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No, you’re the electrochemical interactions happening inside the lump of fat.
I’m still rooting for Idealism or the immortal soul to somehow be a thing.
Go Banana!
We are ALL thinking lumps of fat on this blessed day :)
Action potential doesn’t do thinking. Thinking happens at neuron junctions and that shits chemical and analogue. The electrical part just moves the data to the next synapse. There are some gap junctions but those aren’t really associated with thinking.
I never understood this weird hangup, it’s like people struggling to reconcile free will with deterministic actions to a being outside normal time. Of course you’ll make the same choices if you rewound time and changed nothing… You’re the same, the universe is the same down to the last particle - how does that conflict with the idea of agency?
Consciousness is an emergent property. One neuron is complex, but 1000 can do things one could never do alone. Why is it so surprising that billions, arranged in complex self organizing structures, would give rise to something more than the sum of its parts?
Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not… It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
To be honest the thing that confuses me is that I am conscious. That’s weird, how am I aware, there is no explanation of this. Assuming we pretty much understand all physics and science and there isn’t anything surprising around the corner. Consciousness has to be a physical thing, a computation. But that’s weird as hell too? What rule of the universe governs whether or not something is aware. A brain could do everything it does now without being really aware just pretending. And if that’s true does that mean it’s just the flow of information that can become conscious? Could anything become conscious? If I made a marble Rube Goldberg machine complicated it enough and doing the right calculations could it be conscious?? It feels wrong it feels like we are missing something
This is exactly what puzzles me. Or at least you seem to be talking about what puzzles me. The problem is that when I mention this to others, most missunderstand what I mean by “being aware” or “conscious”, and im not sure its possible to refer to this phenomena in a much better way. But that is exactly the argument i usually make, that an automata could behave exactly like me, following the supposed physical laws, but without being aware, or having any sensation, without seeing the images, hearing the sounds, only processing sensorial data. Processing sensorial data isnt the same as feeling/hearing/seeing it.
We absolutely are missing something. Clearly it requires more than just a lot of intelligence, otherwise we’d have seen a computer become sentient by now instead of ChatGPT proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that they absolutely will not be anytime soon.
It seems like it’s all based in this idea humans are so extra special that surely there must be special laws of the universe just for us
I never got that argument against the soul as it were. What makes you think that these special laws would only exist for humans? Aren’t there plenty of people who believe all things have some kind of soul or spirit? Isn’t that most Eastern Religions and quite a few Western Pagan ones?
Maybe there’s a quantum aspect to it, maybe there’s not…
I see what you did there, intentionally or not.
Heh. It was unintentional, next time it won’t be
Yep. This was the issue people took with Chomsky’s approach to language, basically the same sentiment. Humans are “special” in some way. It underlines the basis of almost all cognitive, neuroscience, and language research for decades.
It’s crazy to me how much this holds us back, and the amount of cognitive dissonance involved
Take pets. We look at them acting shifty around the sock they know they aren’t allowed to play with, and say “she’s thinking about it”. We avoid words like “walk” because they’ve understood one of the meanings of it. And usually not just the meaning, but the difference between tone and context - most won’t react the same to “should we take her for a walk” and “is he able to walk”. My mom’s dog knew all of our names, and the difference between “soon”, “tomorrow”, and “the day after tomorrow” - she would watch the door all day on the right day
And yet, most people will share all of these observations and turn around to dismiss it as “she’s just a dog”. For them it’s just association and behavioral conditioning, but the same things are different for humans because we’re extra special. Clearly her acting shifty before stealing the sock isn’t planning or considering, it’s instincts fighting against training
But only humans can ever understand, only we make choices. Because we’re extra special
Clearly humans are special in that we’re the only species to have the ability to use tools or a complicated language. But we’re also inferior in very major ways, humans are horrible at reproduction and we need to alter the environment for our survival because there’s no habitat we can thrive in that we don’t make ourselves.
It’s like creatures such as us don’t really belong here or something.
