Are Insects Conscious?

Think morphic fields at that point!

It would be extraordinary to discover the mental life of dogs. My bet is that a lot of their thought processes would revolve around smells. Conversely, they might find our metal life utterly impoverished by our very poor sense of smell.

I suspect it would probably turn out that it is not possible to construct a hierarchy of increasingly conscious creatures with us at the top.

This goes too far in the name of politically correct all-inclusivity. I can't conceive of there not being in fact an order of levels of consciousness, where at least for physical beings on this Earth there is in fact a hierarchy, in which a man contemplating Einstein's general theory of relativity or the works of Aquinas (for example) stands at the top. Surely Man's higher mental faculties of reason, abstraction, understanding, imagination, creativity, etc. to say nothing of love and spiritual experience constitute a higher form of consciousness than that of any of the "lower" animals. OK, politically incorrect.

The science of this issue seems to be at a rudimentary level of development.

Science is starting to look into the matter of the gradations of level of consciousness in animals of varying complexity and evolutionary development. One article on the status of this research is at https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sc...20)30192-3. The authors consider the field to currently be mainly consisting of questions waiting to be answered by future research. They consider the issue to be one where animal consciousness, rather than it being some sort of simple graduation of level from simple to complex, is something that must be demarcated into several different dimensions, which they feel must be scientifically measureable. The unmentioned obvious limitation of such research is that the qualia of conscious subjective experience are fundamentally unmeasurable (at least directly) since they are totally immaterial.

The current status of the science is that of being a work in progress.

One unquestioned view is that there is in fact a (rather complex multidimensional) gradation of levels of consciousness from rudimentary to human. One unstated assumption is that apparently there is no absolute lower limit to consciousness below which there is absolutely none.

"(The area of animal consciousness can be categorized into) five dimensions of animal consciousness varying across and within species. Instead of thinking about variation between species in terms of levels of consciousness, we should think about multidimensional consciousness profiles." 

Their aim in this work was to make a case for the value of consciousness profiles in preference to the idea of a single sliding scale on which some animals are considered more or less conscious than others.

Suggested categories or dimensions of consciousness in animals, dimensions that hopefully can be measured in various ways via further research:

(1) Perceptual richness
(2) Evaluative richness, or experiences being "good" or "bad"
(3) Integration of time experiences into a single perspective (unity of consciousness)
(4) Integration of consciousness across time
(5) Self-Consciousness (Selfhood)

Needless to say, in each of the categories or dimensions, human consciousness as experienced appears assumed to be at the highest level. This seems valid as a starting assumption to me. 

The authors summarize the current status in the following list of outstanding questions that need to be answered by future research:

- In the absence of verbal report, what constitutes evidence that a particular stimulus is perceived consciously rather than unconsciously by an animal?
- Can we develop tests for conscious perception based on cognitive abilities, such as trace conditioning, that are linked to conscious perception in humans?
- How does the sophistication and flexibility of affect-based decision making vary across the animal kingdom and how can we measure and quantify the variation?
- Are there specific types of flexible decision making that indicate conscious affect?
- Can we adapt experiments designed to probe the split-brain syndrome in humans to explore the unity of consciousness in animals?
- What can we infer about the unity of consciousness from the extensive lateralization of bird brains?
- How can we test for the presence of two (or more) conscious perspectives in an animal?
- Which animals (if any) have mechanisms that edit incoming stimuli for coherence and continuity, creating a flowing stream of consciousness?
- Can we find evidence in animals of illusions, such as the colour-phi phenomenon, that rely on this type of editing?
- How can we show that animals are consciously simulating future scenarios and consciously reliving episodic memories?
- Can we show that, in some cases, the simulation or memory unfolds over the same length of time as the real, sensory experience of the same event would?
- How can we go beyond the mirror-mark test to find evidence of higher grades of self-consciousness?
- How can we test for experience projection in a wider range of animals?
- How should we aggregate evidence concerning p-richness, e-richness, unity, temporality, and selfhood to construct evidence-based consciousness profiles?
- Is there a principled way to score animals along these dimensions to allow quantitative comparisons?

This goes too far in the name of politically correct all-inclusivity.

I have no love of political correctness - none!

I can't conceive of there not being in fact an order of levels of consciousness, where at least for physical beings on this Earth there is in fact a hierarchy, in which a man contemplating Einstein's general theory of relativity or the works of Aquinas (for example) stands at the top. Surely Man's higher mental faculties of reason, abstraction, understanding, imagination, creativity, etc. to say nothing of love and spiritual experience constitute a higher form of consciousness than that of any of the "lower" animals. OK, politically incorrect.

What I meant was that consciousness might vary along multiple dimensions and pairs of consciousnesses might be only partially comprehensible to each other.

In fact your link above seems to be saying something like that.

That certainly doesn't imply that every consciousness is equal.

https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sc...20)30192-3

David

The science of this issue seems to be at a rudimentary level of development.

Science is starting to look into the matter of the gradations of level of consciousness in animals of varying complexity and evolutionary development. One article on the status of this research is at https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sc...20)30192-3. The authors consider the field to currently be mainly consisting of questions waiting to be answered by future research. They consider the issue to be one where animal consciousness, rather than it being some sort of simple graduation of level from simple to complex, is something that must be demarcated into several different dimensions, which they feel must be scientifically measureable. The unmentioned obvious limitation of such research is that the qualia of conscious subjective experience are fundamentally unmeasurable (at least directly) since they are totally immaterial.

