I wasn’t aware of the current scientific consensus about consciousness; this article was a good primer on the state of the field for me in terms of which theories are preferred. I do like your though and I think it’s an interesting challenge or way to approach thinking about consciousness in machines. I’ve typed out/deleted this reply several times as it does make me re-evaluate what I think about panpsychism. I believe I like your approach and think it is useful for thinking about consciousness at least in machines, but am not sure that “panpsychism” as a theory adds much.
Psychological or neurological theories of consciousness are implicitly prefaced on studying human or non-human animal systems. Thus, though they reckon with the cognitive building blocks of consciousness, there’s less examination of just how reductive your system could get and still have consciousness. Whether you’re taking a GWT, HOT, or IIT approach, your neural system is made up of millions of neurons arranged into a number of complex components. You might still think there needs to be some level of complexity within your system to approach a level of valenced conscious experience anything like that which you and I are familiar. Even if there’s no arbitrary “complexity cut-off”, for “processes that matter morally” do we care about elemental systems that might have, quantitatively, a tiny, tiny fraction of the conscious experience of humans and other living beings?
To be a bit more concrete about it (and I suspect you agree with me on this point): when it comes to thinking about which animals have valenced conscious experience and thus matter morally, I don’t think panpsychism has much to add—do you? To the extent that GWT, HOT, or IIT ends up being confirmed through observation, we can then proceed to work out how much of each of those experiences each species of animal has, without worrying how widely that extends out to non-living matter.
And then proceeding squarely on to the question of non-living matter. Even if it’s true that neurological consciousness theories reduce to panpsychism, we can still observe that most non-living systems fail to have anything but the most basic similarity to the sorts of systems we know for a fact are conscious. Consciousness in more complex machines might be one of the toughest ethical challenges for our century or perhaps the next one, but I suspect when we deal with it, it might be through approaches like this, which attempt to identify building blocks of consciousness and see how machines could have them in some sort of substantive way rather than in a minimal form. Again, whether or not an electron or positron “has consciousness” doesn’t seem relevant to that question.
Having said that, I can see value in reducing down neurological theories to their simplest building blocks as you’ve attempted here. That approach really might allow us to start to articulate operational definitions for consciousness we might use in studying machine consciousness.
You might still think there needs to be some level of complexity within your system to approach a level of valenced conscious experience anything like that which you and I are familiar. Even if there’s no arbitrary “complexity cut-off”, for “processes that matter morally” do we care about elemental systems that might have, quantitatively, a tiny, tiny fraction of the conscious experience of humans and other living beings?
I think we couldn’t justify not assigning them some value with such an approach, even if it’s so little we can ignore it (although it could add up).
To be a bit more concrete about it (and I suspect you agree with me on this point): when it comes to thinking about which animals have valenced conscious experience and thus matter morally, I don’t think panpsychism has much to add—do you? To the extent that GWT, HOT, or IIT ends up being confirmed through observation, we can then proceed to work out how much of each of those experiences each species of animal has, without worrying how widely that extends out to non-living matter.
I agree, and I think this could be a good approach.
My reading leading up to this post and the post itself were prompted by what seemed to be unjustifiable confidence in almost all nonhuman animals not being conscious. Maybe a more charitable interpretation or a steelman of these positions is just that almost all nonhumans animals have only extremely low levels of consciousness compared to humans (although I’d disagree with this).
I arrived here from Jay Shooster’s discussion about the EA community’s attitude to eating animals.
I wasn’t aware of the current scientific consensus about consciousness; this article was a good primer on the state of the field for me in terms of which theories are preferred. I do like your though and I think it’s an interesting challenge or way to approach thinking about consciousness in machines. I’ve typed out/deleted this reply several times as it does make me re-evaluate what I think about panpsychism. I believe I like your approach and think it is useful for thinking about consciousness at least in machines, but am not sure that “panpsychism” as a theory adds much.
Psychological or neurological theories of consciousness are implicitly prefaced on studying human or non-human animal systems. Thus, though they reckon with the cognitive building blocks of consciousness, there’s less examination of just how reductive your system could get and still have consciousness. Whether you’re taking a GWT, HOT, or IIT approach, your neural system is made up of millions of neurons arranged into a number of complex components. You might still think there needs to be some level of complexity within your system to approach a level of valenced conscious experience anything like that which you and I are familiar. Even if there’s no arbitrary “complexity cut-off”, for “processes that matter morally” do we care about elemental systems that might have, quantitatively, a tiny, tiny fraction of the conscious experience of humans and other living beings?
To be a bit more concrete about it (and I suspect you agree with me on this point): when it comes to thinking about which animals have valenced conscious experience and thus matter morally, I don’t think panpsychism has much to add—do you? To the extent that GWT, HOT, or IIT ends up being confirmed through observation, we can then proceed to work out how much of each of those experiences each species of animal has, without worrying how widely that extends out to non-living matter.
And then proceeding squarely on to the question of non-living matter. Even if it’s true that neurological consciousness theories reduce to panpsychism, we can still observe that most non-living systems fail to have anything but the most basic similarity to the sorts of systems we know for a fact are conscious. Consciousness in more complex machines might be one of the toughest ethical challenges for our century or perhaps the next one, but I suspect when we deal with it, it might be through approaches like this, which attempt to identify building blocks of consciousness and see how machines could have them in some sort of substantive way rather than in a minimal form. Again, whether or not an electron or positron “has consciousness” doesn’t seem relevant to that question.
Having said that, I can see value in reducing down neurological theories to their simplest building blocks as you’ve attempted here. That approach really might allow us to start to articulate operational definitions for consciousness we might use in studying machine consciousness.
I think we couldn’t justify not assigning them some value with such an approach, even if it’s so little we can ignore it (although it could add up).
I agree, and I think this could be a good approach.
My reading leading up to this post and the post itself were prompted by what seemed to be unjustifiable confidence in almost all nonhuman animals not being conscious. Maybe a more charitable interpretation or a steelman of these positions is just that almost all nonhumans animals have only extremely low levels of consciousness compared to humans (although I’d disagree with this).
It’s worth checking out this very much ongoing twitter thread with Lamme about related issues.
https://mobile.twitter.com/VictorLamme/status/1258855709623693325