ben.smith

• ben.smithJan 1, 2024, 10:38 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  But I would guess that pleasure and unpleasantness isn’t always because of the conscious sensations, but these can have the same unconscious perceptions as a common cause.

  This sounds right. My claim is that there are all sorts of unconscious perceptions an valenced processing going on in the brain, but all of that is only experienced consciously once there’s a certain kind of recurrent cortical processing of the signal which can loosely be described as “sensation”. I mean that very loosely; it even can include memories of physical events or semantic thought (which you might understand as a sort of recall of auditory processing). Without that recurrent cortical processing modeling the reward and learning process, probably all that midbrain dopaminergic activity does not get consciously perceived. Perhaps it does, indirectly, when the dopaminergic activity (or lack thereof) influences the sorts of sensations you have.

  But I’m getting really speculative here. I’m an empiricist and my main contention is that there’s a live issue with unknowns and researchers should figure out what sort of empirical tests might resolve some of these questions, and then collect data to test all this out.

• ben.smithDec 31, 2023, 10:50 PM

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  I would say thinking of something funny is often pleasurable. Similarly, thinking of something sad can be unpleasant. And this thinking can just be inner speech (rather than visual imagination)....Also, people can just be in good or bad moods, which could be pleasant and unpleasant, respectively, but not really consistently simultaneous with any particular sensations.

  I think most of those things actually can be reduced to sensations; moods can’t be, but then, are moods consciously experienced, or do they only predispose us to interpret conscious experiences more positively or negatively?

  (Edit: another set of sensations you might overlook when you think about conscious experience of mood are your bodily sensations: heart rate, skin conductivity, etc.)

  But this also seems like the thing that’s more morally important to look into directly. Maybe frogs’ vision is blindsight, their touch and hearing are unconscious, etc., so they aren’t motivated to engage in sensory play, but they might still benefit from conscious unpleasantness and aversion for more sophisticated strategies to avoid them. And they might still benefit from conscious pleasure for more sophisticated strategies to pursue pleasure.

  They “might” do, sure, but what’s your expectation they in fact will experience conscious pleasantness devoid of sensations? High enough to not write it off entirely, to make it worthwhile to experiment on, and to be cautious about how we treat those organisms in the meantime—sure. I think we can agree on that.

  But perhaps we’ve reached a sort of crux here: is it possible, or probable, that organisms could experience conscious pleasure or pain without conscious sensation? It seems like a worthwhile question. After reading Humphrey I feel like it’s certainly possible, but I’d give it maybe around 0.35 probability. As I said in OP, I would value more research in this area to try to give us more certainty.

  If your probability that conscious pleasure and pain can exist without conscious sensation is, say, over 0.8 or so, I’d be curious about what leads you to believe that with confidence.

• ben.smithDec 31, 2023, 10:37 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bella’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  To give a concrete example, my infant daughter can spend hours bashing her toy keyboard with 5 keys. It makes a sound every time. She knows she isn’t getting any food, sleep, or any other primary reinforcer to do this. But she gets the sensations of seeing the keys light up and a cheerful voice sounding from the keyboard’s speaker each time she hits it. I suppose the primary reinforcer just is the cheery voice and the keys lighting up (she seems to be drawn to light—light bulbs, screens, etc).

  During this activity, she’s playing, but also learning about cause and effect—about the reliability of the keys reacting to her touch, about what kind of touch causes the reaction, and how she can fine-tune and hone her touch to get the desired effect. I think we can agree that many of these things are transferable skills that will help her in all sorts of things in life over the next few years and beyond?

  I’m sort of conflating two things that Humphrey describes separately: sensory play, and sensation seeking. In this example it’s hard to separate the two. But Humphrey ties them both to consciousness, and perhaps there’s still something we can learn from about an activity that combines the two together.

  In this case, the benefits of play are clear, and I guess the further premise is that consciousness adds additional motivation for sensory play because, e.g., it makes things like seeing lights, hearing cheery voices much more vivid and hence reinforcing, and allows the incorporation of those things with other systems that enable action planning about how to get the reinforcers again, which makes play more useful.

