1. We clearly don't have a consensus definition of consciousness. But its not clear to me that we even have rough, working definitions that are better than just comparisons back to subjective human mental experience. Until we can get past that then people will still invoke human exceptionalism.
2. Until we stop thinking of consciousness as a single continuum, we're not going to be able to talk clearly about different dimensions of consciousness, or consciousness that in some ways exceeds that of humans.
3. We need to take ourselves out of the picture. Because its possible that consciousness is no more than a mental illusion.
4. Imo our tendency to kill and eat other animals might well be a block on our collective ability to fully recognise and confront non-human consciousness, and therefore to see consciousness for what it is.
1. Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators. This is definitional. It’s not some mystery. Furthermore, unless you’re a Cartesian dualist, I don’t know of anyone who denies non-human animals consciousness. The consciousness of non-human animals differs, because it isn’t intellectual in nature (non-human animals operate at the level of the sensory/imaginary/particular; human beings further abstract from sensory experience concepts which gives us universal or general knowledge; LLMs don’t even rise to the level of the most primitive life form’s consciousness).
3. The idea of consciousness being an illusion is incoherent. An illusion is by definition a phenomenon of consciousness!
Thanks for responding to my fuzzy, Sunday morning though-dump.
Overall, I'd say that you seem to be leaning pretty heavily on your own definitions. I suspect that other definitions are available.
> Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators.
So tell me how human brains create this "aboutness" and "semantic content"? How does this arise out of physical, neuronal activity? And why can't sufficiently complex logic operations achieve the same outcome?
Using brains to try to understand the emergent properties of brains seeme fraught with conceptual problems to me. Not least of which is a potential to over-estimate the centrality of how it subjectively feels to be a brain. In a way it's understandable as, in the end, that feeling is all we have. But imo that doesn't make it right.
> Overall, I'd say that you seem to be leaning pretty heavily on your own definitions.
This is just what intelligence involves if intelligence is to be intelligence. The terminology is common in the philosophy of mind. The attack - that these are just my definitions - is also fallacious. It doesn’t respond substantively to them.
> So tell me how human brains create this "aboutness" and "semantic content"?
The burden of proof is not mine. I am pinning down the thing that must be explained. How can you coherently deny aboutness and semantic content as central to intelligence? That is exactly what intelligence entails if it is to be intelligence, which is the capacity to apprehend reality. Otherwise, what are we even debating?
(FWIW, we can strongly argue that brains alone cannot account for concepts, because concepts are universal while matter is concrete and particular. We can have the concept Triangularity and talk about what is true of all triangles by analyzing the concept, but you never encounter Triangularity in the wild, as it were. You only ever witness particular triangles, each determined in ways that Triangularity is not. Triangularity is abstracted from them. So if matter is concrete and determined and can only be concrete and determined, and what a thing is is the substance of the content we apprehend - that must be the case, or else you deny the possibility of knowledge and render your claims incoherent - then these abstracted universal concepts cannot exist as such in matter without losing their universality, destroying knowledge in the process.)
> why can't sufficiently complex logic operations achieve the same outcome?
Why would they? This is magical thinking. These “logic operations” in question are purely syntactic operations - this is just definitional. Computational models are formalizations of effective methods, which are operationally mechanical and syntactic. You cannot pile on more syntax or more fancy looking syntax to get semantics. That makes no sense.
> Using brains to try to understand the emergent properties of brains seeme fraught with conceptual problems
Why? If a “brain” (let’s say mind) can understand reality at all, then why should brains escape the domain of things it can understand? Conversely, if a brain cannot grasp the brain, why should it be able to grasp anything at all? Is not a matter of complexity, because knowledge is about grasping the principles governing a thing, not holding some vast state diagram in your head.
> a potential to over-estimate the centrality of how it subjectively feels to be a brain. In a way it's understandable as, in the end, that feeling is all we have.
This has nothing to do with feelings, though the subjectivity of consciousness (again, intentional in nature) is a fact you cannot ignore and must account for. Otherwise, you are guilty of eliminativism, that is, the denial of the very facts that must be explained, because of a prior commitment to materialistic presuppositions.
1. We clearly don't have a consensus definition of consciousness. But its not clear to me that we even have rough, working definitions that are better than just comparisons back to subjective human mental experience. Until we can get past that then people will still invoke human exceptionalism.
2. Until we stop thinking of consciousness as a single continuum, we're not going to be able to talk clearly about different dimensions of consciousness, or consciousness that in some ways exceeds that of humans.
3. We need to take ourselves out of the picture. Because its possible that consciousness is no more than a mental illusion.
4. Imo our tendency to kill and eat other animals might well be a block on our collective ability to fully recognise and confront non-human consciousness, and therefore to see consciousness for what it is.