Consciousness likely not unique to earthlings, paper says

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.

We should stop seeing consciousness as a thing.

Probably best to read the paper. I personally don't find it very convincing, because of the many speculative premises. But that is not a refutation.

Here it is:

https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/SubstrateFle...

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.

Expanding in an edit: It just means that the word consciousness is more descriptive, like awareness, and not the soul-derived concept that it still functions as today. Side note – I spent a couple months last year researching the history of consciousness for an essay contest, and one conclusion is how consciousness is descended in large part from our concepts of the soul. Which explains a lot of the reason it has such cultural prestige today.

When I checked the last time "consciousness" was not defined yet. So the title can be read as "Some things are likely not unique to earthlings"

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 be harsh here. To be clear, I do believe in consciousness. This sounded a little clickbaity. I also think string theory is a meaningless pursuit.

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 problem with assertions like this is there’s not an attempt to prove or disprove them. Just a vague reasoning from examples.

Science works. Philosophy can help guide that by helping us decide where to look. So I guess this paper is helping in its own small way.

> Schwitzgebel and Pober do not attempt to define consciousness

Aaand I stopped reading. If you cannot describe or frame the object of your study, then I don't care.