Comment on ​My recent thoughts on consciousness

Wed, 24 Jun 2015 12:45:19 GMT

"Only humans are conscious" should indeed have a lower prior probability than "Only physical systems specified in some way are conscious", since the latter must be true for the former to be true but not the other way around.

However, whether or not only humans are conscious is not the issue. Most people think that many or all animals are conscious, but they do not think that "all physical systems are conscious." And this is not because of the prior probabilities, but is a conclusion drawn from evidence. The reason people think this way is that they see that they themselves appear to do certain things because they are conscious, and other people and animals do similar things, so it is reasonable to suppose that the reason they do these things is that they are conscious as well. There is no corresponding reason to believe that rocks are conscious. It is not even clear what it would mean to say that they are, since it would take away the ordinary meaning of the word (e.g. you yourself are sometimes conscious and sometimes not, so it cannot be universal).

Discuss