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It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is

It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition. The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness. The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.

akersten 20d ago
It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?
- niam 20d ago
  It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.
  - Dylan16807 20d ago
    Claiming a publication uses bad writers isn't a conspiracy.
    - niam 20d ago
      And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.
- skrebbel 20d ago
  You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.
  - fasterik 20d ago
    Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a computer scientist at Google. But I agree, it's an opinion piece and it's not the Economist's job to grade it as a philosophical essay. Generally, I think the Economist is a high quality publication for news even if the opinion pieces are sometimes a bit silly.
Noaidi 20d ago
> It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it. Yes, I agree. To me it reads as an apology to sociopathy.
- pc86 20d ago
  I think this lends intent toward the article that it doesn't necessarily warrant. The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.
- chasd00 20d ago
  i don't want to get too far into it but if no human cares enough to call it immoral than how can it be immoral? Morality is a strictly human invention.
- nkrisc 20d ago
  No, not necessarily so. But arguing for the existence of objective morality that stretches across the entire universe seems to be a huge stretch. For what it’s worth, my subjective sense of morality is opposed to torture.
jampekka 20d ago
The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.
- fasterik 20d ago
  It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph: >Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.
  - jptlnk 20d ago
    Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the existence of an objective "consciousness" property is a hotly debated question philosophically. Many great thinkers have written and discussed this question at length, and as of now the jury is very much out.
    - fasterik 20d ago
      Sure, but staking a claim in that debate is taking a position on what is and isn't conscious.
  - jampekka 20d ago
    I read "consciousness" in there meaning attribution of consciousness, not as an ontological claim about what is conscious. The article seems to use this switching of the definition as a bit of a rhetorical device, which does muddy the point.
  - lnenad 20d ago
    But there isn't? What does it factually mean to be conscious? How can we claim other living beings aren't are conscious?
    - fasterik 20d ago
      We don't know yet because we don't have a fundamental theory of consciousness. My money is on that it's an objective property of the structure of computation happening in the brain.
Animats 20d ago
It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient? What rights do they have? How do you get along with such different creatures? This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's more of a problem when the difference is small, or complex. Look at how much trouble we have with race. The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals became extinct. Close to human level, but maybe not quite there. They lost. Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries. The machines outlive humans. Japan is officially resigned to this fate.[1] [1] https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Summary.pdf https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Su...
- arionhardison 20d ago
  This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.
  - hadlock 20d ago
    It might be time to take a sabbatical
Der_Einzige 20d ago
Actually good philosophical analysis on HN and it's the top upvoted comment? A rare W for the users of this website.
xelxebar 20d ago
I believe you completely miss the point. The interesting observation is this: when we judge something to have subjective experience, we are invoking moral intuitions. There is no objective measure we can perform (yet?), and it's not even clear whether such a measure makes sense. You may disagree, but this is still a central debate in serious discussion on "hard" consciousness. I would say that your entire argument just begs the question by implicitly assuming consciousness to have real, independent existence. Does elan vital (the substance that provides the motive force of life) have mass? You're saying that this is a theorem; the article questions the entire premise. > The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. Bizzare. "If it rains, the car will get wet." Is this a statement, as you say, about rain? Descarte tries to prove the existence of his God and states an axiom. The atecedent "I think" seems to be about thinking, whatever that may mean, and "I am" makes an existential claim based on subjective experience... or something. Who knows why Descarte believed cogito ergo sum to be solid starting ground. IMHO, your rebuttal here reads as little more than a complaint that something disagrees with your personal assumptions about the world. You clearly got me riled up just as much as you did against OP, so thanks for the elan vital!
scoofy 20d ago
>The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. I generally agree with the thrust of your argument -- the article is a mess and borderline unintelligible to this former philosophy postgraduate -- but I might nitpick this. Two points: (1) I do not think there is a substantial difference between whether the cogito is about thinking or perceiving. And (2) I'm not entirely sure the sensation that is thinking is independent from qualia. I'm in less disagreement, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by: >Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Moral frameworks are exactly deductive frameworks with arbitrary axioms. Like mathematics, they don't actually exist outside of a mind. Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible. --- An unrelated comment, but I just don't want to double post: To me the most interesting thing to fall out of starting to understanding intelligence -- and we're definitely not there yet -- is that it is entirely possible that the 'consciousness is an illusion' argument ends up as significantly more serious. Ultimately, solipsism means it sort of doesn't matter, but it could be a kind of Darwin-style "we aren't special" result in thinking going forward.
- TheOtherHobbes 20d ago
  Not much to add except that The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny.
  - scoofy 20d ago
    I don't think this kind of comment is helpful at all. We should treat these arguments on their merits, rather than with some ad hominum prejudice. If your (I presume anti-liberal) views are compelling, you wouldn't need to trot them out in as a flippant quip. I would hope I didn't have to regurgitate that kind of basic intro to logic copy in a forum named after a combinatory logic.
    - calf 20d ago
      I hate ad hominems leveled (especially against me), but the information about the Economist and this author is relevant. It suggests bad faith (to readers who have noticed a pattern by those sources). Which is not necessarily an ad hominem. Specifically it turns out I already read a problematic piece by this author last year, so the heads up saves me time, attention, and energy.
scotty79 20d ago
> Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. I'm willing to consider that consciousness is like art, mostly in the eye of the beholder and objectively defining consciousness doesn't make any sense, there's only a spectrum of intelligent behavior.
chermi 20d ago
Those are also different things. I think it should unambiguously clear that humans are special to humans. If not that's basically a mental health problem lol
dwd 20d ago
Be careful not to equate conscious with subjective experience. - Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system. - Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model. - Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system. I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong. The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external). The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.
xg15 20d ago
> This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's interesting that there was a change even in that area in the last century and specifically the last decades. I think it was always contested if animals have something like a consciousness (or "soul") at all. On the one hand, animals were often used as stand-in for humans in fables, etc - on the other hand, there was the widespread view that they are mostly automatons driven by instinct. If an animal behaved too smart, people were more likely to find a supernatural explanation (it's a disguised god/spirit/etc) than accept that an ordinary animal could do that. The debate really only shifted in the last decades with scientific evidence for (some) animal cognition coming in. On the other hand, humans always seemed to have a tendency to attribute consciousness (or at least "worthiness of care") to supernatural entities or even landscape features. I think most cultures always had a whole world of conscious, non-human entities, they just ignored the ones that mighy actually be conscious.

