22 Theories of Consciousness
They are all wrong ?
https://www.noemamag.com/exploring-the-boundaries-of-consciousness/
By Tim Bayne
Actually, Dennett explained consciousness more than 30 years ago but his account is nothing like Bayne's account.
Bayne is looking for some sort of brain structure that causes consciousness. Those that have that structure have consciousness and those without it don't.
He and a colleague analyzed the literature and found 22 theories of consciousness.
I don't know them all and the ones I've seen are pretty ingenious but I think they all share the same flaw. They treat consciousness as a thing.
In fact, we think. We don't have a thing called consciousness.
Our brain is structured in a way that draws meaning from our sensory inputs.
But our brains are structured to do many complementary things. There are structures that recognize faces for instance. There are structures that remember. How would meaning be meaningful without memory? And many of those structures are common throughout the animal kingdom.
There is a big moral dimension to this question. Among ourselves we have this idea of being responsible for our actions. We are not supposed to harm others for instance and suffer penalties if we do. But if we can't help our actions whether by accident or insanity then we aren't held responsible.
What is our responsibility to other animals if they are conscious?
Which animals are conscious and which are not?
Is a lobster conscious when thrown alive into boiling water?
How about fish? Or octopuses?
But surely my pet dog or cat is conscious.
I think the idea is to look for other animals who have consciousness like ours. Those are the ones we have moral responsibilities towards. Once that was a progressive stance that we are learning to transcend.
Say I make friends with an AI. AI passes the Turing test with flying colours. I treat AI as conscious but I wouldn't say that it had consciousness.
One of Dennett's many good ideas was the "intentional stance"; that is, that you approach whatever you're interacting with had goals and intentions. That's a stance that works pretty well with people (though people are unpredictable) and computer chess games (which always beat me ?
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.