  I agree this argument is pretty weak, because we can all agree that even the most basic lifeforms can do things like approach or avoid light. Humphrey’s argument is something like the particular neurophysiology that generates consciousness also provides the motivation and ability for play. I think I have said about as much as I can to repeat the argument and you’d have to go directly to Humphrey’s own writing for a better understanding of it!

• ben.smithDec 31, 2023, 1:27 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bella’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Yes I see that is a reasonable thing to not be convinced about and I am not sure I can do justice to the full argument here. I don’t have the book with me, so anything else I tell you is pulling from memory and strongly prone to error. Elsewhere in this comments section I said

  When you have sensations, play can teach you a lot about your own sensory processes and subsequently use what you’ve learned to leverage your visual sensations to accomplish objectives. It seems odd that an organism that can learn (as almost all can) would evolve visual sensations but not a propensity to play in a way that helps them to learn about those sensations.

  And

  Humphrey theorises that the evolutionary impulse for conscious sensations includes (1) the development of a sense of self (2) which in turn allows for a sense of other, and theory of mind. He thinks that mere unconscious perception can’t be reasoned about or used to model others because, being unconscious, it is inaccessible by the global workspace for that kind of use. in contrast, conscious sensations are accessible in the global workspace and can be used to imagine the past, future, or what others are experiencing. The cognitive and sensory empathy that allows can enable an organism to behave socially, to engage in deceit or control, to more effectively care for another, to anticipate what a predator can and can’t see, etc.

  I believe the idea is something like sentience enables a lot more opportunity to learn about the world, and learning opportunities can be obtained through play. Not taking those opportunities if you’re able is sort of like leaving free adaptive money on the table.

• ben.smithDec 30, 2023, 7:01 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  To me “conscious pleasure” without conscious sensation almost sounds like “the sound of one hand clapping”. Can you have pure joy unconnected to a particular sensation? Maybe, but I’m sceptical. First, the closest I can imagine is calm joyful moments during meditation, or drug-induced euphoria, but in both cases I think it’s at least plausible there are associated sensations. Second, to me, even the purest moments of simple joy seem to be sensations in themselves, and I don’t know if there’s any conscious experience without sensations.

  Humphrey theorises that the evolutionary impulse for conscious sensations includes (1) the development of a sense of self (2) which in turn allows for a sense of other, and theory of mind. He thinks that mere unconscious perception can’t be reasoned about or used to model others because, being unconscious, it is inaccessible by the global workspace for that kind of use. in contrast, conscious sensations are accessible in the global workspace and can be used to imagine the past, future, or what others are experiencing. The cognitive and sensory empathy that allows can enable an organism to behave socially, to engage in deceit or control, to more effectively care for another, to anticipate what a predator can and can’t see, etc.

  I would add that conscious sensation allows for more abstract processing of sensations, which enables tool use and other complex planning like long term planning in order to get the future self more pleasurable sensations. Humphrey doesn’t talk about that much, perhaps because it’s only a small subset of conscious species that have been observed doing those things, so perhaps mere consciousness isn’t sufficient to engage in them (some would argue you need language to do good long term planning and complex abstraction).

  Humphrey believes that mammals in general do engage in play, which he thinks all (but not only) conscious animals do, and that they also engage in sensation-seeking (e.g. sliding down slopes or moving fast through the air for no reason), which he thinks only (but not all) conscious animals do. And he’d say the same thing about birds, and the fact that those behaviors’ distribution over species lines up nicely with the species with neural structures he thinks generates consciousness he treats as additional confirmation of his theory.

  Animals do engage in play with unpleasant experiences, e.g., playfighting can include moderately unpleasant sensations. I suppose the benefits of those experiences being conscious might be to form more sophisticated strategies of avoiding them in future. It isn’t that Humphrey thinks play is necessary for conscious to emerge, it’s that he thinks all conscious animals are motivated to engage in play.

