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What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.

Please don’t write like you’re trying to impress a teacher. Use simple language anyone can understand. If you’re using AI to write or help write your ideas, you must tell people by checking the checkbox in the form.

What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.

It’s the software that would give rise to consciousness because computation is substrate-independent. So yes, I think hardware continuity is irrelevant (unless there’s a switch from non-universal computer to universal or vice versa).

… seems to assume the package-deal hypothesis rather than provide an argument for it.

It sounds like you’re using a non-Popperian epistemology, with positive reasons to adopt some stance.

I don’t think that’s right, for the reasons Popper explained. I don’t make arguments for any stance. I ask if anyone finds anything wrong with it. I keep advocating it until someone does.

That is precisely why I think it provides some evidence that phenomenal experience is not tightly bound to the other capacities.

If that is so, please give example source code that has “phenomenal experience” but no consciousness.

… the distinction I was making between phenomenal experience and reflective/metacognitive awareness.

As Deutsch likes to emphasize, there’s a G in AGI for a reason. No distinction need be made here.

What is characteristically absent in a non-lucid dream is awareness that one is dreaming, together with much of the associated reality monitoring and critical reflection.

This sounds like you’re agreeing with me – absence of awareness = absence of critical reflection – yet it’s marked as a criticism.

OK but there are many things we do while awake that we aren’t aware of either. People aren’t aware always of their accents or ticks or fidgeting. I don’t understand why that matters.

To infer insentience from the robotic behavior, we would still need the separate premise that phenomenal experience cannot accompany non-universal information processing, which is the point under dispute.

Same goes for inferring sentience from robotic behavior; for the claim that phenomenal experience can accompany non-universal information processing.

Hence my suggestion that conscious information processing is critical.

Humans working at an assembly line can be ‘robotic’ in the sense you describe. That’s a fair point. But then they go home and don’t act robotically.

Sleepwalkers are another example: they act robotically/uncritically while sleepwalking, but then they wake up and stop.

The claim is that animals always act robotically (outside of just plain random or buggy behavior). They can’t do otherwise. The claim is not that humans never act robotically. They do, sometimes, but they can be critical and change course.

Humans working at an assembly line can be ‘robotic’ in the sense you describe. That’s a fair point. But then they go home and don’t act robotically.

Sleepwalkers are another example.

The claim is that animals always act robotically (outside of just plain random or buggy behavior). They can’t do otherwise. The claim is not that humans never act robotically. They do, sometimes, but they can be critical and change course.

Rival predictions don’t keep a question open. By that standard, the question of whether rocks or thermostats are conscious stays open too. IIT gives some consciousness even to a photodiode, and panpsychism gives it to everything. That rival theories predict different things doesn’t leave a question undecided, or no question would ever be decided. What settles it is which rivals survive criticism.

It just illustrates that knowing what the two programs can do would not by itself decide which theory of consciousness is correct.

There would need to be something different about a program that gives rise to consciousness. We just haven’t seen any such program because we don’t know how to write one. But I do think the difference would be apparent once we see the source code.

For example, IIT explicitly allows functionally equivalent systems to differ in consciousness depending on their intrinsic causal organization.

I don’t see how that can be possible. Surely the same source code would arise in consciousness every time?

… 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.

… 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.

The evidential standard seems asymmetric.

You have said that there ultimately cannot be a purely behavioral criterion for consciousness, because what matters is an explanation of the underlying program (#5693). But at the same time, apparently rigid or “blatantly robotic” behavior is allowed to count as evidence against consciousness.

In the other direction, apparently flexible, sophisticated or sentient-like animal behavior does not seem able to count correspondingly in favor of consciousness, because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.

If behavior alone cannot establish sentience because we need to understand the underlying processing, I don’t see why apparently robotic behavior should by itself count more readily toward insentience. Unless there is already an independent reason to think phenomenal experience requires universal creativity, the evidential standard seems to favor insentience in advance.

I agree that this is not “learning” in the special Deutschian sense of universal knowledge creation. I was using “learning” in the ordinary biological sense of experience-dependent changes in processing and behavior.

In fact, the passage you link makes that distinction explicitly: Deutsch allows that the robot’s useful change can be called learning, while denying that it constitutes genuine creation of new knowledge.

