Consciousness

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The word "consciousness""consciousness" is used in a variety of different ways, and there are large disagreements about the reality and nature (and even coherence) of some of the things people profess to mean by "consciousness."

  • A long time ago BC: Someone comes up with the idea that "minds" are a pretty basic and fundamental feature of the world. Maybe gods have minds; maybe trees; maybe rivers; and so on. See also When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid and Mind Projection Fallacy.
  • ~400 BC: Democritus proposes that all human-scale phenomena, including psychological phenomena, are the result of small physical parts bouncing off each other. From Encyclopedia Britannica: "Democritus thought that the soul consists of smooth, round atoms and that perceptions consist of motions caused in the soul atoms by the atoms in the perceived thing."
  • 1641: René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy. Descartes argues that mind and matter must be irreducibly distinct (mind-body dualism), because (e.g.) material things are spatially extended, while thoughts are not. Descartes speculates that minds interact with the physical world via a specific part of the brain, the pineal gland.
    • Descartes also popularizes the idea that everyone knows their own conscious experiences with certainty: at any given moment, we are infallible about the fact that we are having an experience (the "cogito"), and we are also infallible about the contents of that experience.
  • 1651: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Hobbes insistently asserts that everything (including the mind) is material, and can be thought of as a mechanism or machine.
  • 1714: Gottfried Leibniz. The Monadology. Leibniz argues that mind can't be reduced to matter:
    • "One is obliged to admit that perception and what depends upon it is inexplicable on mechanical principles, that is, by figures and motions. In imagining that there is a machine whose construction would enable it to think, to sense, and to have perception, one could conceive it enlarged while retaining the same proportions, so that one could enter into it, just like into a windmill. Supposing this, one should, when visiting within it, find only parts pushing one another, and never anything by which to explain a perception. Thus it is in the simple substance, and not in the composite or in the machine, that one must look for perception."
  • 1866: Charles Sanders Peirce, Lowell Lectures. Peirce introduces the term "qualia" to refer to what it's like to have a specific experience — e.g., the particular experience of redness. Qualia is the plural of quale, Latin for "what kind of thing?" and source of the English word quality.
  • 1874: Thomas Huxley, "On the Hypothesis that Animals Are Automata, and Its History." Huxley argues for epiphenomenalism, the view that consciousness is caused by physical processes, but has no effects of its own.
    • "The consciousness of brutes would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the
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  • 1. When should I care about something else's welfare?
    • 1.1. Animal welfare: Pain, pleasure, desire, etc. are commonly taken to be experiences, and experiences of great moral importance. Knowing which species are capable of "having experiences," then, could matter decisively in assessing the morality of factory farming and the morality of policies affecting wild animals.
    • 1.2. Machine welfare and s-risks: Similarly, knowing which kinds of (actual or potential) software have "experiences""experiences" could tell us a great deal about which programs are morally important.
  • 2. When should I think of something as "me" (or "relevantly me-like")?
    • 2.1. Personal identity, whole brain emulation, and simulations: Normally, people care about their future selves (at least in part) because they anticipate having those selves' experiences. Thus, one might say: "It doesn't make sense for me to sign up for cryonics, because a cryo-revived copy of me wouldn't be me." (Or, replying to 1.2 above, one might say "It doesn't make sense for me to sign up for cryonics, because a cryo-revived emulation of me would be a mere automaton with no experiences.")
    • 2.2. Anthropics: Anthropic questions turn on how many copies of "you" exist, or how many copies of "observers similar to you" exist. One could speculate that this is related to the question of what makes a copy of you conscious, and what "consciousness" is in the first place.
  • 3. Does the existence or nature of subjective experience imply any major updates about the world as a whole, about scientific methodology, etc.?
    • 3.1. Reductionism, physicalism, and naturalism: Can experience be a mere matter of, uh, matter? If experience turned out to be irreducibly unphysical (and real), this would falsify some of the most well-established generalizations in science.

 

How does this "having experiences" thing work, then? Well, this wiki page's authorseditors haven't agreed on an answer yet. As a cop-out, we instead provide a list of highlights from the history of other people thinking about this.

The word "consciousness" is used in a variety of different ways, and there are large disagreements about the reality and nature (and even coherence) of some of the things people profess to mean by "consciousness."

Colloquially, the word "conscious" is used to pick out a few different things:

  • Wakefulness - The property that distinguishes, e.g., a person who is awake from a person who is asleep.
    • We call people "unconscious" in this sense based on observed features like "sharply reduced mobility," though we wouldn't normally call someone unconscious if we think they're merely paralyzed. Instead, calling someone "unconscious" tends to imply reduced ability to perceive and/or reason about events in one's environment.
    • An unconscious person (in this sense) might or might not be dreaming; and if dreaming, they might or might not be lucid.
  • Having experiences - The property that distinguishes, e.g., a comatose person who is having experiences from a comatose person who is not having experiences.
  • Knowledge, perception, and/or attention - E.g., we might say that someone becomes "conscious of" a fact when they first learn that fact. Or we might say that they become "conscious of" something whenever they're currently perceiving it, or whenever they're paying attention to it.
  • Meta-cognition or reflective awareness - Knowing, perceiving, and/or attending to your own mental states; or knowing, perceiving, and/or attending to the fact that you have certain mental states.
    • E.g., we might say that someone is less "conscious" when they're fully immersed in a novel than when they're thinking about their own experiences, directing attention to the fact that they're reading a book, etc.
  • Self-awareness - Knowing, perceiving, and/or attending to your own existence or your own central properties.
    • Depending on what exactly is meant by "self-awareness," the "immersed in a novel" example might also involve less self-awareness. In some weaker senses of "self-aware," one might instead claim that humans who are experiencing anything are always "self-aware."

Reasonably mainstream academic overviews of "consciousness" can be found in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences.

This tag is tentatively and provisionally about the "having experiences" meaning(s) of "consciousness." For wakefulness and dreaming, see sleep. For knowledge, perception, and attention, see attention and cognitive science. And for reflective awareness and self-awareness, see identity, personal identity, and reflective reasoning.

This tag's focus is tentative and provisional because it is not altogether clear that "consciousness in the sense of having experiences" is a coherent idea, or one that's distinct from the other categories above. This tag is a practical tool for organizing discussion on a family of related topics, and isn't intended as a strong statement "this is the right way of carving nature at its joints."

Suffice to say that (as of December 8, 2020) enough LessWrongers find consciousness confusing...

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