  I feel this last answer maybe hasn’t answered all your questions but I was a bit confused by your last paragraph, which might have arisen out of an understandable misunderstanding of the claim about consciousness and play.

• ben.smithDec 30, 2023, 4:58 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Humphrey’s argument fish aren’t conscious doesn’t only rest on their not having the requisite brain structures, because as you say, it is possible consciousness could have developed in their own structures in ways that are simply distinct from our own. But then, Humphrey would ask, if they have visual sensations, why are they uninterested in play? When you have sensations, play can teach you a lot about your own sensory processes and subsequently use what you’ve learned to leverage your visual sensations to accomplish objectives. It seems odd that an organism that can learn (as almost all can) would evolve visual sensations but not a propensity to play in a way that helps them to learn about those sensations.

  Perhaps fish just don’t benefit from learning more about their visual sensations. The sensations are adaptive, but learning about them confers no additional adaptive advantage. That seems a stretch to me, because it’s hard for me to imagine sensations being adaptive without learning and experimenting with them conferring additional advantage.

  You could also respond by citing examples where fish can play, and are motivated to sensation-seek, as you already have, and I think if Humphrey believes your examples he would find that persuasive evidence about those organisms consciousness.

• ben.smithDec 30, 2023, 4:38 AM

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: kewlcats’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  I feel like I should be writing and reading posts about AI but honestly I am too intimidated to go near that topic.

• ben.smithDec 28, 2023, 10:26 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: JWS 🔸’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  I tend to think that questions about which organisms or systems are conscious mostly depend on identifying the physical correlates of consciousness, and understanding how they work as a system, and that questions about panpsychism, illusionism, eliminativism, or even Calmer’s Hard Problem don’t bear on this question very much. I think there’s probably still a place for that philosophical debate because (1) there might be implications about where to look for the physical systems and (2) as I said to Michael earlier, illusionism might change our perspective on whether we assign special moral value to conscious experience at all. But I think (1) is marginal, and (2) is sort of a long shot.

  In contrast, I think empirical and scientific investigation can help us understand a lot about which systems are conscious, and about what sort of conscious experiences they have, so I think most morally cruxy questions of consciousness are scientific and empirical.

  Consequently, I wasn’t too bothered by Humphrey side-stepping this issue, although I basically agree he did, because he offered solid theory and empirical investigation that suggests further empirical tests that might help us make progress on understanding consciousness in animals and other systems.

  The D.B. case is also an interesting one—I don’t see why it isn’t plausible to imagine that the operation (and similarly split brain cases as documented by Nagel) might lead to a second vestige of consciousness as cut off from you as that of your family, friends, and coworkers. Except this fragment doesn’t have control of motor or speach functions, how horrible! It can only pass information onto the ‘dominant’ one.

  That was my reaction when I first read about split-brain patients. I now doubt it’s all that horrible. First, there’s been plenty of research of split-brain patients and I don’t think anyone has discovered signs of distress from split-halfs that are cut off from speech expression; those halves do have other ways of communicating, e.g., through signs. Second, in humans, much of distress is governed physiologically, and so (1) we would be able to detect physiological signs of stress, but more importantly (2) even if there’s a conscious half of a split-brain which can’t express itself, its mood-state might be normal because it shares a body with the other half, and so the two jointly set mood, and the system overall might not be in distress. Finally, even if consciousness isn’t illusory, conscious will often is; much more of our decisions are determined subconsciously than we think, and if the illusion still holds, the loss of conscious control might not even be perceived.

• ben.smithDec 28, 2023, 7:46 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  say that pain is bad (even if it is not phenomenal) because it constitutively includes the frustration of a desire, or the having of a certain negative attitude of dislike

  I’m curious how, excluding phenomenal definitions, you define he defines “frustration of a desire” or “negative attitude of a dislike”, because I wonder whether these would include extremely simple frustrations, like preventing a computer generated character in a computer game from reaching its goal. We could program an algorithm to try to solve for a desire (“navigate through a maze to get to the goal square”) and then prevent it from doing so, or even add additional cruelty by making it from an expectation it is about to reach its goal and then preventing it.

