Are animals conscious?
If so, how would we find out?
Wouldn't we have to use external observation in the form of some material mechanism?
Maybe one would think that animals could tell us what it is like to be them. Maybe we could interpret their languages and understand that they are experiencing what we are experiencing.
How would you explain to a foreign person that has never heard the word consciousness what consciousness is? How would a dolphin explain to us that it is conscious? How would we ask it?
Saying that humans have consciousness is a fact and then postulating that that fact is an indicator that all things are conscious seems like a very big leap. If consciousness is at the root of all physical reality then many entities would experience the world in a similar way as humans and should at least experience some form of consciousness.
How is consciousness defined? If the definition comes from the only thing we know is conscious then the definition must include the aspects that are linked to the human we experience of it. This means that it would include characteristics such as a self-concept or self-representation, a stream of present tense external and internal stimulus that includes some form of symbolic representation such as a language that interprets, analyses and integrates stimulus in a meaningful and expressible manner.
If the only way we know that something is conscious is to ask them and if we ask someone if they are conscious and they say yes why should we believe them? Why should we trust our own perception of consciousness? How, other than appealing to physical reality, would we ground our confidence that consciousness exists?
Philip also relies on the difference between quantity and quality but I didn't get a good definition of quality. Maybe it is just another term for subjective valuation and has no objective base. If that is true and "quality" can not be judged then there is no reason to study it as it can neither be wrong or right. So how does someone who thinks consciousness is only qualitative expect to study it?
Is there a way to evaluate quality in the form of quantity such as a degree of happiness, or a degree of redness? Also, I'm not sure if "redness" is a qualitative characteristic. Experiences can be quantified such as how many times one experiences something or the amount of hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical activity that exist before, during and after an experience.
If the only way we know that something is conscious is to ask them and if we ask someone if they are conscious and they say yes why should we believe them? Why should we trust our own perception of consciousness? How, other than appealing to physical reality, would we ground our confidence that consciousness exists?
Philip also relies on the difference between quantity and quality but I didn't get a good definition of quality. Maybe it is just another term for subjective valuation and has no objective base. If that is true and "quality" can not be judged then there is no reason to study it as it can neither be wrong or right. So how does someone who thinks consciousness is only qualitative expect to study it?
Is there a way to evaluate quality in the form of quantity such as a degree of happiness, or a degree of redness? Also, I'm not sure if "redness" is a qualitative characteristic. Experiences can be quantified such as how many times one experiences something or the amount of hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical activity that exist before, during and after an experience.
If you care about science then you must care about the means in which we verify intuitions. Also, Philip repeats the idea that neuroscientists can only get at a correlation between brain activity and conscious accounts but that correlation does not disprove causation as much as it proves causation. Also, neuroscience is not the only science that studies consciousness.
Philip keeps asking Sean to explain what a particle is as opposed to what it does but he doesn't explain how if everything is conscious how would we ever prove it if materialism or scientific methods or empiricism is on a different level as consciousness. It is a kind of unmoved mover kind of argument. It's not that physical reality includes consciousness it is that consciousness is what physical reality actually is and therefore cannot be explained by physical reality. Saying that what we do when we do math or science is just describe the behavior of consciousness doesn't explain consciousness or prove its existence at all. It is the same argument that God is before time and space and therefore one can not prove its existence using science.
Why should consciousness be on a different ground than any other concept? It should not be held up higher than any other hypothesis or theory. We should be skeptical of our assumptions regardless of how real they feel and we should be skeptical of our willingness to separate things because they seem mysterious and miraculous. We should ask questions about what we are talking about when we use the word consciousness and why it's important.
I suppose what I mean is I should ask these questions and look into the subject more.
Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/11/04/71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere/
