What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness (2016)

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/18/4900.full

by headalgorithm • 7 years ago

150 107 7 years ago

vxxzy• 7 years ago

Is this really saying that consciousness is an efficient solution to basic problems of sensory reafference? Does this mean it is the base from which consciousness arrives or is it merely an attribute of consciousness?

sven773• 7 years ago

Karl Friston's free energy principle says something similar - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI

bencollier493• 7 years ago

"In vertebrates the capacity for subjective experience is supported by integrated structures in the midbrain that create a neural simulation of the state of the mobile animal in space."

Whoah there! I think this might be another case of semantic creep. It's very easy to conflate consciousness with self-image in the brain, and it's regularly mis-sold in this way by neuroscientists.

I once went to a talk at the Royal Society which was supposed to be about consciousness. The bloke just spoke for an hour about things like optical illusions.

By the same token, if I were to create a processing system for a robot which integrated visual, haptic and auditory feedback to create a representation of the robot in space, we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious.

amelius2• 7 years ago

Yes, before we solve consciousness, we first need to get the nomenclature right.

bencollier493• 7 years ago

To be fair, as soon as we go near anything really subjective, the nomenclature seems to fall apart across most disciplines. For obvious reasons, I suppose.

For example, the term "Nous":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nous

TuringTest• 7 years ago

we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious

How do you differentiate a robot from a philosophical zombie, and this one from a human? We can not be sure that other humans apart from myself (yours truly writing these lines); we only make estimated guesses that, because we share the same physical structures, our experience will also be similar.

Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions. It may be the case that insect structures are too simple for that (maybe, as you point out, it requires complex coordination among subsystems and not just a spacial model), but at least it provides a lower bound.

TelmoMenezes4• 7 years ago

Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing structures with similar functions.

This is more or less the current mainstream stance. I think it's fine to do it for practical purposes, for example deciding that animals cannot be ethically subjected to certain treatments by virtue of the complexity of their nervous systems. But this is reasonable doubt + principle of precaution. I'm fine with that.

What we cannot do is make this presumption and pretend that we are still within the realms of serious science or philosophy. The technical name for this presumption is emergentism, that consciousness somehow arises from the interactions of matter. I believe that the reason why this hypothesis is so popular, and even confused with scientific fact, is that it is the less weird. Avoiding weirdness is a common pitfall in the history of science, it leads to temporary dead-ends.

garmaine2• 7 years ago

You’re missing the point. Most people intuitively define consciousness to include not just self image, but the processing related to it—having wants and desires, and the self-conscious reasoning about them. Having self image is only the first, small step.

digitaltrees2• 7 years ago

There is a different way to look at it. If you accept that you meet the definition of consciousness, and can derive a definition of what characteristics you possess that would satisfy the definition for another bein to be similarly conscious to you then that definition is at least rational. True, we may not be able to apply that definition to specific humans, robots, or other beings but the definition is a rational measure of the answer.

For me consciousness is an emergent property of language that possesses the concept of a self as opposed the the external world. Other things like sensory perception or a concept of a body are better described as awareness. This distinction allows us to say that a cockroach or robot are aware but not conscious because they can respond to their environment but not self reflect on that data as they have no narrative structures to use.

chr1• 7 years ago

Why do you think that consciousness is different from a self image in a neural network which is configured to use some effective learning algorithm?

Of course there are other theories but they are just as unproven as this one.

naasking12• 7 years ago

I once went to a talk at the Royal Society which was supposed to be about consciousness. The bloke just spoke for an hour about things like optical illusions.

Perhaps he was trying to convey that apparent subjective experience is an analogous perceptual illusion.

By the same token, if I were to create a processing system for a robot which integrated visual, haptic and auditory feedback to create a representation of the robot in space, we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious.

Perhaps it depends on what you mean by "integrated". Consciousness must serve a functional, adaptive purpose, and if your integration does not perform the same function, then it wouldn't be conscious as we understand it.

goatlover6• 7 years ago

Consciousness must serve a functional, adaptive purpose,

Why? Not all of evolution is adaptive. It's also possible that consciousness is something more fundamental that strongly emerges when the right sort of physical activity takes place. On Chalmers view, it's rich information processing that results in consciousness. Evolution would only provide the means for how that information processing came about in animals. But it could also came about because of Boltzman Brain randomly popped into existence or human design.

coldtea2• 7 years ago

Whoah there! I think this might be another case of semantic creep. It's very easy to conflate consciousness with self-image in the brain

But it's very hard to say why consciousness shouldn't be conflated with self-image in the brain!

mjburgess• 7 years ago

A conscious agent believes, desires, wants, feels, etc.