The distinction being made when we talk about “understanding” and “choices” I about the distinction between sentience and sapience.
Dogs are sentient, meaning they have a conscious experience involving emotions and works with memory and instincts to determine motivated actions. This is a complex system that results in complex behaviour like preferring one food over another, stubbornly ignoring your commands, or recognizing when you’re upset and coming up to you to comfort you. It’s beautiful.
Sapience is related to the capacity to be meta/self-aware. This is what is normally meant by “understand” and “choice” when talking about how “special” humans are. As far as we can tell in experiments, dogs do not have the capacity to understand themselves like “I’m a dog who really enjoys walking” or “Good dogs take care of people, so I’m going to choose to take extra care of human because I want to be good.” This is what you might call “wisdom” or “rational” behaviour, and some animals to exhibit sapience to an extent. Both can be involve what we think of as “choices” e.g. selecting one of several options, but they’re distinct behaviours.
Humans engage in both, making it extra confusing. I’m not being particularly meta-aware and rational when I choose to cut off a piece of my steak and eat it. I am being more meta-aware when I choose to slow down my eating because I want to be respectful of my friend who cooked it for me, and I want to savour the moment, appreciating the flavours, texture, and effort that went into its preparation.
My dog knows that I prepare her food and she expresses her emotions and desires to me and she responds to my behaviour/communication. But she doesn’t understand that I chose to rescue her or that we are two people living our short and shorter lives together.
How can we truly know this though - we don’t even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means “why are we the most special”. It’s been a constant game of moving goalposts
Here’s a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read
Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That’s the same as your example with eating slower
There’s also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one
There’s even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat
We hold ourselves back, because we’re always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter… But ultimately, they have different priorities
Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other “human” trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere
Whose to say dogs don’t wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?
Very well said!
You bring up some great points! Indeed it is very difficult to determine scientifically what kinds of reasoning occurs within animals’ experiences and behaviours. My post was more to clarify the classic distinction between sentience and sapience going with the assumption that dogs aren’t sapient. But as you indicate, it’s absolutely an ongoing question we’re actively interrogating. Sure, sapience is a bit of a floppy term, but we can choose more operational definitions around meta-cognition and the like. I leave it to the experts to refine terms and conduct research. We have very strong collective evidence that animals are sentient and very weak evidence (so far) to indicate sapience (however you define it). Epistemologically, we are limited in that we can only ever approach this question from the human perspective.
Your dog may well ponder their life as a dog, but the evidence for it is nil. So scientifically we cannot conclude it and assume the null hypothesis of non-sapience.
Philosophically we can consider how we approach the possibility of it though. Metaphysically, we can consider whether dogs’ consciousness resemble humans re: perception, free will, or self. Ethically, we can consider if it’s better to treat them as if they are sapient or not, I can imagine arguments either way. And an example of where we would is with humans who are extremely cognitively impaired.
Emotionally, we can also decide for ourselves what is the appropriately meaningful relationship we have with our pets in how we relate to them.
It seems weird to me that the null-hypothesis there should be that dogs are non-sapient. It seems to be common for scientists to default on non-existence until evidence of existence is found. But in some situations existence and non-existence should have equivalent weights. In the field of mathematics, the existence of a thing can be logically equivalent to the non-existence of another thing, and we dont know which of the two exists, but we cant default to assuming neither of the two. Science is a bit different from pure mathematics though, but im not sure in what ways.
You are right to think through this question, and as you imply, there are different forms of knowledge, i.e. epistemologies. Science geneologically derives from empiricism, the epistemological idea that true knowledge comes from sensory experience and observation–philosophy has moved on from this idea. But accepting empirocism, the default is necessarily no knowledge, as absence of knowledge precedes knowledge from observation. Science applies empirical methods and deductive/inductive reasoning to generate new knowledge; while you may reason a theory, that theory must ultimately be tested against observation. So empirically, we cannot conclude/know sapience exists somewhere without observing it. Now the idea of “null hypothesis” can be thought of as a formalization of this. It comes from statistics in the 1920s when they were trying to determine a relationship between two data sets. As per empiricism, the null hypothesis is always that there is no relationship and therefore observations are due to random chance. And the purpose of the tests are to see if this null hypothesis should be rejected/disproven.