  I share your moral antirealism, but don’t think I could be convinced to care about preventing frustration of that sort of simple desire. It’s the qualia-laden desire that seems to matter to me, but that might be irrational if it turns out qualia is an illusion. In think within anti-realism it still makes sense to avoid certain stances if they involve arbitrary inconsistencies. So if not qualia, I wonder what meaningful difference there is between a starcraft ai’s frustrated desires and a human’s

• ben.smithDec 28, 2023, 5:01 AM

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Not absolutely sure I’m afraid. I lent my copy of the book out to a colleague so I can’t check.

  Humphrey mentioned illusionism (page 80 acc to Google books) but iirc he doesn’t actually say his view is an illusionist one.

  Personally I can’t stand the label “illusionism” because to me the label suggests we falsely believe we have qualia, and actually have no such thing at all! But your definition is maybe much more mundane—there, the illusion is merely that consciousness is mysterious or important or matters. I wish the literature could use labels that are more specific.

  And it seems like the version matters a great deal too. Perhaps if consciousness really is an illusion, and none of us really have qualia—we’re all p-zombies programmed to believe we aren’t—I have a hard time understanding the point of altruism or anything more than instrumental morality. But if we’re just talking about an illusion that consciousness is a mysterious other worldly thing, and somehow, there really are qualia, then altruism feels like a meaningful life project to adopt.

  On the whole having read Humphrey’s book, I don’t think he explicitly said he was an illusionist. but perhaps his theory suggests it, I’m not sure. He didn’t really explain why exactly he thought, a priori, we should expect sensorimotor feedback loops would generate consciousness, just that they seem to do so empirically. Perhaps he cleverly sidestepped the issue. I think his theory could make sense whether you are an illusionist or not.

  What links here?

  • ben.smith's comment on Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness” by ben.smith (Dec 28, 2023, 10:26 PM; 3 points)

• ben.smithDec 28, 2023, 1:32 AM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Thanks Michael. For readers who are confused by my post but still want to know more, consider just reading (2), which is a very good précis by Nick Humphrey of his book which I tried to summarize. It might be better for readers, rather than reading my essay, to just read that.

• ben.smithDec 27, 2023, 7:54 PM

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Actually, I have to correct my earlier reply. Iirc the argument is that all conscious animals engage in physical play, not necessarily that all playful animals are conscious. On the other hand, Humphrey does say that all animals engaging in pure sensation-seeking type play are conscious, so that’s probably the sort of play he’d need to bring him around on octopuses.

• ben.smithDec 27, 2023, 7:41 PM

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Will Aldred’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  Humphrey spent a lot of time saying that authors like Peter Godfrey-Smith (whose book on octopus sociality and consciousness I have read, and also recommend) are wrong or not particularly serious when they argue that octopus behavior is play, because there are more mundane explanations for play-like behavior. I can’t recall too much detail here because I no longer have Humphrey’s book in my possession. In any case I think if you convinced him octopuses do play he would probably change his mind on octopuses without needing to modify any aspects of the overall theory. He’d just need to concede that the way consciousness developed in warm blooded creatures is not the only way it has developed in evolutionary history.

• ben.smithDec 27, 2023, 7:32 PM

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MikhailSamin’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  No, the author is ultimately unclear why qualia in itself is useful, but by reasoning about the case studies I listed, his argument that qualia is in fact related to recursive internal feedback loops is ultimately a bit stronger than just “these things all feel like the same things so they must be related”.

