| It seems to me we’ve had a long history of bias to human specialness (uniqueness, not merely superiority) that has blinded us to consciousness elsewhere. Only 50 years ago the thought of apes being conscious was considered largely naive, yet alone dogs, contrary to the experience of most owners with a close relationship with their canine companions. Come 2013 and a group of scientists much like in the attached make the argument that dogs, and other animals, share traits of consciousness (https://gizmodo.com/brain-scans-show-that-dogs-are-as-consci...). The needle seems to have moved continually since in the direction of “human consciousness is likely to sit on a continuum of consciousness with other life”. Given this I’m inclined to take this argument at face value. As to what that means and what we should take as moral guidance from the view is a broader question (I feel it sits a bit closer to the thinking of the recently passed Daniel Dennett, or David Chalmers). But it seems evident that whatever we take to be associated with consciousness is shared across other forms of life. Even plants seem to react to anaesthetics, and demonstrate behaviour consistent with emotional experience. If you spend time with life you tend to observe similar things across all forms. Sure you can reduce it to pure stimuli reactions, but you can also reduce all humans to philosophical zombies with the same arguments. I’d argue the trend of evidence is suggestive of broad consciousness. In this spirit, I’m interested if we’ll see this property extend beyond life to other systems, and not merely AI - if we reasonably argue that we have consciousness, but “we” are a system composed of cells and bacteria, that is we are effectively a macro system composed of more micro systems within us, why doesn’t a city or a planet or a solar system have some element of consciousness? Is the energy we feel at a sporting match an emotional, and conscious, expression of the communal human group present at the game? And if not, why not? |