Another dated, but still helpful approach to thinking of the scientific question is Karl Popper’s falsifiability. It is possible to falsify the theory that “dogs cannot possess sapience by” observing one instance (not due to random chance) of sapience in a dog. However you cannot falsify the theory that “dogs can possess sapience” unless you can observe all dogs throughout space and time and show they don’t possess sapience.
But that’s kind of my point - we do have evidence. As much as we have for humans, at least
Koko the gorilla is what made me start to question all of this back in grade school. This gorilla learns sign language, and is shown picture books with cats. She asks for a cat for Christmas, despite never having actually seen one. They give her a toy one and she gets angry.
Months later, they bring in kittens. She picks the tailless tabby and names it “all ball”. It was her pet all its life, she would take care of it and even told the keepers it had ear mites
On a foggy December morning, one of the assistants told me that Ball had been hit by a car. He had died instantly. I was shocked and unprepared. I didn’t realize how attached I had grown to Ball, and I had no idea how the news would affect Koko. The kitten meant so much to her. He was Koko’sbaby. I went to Koko at once. I told her that Ball had been hit by a car; she would not see him again. Koko did not respond. I thought she didn’t understand, so I left the trailer.
Ten minutes later, I heard Koko cry. It washer distress call—a loud, long series of high-pitched hoots. I cried, too.
Three days later, Koko and I had a conversation about Ball. “Do you want to talk about your kitty?” Iasked. “Cry,” Koko signed.“ Can you tell me more about it?” I asked. “Blind,” she signed. “We don’t see him anymore, do we? What happened to your kitty?” I asked. “Sleep cat,” Koko signed. A few weeks later, Koko saw a picture of a gray tabby who looked very much like Ball. She pointed to the picture and signed, “Cry, sad, frown.”
Koko described herself as “fine gorilla person”, she painted and joked and understood mortality.
Why is Koko special? Because she was interested in communicating, and so was her keeper. That was decades ago… Back when we rarely accepted animals were even sentient, let alone sapient
I’ve watched a video where a dog described it’s dreams, and one where a cat lied and negotiated for a treat before being convinced over the course of minutes to willingly take it’s medicine to make the “hurt go bye”.
My childhood dog was well behaved, so we’d let him in or out when he scratched on the door. We stopped paying attention… We only caught him exploring the suburbs when a neighbor called us. One day we were driving and saw him miles from home, so we followed… He kept to the sidewalks, avoided people, and looked before crossing the street. So we let him have his secret life, and he never got into any trouble… We wouldn’t have known otherwise, because he timed his adventures well
My mom’s dog used to watch dog shows, and smiled wide when I put a medal around her neck jokingly… Not when I put my keys around her neck, just the medal - I did ABACAB testing, just the medal got that reaction.
You can explain away all these things, or you can entertain the idea. Maybe Koko was the exception or my mom’s dog just thought the medal was pretty, or maybe she dreamed of winning a dog show.
We can’t even philosophically nail down sapience, and yet we don’t have a second Koko… Because we barely try to meet them where they are, and dismiss every success as an anomaly
The evidence is everywhere, we just seem to ignore it
Calling it a lump of fat is a bit like calling the Milky Way a very sparse field of hydrogen
That’s true tho
It’s accurate, but not precise.
Right, but it doesn’t capture the whole story, namely that it’s arranged in a very particular way
You’re an electrified hunk of fat piloting a meat-covered skeleton riding on a damp rock that’s hurling through space and time.
“At thе end of the day, your brain is just a meat computеr in a bone cockpit piloting a skin robot You think the world makes sense? Nothing makes sense! So you might as well make nonsense!”