  Humphrey first argues through his case studies that activity in the neocortex seems to generate conscious experience, while activity in the midbrain does not. Further, midbrain activity is sophisticated and can do a lot of visual and other perceptual processing independent of the neocortex, so all of that seems to be dissociable from consciousness. What remains is the generation of sensations in the neocortex. From that we can understand sensations ([in certain parts of?] the neocortex) are separable from perceptions (in the midbrain). So while that doesn’t tell us what consciousness is needed for, it does tell us what it is not used for, including at least some perception and midbrain processes like RL. The vulnerability in this argument IMO is mainly that self report about conscious experience might not be entirely reliable.

  Then he advances his “ipsundrum” hypothesis about how recursive (or recurrent, perhaps) sensory feedback loops could have evolved and gives strong arguments about why this was evolutionarily useful. The argument includes the idea that recurrent sensory feedback allows complex integrative processes such as self reflection and theory of mind, and those have strong evolutionary advantages. The development of warm blood might have both facilitated those feedback loops by speeding up neural processing, and necessitated them by requiring a more sophisticated homeostatic apparatus. So an evolutionary feedback loop created the sensory feedback loop.

  At this point, I guess we still can’t be confident these processes are inseparable from consciousness, but they seem more closely related to consciousness than other clearly separable processes. That seems valuable for at least lowering our expectations of sentience in species that don’t have the cognitive processes whose relationship to consciousness we haven’t ruled out.

• ben.smithDec 27, 2023, 5:18 PM

  11 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Bella’s comment on: Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

  I’ve tried to condense a book-length presentation into a 10 minute read and I probably have made some bad choices about which parts to leave out.

  Its not that sensory play is necessary for producing sentience. The claim is that any animal that is sentient would be motivated to play. There might be other motivations for play that are not sentience, but all sentient creatures (so the argument goes) would want to play in order to explore and learn about the properties of its own sensory world.

  For the limbless species you mentioned, if we imagine a radical scenario like a mammal that evolves into an entirely static plant-like existence, but for some reason, it doesn’t lose its now-evolutionarily-useless capacity for sentience, i suppose I imagine that it would play if it could, but does not because it can’t. So perhaps you could rescue Humphrey’s assertion about play by modifying it to “any sentient animal will be motivated to play and will play to the extent they are physically able to do so”.

  The theory depends on humans shared ancestry and neurophysiology with other animals. Conditional on shared ancestry and neurophysiology we are able to make some tentative inferences about animal experience from our own experiences. Without that shared ancestry, I think he would be far too far out on a limb (heh).

Only mam­mals and birds are sen­tient, ac­cord­ing to neu­ro­scien­tist Nick Humphrey’s the­ory of con­scious­ness, re­cently ex­plained in “Sen­tience: The in­ven­tion of con­scious­ness”

• ben.smith 10 Dec 2023 6:57 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: EA is Not Reli­gious Enough (EA should em­u­late peak Quak­erism)

  Early (and peak) Quakers went down some weird ineffective paths. It’s cool that they were into nonviolence and class equality, but they were also really into renaming the days of the week and months of the year to avoid pagan names.

  This sounds like hits-based cause selection. The median early Quaker cause area wasn’t particularly effective, but their best cause area was probably worth all of the wasted time in all of the others.

• ben.smith 10 Dec 2023 6:55 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA is Not Reli­gious Enough (EA should em­u­late peak Quak­erism)

  I am visiting a Quaker church for the first time ever tomorrow. I’ve been out of religious community for 15 years or so and I’d like to explore one that is compatible with my current views.

  I’m trying to think about what “EA but more religious” might look like. Could you form a religious community holding weekly assemblies to celebrate our aspirations to fill the lightcone with happy person moments? I think that is a profoundly spiritual and emotional activity and I think we can do it.

  I’ll post a longer post to this effect soon.

Shee­lah Kolhatkar at The New Yorker writes “In­side Sam Bankman-Fried’s Fam­ily Bub­ble”

• ben.smith 2 Oct 2023 5:25 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: ben.smith’s Quick takes

  Linkpost: Sheelah Kolhatkar at The New Yorker writes “Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Bubble” https://​​www.newyorker.com/​​magazine/​​2023/​​10/​​02/​​inside-sam-bankman-frieds-family-bubble