akersten 20d ago

It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?

niam 20d ago
It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.
- Dylan16807 20d ago
  Claiming a publication uses bad writers isn't a conspiracy.
  - niam 20d ago
    And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.
skrebbel 20d ago
You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.
- fasterik 20d ago
  Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a computer scientist at Google. But I agree, it's an opinion piece and it's not the Economist's job to grade it as a philosophical essay. Generally, I think the Economist is a high quality publication for news even if the opinion pieces are sometimes a bit silly.

Noaidi 20d ago

> It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it. Yes, I agree. To me it reads as an apology to sociopathy.

pc86 20d ago
I think this lends intent toward the article that it doesn't necessarily warrant. The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.
chasd00 20d ago
i don't want to get too far into it but if no human cares enough to call it immoral than how can it be immoral? Morality is a strictly human invention.
nkrisc 20d ago
No, not necessarily so. But arguing for the existence of objective morality that stretches across the entire universe seems to be a huge stretch. For what it’s worth, my subjective sense of morality is opposed to torture.

jampekka 20d ago

The article doesn't claim anything about what is and what is not conscious. It's about what we may think is conscious, and why.

fasterik 20d ago
It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph: >Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency.
- jptlnk 20d ago
  Unless I'm misunderstanding you, the existence of an objective "consciousness" property is a hotly debated question philosophically. Many great thinkers have written and discussed this question at length, and as of now the jury is very much out.
  - fasterik 20d ago
    Sure, but staking a claim in that debate is taking a position on what is and isn't conscious.
- jampekka 20d ago
  I read "consciousness" in there meaning attribution of consciousness, not as an ontological claim about what is conscious. The article seems to use this switching of the definition as a bit of a rhetorical device, which does muddy the point.
- lnenad 20d ago
  But there isn't? What does it factually mean to be conscious? How can we claim other living beings aren't are conscious?
  - fasterik 20d ago
    We don't know yet because we don't have a fundamental theory of consciousness. My money is on that it's an objective property of the structure of computation happening in the brain.