A "self-image" is more-or-less just proprioception, and it seems very easy to ditch that and still be conscious.

mrfusion2• 7 years ago

The map is not the territory.

modzu• 7 years ago

to be fair, the claim is, "supported by...". this is not the same as equality.

chaosfox• 7 years ago

see also: "Insects cannot tell us anything about subjective experience or the origin of consciousness"

https://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/E3813

amelius2• 7 years ago

The title of that note is, of course, possibly not correct.

Thus, they fail to make a convincing case that insects can tell us anything about subjective experience or consciousness.

This is not the same as "Insects cannot tell us anything about subjective experience or the origin of consciousness"

mfoy_4• 7 years ago

Right, the title makes a claim, and their conclusion is that the opposite claim has failed to meet its burden of proof...

Thinking that "because something has not met its burden of proof means that the opposite must be true" is a fallacy.

DocSavage• 7 years ago

And the original authors' rebuttal to that and other work: https://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/E3814

saagarjha• 7 years ago

The brain structures that support subjective experience in vertebrates and insects are very different from each other, but in both cases they are basal to each clade. Hence we propose the origins of subjective experience can be traced to the Cambrian.

Insects are thought to have arisen in the Devonian period, did they not?

blacksqr• 7 years ago

"Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive!"

kjeetgill• 7 years ago

For anyone not in the know, this is a line from Starship Troopers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKk4Cq56d1Y

davesque• 7 years ago

Well done. Forgot about that movie.

viivaux2• 7 years ago

However, consciousness also gives out somewhere. Plants do not have it.

Stopped reading there.

alanbernstein3• 7 years ago

You think they do? Or just that it's an unreasonably certain assertion? Is there a dividing line? If not plants/animals, then where?

viivaux2• 7 years ago

If anyone proved beyond doubt that plants are not conscious & don't make decisions, I sure didn't hear about it. I have little doubt there are many flavors of consciousness out there, and while humans and animals and plants have their differences, they are not as large as some assume.

What I believe is this: We don't know nearly enough about consciousness, how it's made, and what it is, to make statements like that. And when people make the mistake of assuming they know otherwise, anything that follows is likely a pile of ballsack.

I suspect the dividing line, if we assume there is a single one, is pretty fuzzy and subjective. If a tree is cut down, is it still a tree? What about when it's cut into planks? At what point does an acorn become a tree; at it's first leaf, first sprout, first branch?

If we had answers to these kind of questions, the world would be very different to what I've observed.

hopler3• 7 years ago

Similar article thoroughly discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621

cobbzilla• 7 years ago

It seems like the assertion (very roughly) is something like: a creature is conscious if it can make a subjective decision about something. It's not a terrible definition, but I feel like I'm missing some nuance.

ZeroFries• 7 years ago

How, why, and when consciousness evolved remain hotly debated topics

Conversely, consider whether or not consciousness as a feature of the world actually evolved at all. That is, consciousness could be an inherent part of reality throughout all of reality. See various versions of panpsychism or idealism. The idea is that energy itself is conscious, and what evolves is the shape or form consciousness takes. There is no place in space-time one can point to and say "this is where the lights came on".

To answer the question of "why" is the same as answering the question "why something rather than nothing?" It's not clear whether a semantic or symbolic expression (which is itself a part of consciousness) can satisfactorily answer it (that is, explain the whole).

m3kw92• 7 years ago

Maybe look no further to when human babies become conscious, their first moments that they remember can say a lot about what consciousness is. Having memory is a big part of consciousness.

m3kw92• 7 years ago

Not saying SSDs have consciousness however

reb• 7 years ago

Lacking any intelligible means to communicate, this is tough to say definitively.

taneq• 7 years ago

Kids are conscious way before they're making memories that will last until adulthood.

What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness (2016)

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