
What insects can tell us about the origins of consciousness (2016) - headalgorithm
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/18/4900.full
======
bencollier49
"In vertebrates the capacity for subjective experience is supported by
integrated structures in the midbrain that create a neural simulation of the
state of the mobile animal in space."

Whoah there! I think this might be another case of semantic creep. It's very
easy to conflate consciousness with self-image in the brain, and it's
regularly mis-sold in this way by neuroscientists.

I once went to a talk at the Royal Society which was supposed to be about
consciousness. The bloke just spoke for an hour about things like optical
illusions.

By the same token, if I were to create a processing system for a robot which
integrated visual, haptic and auditory feedback to create a representation of
the robot in space, we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being
conscious.

~~~
TuringTest
_> we're being asked to credit the robot as somehow being conscious_

How do you differentiate a robot from a philosophical zombie, and this one
from a human? We can not be sure that _other humans_ apart from myself (yours
truly writing these lines); we only make estimated guesses that, because we
share the same physical structures, our experience will also be similar.

Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing
structures with similar functions. It may be the case that insect structures
are _too_ simple for that (maybe, as you point out, it requires complex
coordination among subsystems and not just a spacial model), but at least it
provides a lower bound.

~~~
TelmoMenezes
> Therefore, we could as well extend that presumption to a being sharing
> structures with similar functions.

This is more or less the current mainstream stance. I think it's fine to do it
for practical purposes, for example deciding that animals cannot be ethically
subjected to certain treatments by virtue of the complexity of their nervous
systems. But this is reasonable doubt + principle of precaution. I'm fine with
that.

What we cannot do is make this presumption and pretend that we are still
within the realms of serious science or philosophy. The technical name for
this presumption is emergentism, that consciousness somehow arises from the
interactions of matter. I believe that the reason why this hypothesis is so
popular, and even confused with scientific fact, is that it is the _less
weird_. Avoiding weirdness is a common pitfall in the history of science, it
leads to temporary dead-ends.

~~~
hopler
It's fine to say that science does not support the claim that animals have
consciousness, as long as you also agree that science does not support the
claim that humans have consciousness.

I don't understand what you are saying about emrgentism being non scientific.
Emergentism is the reason the reason that the Universe today has so many
properties that it didn't have when it was a miasma of isolated hydrogren or
whatever around the time of the Big Bang.

~~~
xamuel
Science _does not_ support the claim that humans have consciousness! You know
that you are conscious, but you have no way to falsify the hypothesis that
everyone OTHER than you is a philosophical zombie. (If you discover such a
test, then congratulations, you are now a scientist up there with Aristotle,
Newton and Einstein.)

~~~
simonh
Dennett has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that the philosophical zombie
paradoxes are logically incoherent.

I see the zombie paradoxes as pulling a similar trick to the Chinese Room.
They both try to trivialise the problem to a simplistic model, but of course
the problem is not simplistic.

The Chinese room would have to be the size of a planet, containing millions of
trillions of symbols and would take the man inside it the lifetime of the
universe to perform simple linguistic processing and cognitive tasks. Likewise
the philosophical zombies are cast as simple dumb mechanisms that are somehow
performing a stupendously complex and little understood process, except 'not
really'. They're both just rhetorical sleight of hand.

~~~
xamuel
Showing that paradoxes are incoherent is a logical exercise, not a scientific
one.

If we use a truth-table to show "P and not P" is always false, that's logic.
If we repeatedly drop a ball and observe that it falsifies "balls don't fall",
that's science. Stop confusing the two.

Dennett has not provided a laboratory experiment X such that if "simonh is the
only conscious being in the universe" is true then X has one result, and yet
when we run the experiment we see a different result.

~~~
simonh
Hold on there just a cotton picking minute. You're the one that invoked
philosophical zombies. So they're science when you invoke them, but only
philosophy when I do?

I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot
either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It's essentially a
philosophical question.

~~~
the_af
> _I would rather say that it seems likely science in the strict sense cannot
> either support or refute the existence of consciousness. It 's essentially a
> philosophical question._

Agreed, but I'd make the following change: however, whatever consciousness is,
science can safely assume most healthy humans have it, and can make educated
guesses (and experiments) to explore whether insects have it.

~~~
simonh
Sure, I honestly don't have any problem defining consciousness in terms of the
human experience of it. After all to my mind that's what it is - an
experience. We can use scientific processes and techniques to analyse it for
sure, to trim away misconceptions and more precisely understand it's
parameters but we're never going to identify a 'consciousness particle', or
special quantum entanglement whatsit that Roger Penrose seems to believe is
responsible for it. I'd rather just embrace the fact that this is a
philosophical question. Science can illuminate philosophy, just as philosophy
can illuminate science.

------
blacksqr
"Frankly, I find the idea of a bug that thinks offensive!"

~~~
kjeetgill
For anyone not in the know, this is a line from Starship Troopers.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKk4Cq56d1Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKk4Cq56d1Y)

------
chaosfox
see also: "Insects cannot tell us anything about subjective experience or the
origin of consciousness"

[https://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/E3813](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/27/E3813)

~~~
amelius
The title of that note is, of course, possibly not correct.

> Thus, they fail to make a convincing case that insects can tell us anything
> about subjective experience or consciousness.

This is not the same as "Insects cannot tell us anything about subjective
experience or the origin of consciousness"

~~~
mfoy_
Right, the title makes a claim, and their conclusion is that the opposite
claim has failed to meet its burden of proof...

