"andy-k" wrote in
news:B8ibk.229884$M63.123622@newsfe13.ams2:
>>> One use of the word 'conscious' is to differentiate between objects
>>> that are thought capable of having associated subjective states and
>>> objects thought incapable (conscious/non-conscious), and another use
>>> is to differentiate between the presence and the absence of
>>> subjective states in an object thought capable of having subjective
>>> states (conscious/unconscious). Our instinct gives us no room to
>>> doubt that other members of our species are conscious in the former
>>> sense of the word.
>>
>> Then you consider a dead person to be unconscious, rather than
>> nonconscious?
>
> 'Unconsciousness' implies the *temporary* absence of the unified
> subjective perspective associated with an organism, whereas 'dead'
> implies a *permanent* absence of the unified subjective perspective
> associated with an organism. I'm entertaining the possibility that, in
> both of these cases, the absence of a unified subjective perspective
> need not imply the absence of subjective states in the *parts* of that
> organism (e.g. the atoms comprising it).
The point I was responding to above was whether "instinct gives us no
room to doubt that other members of our species are conscious." It seems
that we often do have occasion to doubt whether a member of our species
is conscious (in both senses). Our "instinct" can be wrong.
I'm curious how you would view the role of instinct in the case of my
alien plant creature. Should we become convinced it is conscious, as
seems likely, would that conviction be "instinctive"? What about animals
--- does "instinct" tell they are conscious, or do we make that
determination by some other method? Do we have two means of determining
whether another organism is conscious --- instinct for our fellow
humans, and some sort of analytical procedure, whether reflective or
automatic, for animals and alien creatures?
> The recognition of words in one's native language is a learned
> response that has become automatic (i.e. this is a process that
> goes on below the level of thinking). The process of deriving
> conclusions from premises goes on at the level of thinking
> (and this is the 'analysis' to which I'm referring, and also calling
> 'reasoning'). What I'm suggesting is that the kind of processing
> that permits an animal to recognize another member of it's own
> species is neither learned nor reasoned, but innate (instinctive).
I suspect you are right (in essence) with respect to non-human animals
--- many of them recognize members of their own species, largely via
scent (but also sound and visual cues). But it is something of a stretch
to characterize that recognition as "recognition of one's own species,"
since "species" is a complex concept acquired via social experience.
What the stimuli trigger are specific innate responses, which vary
depending on the species in question --- to herd or flock, flee, mate,
etc. It is even a stretch to suppose animals grasp that other members of
their species are "like themselves," since that involves making a
comparison many of them are probably incapable of making.
"Instinctive" recognition does not appear to be the case with humans,
however, and with some other animals. The higher primates seem to have
an innate "face template," which differentially draws infants' attention
to faces, compared to other visual patterns. But that pattern is not
species-specific. Macaques and gibbons raised (from shortly after birth
to 2 months or more) by humans will respond preferentially to human
faces, compared to gibbon or macaque faces. (No studies have been done
to determine if human infants would prefer gibbon faces, since it is
difficult to find human infants raised by gibbons). :-)
The face template seems to serve to draw the infants attention to face
patterns. But differentiating among faces, even distinguishing
conspecific faces from faces of other species, requires social
experience.
http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/papers/ref3/myowa2005.pdf
Of course, face recognition is not the only conceivable means by which
animals recognize other members of their species. But for any any
proposed means we'd have to study the behavior of infants, since all
older individuals would have been socialized. But there is a fair amount
of evidence that other animals do not recognize their own species at
birth. The infants of many mammal species will attempt to nurse from any
lactating female, regardless of species (and sometimes those mothers
allow non-conspecific infants to nurse). Baby primates seem just as
happy being raised by humans as by their own mothers (as do kittens and
puppies). Not until sexual maturity does species seem to matter much to
most mammals.
> I don't think that's what I'm doing -- I'm just acknowledging the
> existence of that automatic response and proposing that it is
> instinctive rather than learned or reasoned.
I agree that many responses are instinctive, but suggest the triggering
stimuli are not species-specific (though they are signal-specific).
I.e., certain signals trigger the responses, regardless of the source of
the signal.
>> I think we are trying to come up with a cogent *concept* of
>> consciousness, one that will allow us to resolve the ambiguous or
>> otherwise puzzling cases. I.e., we want some definitive criteria to
>> apply. That we or other organisms *respond* to various things as
>> though they are conscious, or unreflectively assume they are
>> conscious based on subconscious signal processing, does not help
>> us much with developing those criteria. One reason we need those
>> criteria just is that our "instinctive" judgments are often mistaken.
> If we insist on a definition of 'consciousness' to which public truth
> conditions apply, then we overlook the use of the word that is of
> particular interests to me -- the brute fact of the existence of
> "this", the first-person subjective perspective upon a world.
