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?
That is the problem with goal moving, it is the selective forgetting of what came before, thus making the present time seem new.
You think I'm making up swaths of people that used to think animals weren't conscious? That couldn't feel pain?
Time Line: ok, I might have date wrong, pre-2000 animals considered not conscious, many to not experience pain. By 2021-2022 there were enough people changing their mind that laws were being changed. It's been slowly shifting over a time range from 2000-2020.
Not sure Mid 2000-2020, versus 2022 really invalidates any of my argument.
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)."
I was referring to 'people' as in general public, including STEM people on HN.
I doubt many of them were reading Nagel or contemplating Stanford studies on this subject.
Maybe you are objecting to 2022 versus slightly earlier, 2016? Is 6 years for public opinion to change really the hang up? In my haste, I had used slang terminology of 'a couple years', and everyone did the math, said that is 2022, and objected to the year 2022? OK. I had the dates wrong. Go with 2016.
Maybe 'dogs' are a bad example, since even the Pope says they go to heaven.
But you can't deny that for Pigs, Cows, Chickens, that up to 2005 and even up to recent years ~2020, it was commonly accepted that they were not conscious, and not intelligent and thus have no ability to experience pain.
Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, but plenty of dog owners eat bacon and don't think twice. So what is the difference? They are both conscious right?
So consciousness is not what we use to provide any moral standing?
The article was about how to 'test' for consciousness. The discussion was, could you apply it to AI. I was simply saying, that for many years 'intelligence' was used as a substitute indicator for consciousness and now that AI is 'intelligent' people were re-defining that indicator.
"But you can't deny that for Pigs, Cows, Chickens, that up to 2005 and even up to recent years ~2020, it was commonly accepted that they were not conscious, and not intelligent and thus have no ability to experience pain."
I'm not sure if you mean the majority opinion was they are not conscious? If so I do deny this outside of survey data showing otherwise.
I was alive since 1982 and have noticed no cultural shift on this topic. I imagine for most people whether animals are conscious has little to do with whether it's okay to eat them, I recall someone in high school once saying "being a vegetarian is stupid because animals eat other animals."
The U.S. president first pardoned a turkey in 1963 and it's been an annual tradition since 1989. I recall an author possibly making an overly speculative argument linking this to the fact most people in modern times grew up with children's movies like Bambi depicting animals as sentient.
I wonder if the view shifts measurably by region/state in the US.
There is definitely a right leaning/religious view that animals are not conscious. And this was the dominant opinion in the US for many decades. When I think back on when I encountered these opinions the most, it was mostly in Midwest and South. When I was living on east coast, there was more opinion's like you are expressing.
Even a few years ago when UK passed laws about squid and lobster. It was right wing pundits that were just howling at how stupid it was since these animals are not conscious.
Guess what we call the 'public', versus what we are exposed to locally, is the real disagreement here.
(I'd say the Turkey thing was a joke, not any indication of sentiment. Probably more a joke about crime, not animals.).
People are full of contradictions but the internet tells me 44.5% of U.S. households own dogs. Did those right leaning religious people own dogs, and would they have said, "Sure my pet is not conscious?" if asked?
Or was it only the delicious animals they love cooking that aren't conscious?
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?