It would violate Copernican mediocrity if humans were luckily endowed with consciousness-instilling Earthiform neurons, while aliens of different biology are experienceless "zombies"
I’m intrigued by your idea of how the U.S. as an entity could be considered conscious.
I was just starting to write an article today about how we colloquially personify a wide range of entities, like corporations, universities, and governments — and how it relates to our tendency to personify everything so that its “behavior” makes sense to us.
Your idea extends this even further — plenty of things could be conscious if we don’t reduce consciousness to neuronal function. I’ll be thinking about this and including it in a future essay. Thanks for sharing.
What is the dividing line if we are to deem entities like corporations, countries, etc. as conscious? Do we then extend this to different cultural groupings such as sports fans, fans of rock and roll, fans of Russian literature, all of which and more bear the same diversity as a corporation or a country bound under the same banner.
Right, I don't know what the line would be, if anything. I would also support the cases that there might be indeterminacy in what entities are vs are not conscious.
So fascinating. Thanks for the reply. I'm in the process of writing an article that explores this type of question (how we view big groups of people as individual agents, although not necessarily actual conscious entities).
Haven’t read the paper, so apologies if you already addressed this. But can’t the reasoning that “our being conscious entities of the right type would be surprising and too coincidental if the ‘right type’ only occupied a small minority of possible brain states” be countered with anthropic argumentation? In other words, it’s not surprising that we’re conscious, even if only a very small minority of possible and actual brains are conscious, because in order to make observations of that sort we have to be conscious in the first place.
Right -- the paper is still only in partial, non-circulating draft, so of course you haven't seen it. This is one of the most important modifiers of Copernican principles. Our location has to be special enough to allow for observers, otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question. Our response is to hold that having behavioral sophistication similar to that of a human is to be an "observer" in a relevant sense. (There's another relevant sense in which you could formulate the principle in terms of conscious observers; that's also a plausible principle, but less useful.) We haven't fully articulated our defense of that as a permissible reading of "observer", but here are two preliminary thoughts: (1.) If we interacted with aliens with human level behavioral sophistication, they would emit behavior that would qualify as linguistic by interpretativist standards (Dennett, Davidson) and we would naturally describe them as tracking their environments and making observations. (2.) A neutral third party looking at them and us would have no particular grounds to regard us as special. If we were conscious and the others observed by that third party were not, then we would be in some plausible sense lucky, and our formulation of the Copernican Principle of Consciousness captures that sense of luck.
Interesting. With respect to 1, my only quibble is that the copernican argument was framed in this article as being in some way a response to the Searle and Block anti-functionalist arguments. But the issue here is that if you were moved by, say, the Chinese room argument, then presumably you won’t buy a behavioralist definition of “observer” in the first place. Non-conscious observers wouldn’t be uttering meaningful phrases, since word utterances without consciousness by themselves lack meaning (on at least one plausible interpretation of what the Chinese room argument is meant to show).
2) I agree that we are lucky in the third party sense, but don’t see how this is an argument against “only a small-minority of brain states are conscious”. An anonymous lottery winner is lucky from a third person perspective. But the fact that a third person can inadvertently find hidden lottery winners, without realizing it, after sampling a large space, does not entail that the existence of hidden lottery winners implies that the lottery odds must be good, or that there must be many such lottery winners.
You're probably right that the setup with Block and Searle makes (1) less attractive in the dialectical context. The point is not to argue against Block and Searle -- in fact, I think/hope they would both accept some version of this argument -- as to just give the reader some wedge into thinking about why there might be any need for an argument at all. A strict Searlean interpretation of the Anthropic qualification on our Copernican Principle would undercut our argument.
On 2: Right, the neutral party looking at a thousand behaviorally sophisticated species shouldn't be surprised to see one species with some special feature only 0.1% of species have. If they then say, "Ooh, weird, humans really stand out in this 0.1% way, in virtue of being conscious among the zombies!" they shouldn't be so surprised -- but still *we* are the lucky ones. We won't capture that sense of luck if we require that the "observer" be conscious. We will capture that sense of luck if we don't require that the "observer". Thus the Copernican Principle framed in terms of behavioral sophistication instead of consciousness captures of kind of strange luck we would have, which would not be captured if it were framed in terms of conscious observers.
Thanks. These are all good points. That said, I’m not sure it’s necessary to frame 2 in terms of the Copernican framework at all. The Anthropic framework can handle such cases of luck just fine. We would just say that the *true* reference class should include observers defined in the interpretative linguistic sense, in which case we are indeed lucky to have been observers of the particular sort which are conscious, and your argument still goes through. So it all hinges on what your intuition for what an observer will be, whether consciousness is an appropriate selection mechanism, and whether you think it makes sense to count yourself in the reference class of non-conscious observers, which circles back to the argument for 1.
Yes, maybe that's the core issue, if one takes an Anthropic approach. I'm not sure I like jumping to the Anthropic Principle right away, though, since it's so contentious and difficult. Arguably, the spirit is Copernican, and the Anthropic Principle -- if applied in a consciousness-requiring way -- can be seen as entering the dialectic as an objection to which there's an available reply.