As I think we agree, the only brute fact of which we are in possession
is the brute fact of our *own* consciousness. We have no brute facts
regarding consciousness in anything or anyone else, so if we are to
impute that property to anyone or anything else, we will need some
criteria for applying it (and "instinct" will not do the trick: it is
unreliable when applied to humans, and improbable when applied to alien
plant-creatures). And if we are to be able to communicate with others
using this concept those criteria must be public.
>> In other words, that we respond automatically to certain things as
>> though they are conscious does not demonstrate that they are, in
>> fact, conscious, any more than my cat's response to the statue
>> demonstrates that the statue is a living cat, or a tribesman's
>> conviction that the volcano on his island is conscious demonstrates
>> that the volcano is conscious.
>
> Quite right -- our instinctive conviction that other people are
> associated with subjective states of their own does not demonstrate
> that they in fact are, but we can do no better than to take that
> conviction on face value. There seems little to be gained by calling
> that conviction into question as though we really did believed that
> some people could be 'zombies'.
It isn't the possibility of zombies which obliges us to formulate
explicit criteria for imputing consciousness. It is the possibility of
dead persons, brain-dead persons, and "thinking machines."
>> But I suspect I'm missing something here. I don't understand why you
>> place so much weight on these automatic responses (regardless of
>> whether they are hardwired or learned), when they have so little
>> evidentiary value.
> Because any concept of consciousness that can be acquired
> through social conditioning overlooks the use of the word
> that is of particular interest to me.
I defined consciousness as "having the capacity for being in subjective
states," or (occurrent sense) "being in one or more of those states."
How does that overlook subjective states?
> Your view seems to be that:
> 1. the word 'consciousness' is already extant in our language
> 2. we are culturally conditioned to apply that word to ourselves
> 3. we then impute the referent of that word to certain other objects
>
> I'm not sure about step2. I'm not saying that we couldn't establish
> an association between the word 'conscious' as the surgeon uses
> it (i.e. behaviorally) but this misses the use of the word that is of
> particular interest to me. In the absence of some kind of
> bootstrapping mechanism like an instinctive belief in the subjective
> states of others, how do we get from the linguistic "he's conscious,
> she's conscious, I'm conscious" to an association between that word
> and ***the idea of the existence of the first-person subjective
> perspective upon a world***? (Note that I'm not just talking about the
> subjective states that are part of the contents of that perspective,
> but the *entire perspective*, the first-person "all-there-is".)
Because that latter ("the existence of the first-person subjective
perspective upon a world") is the socially learned capacity sense of the
term "conscious."
1. We learn to apply the term "conscious" to certain things,
distinguished by their appearance and especially their behaviors, just
as we learn to apply the term "alive" (and many other terms) to certain
things based on their appearance and behavior.
2. We also learn to apply terms for internal states to things (among us
Westerners, primarily humans and animals), also based on their
appearance and behavior ("She is happy, he is angry, that dog is hungry,
that cat is in pain," etc.).
3. We learn that those internal states (pain, hunger, feeling happy) are
imputed only to things we deem "conscious."
4. Others apply those same terms to us, when we appear or are behaving
in the ways that prompt us to apply them to others.
5. When they are applied to us, we associate whatever internal state we
are experiencing at the time with the term used, and hence that term
(angry, cold, sleepy, etc.) becomes our *private referent* for that
term. That private experience thus becomes part of the meaning of those
terms.
6. Because of our propensity to impose complete patterns on things which
present only a portion of the pattern, we then automatically impute
subjective states similar to our own to anything that exhibits the
appearance and behaviors that are *criterial* for the imputation of
those states to others.
7. "Consciousness" then comes to refer to all of those subjective states
taken together, or a "subjective perspective on the world," even though
we have not learned that term by observing anyone's subjective
perspective on the world, except our own. And we don't apply it to our
own subjective perspective upon the world until after we've learned how
to use the term in social contexts, via public truth conditions.
> I'm more inclined to suppose that we impute subjective states to other
> people instinctively, without need for language, *before* we arrive at
> a private recognition of our own first-person subjective perspective
> upon the world (via reflexive awareness).
And we may indeed do that; that is the explanation for animism. But
those imputations are still based on behavior. The islanders would not
describe their volcano as "angry" unless it were erupting; it is
"conscious" because it has a capacity to erupt. But those views, too,
are transmitted culturally. In the West, we learn that "consciousness"
and "anger" don't apply to volcanos. Of course, it is very hard to guess
how a completely unacculturated human might view the world. The only
such persons available to study are infants.
[gonna break for tonite. You might hold a response til I finish with
this one, tomorrow. I read the Strawson paper. Have extensive comments.]