That distinction is actually part of my point. I’m not claiming continuity in universal creativity between humans and other animals. I’m pointing to continuity in the older, non-universal capacities (such as sensory, nociceptive, affective and ordinary learning processes). Whether those processes can support phenomenal experience is precisely what is under discussion.

I also wonder whether your note here should be a criticism rather than a comment. As I understand Veritula, an outstanding criticism makes the parent idea problematic and therefore not rationally adoptable, whereas comments are neutral.

A suggestion that an idea could be phrased more simply seems like a useful comment, but unless the wording actually makes the content of the claim ambiguous or substantively defective, I don’t see why it should count as a reason to reject the idea itself.

I initially wondered whether you were right that I could simplify this, but I think the distinction is necessary here. Writing “they … feel pain” would already assume part of the conclusion under dispute: that animal nociceptive processing is accompanied by phenomenal pain.

By “sensory, affective, nociceptive and learning mechanisms” I was trying to refer to processes we can identify without assuming that they involve conscious experience. The wording is less simple, but in this case I think the precision actually matters.

I agree of course that consciousness, if computational, need not depend on neurons as a particular material substrate. But that is different from saying that the organization and activity implemented by those neurons tell us nothing.

The article you link makes this distinction itself: substrate independence means that most details of the substrate do not matter; what matters is the relevant pattern or structure of information processing. Studying homologous neural systems can give us evidence about exactly that organization and processing.

So my claim is not “they have similar neurons, therefore they have similar experiences.” It is that there is evolutionary continuity not only in the neural substrate, but also in how systems involved in sensory, nociceptive and affective processing are organized, what signals they process, and how they interact with other systems.

That seems evidentially relevant to what information processing is occurring. Substrate independence does not make that evidence irrelevant.

Yes, it’s a guess. So the leap to universal creativity does not itself imply that phenomenal experience appeared in the same leap.

I proposed an alternative possibility (#5739): older, shared systems may already have supported phenomenal experience before universal creativity emerged. I’m not claiming that this alternative is established either.

I’m not sure “no other explanation is known” is quite right. For example, IIT offers a very different theory under which consciousness depends on a system’s intrinsic causal organization. My conjecture that phenomenal experience could predate universal creativity is at least compatible with that kind of account.

So it seems to me that we currently have competing conjectures here, rather than one known explanation and no alternative.

I agree that shared evolutionary history by itself would not establish that the same “software” is running. But that wasn’t my claim.

My point is that humans inherited from earlier animals many of the same organized systems involved in things like sensory processing, nociception, affect and learning. The emergence of universal creativity could have changed the overall cognitive architecture dramatically without implying that all of those older systems acquired their phenomenal properties only at that same point.

So the laptop analogy shows that common ancestry does not entail identical software, which I agree with. What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.

By “phenomenal experience” I simply mean there being something it is like to see red, feel pain, fear, etc. Your claim that animals are insentient is itself a claim that these experiences are absent.

Whether such experience can occur without universal/critical cognition is precisely what is under dispute. So saying that these distinctions may not exist, because ultimately there is one kind of information processing that gives rise to consciousness, seems to assume the package-deal hypothesis rather than provide an argument for it.

If there is an independent reason why phenomenal experience cannot occur without universal creativity, that would address the criticism. But I don’t think collapsing the distinction itself does.

I don’t think the movie/video-game analogy captures what I find interesting about dreaming here, because it seems to put phenomenal awareness, meta-awareness and control on a single scale of “critical ability”.

These capacities can dissociate: In an ordinary non-lucid dream there can already be vivid phenomenal experience without awareness that one is dreaming. Lucidity adds that meta-awareness, but does not necessarily add control (lucid dreams can themselves occur with or without substantial control over what happens).

So rather than a simple progression from passive/uncritical to active/critical, dreaming seems to give us different combinations of phenomenal experience, meta-awareness and control.

That is precisely why I think it provides some evidence that phenomenal experience is not tightly bound to the other capacities.

I think “awareness” is doing two different jobs here. Of course we are consciously experiencing an ordinary dream (seeing, feeling, fearing, etc.). That is a premise of my criticism.

What is characteristically absent in a non-lucid dream is awareness that one is dreaming, together with much of the associated reality monitoring and critical reflection. Becoming aware that one is dreaming is precisely what distinguishes lucid dreaming.

So saying “we’re aware of them” does not seem to address the distinction I was making between phenomenal experience and reflective/metacognitive awareness.