I’m intrigued by your idea of how the U.S. as an entity could be considered conscious.
I was just starting to write an article today about how we colloquially personify a wide range of entities, like corporations, universities, and governments — and how it relates to our tendency to personify everything so that its “behavior” makes sense to us.
Your idea extends this even further — plenty of things could be conscious if we don’t reduce consciousness to neuronal function. I’ll be thinking about this and including it in a future essay. Thanks for sharing.
Neat! Thanks for the kind words.
What is the dividing line if we are to deem entities like corporations, countries, etc. as conscious? Do we then extend this to different cultural groupings such as sports fans, fans of rock and roll, fans of Russian literature, all of which and more bear the same diversity as a corporation or a country bound under the same banner.
It is intriguing to consider the dividing line.
Right, I don't know what the line would be, if anything. I would also support the cases that there might be indeterminacy in what entities are vs are not conscious.
So fascinating. Thanks for the reply. I'm in the process of writing an article that explores this type of question (how we view big groups of people as individual agents, although not necessarily actual conscious entities).
Hi Eric,
Haven’t read the paper, so apologies if you already addressed this. But can’t the reasoning that “our being conscious entities of the right type would be surprising and too coincidental if the ‘right type’ only occupied a small minority of possible brain states” be countered with anthropic argumentation? In other words, it’s not surprising that we’re conscious, even if only a very small minority of possible and actual brains are conscious, because in order to make observations of that sort we have to be conscious in the first place.
Right -- the paper is still only in partial, non-circulating draft, so of course you haven't seen it. This is one of the most important modifiers of Copernican principles. Our location has to be special enough to allow for observers, otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question. Our response is to hold that having behavioral sophistication similar to that of a human is to be an "observer" in a relevant sense. (There's another relevant sense in which you could formulate the principle in terms of conscious observers; that's also a plausible principle, but less useful.) We haven't fully articulated our defense of that as a permissible reading of "observer", but here are two preliminary thoughts: (1.) If we interacted with aliens with human level behavioral sophistication, they would emit behavior that would qualify as linguistic by interpretativist standards (Dennett, Davidson) and we would naturally describe them as tracking their environments and making observations. (2.) A neutral third party looking at them and us would have no particular grounds to regard us as special. If we were conscious and the others observed by that third party were not, then we would be in some plausible sense lucky, and our formulation of the Copernican Principle of Consciousness captures that sense of luck.
Interesting. With respect to 1, my only quibble is that the copernican argument was framed in this article as being in some way a response to the Searle and Block anti-functionalist arguments. But the issue here is that if you were moved by, say, the Chinese room argument, then presumably you won’t buy a behavioralist definition of “observer” in the first place. Non-conscious observers wouldn’t be uttering meaningful phrases, since word utterances without consciousness by themselves lack meaning (on at least one plausible interpretation of what the Chinese room argument is meant to show).
2) I agree that we are lucky in the third party sense, but don’t see how this is an argument against “only a small-minority of brain states are conscious”. An anonymous lottery winner is lucky from a third person perspective. But the fact that a third person can inadvertently find hidden lottery winners, without realizing it, after sampling a large space, does not entail that the existence of hidden lottery winners implies that the lottery odds must be good, or that there must be many such lottery winners.
Thanks for the follow up!
You're probably right that the setup with Block and Searle makes (1) less attractive in the dialectical context. The point is not to argue against Block and Searle -- in fact, I think/hope they would both accept some version of this argument -- as to just give the reader some wedge into thinking about why there might be any need for an argument at all. A strict Searlean interpretation of the Anthropic qualification on our Copernican Principle would undercut our argument.
On 2: Right, the neutral party looking at a thousand behaviorally sophisticated species shouldn't be surprised to see one species with some special feature only 0.1% of species have. If they then say, "Ooh, weird, humans really stand out in this 0.1% way, in virtue of being conscious among the zombies!" they shouldn't be so surprised -- but still *we* are the lucky ones. We won't capture that sense of luck if we require that the "observer" be conscious. We will capture that sense of luck if we don't require that the "observer". Thus the Copernican Principle framed in terms of behavioral sophistication instead of consciousness captures of kind of strange luck we would have, which would not be captured if it were framed in terms of conscious observers.
Thanks. These are all good points. That said, I’m not sure it’s necessary to frame 2 in terms of the Copernican framework at all. The Anthropic framework can handle such cases of luck just fine. We would just say that the *true* reference class should include observers defined in the interpretative linguistic sense, in which case we are indeed lucky to have been observers of the particular sort which are conscious, and your argument still goes through. So it all hinges on what your intuition for what an observer will be, whether consciousness is an appropriate selection mechanism, and whether you think it makes sense to count yourself in the reference class of non-conscious observers, which circles back to the argument for 1.
Yes, maybe that's the core issue, if one takes an Anthropic approach. I'm not sure I like jumping to the Anthropic Principle right away, though, since it's so contentious and difficult. Arguably, the spirit is Copernican, and the Anthropic Principle -- if applied in a consciousness-requiring way -- can be seen as entering the dialectic as an objection to which there's an available reply.