Animats 20d ago

It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special. AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient? What rights do they have? How do you get along with such different creatures? This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's more of a problem when the difference is small, or complex. Look at how much trouble we have with race. The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals became extinct. Close to human level, but maybe not quite there. They lost. Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries. The machines outlive humans. Japan is officially resigned to this fate.[1] [1] https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Summary.pdf https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Su...

arionhardison 20d ago
This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.
- hadlock 20d ago
  It might be time to take a sabbatical

Der_Einzige 20d ago

Actually good philosophical analysis on HN and it's the top upvoted comment? A rare W for the users of this website.

xelxebar 20d ago

I believe you completely miss the point. The interesting observation is this: when we judge something to have subjective experience, we are invoking moral intuitions. There is no objective measure we can perform (yet?), and it's not even clear whether such a measure makes sense. You may disagree, but this is still a central debate in serious discussion on "hard" consciousness. I would say that your entire argument just begs the question by implicitly assuming consciousness to have real, independent existence. Does elan vital (the substance that provides the motive force of life) have mass? You're saying that this is a theorem; the article questions the entire premise. > The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. Bizzare. "If it rains, the car will get wet." Is this a statement, as you say, about rain? Descarte tries to prove the existence of his God and states an axiom. The atecedent "I think" seems to be about thinking, whatever that may mean, and "I am" makes an existential claim based on subjective experience... or something. Who knows why Descarte believed cogito ergo sum to be solid starting ground. IMHO, your rebuttal here reads as little more than a complaint that something disagrees with your personal assumptions about the world. You clearly got me riled up just as much as you did against OP, so thanks for the elan vital!

scoofy 20d ago

>The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. I generally agree with the thrust of your argument -- the article is a mess and borderline unintelligible to this former philosophy postgraduate -- but I might nitpick this. Two points: (1) I do not think there is a substantial difference between whether the cogito is about thinking or perceiving. And (2) I'm not entirely sure the sensation that is thinking is independent from qualia. I'm in less disagreement, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by: >Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Moral frameworks are exactly deductive frameworks with arbitrary axioms. Like mathematics, they don't actually exist outside of a mind. Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible. --- An unrelated comment, but I just don't want to double post: To me the most interesting thing to fall out of starting to understanding intelligence -- and we're definitely not there yet -- is that it is entirely possible that the 'consciousness is an illusion' argument ends up as significantly more serious. Ultimately, solipsism means it sort of doesn't matter, but it could be a kind of Darwin-style "we aren't special" result in thinking going forward.

TheOtherHobbes 20d ago
Not much to add except that The Economist pontificating about morality is like a vampire complaining blood tastes funny.
- scoofy 20d ago
  I don't think this kind of comment is helpful at all. We should treat these arguments on their merits, rather than with some ad hominum prejudice. If your (I presume anti-liberal) views are compelling, you wouldn't need to trot them out in as a flippant quip. I would hope I didn't have to regurgitate that kind of basic intro to logic copy in a forum named after a combinatory logic.
  - calf 20d ago
    I hate ad hominems leveled (especially against me), but the information about the Economist and this author is relevant. It suggests bad faith (to readers who have noticed a pattern by those sources). Which is not necessarily an ad hominem. Specifically it turns out I already read a problematic piece by this author last year, so the heads up saves me time, attention, and energy.

scotty79 20d ago

> Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. I'm willing to consider that consciousness is like art, mostly in the eye of the beholder and objectively defining consciousness doesn't make any sense, there's only a spectrum of intelligent behavior.

chermi 20d ago

Those are also different things. I think it should unambiguously clear that humans are special to humans. If not that's basically a mental health problem lol

dwd 20d ago

Be careful not to equate conscious with subjective experience. - Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system. - Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model. - Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system. I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong. The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external). The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.

xg15 20d ago

> This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's interesting that there was a change even in that area in the last century and specifically the last decades. I think it was always contested if animals have something like a consciousness (or "soul") at all. On the one hand, animals were often used as stand-in for humans in fables, etc - on the other hand, there was the widespread view that they are mostly automatons driven by instinct. If an animal behaved too smart, people were more likely to find a supernatural explanation (it's a disguised god/spirit/etc) than accept that an ordinary animal could do that. The debate really only shifted in the last decades with scientific evidence for (some) animal cognition coming in. On the other hand, humans always seemed to have a tendency to attribute consciousness (or at least "worthiness of care") to supernatural entities or even landscape features. I think most cultures always had a whole world of conscious, non-human entities, they just ignored the ones that mighy actually be conscious.