Animal Consciousness
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.I don’t think animals are sentient.
I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.
There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
Dozens of videos compiling and explaining evidence of animal insentience: https://libertythroughreason.com/insentience-in-animals-and-sleepwalkers/
Additional reasoning:
You propose in your writings that universal creativity can emerge from lower-level, mindless computation, and that consciousness is among the emergent properties associated with creativity. But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
The fact that simple execution-only systems are not conscious does not show that no noncreative computation can have phenomenal properties. For example, pain could in principle have emerged from a different kind of lower-level computation long before that system acquired universal creativity.
So unless there is an explanation for why phenomenal experience cannot emerge from noncreative computation, the inference from “animals are noncreative” to “animals are insentient” does not seem to follow.
The inference would seem more natural in the opposite direction: evidence that animals lacked phenomenal experience might support doubts about more general mental capacities, but the absence of universal creativity does not by itself explain why even pain or color experience should be absent.
Hi Vincent, welcome to V. Nice meeting you at Conjecture Con.
But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
Idk why you switched from “consciousness” to “phenomenal experience” here. But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
I have seen no evidence of any animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. If you know of any, please show me.
But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
This seems to be circular reasoning:
Your reply seems to move from “the behavior could have been preprogrammed” to “the behavior is therefore mindless.” But those are different claims.
“Preprogrammed” describes how the behavior is generated. “Mindless” additionally says that no phenomenal experience accompanies that process. That does not follow unless we already assume that non-universal or preprogrammed computation cannot support phenomenal experience. Which is precisely the connection my criticism questioned.
So showing that animal behavior could be preprogrammed may show that the behavior does not prove sentience, but it does not by itself provide evidence of insentience.
Explanations of animal behavior can be phrased fully in terms of unconscious, purely dogmatic information processing. We can write the programs and simulate animals on a computer. We don’t need consciousness for any of it. But we can’t write the program that would simulate a person on a computer. That program would result in consciousness. There’s an asymmetry there.
Can I prove that dogmatic programs don’t give rise to consciousness? No. But I think that’s the wrong epistemological standard. I can’t prove that rocks aren’t conscious either. What I do know is that I don’t invoke the concept of consciousness when explaining rocks (whatever little there is to explain about them).
I understand “we can write the programs and simulate animals” to mean that we can write an underlying program capable of generating an animal’s full behavioral and cognitive repertoire across novel circumstances. If you only mean that we can reproduce particular behaviors, then I don’t see the asymmetry, since we can reproduce particular human behaviors computationally too.
But I think we should be careful with the stronger claim. As far as I know, we cannot currently write such a complete generative program for animals such as crows or apes either. Indeed, even for vastly simpler animals such as the fruit fly or C. elegans, despite having mapped its complete connectome, our executable models still reproduce only parts of its behavior rather than the organism’s full repertoire.
… since we can reproduce particular human behaviors computationally too
Only for very narrow tasks, and even then there’s no guarantee humans won’t deviate from it, whereas for animals there basically is. Humans aren’t predictable like that but animals are.
… our executable models still reproduce only parts of its behavior rather than the organism’s full repertoire.
Maybe so, still I have seen nothing any animal does that could not be explained through the uncritical/mindless execution of existing knowledge or plain bugs.