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Consciousness: The Fun Part. :)

quarky said:
I find it odd how quickly the super-organism is dismissed; i.e., advanced ant colonies, as per consciousness or not.

Knee-jerk rejection of non-human consciousness strikes me as steeped in quasi-religious, 'crown-of-creation' anthropomorphic chauvinism, rather than science.
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The fact remains that we have no way to tell if ant hills are conscious. We only know that they don't work like brains, and they don't claim to be conscious.
 
quarky said:
Shamefully, I only read page one.
I wouldn't reject a human colony as a super organism, though it would need to be cooperative, with an active feed-back mechanism capable of problem solving with the intent of the survival of the organism.

Initially, it was dolphin pods that had me questioning our definitions, though later, I found that this too was loaded with my expectations and prejudices about brain size...i.e., a certain threshold of neurons was required.
Hence, slime molds didn't make the grade.

Now that some ant colonies have essentially 'teamed up' in a non-competitive way, it is clear that they have more neurons working together than I do.

I guess I'll have to read the whole thread if I want to argue the 'mootness'.
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I haven't read it either, so don't sweat that. :)

Slime molds are awesome! How could you dismiss the poor blighted buggers?

One thing that I think needs to be kept in mind when thinking about these sorts of things is minding the difference between "cooperation" and large-scale emergent properties. Sometimes really useful things occur under certain conditions because that's just they way physics is. Cells wouldn't function at all without this sort of thing, but it would be a mistake to consider a cell as conscious -- it's just a machine.

In the end, colony or individual, all life is just a machine, IMO, and consciousness is merely a mechanism produced. What I'm saying though is that there is probably a very important distinction between consiousness and organized behavior. If ants didn't act in a certain way, the colony wouldn't thrive. This in no way implies that the ants are doing it on purpose, or that the colony is anymore aware of the behavior of its parts than your bicep is aware of the chemistry that drives it, or the cells is aware of the chemistry that allows chemotaxis. If this, then that. If that construction is useful, it's conserved through enhanced replication -- not desire.

This isn't to say that an anthill can't be conscious. But we need to be careful we aren't making the mistake of saying, well, consciousness is complicated, the brain is complicated, and ant colonies are complicated, and therefore ant colonies are conscious. It doesn't take much induced disorganisation to shut a brain down. But you can reduce an ant colony down to a single queen that's preggers and voila.
 
This thread is kind of going the way I hoped it would. :) At least in this case, I've been able to follow the whole thing from the beginning in order to avoid getting hopelessly and completely lost. Mostly, I'll just be happy if we don't get two or three people snipping back and forth at each other without much of anything else happening.

I've never been very impressed by E.O. Wilson's arguments about the behavior of ant colonies, and it's basically because the interdisciplinary conclusions that he tries to draw from the good scientific work he's done are not themselves scientific. I do think that this is a good example of how the attempts to find materialist-based answers to questions about consciousness too quickly are probably not going to stand up too well over time, because the answers just aren't all here yet. That doesn't mean they won't be there, but they aren't available now. There's just too much that isn't known. We don't even know such basic things as the mechanisms of psychoactive drugs.
 
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Fungi are awesome. The one that leaf-cutter ants 'grow' and eat intrigues me. I wonder what it tastes like?
 
I think it's pretty logical to assume that consciousness/sentience/self-awareness/qualities that would have, in the past, been attributed to a soul, is dependent on a brain.

INRM
 
INRM said:
I think it's pretty logical to assume that consciousness/sentience/self-awareness/qualities that would have, in the past, been attributed to a soul, is dependent on a brain.

INRM
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There's two different possible claims being mixed up here:

(1) Consciousness is dependent on a brain.
(2) Consciousness is fully explainable in terms of brains.

I don't think anybody here seeks to deny (1). It is (2) that is being contested.

Some of the functions/properties that might once of have been attributed to a soul are now known to be dependent on brains, but there are also a load of other functions/properties which appear to be irreducible to brains and which are therefore (presumably) also dependent on something else.
 
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I watched the Dennett video, and here's what I got out of that ant example. Actually, it is a very good example of why I think that these theories may be fascinating, thought-provoking, and everything else, but aren’t scientific in the sense that they are anything which can be empirically proven or demonstrated one way or another.

From Hofstader’s ant analogy, Dennett conceptualizes the entire ant colony as one person and imagines them interacting in all kinds of ways as a superorganism, carrying this to its logical extreme and referring to the colony by name (“Ant Hillary”). The units (ants) are clueless about the larger phenomenon, so they have competence without comprehension. Is the whole “person” (ant colony) conscious?. If it’s organized, then the answer is yes. How conscious could a mind made of ants be? Well, this hypothetical “Ant Hillary” “person” could carry on a conversation, and the vocalizations would be composed out of the efforts of all of these ants.

