I don’t think you should give 0 probability to individual cells being conscious, because then no evidence or argument could move you away from that, if you’re a committed Bayesian. I don’t know what an uninformed prior could look like. I imagine there isn’t one. It’s the reference class problem.
You should even be uncertain about the fundamental nature of reality. Maybe things more basic than fundamental particles, like strings. Or maybe something else. They could be conscious or not, and they may not exist at all.
Yeah if I were to translate that into a quantitative prior I suppose it would be that other individuals have roughly 50% of being conscious (I.e. I’m agnostic on if they are or not).
Then I learn about the world. I learn about the importance of certain biological structures for consciousness. I learn that I act in a certain way when in pain and notice other individuals do as well etc. That’s how I get my posterior that rocks probably aren’t conscious and pigs probably are.
What do you count as “other individual”? Any physical system, including overlapping ones? What about your brain, and your brain but not counting one electron?
I’m a bit confused if I’m supposed to be answering on the basis of my uninformed prior or some slightly informed prior or even my posterior here. Like I’m not sure how much you want me to answer based on my experience of the world.
For an uninformed prior I suppose any individual entity that I can visually see. I see a rock and I think “that could possibly be conscious”. I don’t lump the rock with another nearby rock and think maybe that ‘double rock’ is conscious because they just visually appear to me to be independent entities as they are not really visually connected in any physical way. This obviously does factor in some knowledge of the world so I suppose it isn’t a strict uninformed prior, but I suppose it’s about as uninformed as is useful to talk about?
I don’t think you should give 0 probability to individual cells being conscious, because then no evidence or argument could move you away from that, if you’re a committed Bayesian. I don’t know what an uninformed prior could look like. I imagine there isn’t one. It’s the reference class problem.
You should even be uncertain about the fundamental nature of reality. Maybe things more basic than fundamental particles, like strings. Or maybe something else. They could be conscious or not, and they may not exist at all.
I certainly don’t put 0 probability on that possibility.
I agree uninformed prior may not be a useful concept here. I think the true uninformed prior is “I have no idea what is conscious other than myself”.
I don’t think that gives you can actual proper quantitative prior, as a probability distribution.
Yeah if I were to translate that into a quantitative prior I suppose it would be that other individuals have roughly 50% of being conscious (I.e. I’m agnostic on if they are or not).
Then I learn about the world. I learn about the importance of certain biological structures for consciousness. I learn that I act in a certain way when in pain and notice other individuals do as well etc. That’s how I get my posterior that rocks probably aren’t conscious and pigs probably are.
Ok, this makes more sense.
What do you count as “other individual”? Any physical system, including overlapping ones? What about your brain, and your brain but not counting one electron?
I’m a bit confused if I’m supposed to be answering on the basis of my uninformed prior or some slightly informed prior or even my posterior here. Like I’m not sure how much you want me to answer based on my experience of the world.
For an uninformed prior I suppose any individual entity that I can visually see. I see a rock and I think “that could possibly be conscious”. I don’t lump the rock with another nearby rock and think maybe that ‘double rock’ is conscious because they just visually appear to me to be independent entities as they are not really visually connected in any physical way. This obviously does factor in some knowledge of the world so I suppose it isn’t a strict uninformed prior, but I suppose it’s about as uninformed as is useful to talk about?