Thinking that "because something has not met its burden of proof means that
the opposite must be true" is a fallacy.

------
cobbzilla
It seems like the assertion (very roughly) is something like: a creature is
conscious if it can make a subjective decision about something. It's not a
terrible definition, but I feel like I'm missing some nuance.

------
vxxzy
Is this really saying that consciousness is an efficient solution to basic
problems of sensory reafference? Does this mean it is the base from which
consciousness arrives or is it merely an attribute of consciousness?

~~~
sven773
Karl Friston's free energy principle says something similar -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIu_dJGyIQI)

------
ZeroFries
> How, why, and when consciousness evolved remain hotly debated topics

Conversely, consider whether or not consciousness as a feature of the world
actually evolved at all. That is, consciousness could be an inherent part of
reality throughout all of reality. See various versions of panpsychism or
idealism. The idea is that energy itself is conscious, and what evolves is the
shape or form consciousness takes. There is no place in space-time one can
point to and say "this is where the lights came on".

To answer the question of "why" is the same as answering the question "why
something rather than nothing?" It's not clear whether a semantic or symbolic
expression (which is itself a part of consciousness) can satisfactorily answer
it (that is, explain the whole).

------
hopler
Similar article thoroughly discussed previously:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11849621)

------
saagarjha
> The brain structures that support subjective experience in vertebrates and
> insects are very different from each other, but in both cases they are basal
> to each clade. Hence we propose the origins of subjective experience can be
> traced to the Cambrian.

Insects are thought to have arisen in the Devonian period, did they not?

------
m3kw9
Maybe look no further to when human babies become conscious, their first
moments that they _remember_ can say a lot about what consciousness is. Having
memory is a big part of consciousness.

~~~
m3kw9
Not saying SSDs have consciousness however

~~~
shredprez
Lacking any intelligible means to communicate, this is tough to say
definitively.

------
viivaux
>However, consciousness also gives out somewhere. Plants do not have it.

Stopped reading there.

~~~
alanbernstein
You think they do? Or just that it's an unreasonably certain assertion? Is
there a dividing line? If not plants/animals, then where?

~~~
viivaux
If anyone proved beyond doubt that plants are not conscious & don't make
decisions, I sure didn't hear about it. I have little doubt there are many
flavors of consciousness out there, and while humans and animals and plants
have their differences, they are not as large as some assume.

What I believe is this: We don't know nearly enough about consciousness, how
it's made, and what it is, to make statements like that. And when people make
the mistake of assuming they know otherwise, anything that follows is likely a
pile of ballsack.

I suspect the dividing line, if we assume there is a single one, is pretty
fuzzy and subjective. If a tree is cut down, is it still a tree? What about
when it's cut into planks? At what point does an acorn become a tree; at it's
first leaf, first sprout, first branch?

If we had answers to these kind of questions, the world would be very
different to what I've observed.

~~~
alanbernstein
I can't argue with any of that, and of course these things are all fuzzy. But
if plants have anything resembling consciousness, it seems to be so different
than what we experience, as to be worth distinguishing.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
> But if plants have anything resembling consciousness, it seems to be so
> different than what we experience, as to be worth distinguishing

Why? They're alive, and their lives are drastically different from ours, but
we don't need to distinguish it and use a separate term for term. Unless we
know what consciousness is we can't define what has it.

~~~
alanbernstein
Living beings, I believe, is a strictly broader group than conscious beings.
I'm not claiming to be certain about this - it's a belief I've taken for
granted most of my life - but it would take a good argument to convince me
otherwise.

There are plenty of different ways to define life, and some of them include
entities that, I believe, are clearly not conscious. For example, starting way
at the bottom, I strongly believe these things are not conscious: genes, DNA,
RNA, proteins, prions, viruses. I also assume that some other things are not
conscious, such as single cells. Beyond that, things get more murky.

As far as I can tell, "being conscious" and "having a mind" are equivalent. I
can't define what a mind is, but I can say it would be hard for me to accept
that something could have a mind without anything resembling a brain. Plants
seem not to have anything resembling a brain.

Of course, I could be wrong about that. Mechanically, a brain is nothing but a
complex network of electrochemical signaling devices (plus a bunch of sensors
and actuators, but I'll ignore those for now even though they appear to be
crucial), and there are lots of other places to find electrochemical signals,
including both within and between plants. There just aren't any that seem to
resemble the structure, function, or complexity of a brain.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
In practice I don't disagree with anything you said.

But in theory, I'm not really sure (and none of us are). There are sea
creatures (jellyfish?) that have distributed nervous systems throughout their
body. They exhibit complex reactions and behaviors we'd expect of a complex
animal but have no central "brain".

Similarly plants respond to stimuli, turn and twist to move towards light,
send out chemical distress signals to other plants when injured / being
eaten... Does that mean they have a non-traditional form of "nervous system"
as well?

If someone forced me to choose, I'd clearly say plants aren't conscious. But I
had to provide a strong justification I had to stick behind, I couldn't argue
why they (or the jellyfish) are or aren't conscious, nor about an ant or
butterfly.

At some point we may have to declare consciousness outside of the realm of
science, as there is no objective test for it. Ie distinguish between
consciousness and simulated consciousness or reflexive responses. And that's
very disappointing to a scientifically curious person like me.

