The Plant Consciousness Wars

Just curious how you're distinguishing between consciousness and sentience - in my understanding the words are (roughly/essentially) synonyms. Perhaps you were thinking of sapience rather than sentience?

Probably - I was trying to distinguish, for example, the sensing of pain versus the holding of propositions.

For example, I'm quite confident mice can sense cats in the same we do - via qualia. However, do mice actually think "There's a cat!"?

This is complicated by factors like the nature of souls, but trying to stick to "mundane" line of reasoning the research seems to show animals can hold mental content that is about the world or even mathematics (see bees).

Is structure enough to create a conscious entity? Not if we assume structure alone suffices, but in talking to Marcus Arvan of the P2P Hypothesis I've come to see the possibility that one can have irreducible consciousness instantiated by structure. I know he's working on a paper about this but I've not see it out yet...

This all relates back to plants and machines. It would be odd for our evolution to rely on structure meant to sense qualia while plants are akin to "zombies" having no sensory experience. But if plants have qualia-sensing structure, does a motion sensor have some kind of experience? What about a thermometer?

OTOH, we can see the teleology of the plant, with it's drive to live internal to itself. Meanwhile the motion sensor does what it does because of our imposition on nature.

All goes to show Life and Consciousness are Big Mysteries, as noted by the Nobel biologist Wald in his last lecture:

But I know that I see. Does a frog see? It reacts to light -- so does a photocell‑activated garage door. But does it know it is responding, is it aware of visual images?

There is nothing whatever that I can do as a scientist to answer that question. That is the problem of consciousness: it is altogether impervious to scientific approach. As I worked on visual systems -- it would have been the same for any other sensory mode, let alone more subtle or complex manifestations of mental activity -- this realization lay always in the background. Now for me it is in the foreground. I think that it involves a permanent condition: that it never will become possible to identify physically the presence or absence of consciousness, much less its content.

Consciousness is not part of that universe of space and time, of observable and measurable quantities, that is amenable to scientific investigation. For a scientist, it would be a relief to dismiss it as unreal or irrelevant. I have heard distinguished scientists do both. In a discussion with the physicist P. W. Bridgman some years ago, he spoke of consciousness as “just a way of talking.” His thesis was that only terms that can be defined operationally have meaning; and there are no operations that define consciousness. In the same discussion, the psychologist B. F. Skinner dismissed consciousness as irrelevant to science, since confined to a private world, not accessible to others.

Unfortunately for such attitudes, consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon, a strange concomitant of our neural activity that we project onto physical reality. On the contrary, all that we know, including all our science, is in our consciousness. It is part, not of the superstructure, but of the foundations. No consciousness, no science. Perhaps, indeed, no consciousness, no reality -- of which more later....

But then, ciliate protozoa are the most complex cells we know. How about a cell highly specialized to perform a single function in a higher organism, a nerve cell for example, that can only transmit an impulse? Once, years ago, I was visiting the invertebrate physiologist, Ladd Prosser, at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He took me into his laboratory, where he was recording the electrical responses from a single nerve cell in the ventral nerve cord (which takes the place of our spinal cord) of a cockroach. It was set up to display the electrical potentials on an oscilloscope screen, and simultaneously to let them sound through a loudspeaker. I was hearing a slow, rhythmic reverberation, coming to a peak, then falling off to silence, then starting again, each cycle a few seconds, like a breathing rhythm. Prosser remarked, “That kind of response is typical of a dying nerve cell.”

“My God!” I said, “It’s groaning! You’ve given it a voice, and it’s groaning!”

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If you can submit that question using a playground see-saw, rather than your usual device, it may be worth discussing.

Not sure what question you are referring to but taking stab --> A see-saw is on a lower complexity scale than a computer, but I can make a computer out of Tinker Toys...is that computer capable of consciousness?

What is it about complexity that would make a difference, since "complexity" seems like the kind of thing you need consciousness to judge. Same with "information processing"?

I probably should not say more on this matter. I feel it is essential to speak up from time to time,  to remain silent would be misleading. But I don't really have anything to add.

What feels wrong to me is the separation of consciousness from computation. If the computation is producing the consciousness, I don't think it makes sense that the computation could be identical in two cases - one with and one without consciousness. I think if the computation were the same, the consciousness would necessarily also be the same.

I really am curious to find some sort of answer to the question I posed in #46 - if computationalism/materialism is true how can conscious awareness somehow emerge from or be one and the same as neurological structures and their actions (matter, energy, calculation), when the properties of conscious awareness (to say nothing of abstract thought for instance) can't be derived from the physics and chemical properties of the nerve structures, or from the properties of their actions in processing information? When in fact they are in entirely different existential realms?

Is the question somehow invalid?

Well, I am going to try to be more disciplined about staying out of these discussions from now on. I realise I've said that several times before, but maybe I'll learn eventually.

Anyway, this will be my last word in this thread too.

I probably should not say more on this matter. I feel it is essential to speak up from time to time,  to remain silent would be misleading. But I don't really have anything to add.

FWIW, I think your analogy holds. Can't get blood (consciousness) from a stone (non-conscious material made into machines).

FWIW, I think your analogy holds. Can't get blood (consciousness) from a stone (non-conscious material made into machines).

I think that a see-saw is a fair analogy when talking about machine computation. A see-saw is binary - up or down. Computer logic boils down to binary too. From my point of view, it is an astonishing feat of true consciousness to succeed in encoding so much complexity using (binary) digital data though I very much doubt that consciousness itself can be reduced to binary data. One is an encoded representation of reality and the other is reality itself.

Why Chris, who's views I respect, should find the analogy reason enough to disengage from the discussion is beyond me, however.

Why Chris, who's views I respect, should find the analogy reason enough to disengage from the discussion is beyond me, however.

I think it's more that there is no ultimate resolution to these discussions and this one sidelined the plant consciousness question.

I do think there are parallels between asking about machine consciousness and plant consciousness, as both attribute consciousness to entities far different from our own bodily make up.

I'm more able to see a plant as having, at the least, some subjective experiences of the world than I am most machines. I suspect in the future these debates may turn on Psi-related questions.

Why Chris, who's views I respect, should find the analogy reason enough to disengage from the discussion is beyond me, however.

I suspect my postings have been abrasive at times, previously.

That wasn't my intention here, merely to express the distance we find ourselves apart in this instance. As I said, to remain silent would be a disservice. If my style gives offence then I apologise.

I'm more able to see a plant as having, at the least, some subjective experiences of the world than I am most machines. I suspect in the future these debates may turn on Psi-related questions.

I agree that subjective experience is the crucial difference. I really can't find the words to express my conviction that subjective experience is in an entirely different category to any algorithm or programmed process. You may be able to write a program to simulate feelings but no program can feel those feelings nor can the inert materials which perform the programmed tasks. 

Whether inert materials are capable of some kind of conscious awareness is quite another question but I'm certain that any such awareness is not the result of some program running in the mechanism of which that material is a part. The programmer does not endow the material of the mechanism with awareness, subjective or otherwise. Any awareness would have to be due to the peculiar focus of consciousness which manifests as that material.

Now, that would apply to plant consciousness as well as cells or ant colonies or Jung's collective consciousness. Each has a peculiar focus.

I suspect my postings have been abrasive at times, previously.

That wasn't my intention here, merely to express the distance we find ourselves apart in this instance. As I said, to remain silent would be a disservice. If my style gives offence then I apologise.

No, it didn't give offence, and I had already said I was sorry I'd raised the question of AI and that I thought the discussion was fruitless, so it wasn't my reason for withdrawing.