The problem—and Dennett even goes on to admit this—is that this phenomenon clearly doesn’t happen in reality. (As he says, there may be people who talk to ant colonies, but the colonies don’t answer back.) He hurries to add that in principle, though, enough ants organized in the right way should create a mind capable of having a conversation (consciousness). But he himself has made an admission which opens the door to an understanding of why his arguments aren’t scientific ones. Nobody can even conceive of an experiment based on a “humanoid” consciousness of an ant colony when we already know that ant colonies aren’t conscious in a human way. Yes, there’s evidence that ant colonies may behave in nature with very organized cooperation, but there’s simply no way to be sure that by saying that this represents consciousness, we aren’t projecting our own expectations onto experimental observations. It may be very interesting to theorize that the behavior of ant colonies really does represent a unitary consciousness of some kind (but this in itself is a big if.) But as Dennett himself comes close to saying, to jump from this to the firm conclusion that ant collective consciousness could possibly be analogous to anything remotely resembling human consciousness is staggeringly illogical and unbelievably unscientific. If we treat it as a very provisional philosophical concept, then that’s all well and good, but to call it “science” is a huge insult to the word.

What I really don’t like is that this kind of thinking continues to slop over into his other arguments. For instance, when Dennett contrasts this interpretation of the “ant colony” dialectic against Block’s opposing idea (maybe it was Brock? the audio wasn't that great), which he says must imply a type of dualism, he’s probably right. But what he can’t do is to pretend that his interpretation is somehow “more scientific”, because he isn’t doing much better than Block in that area. Good science doesn’t create better theories when a philosopher departs from it and yet pretends to be sticking to the scientific method. He goes on to talk about the myth of double transduction, casting it as a “tempting way to think about what happens in the mind”. Since transduction refers to the change of one medium into another, such as the processing of acoustic sound waves into spikes into brain, the same thing obviously has to happen at the other end of nervous system—the output end—which means that we get spike trains coming out of the motor neurons. So what happens in middle? As Dennett puts it, it’s “tempting” to think there has to be a second transduction process in the middle, a medium where colors and sounds are produced, but his claim is that this isn’t true if materialism itself is true, and that there are just “spike trains all the way.” Again, this may be good logic (from his POV, at least), but it’s bad science. The middle transduction process either exists, or it doesn’t. Either way, it must be proven through empirical methods, not philosophical arguments.

I’m sorry, but I really think Dennett spends a lot of time wearing the emperor’s new clothes, and he gets away with it by shooting fish in a barrel in his debates. In the future, I think we’re going to see and hear from more interesting people and more logical thinkers than he is.
 
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Maia said:
From Hofstader’s ant analogy, Dennett conceptualizes the entire ant colony as one person and imagines them interacting in all kinds of ways as a superorganism, carrying this to its logical extreme and referring to the colony by name (“Ant Hillary”). The units (ants) are clueless about the larger phenomenon, so they have competence without comprehension. Is the whole “person” (ant colony) conscious?. If it’s organized, then the answer is yes. How conscious could a mind made of ants be? Well, this hypothetical “Ant Hillary” “person” could carry on a conversation, and the vocalizations would be composed out of the efforts of all of these ants.

The problem—and Dennett even goes on to admit this—is that this phenomenon clearly doesn’t happen in reality.
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No, the problem, as usual, is that Dennett has already has assumed his conclusion and gone marching off with it. This time he is conflating cognition and consciousness. Consciousness is NOT "organisation". Not only does this not happen in reality, he isn't actually talking about consciousness at all but something else related to brains.

This is why he this man winds me up. He starts out by making his normal materialistic assumptions, uses it to come to a conclusion, then admits some other problem concerning his conclusion, thus distracting people's attention from the more fundamental problem that he never actually addresses.

(As he says, there may be people who talk to ant colonies, but the colonies don’t answer back.) He hurries to add that in principle, though, enough ants organized in the right way should create a mind capable of having a conversation (consciousness).
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So now anything capable of having a conversation is conscious? More *******.

But he himself has made an admission which opens the door to an understanding of why his arguments aren’t scientific ones. Nobody can even conceive of an experiment based on a “humanoid” consciousness of an ant colony when we already know that ant colonies aren’t conscious in a human way. Yes, there’s evidence that ant colonies may behave in nature with very organized cooperation, but there’s simply no way to be sure that by saying that this represents consciousness, we aren’t projecting our own expectations onto experimental observations. It may be very interesting to theorize that the behavior of ant colonies really does represent a unitary consciousness of some kind (but this in itself is a big if.) But as Dennett himself comes close to saying, to jump from this to the firm conclusion that ant collective consciousness could possibly be analogous to anything remotely resembling human consciousness is staggeringly illogical and unbelievably unscientific. If we treat it as a very provisional philosophical concept, then that’s all well and good, but to call it “science” is a huge insult to the word.
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Agreed.

What I really don’t like is that this kind of thinking continues to slop over into his other arguments. For instance, when Dennett contrasts this interpretation of the “ant colony” dialectic against Block’s opposing idea (maybe it was Brock? the audio wasn't that great), which he says must imply a type of dualism, he’s probably right.
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No, he's wrong as usual. Dennett thinks everything that isn't materialism is dualism.

I’m sorry, but I really think Dennett spends a lot of time wearing the emperor’s new clothes, and he gets away with it by shooting fish in a barrel in his debates. In the future, I think we’re going to see and hear from more interesting people and more logical thinkers than he is.
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We can only hope so. Unfortunately, to continue your metaphor, there are currently not enough people in the scientific community who are are brave enough to point out Denett's nakedness, because they have as much invested in the supposed reality of his Birthday Suit as he does.
 
And what is it with Hofstadter's HAIR??? Is there something about being a modern philosopher that requires them all to have some kind of weird hair?



BTW, this is the first of the "Separated At Birth" series. Next: Dennett and Santa Claus. ;)
 
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