I place some (significant) credence in social models of consciousness, as well as some credence in consciousness-like computation being rare in nature, so evolutionary/neural paths should look more similar to humans in conscious beings, which is why I’m more confident that chickens and other social animals at that level of sophistication are conscious than I am that objectively smarter but nonsocial and evolutionarily distant animals like octopodes are conscious.
But resting all your hopes on language just seems like a very specific bet. I think I see the case for it, but I don’t see why we should believe that this particular hypothesis is better than several others, both backed by other theories and more theory-free ones.
I wouldn’t put >50% probability on language, because it’s super specific. But it does seem like a pretty unique transition point—there certainly isn’t anything else social, prior to language, that placed super obvious super strong constraints on how one’s mind (or persona) had to be internally/introspectively organized.
Before language, there were a lot more degrees of freedom in how a brain’s computations could ‘appear or be represented to the brain itself’, in order to produce the selected-for output. Afterwards, you suddenly had a sort of invasive, ever-present auditing process checking all sorts of questions about the brain’s self-representations.
If it’s not language, then I’m not sure social selection pressures matter much more (or less) than general planning selection pressures. ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to keep track of who my enemies and allies are, know what volume to emit my hunger-shriek at in the presence of enemies vs. allies, etc.’ doesn’t seem obviously more compelling to me than ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to make multi-step physical plans about where to relocate myself, how those hypothetical relocations will affect my internal senses of pain/hunger/lust/fear, and so on.’ And it all sounds pretty unconstraining to me.
I place some (significant) credence in social models of consciousness, as well as some credence in consciousness-like computation being rare in nature, so evolutionary/neural paths should look more similar to humans in conscious beings, which is why I’m more confident that chickens and other social animals at that level of sophistication are conscious than I am that objectively smarter but nonsocial and evolutionarily distant animals like octopodes are conscious.
But resting all your hopes on language just seems like a very specific bet. I think I see the case for it, but I don’t see why we should believe that this particular hypothesis is better than several others, both backed by other theories and more theory-free ones.
I wouldn’t put >50% probability on language, because it’s super specific. But it does seem like a pretty unique transition point—there certainly isn’t anything else social, prior to language, that placed super obvious super strong constraints on how one’s mind (or persona) had to be internally/introspectively organized.
Before language, there were a lot more degrees of freedom in how a brain’s computations could ‘appear or be represented to the brain itself’, in order to produce the selected-for output. Afterwards, you suddenly had a sort of invasive, ever-present auditing process checking all sorts of questions about the brain’s self-representations.
If it’s not language, then I’m not sure social selection pressures matter much more (or less) than general planning selection pressures. ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to keep track of who my enemies and allies are, know what volume to emit my hunger-shriek at in the presence of enemies vs. allies, etc.’ doesn’t seem obviously more compelling to me than ‘I need to self-represent in a pretty specific and coherent way in order to make multi-step physical plans about where to relocate myself, how those hypothetical relocations will affect my internal senses of pain/hunger/lust/fear, and so on.’ And it all sounds pretty unconstraining to me.