You are fighting straw men way harder than others are moving goal posts. Who, specifically, argued vehemently in 2022 that dogs aren't conscious and now admits that they are? Who is in any doubt over whether cats and pigs have meaningfully different levels of consciousness than dogs? Are you or are you not simply inventing whole swathes of people who conveniently held the exact positions that you need people to have held in order for your argument to be convincing?
I feel certain all mammals are conscious. I don’t think humans are doing anything special there.
The ethics of eating something that was once conscious is another thing entirely. Carnivores live by eating other animals. I’m sure there are plenty of animals that would love to eat me :-)
>>Only couple years ago, people would argue vehemently that dogs are not conscious.
This sentence makes it sound like you believe in 2022 everyone decided dogs are conscious in reaction to the latest shiny toy coming out of silicon valley.
You can find "people" who will argue anything, but I find it very hard to believe dog owners didn't tend to think their dogs were conscious a couple of years ago.
At any rate here's a quote from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:
"In his seminal paper “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel (1974) simply assumes that there is something that it is like to be a bat, and focuses his attention on what he argues is the scientifically intractable problem of knowing what it is like. Nagel’s confidence in the existence of conscious bat experiences would generally be held to be the commonsense view and, as the preceding section illustrates, a view that is increasingly taken for granted by many scientists too."
This would suggest sometime between when the encyclopedia article article was written (2016) and 1974 the ideas that animals like bats, cats and dogs are conscious became the majority view. It goes without saying but this has nothing to do with LLMs.
But even before then I find it hard to believe a generation who grew up watching Lassie (1954 to 1973) didn't believe dogs were conscious.
>There were long stretches of time when 'intelligence' was a benchmark for 'consciousness'.
I find that hard to believe? Really, the biological similarity of animals and humans would seem to be the obvious benchmark, not "intelligence" whatever that means.
The encyclopedia of philosophy again says
"Neurological similarities between humans and other animals have been taken to suggest commonality of conscious experience; all mammals share the same basic brain anatomy, and much is shared with vertebrates more generally. Even structurally different brains may be neurodynamically similar in ways that enable inferences about animal consciousness to be drawn (Seth et al. 2005)."
FrustratedMonky|1 year ago
Only couple years ago, people would argue vehemently that dogs are not conscious. Now it seems as a given that they are, lot of people agree on dogs.
But are cats?
Pigs are 'smarter' than dogs, but nobody cares really about eating them. Are they not conscious. How are we determining dogs are, but pigs aren't?
There were long stretches of time when 'intelligence' was a benchmark for 'consciousness'.
That was ok as long as humans were way far ahead of every other animal.
Suddenly, with AI showing a lot of 'intelligence', now that isn't the measurement we want to use anymore.
But if intelligence isn't the measure of consciousness, and dogs are conscious, then why are we ok with eating animals?
amenhotep|1 year ago
amanaplanacanal|1 year ago
The ethics of eating something that was once conscious is another thing entirely. Carnivores live by eating other animals. I’m sure there are plenty of animals that would love to eat me :-)
staticman2|1 year ago
This sentence makes it sound like you believe in 2022 everyone decided dogs are conscious in reaction to the latest shiny toy coming out of silicon valley.
You can find "people" who will argue anything, but I find it very hard to believe dog owners didn't tend to think their dogs were conscious a couple of years ago.
At any rate here's a quote from the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy:
"In his seminal paper “What is it like to be a bat?” Thomas Nagel (1974) simply assumes that there is something that it is like to be a bat, and focuses his attention on what he argues is the scientifically intractable problem of knowing what it is like. Nagel’s confidence in the existence of conscious bat experiences would generally be held to be the commonsense view and, as the preceding section illustrates, a view that is increasingly taken for granted by many scientists too."
This would suggest sometime between when the encyclopedia article article was written (2016) and 1974 the ideas that animals like bats, cats and dogs are conscious became the majority view. It goes without saying but this has nothing to do with LLMs.
But even before then I find it hard to believe a generation who grew up watching Lassie (1954 to 1973) didn't believe dogs were conscious.
>There were long stretches of time when 'intelligence' was a benchmark for 'consciousness'.
I find that hard to believe? Really, the biological similarity of animals and humans would seem to be the obvious benchmark, not "intelligence" whatever that means.
The encyclopedia of philosophy again says
"Neurological similarities between humans and other animals have been taken to suggest commonality of conscious experience; all mammals share the same basic brain anatomy, and much is shared with vertebrates more generally. Even structurally different brains may be neurodynamically similar in ways that enable inferences about animal consciousness to be drawn (Seth et al. 2005)."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/