And I want off.
It’s actually a lump of lava with a thin crust. Any time the crust breaks we have a very bad time.
Obligatory “um, akhtually, it’s magma”.
Lava is just liquid rock
The core is metal, the outer shell is hard rock, i would assume what’s inbetween is a mix of pop and smooth jazz maybe?
acid metal
I enjoy Marcus Aurelius paraphrasing Epctetus…
“You are a little soul bearing about a corpse.”
It’s weird that we, as people, think that our being or self ends at our skin. And we’re just a consciousness controlling a meat cube.
What about all the bacteria living on and inside of us? People would die without their microflora.
What about our subconscious/unconscious doings/thoughts? Are we in control of them? Or are they in control of us? Could consciousness be an illusion? One created by our senses’ interpretation of external stimuli.
So you’re saying humanity is a mecha space opera?
Yes.
Be fair. You are an abstraction layer; a subsystem running on that electrified hunk of fat. There’s plenty of stuff that evolution has delegated as non-conscious functions of the fatlump.
consciousness is stored in the balls
Next to the microplastic.
A CPU is just a rock we hit with magic lightning…
And inscribed with runes
Well yes, it’s the lightning that makes the inscription.
Light makes the inscription, lightning runs through it.
Light, gas, CVD and a dozen other processes, depending on the application, make the inscription.
Username checks out
🤔
This is covered pretty well in the Discworld series with the druids.
One more series I need to read…
This gets explored a bit in The Talos Principle and it’s sequal. Working on the 2nd one now, it’s been fun
To my knowledge there are interesting quantum-mechanical effects at play as well though. There’s a lot of esoterical nonsense around that of course, however first discoveries pointing into this direction are quite promising.
I always remember a quote from Alan Watts talking about this topic: “You are the universe experiencing itself”. The idea of consciousness being an emerging property of the universe itself makes most sense to me, and the non-deterministic properties of quantum mechanics open this possibility.
Definitely more inspiring to think about it this way than just as a lump of fat.
I can only hope that when this flesh dies, that my consciousness returns to the cosmos and persists free from the limitations of the body.
Gnosticism, one of the oldest known religions that is thought to be the forefather of all religion, taught about that.
maybe but he’s a skinny guy
The brain is not a “lump of fat”. If you desiccate the brain, most of what’s left are lipids, yes, but at that point you are not conscious anymore. The brain is a mix of proteins, carbohydrates, water and fat.
A lump of mostly fat then? Seems needlessly specific.
I’M NOT FAT I’M JUST BIG BRAINED!!
Mostly water, in that case
Also fairly sure that electrical impulses alone cannot account for consciousness. If that were “all” there was to it we’d have simulated a human brain by now. There’s a few theories about quantum processes being involved but this isn’t exactly easily proven.
If that were “all” there was to it we’d have simulated a human brain by now.
Didn’t it take them a long ass time to do this for a fruit fly brain?
Depends on when you start the timer. The fruit fly brain was only completely mapped recently. There’s a simulation of it that runs on a laptop. If that simulation can run on a modern laptop and the map was otherwise available, then it likely could have been done on supercomputers in the decades prior.
I thought they were up to mice now but I might be mistaken.
To simulate a human brain, we would need a complete map of it. We don’t have that yet. If the quantum theories around neurons are correct, then the map would be incomplete without it.
I doubt we could simulate it directly without a very specialized ASIC.
The connectome doesn’t really seem to be so realistic, at smaller scales sure.
people don’t like this idea because if that’s all we are, then who is anyone to say that the inevitable equivalent man-made lump of fat with electrical activity isn’t entitled to all the same rights and status that we are
also jeebus doesn’t want you to think you can’t go on getting punished even after you’re dead
Don’t sell yourself short. It’s a salty lump of fat.
I’ve never understood why people think the most sophisticated and complex technology humans have ever been aware of is too mundane just because we have scratched the surface of understanding it.
