You mention that a further project might be to attempt to make the case that chimpanzees aren’t conscious, and that Gazami crabs are, each to confirm your suspicion you could in fact make a plausible case for each. Could you outline what such cases might look like (knowing that you can’t provide the output of an investigation you haven’t performed)? What evidences would you be looking into that aren’t already in this report (e.g. would it mainly be information as to how their cognition in particular is similar to / differs from human cognition)?
For others’ benefit, what I said in the report was:
I think I can make a weakly plausible case for (e.g.) Gazami crab consciousness, and I think I can make a weakly plausible case for chimpanzee non-consciousness.
By “weakly plausible” I meant that I think I can argue for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness, and separately for a ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness.
Such arguments would draw from considerations that are mentioned at least briefly somewhere in the report, but it would bundle them together in a certain way and elaborate certain points.
My argument for ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness would look something like an updated version of Macphail (1998), plus many of the considerations from Dennett (2017). Or, to elaborate that a bit: given the current state of evidence on animal cognition and behavior, and given what is achievable using relatively simple deep learning architectures (including deep reinforcement learning), it seems plausible (though far from guaranteed) that the vast majority of animal behaviors, including fairly sophisticated ones, are the product of fairly simple (unconscious) learning algorithms operating in environments with particular reward and punishment gradients, plus various biases in the learning algorithms “organized in advance of experience” via evolution. Furthermore, it seems plausible (though not likely, I would say) that phenomenal consciousness depends on a relatively sophisticated suite of reasoning and self-modeling capacities that humans possess and chimpanzees do not (and which may also explain why chimpanzees can’t seem to learn human-like syntactically advanced language). I am pretty confident this conjunction of hypotheses isn’t true, but I think something like this is “weakly plausible.” There are other stories by which it could turn out that chimpanzees aren’t conscious, but the story outlined above is (very loosely speaking) the “story” I find most plausible (among stories by which chimpanzees might not be conscious).
My case for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness would involve pulling together a variety of weak considerations in favor of the “weak plausibility” of Gazami crab consciousness. For example: (1) given the considerations from Appendix H, perhaps phenomenal consciousness can be realized by fairly simple cognitive algorithms, (2) even assuming fairly “sophisticated” cognition is required for consciousness (e.g. a certain kind of self-model), perhaps 100,000 neurons are sufficient for that, and (3) perhaps I’m confused about something fairly fundamental, and I should be deferring some probability mass to the apparently large number of consciousness scholars who are physicalist functionalists and yet think it’s quite plausible that arthropods are conscious.
You mention that a further project might be to attempt to make the case that chimpanzees aren’t conscious, and that Gazami crabs are, each to confirm your suspicion you could in fact make a plausible case for each. Could you outline what such cases might look like (knowing that you can’t provide the output of an investigation you haven’t performed)? What evidences would you be looking into that aren’t already in this report (e.g. would it mainly be information as to how their cognition in particular is similar to / differs from human cognition)?
For others’ benefit, what I said in the report was:
By “weakly plausible” I meant that I think I can argue for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness, and separately for a ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness.
Such arguments would draw from considerations that are mentioned at least briefly somewhere in the report, but it would bundle them together in a certain way and elaborate certain points.
My argument for ~10% chance of chimpanzee non-consciousness would look something like an updated version of Macphail (1998), plus many of the considerations from Dennett (2017). Or, to elaborate that a bit: given the current state of evidence on animal cognition and behavior, and given what is achievable using relatively simple deep learning architectures (including deep reinforcement learning), it seems plausible (though far from guaranteed) that the vast majority of animal behaviors, including fairly sophisticated ones, are the product of fairly simple (unconscious) learning algorithms operating in environments with particular reward and punishment gradients, plus various biases in the learning algorithms “organized in advance of experience” via evolution. Furthermore, it seems plausible (though not likely, I would say) that phenomenal consciousness depends on a relatively sophisticated suite of reasoning and self-modeling capacities that humans possess and chimpanzees do not (and which may also explain why chimpanzees can’t seem to learn human-like syntactically advanced language). I am pretty confident this conjunction of hypotheses isn’t true, but I think something like this is “weakly plausible.” There are other stories by which it could turn out that chimpanzees aren’t conscious, but the story outlined above is (very loosely speaking) the “story” I find most plausible (among stories by which chimpanzees might not be conscious).
My case for a ~10% chance of Gazami crab consciousness would involve pulling together a variety of weak considerations in favor of the “weak plausibility” of Gazami crab consciousness. For example: (1) given the considerations from Appendix H, perhaps phenomenal consciousness can be realized by fairly simple cognitive algorithms, (2) even assuming fairly “sophisticated” cognition is required for consciousness (e.g. a certain kind of self-model), perhaps 100,000 neurons are sufficient for that, and (3) perhaps I’m confused about something fairly fundamental, and I should be deferring some probability mass to the apparently large number of consciousness scholars who are physicalist functionalists and yet think it’s quite plausible that arthropods are conscious.