Probably they should start by NOT treating the consciousness as a non-physical special thing. Maybe it's not a thing to search for at all. At what point did it become a thing? Separate from chemical and physical interactions between elements?
When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.
The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.
I am thinking more and more that it’s fundamentally a Wittgensteinian kind of problem.
We define a word to mean a certain collection of things (consciousness) and then try and stretch that definition to other things in the world that have the same appearance.
The problem is that this abstract term likely doesn’t exist in itself as a quality, but is just a shorthand for a collection of behaviors that are observed only in biological entities.
And so even if a machine exhibits all the appearance qualities of this definition of consciousness, it’s fundamentally not the same thing at all, and the only reason we think it is, is because our language is insufficient for actually describing reality.
In pragmatic terms it might not actually matter, if a machine 100 years from now passes every conceivable Turing Test. But that doesn’t mean that machines have become conscious in the way humans are conscious.
"Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness. Instead, they proceed from the premise that it's a real and recognizable phenomenon, posing a narrower question: Must it be tied to the biology found on Earth?"
Basically, they are asserting that no matter how we define consciousness, it can't be unique to earth's biology.
Wow, a paper said this so it must be true. What is the point of research like this that can never be tested? Genuinely curious. Shouldn't we find non-Earth lifeforms FIRST before even trying to make these conclusions?
Edit: Wasn't trying to harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little click baity.
Of the many different scientific traditions that have converged on different ways of treating this question, the most compelling one I've found is Prigogine's dissipative structures model, which on a detailed read seems to be the most amenable tool for some follow-up work somewhere to start quantifying such things. Worth a look in if you enjoyed the OP article.
The notion that life is favored because it accelerates global evolution toward increased entropy predates, I think, Prigogine.
But it doesn't resolve the question of whether life, especially intelligent life, actually exists elsewhere. On Earth the vast majority of tornados only occur in a narrow swath of land because while they're immensely efficient at dissipating energy there are several prerequisites required for them to emerge. And there are many other simpler dissipation mechanisms that end up narrowing the odds of configurations amenable to tornado formation.
Moreover, these systems could easily overshoot and snuff themselves out; settling into a complex (as opposed to static or chaotic) configuration might be favored in some sense but still be incredibly rare to become established. The fact we see so many of them on Earth might just be a reflection of the anthropic principle. That is, there's a correlation between our existence and all the other complex systems surrounding us, biologic, geologic, etc.
The observable universe isn't infinite, and the more we learn about all the chance mechanisms that coincided to result in Earth, let alone the emergence of Earth life, the easier it is to believe that at this moment in the observable universe we might very well be alone. Maybe we aren't, but "the universe is big" simply doesn't cut it, not even when positing unimaginable biologies. It's doesn't take that many combined odds to conceivably end up with a number for the probability of life that is comparable in [inverse] magnitude to the size of our observable universe in stars, planets, or even atoms.
If we live in an infinite universe, then it's a stronger argument, though it wouldn't necessarily follow that life definitely must exist elsewhere even if beyond observability.
I've been watching this pre-print but I think its going to end up successfully dissolving is-ought for certain classes of murder by agents, partially driven by dissapative structures.
It can’t, unless you descend into sophistry. We came up with and defined the word “consciousness” specifically to fit our own understanding of the collection of behaviors we do that seem to apply only to us. What it means is based on what _we humans_ do, not something observed objectively, so it’s more like a human trait than a thing by itself that we fit into.
Philosophy is often a key stepping stone to science. Wondering what could be, is taking someone to the next step. If we ever want to do something that isn't just small increments on the past this is needed.
Life needs some kind of chemistry that doesn't lock up into compounds so stable they're hard to crack apart, but allows compounds stable enough to build structures.
Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are suck a system. That's why organic chemistry is a thing. There aren't that many families of elements with that property.
Ammonia and silicon based life have been suggested. But none of the alternatives have very promising chemistry. See [1]. Life is probably stuck with CHON, in the "goldilocks zone" where water exists as a liquid.
We now know that planets are not rare. Many extrasolar planets have been discovered. A few are promising. The systems with known extrasolar planets might have smaller, more interesting planets, too small to be detected at interstellar ranges.
But stars are a long way away. Unless FTL is possible (which it probably isn't, because causality would break), the most we can hope for is someone to talk to by radio or something similar.
See the Drake Equation.[2] There's been progress on firming up the numbers since the 1950s.
When you redefine consciousness as just any other chemical, electrical or physical thing, suddenly it's everywhere. You don't need to search for it. The river which finds its way to ocean, has it. The earthquake which decides when to erupt has it. The electrons which decide to jump across orbitals have it.
The confusion is around cause and effect. The standard notion is that a conscious agent can initiate an effect without a cause. A boulder doesn't roll over and hit another unless someone moved it in the first place. It doesn't decide to move and hit another. However this distinction barely survives on the temporal sequencing of cause and effect. That temporal sequence is only valid in a very narrow context and range.
We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.