his test in 1950 to help answer the question "can machines think?" See the wiki page on the context of knowledge.

Problems

• There is not generally accepted and rigorous definition of Consciousness. So, arguing about where or when something thing is conscious cannot come to any final conclusion.
• David Chalmers describe the hard problem as finding an answer to why we have any sense of knowing that what we know is provided by sensory perception. We now know that without comparing our internal knowledge to reality we fall into hallucination. This has been shown by GPT which has no sense perception and hallucinates wildly.
• An early attempt at a definition by Thomas Nagel recognized that trying to reduce Consciousness was never successful. It always had be be addressed as a feature of a real thing. He asked the question "What it's like to be a bat?" His answer is that it must come from the idea of what it is like to be something. But that misses the point of knowing where to be conscious is it enough to be like a human, or does it need to be what is it like to be one particular human? In other words, is it necessary to be a unique identifiable thing first, or can be be what is it like to be a member of class of things (humans, bats, etc.)?
• What it's like to have Artificial Consciousness. (Click on the link.) And could that be related in any way to a living Consciousness?
• If an Artificial Consciousness did exist would it be something that could be downloaded from one device and uploaded to another?
• Many religions now believe that a Consciousness, which they often call a soul, is downloaded at birth and perhaps uploaded at death.
• Most of the current discussion on Consciousness is focused on Carbon-based Life Forms or their simulation on digital computers. But there is no a priori reason to to exclude other large aggregations of energy. For example it has been argued that the sun itself is a good place to look for evidence of self-aware behavior.

Awareness

The question for Consciousness is "What function does it serve?" Clearly for most living organisms, awareness of the environment to enable (1) survival of the person and (2) survival of the species is the over-riding purpose. For humans the overall goal of survival is broken down into tasks that need to be completed on that path. In other words, Consciousness is a agent for change of the current environment into one that is more conducive to a comfortable existence on the path to survival. The success of this drive can lead to self-importance and other less admirable attributes.

Solutions

• At the very simplest level even an amoeba is self-aware to the extent that it can swim upstream in a sugar gradient. This behavior is labeled "tropism" and seldom considered the source of Consciousness but there doesn't seem to be any basis for this exclusion as the path from tropism to Consciousness seems to be a straight path. Really the point of any organism is to survive in the Ecosystem that it inhabits. It seems obvious that the less stable the Ecosystem the more adaptable the organism must be. So it would seems that instability is the direct cause of complex Consciousness. The organisms that did not adapt to changing Ecosystems did not survive. Periodic changes, like the seasons, can be adapted by inherited patterns, but instability does not lead to inherited behavior changes.
• Hod Lipson of the Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University decides to address Consciousness experimentally, since none of the recent philosophers had achieved much just by philosophizing. “We used to refer to consciousness as ‘the C-word’ in robotics and AI circles, because we’re not allowed to touch that topic. It’s too fluffy, nobody knows what it means, and we’re serious people so we’re not going to do that. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s almost one of the big unanswered questions, on par with origin of life and origin of the universe. What is sentience, creativity? What are emotions? We want to understand what it means to be human, but we also want to understand what it takes to create these things artificially. It’s time to address these questions head-on and not be shy about it.”
• A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness. "In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun." Scientists have issued a new declaration. "The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans and insects)."

References

Other material

• Turing Test
• Dualism