Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy.
You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.
It turns out that the bio-molecular machinery that neurons use to do their thing is also present throughout all cells. In other words, all life thinks. Brains are just concentrations of thinking tissue.
I don’t understand the problem with being inclusive a bit. Plants could be aware, so could be all life of all the Kingdom, we kill them and we eat them for own survival.
What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.
As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.
IIRC, he meant that plant life binds and manipulates chemicals in the immediate environment; animals move matter over the surface of the earth (at a much higher rate than plants); humans shift information through time via culture (and later writing, et. al.)
I agree with your insinuation that there is utility in having a language for describing the brain processes or their functions in humans that is different from the other living beings.
One way that I like to think about it is that there's a spectrum of "sophistication". Even within the human population, there's gradation: not everyone is great at critical thinking, forecasting, imagining, reasoning, meta cognition, etc.
When I look to the stars, I wonder what levels exist above the human mind.
Looking "downward", are there "thinking processes" that we could assimilate through technology into our own minds?
> Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?
Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.
"Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem." - Wendell Johnson (Semanticist)
Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.
The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.
It's an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it. But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism. We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.
> But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.
This is some pretty strong language.
We all use words to abstract concepts. It's not clear what "thinking" even means from a scientific standpoint. We can be pretty broad on the definition if this is a philosophical discussion.
> suddenly an automatic door is thinking
It is certainly performing an action in response to stimuli. And, given that more electronics are shifting to microcontrollers, a modern automatic door might as well have the machinery required to 'think', or at least, it will have a computer.
There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.
> There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.
"specifically" is key here. People want to differentiate between one tree and whole forest. Maybe you don't, but there is a reason why those two words exist. The same is with one door and enormous collection of doors acting as a whole big brain. The same is with intelligence of automatic doors and of humans. They live on continuum like light and dark, but we still have words for light and dark.
> It's an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it.
Cheers! Thank you.
> I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.
Fair enough. (FWIW, Galileo turned the charlatans' toys into telescopes.)
> We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.
Meaning no disrespect, this sounds like a philosophical rather than a scientific objection to me. Which is fine, but I want to ask, necessary for what?
I actually don't know if I think cells are robots or tiny people.
It seems to me that slime molds think, and already must have some kind of "self", but do they count as a person? Or the lowly trichoplax[1], a kind of tribe of cells, is it a person?
Cybernetics has a result that says that any efficient self-regulating system must contain an image of itself to function.
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[1] > There are no neurons present, but in the absence of a nervous system the animal use short chains of amino acids known as peptides for cell communication, in a way that resembles how animals with neurons use neuropeptides for the same purpose. Individual cells contain and secrete a variety of small peptides, made up of between four and 20 amino acids, which are detected by neighbouring cells. Each peptide can be used individually to send a signal to other cells, but also sequentially or together in different combinations, creating a huge number a different types of signals. This allows for a relatively complex behavior such as crinkling, turning, flattening, and internal churning.
1. Make something up about whether consciousness is fundamental and run with it.
2. Don't make anything up when you don't need to, because we can answer how plants follow the sun without needing to talk about consciousness, just like we can answer how an automatic door opens for me when I get close without deciding to call it conscious.
> From below: Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?
You're saying "Consciousness isn't solved, therefore we should imagine that these things are conscious."
I'm saying "Consciousness isn't solved and that's irrelevant because we have purely mechanical explanations for these things that don't require imagining that they're conscious."
Because a lightbulb's glow when I push a button or flip a switch _might_ be a sign of the lightbulb's consciousness, but that's 1) not necessary and 2) purely made up and deep into Russell's teapot.
Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?
> Reply to above:
If consciousness is fundamental, the "purely mechanical" explanation is not purely mechanical.
I've found HackerNews to be broadly allergic to the idea of nonlocal consciousness, and worldviews that are not material reductionism. Nevertheless, I will once again point to the work of Dean Radin, among others, to demonstrate that these are not unfalsifiable claims.
I think the problem with both of your arguments is that neither of you will be able to actually define consciousness in a way that is satisfactory to the other party.
Which is cool. Because we don't really fundamentally understand what it actually is. We have a rough feeling, but any definition we put forth will either also be satisfied by something you both agree is not conscious or not be satisfied by something you both agree is conscious.
So we can't really say if it is emergent or fundamental. And it may even be a property of purely mechanical elements.
If consciousness is non-local or non-mechanical then it has a lot of very weird rules about physical and chemical things that can be done to brains to alter it.
"I'm saying "Consciousness isn't solved and that's irrelevant because we have purely mechanical explanations for these things that don't require imagining that they're conscious."
"
Seems you don't really believe in consciousness which is fine. In the end whatever humans think consciousness is can probably also be explained with mechanical explanations.
Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless.
This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet it follows light: https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructio...
Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy.
You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.