The current status of the science is that of being a work in progress.

One unquestioned view is that there is in fact a (rather complex multidimensional) gradation of levels of consciousness from rudimentary to human. One unstated assumption is that apparently there is no absolute lower limit to consciousness below which there is absolutely none.


Their aim in this work was to make a case for the value of consciousness profiles in preference to the idea of a single sliding scale on which some animals are considered more or less conscious than others.

Suggested categories or dimensions of consciousness in animals, dimensions that hopefully can be measured in various ways via further research:

(1) Perceptual richness
(2) Evaluative richness, or experiences being "good" or "bad"
(3) Integration of time experiences into a single perspective (unity of consciousness)
(4) Integration of consciousness across time
(5) Self-Consciousness (Selfhood)

Needless to say, in each of the categories or dimensions, human consciousness as experienced appears assumed to be at the highest level. This seems valid as a starting assumption to me. 

The authors summarize the current status in the following list of outstanding questions that need to be answered by future research:

That's a heck of a paper.  This part struck me.

Normal human experience is highly integrated across time. Our experience of the world takes the form of a continuous stream, one moment flowing into the next [46.,47.]. For example, we experience the leaves of a tree blowing in the wind; we do not infer the motion from a series of static snapshots. Human experience is also temporally integrated across longer timescales. We are able to recall past experiences and simulate future experiences, a form of ‘mental time travel’ [48.]. Let us call this dimension temporality. 

This seems to me not to be a "dimension" but a capability.  The ability to simulate the past and future must have evolved naturally.  Surely we see animals remember and plan ahead.

I don't understand the concept of more and less consciousness except with regards stages of sleep.  Are we saying that insects, for example, experience life from a half asleep position?

I guess the question then is whether any of the ant researchers have observed anything but algorithmic logic responses in the ants to chance disruptions of their behavior by unpredictable external circumstances, like placing a barrier in their path to food. This would be equivalent to a human coming up with an inventive ad hoc cirumstantial response (non-algorithmic) to a problem that is unpredictable and only one of an uncountable number of possibilities (as in the inevitable downfall of AI-driven automobiles). That's a tough one.

I guess even with ants, they aren't sitting in an AI lab, the terrain is rough so legs might slip, bits of terrain might collapse as they walked on it, etc etc (some of those guys may march for hundreds of yards in a forest. Scaled up, that is a bit like taking a hike on rough ground. Wouldn't you use your mind to select the route? I think some rudimentary conscious awareness may be valuable even in such situations. I.e. I think the distinction between algorithmic control and conscious control may not be as clear as people like to pretend.

I think AI driverless cars are a wonderful counterexample to AI hype (I know I harp on about this a bit too much, but I think it is important). These cars were supposed to be just about ready to start to populate our streets some years back, but where are they? It is remarkable that the first decade of AI hype in the 1980's ended in a whimper. Indeed most people don't even remember that there was one!

Yeah driverless cars a con of machine "learning" that are now a menace foisted on the public. Saw a video where one almost ran into a cyclist and had to be stopped by a human inside the car.

Sadly the hype - not to mention lobbying - is so big at this point I think it will take many deaths for people to finally understand the program isn't learning anything.

I don't understand the concept of more and less consciousness except with regards stages of sleep.  Are we saying that insects, for example, experience life from a half asleep position?

I think it's a matter of less or more "going on" in their heads. The complexity of the qualia plus the thoughts plus the emotions, amounting to a sort of quantity of consciousness. For instance with humans, we know for virtual certainty that a baby with practically no abstract thought (and very little thinking of any sort) has less going on up there than a normal adult, but of course both have consciousness. 

With ants and other insects we have much less assurance that anything at all is "going on" besides autonomic processes, other than a few behaviors that just might be clues (or might not).

Yeah driverless cars a con of machine "learning" that are now a menace foisted on the public. Saw a video where one almost ran into a cyclist and had to be stopped by a human inside the car.

Sadly the hype - not to mention lobbying - is so big at this point I think it will take many deaths for people to finally understand the program isn't learning anything.

I think it may not be that bad, given that there are a lot of accidents caused by egregious human errors that would have been prevented by a reasonably well designed but not perfect AI. AI systems don't get sleepy or drunk or drugged up, for instance. All the AI systems need to do is work significantly better than humans as drivers, not work with zero errors. 

In fact, from the practical pragmatic standpoint, AI driving systems only need to work on the average just as well (or poorly) as human drivers, in order for the AI systems to be a desirable option. At that level of performance, no net difference in accident rates, the advantage of not having to pilot the automobile would presumably be a saleable option. However, engineers and scientists are having great difficulty in designing the AI systems to be even just that good. I think they will get there (imperfect but practical and saleable systems), but it will take many more years of development.

Plus of course, the legal tangle of litigation over who or what is responsible for an accident gets much worse.

[Laird]

I think it's a matter of less or more "going on" in their heads. The complexity of the qualia plus the thoughts plus the emotions, amounting to a sort of quantity of consciousness. For instance with humans, we know for virtual certainty that a baby with practically no abstract thought (and very little thinking of any sort) has less going on up there than a normal adult, but of course both have consciousness.

With ants and other insects we have much less assurance that anything at all is "going on" besides autonomic processes, other than a few behaviors that just might be clues (or might not).

What do you make of the observation that very experienced human meditators are able to greatly reduce the amount that's "going on" in their minds, and yet, as a result, they become more conscious, not less?