[pillowkusis]

The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it. So we end up chasing our tails talking about if fish feel “pain”, that is, they suffer, and yet have no tools or criteria that would help us know.

Let’s imagine that, actually, deer don’t have any form of consciousness and cannot suffer. Imagine a deer critically injured in a hunt — nose flaring, eyes open wide, struggling to stand up, screaming maybe. This feels like a reasonable way for an animal to respond, backed by evolutionary reasons, even if its a mindless automaton.

Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different. Conscious or not, the deer behaves the same.

Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable — the claim does not provide any way to be disproven, since there is no difference in measurable characteristics if the claim is true or false. One day, we might have a way to quantify consciousness. For the time being we are not even close.

Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one. Any animal measurably displaying pain is in pain, in every useful form of the word, and we have a moral obligation to prevent it. Fish included.

[uoaei]

You have rediscovered the "philosophical zombie" problem.[0]

Dr. Giulio Tononi[1] has developed an apparatus for calculating what he calls "integrated information"[2] which seems so far from limited experiments to be a good corrolary to the presence of consciousness in biological systems.

It's currently computationally intractable for the human brain at full resolution but heuristics are being developed to minimize that problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

[1] http://centerforsleepandconsciousness.med.wisc.edu/people/to...

[2] http://integratedinformationtheory.org/

[pillowkusis]

I was sure that I had come across something but didn't know what to google! Thanks for the links.

[hyrfilm]

> Claims that are non-falsifiable are not really worthy of scientific inquiry. My personal conclusion, then, is that the question of consciousness is not a useful one.

Hm - ok. Sure, non-falsifiable claims are against a typical "popperian" definition of what science is about. But then again isn't it worth asking yourself: even though a question is unanswerable at this time, might it still not be worth asking? A lot of questions that were once impossible to falsify were at one point moved from the realms of philosophy to science - like, are human character innate or is it entirely shaped by the environment. This question was at one point a purely philosophical question, now less so. Still not easily falsifiable. Actually, most questions in science don't fall in the clear-cut category of being that easy to falsify. Because it's not obvious exactly what the question means, or exactly how one would falsify it. Sure, it's easy to do it when talking about physics but that's about the only field. Take many ideas in social psychology, economics, biology or even hypothetical ideas in physics - like string theory.

Does that mean they are questions that are not "useful"?

[jbob2000]

I think you're confusing "consciousness" with "cognition". A deer is cognizant; it observes and reacts to the world around it, among other qualities of cognition. But it does not have self awareness and does not have abstract thought or any thought beyond carnal ones (eat, sleep, run, fight, etc.).

Consciousness is definitely measurable and definable, but context is important as the word is used in many different scenarios. Terry Schiavo was conscious (because she is a human and humans are conscious beings) but was also not conscious (because she lost her faculties for consciousness).

To your points, the first step of talking about consciousness is defining the "rules of engagement", the context under which consciousness is discussed. Practically speaking, consciousness is a trait that separates humans from "everything else". When things display human-like tendencies (reacting to pain, showing affection, communicating, using tools, etc.), we say they are "conscious".

[dragonwriter]

> The tricky bit about consciousness is that nobody can find a useful way to measure or define it

This, particularly the “define” part, is the key problem.

> Now imagine we magically imbue that deer with a consciousness in this situation. What measurably changes about their behavior? They still scream, try to run, struggle to survive — I can’t think of any way the situation would be different.

Of course you can't, because you haven't defined what consciousness means. Without a definition, you can't answer the question of “what is different if it is present vs. absent”.

> Thus, the claim “deers have consciousness” is non-falsifiable

It's beyond that, it's meaningless.