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Lumifer comments on [Link] First almost fully-formed human [foetus] brain grown in lab, researchers claim - Less Wrong
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Is there any particular reason to believe that a salads might be capable of consciousness? No.
Is there any particular reason to believe that brains might be capable of consciousness? Yes - namely the fact that most brains insist on describing themselves as such. Does this imply brains are conscious if and only if they insist on describing themselves as such? No. No more than than a bird is only capable of flight when it's actually literally soaring in the air.
How can you tell without "any satisfactory theory of consciousness"?
The same way I don't need to understand aerodynamics to know that I have no reason to believe that turtles might be capable of flight. I've never seen a turtle do anything that sits in the neighbourhood of the notion of "flight" in the network of concepts in my head. This type of argument doesn't work against the putative consciousness of foetal brains, since we have good reason to believe that at least brains at a certain stage of development are in fact conscious. To argue that this means we can only have an ethical problem with running dubious experiments on brains at that stage of development is rather like arguing that since you've only ever seen white swans fly, the supposition that black swans might fly too is not justified as such.
You don't need to know the underlying mechanics, but you do need to know what flight is.
You're saying we don't even know what consciousness is.
No one is arguing that. I am saying that if you claim to have a problem, you have to be more specific about what your problem is and what might convince you that it is not a problem.
"Prove to me something I don't know what" is not a useful attitude.
Not in the least. I know what consciousness is because I am a consciousness. The need for a theory of consciousness is necessary to tie the concept to the material world, so that you can make statements like "a rock cannot be conscious, in principle".
What might convince me is a satisfactory theory of consciousness. Do I have to provide a full specification of what would be "satisfactory" just to recognize an ethical problem? If so there is hardly anything about which I could raise an ethical concern, since I'd perpetually be working on epistemic aesthetics until all necessary puzzles are solved. This is just in fact not how anyone operates. We proceed with vague concepts, heuristic criteria for satisfactoriness, incomplete theories, etc. To say that this should be disallowed unless you can unfold your theory's logical substructure in a kind of Principia Ethica is waaay more useless than interpreting ideas through partial theories.
Not "full", but some, yes. Otherwise anyone can squint at anything and say "I think there is an ethical problem here. I can't quite put my finger on it, but my gut feeling ("visceral level") is that there is" -- and there is no adequate response to that.
As an instance of the limits of replacing words with their definitions to clarify debates, this looks like an important conversation.
The fuzziest starting point for "consciousness" is "something similar to what I experience when I consider my own mind". But this doesn't help much. Someone can still claim "So rocks probably have consciousness!", and another can respond "Certainly not, but brains grown in labs likely do!". Arguing from physical similarity, etc. just relies on the other person sharing your intuitions.
For some concepts, we disagree on definitions because we don't know actually know what those concepts refer to (this doesn't include concepts like "art", etc.). I'm not sure what the best way to talk about whether an entity possesses such a concept is. Are there existing articles/discussions about that?
If I don't know what I'm referring to when I say "consciousness," it seems reasonable to conclude that I ought not use the term.
What it is, to know what one is referring to? If I see a flying saucer, I may be wrong in believing it's an alien spaceship, but I am not wrong about seeing something, a thing I also believe to be an alien spaceship.
pangel says:
and that is the brute fact from which the conundrum of consciousness starts. The fact of having subjective experience is the primary subject matter. That we have no idea how, given everything else we know about the world, there could be any such thing as experience, is not a problem for the fact. It is a problem for those seeking an explanation for the fact. Ignorance and confusion are in the map, not the territory.
All attempts to solve the problem have so far taken one of two forms:
Here is something objectively measurable that correlates with the subjective experience. Therefore that thing is the subjective experience.
We can't explain it, therefore it doesn't exist.
Discussion mostly takes the form of knocking down everyone else's wrong theories. But all the theories are wrong, so there is no end to this.
The actual creation of brains-in-vats will certainly give more urgency to the issue. I expect the ethical issues will be dealt with just by prohibiting growing beyond a certain stage.
To know what I'm referring to by a term is to know what properties something in the world would need to have to be a referent for that term.
The ability to recognize such things in the world is beside the point. When I say "my ancestors," I know what I mean, but in most cases it's impossible to pick that attribute out empirically -- I can't pick out most of my ancestors now, because they no longer exist to be picked out, and nobody could have picked them out back when they were alive, because the defining characteristic of the category is in terms of something that hadn't yet been born. (Unless you want to posit atypical time-travel, of course, but that's not my point.)
So, sure, if by "flying saucer" I refer to an alien spaceship, I don't necessarily have any way of knowing whether something I'm observing is a flying saucer or not, but I know what I mean when I claim that it is or isn't.
And if by "consciousness" I refer to anything sufficiently similar to what I experience when I consider my own mind, then I can't tell whether a rock is conscious, but I know what I mean when I claim it is or isn't.
Rereading pangel's comment, I note that I initially understood "we don't know actually know what those concepts refer to" to mean we don't have the latter thing... that we don't know what we mean to express when we claim that the concept refers to something... but it can also be interpreted as saying we don't know in what things in the world the concept correctly refers to (as with your example of being wrong about believing something is an alien spaceship).
I'll stand by my original statement in the original context I made it in, but sure, I also agree that just because we don't currently know what things in the world are or aren't conscious (or flying saucers, or accurate blueprints for anti-gravity devices, or ancestors of my great-great-grandchild, or whatever) doesn't mean we can't talk sensibly about the category. (Doesn't mean we can, either.)
And, yes, the fact that I don't know how subjective experience comes to be doesn't prevent me from recognizing subjective experience.
As for urgency... I dunno. I suspect we'll collectively go on inferring that things have a consciousness similar to our own with a confidence proportional to how similar their external behavior is to our own for quite a long time past the development of (human) brains in vats. But sure, I can easily imagine various legal prohibitions like you describe along the way.