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Strange7 comments on Confused as to usefulness of 'consciousness' as a concept - LessWrong
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There seems to be a correlation between systems being described as "conscious" and those same systems having internal resources devoted to maintaining homeostasis along multiple axes.
Most people would say a brick is not conscious. Placed in a hotter or colder environment, it soon becomes the same temperature as that environment. Swung at something sharp and heavy it won't try to flee, the broken surface won't scab over, the chipped-off piece won't regrow. Splashed with paint, it won't try to groom itself. A tree is considered more conscious than a brick, but less so than an orangutan, and sure enough a tree exhibits some but not all of those equilibrium-maintaining behaviors.
Under that theory, consciousness is correlated with moral worth because consciousness is expensive in itself, and implies the presence of something valuable enough to justify that expense.
I agree with your correlation, but I think your definition would make stars and black holes apex predators.
A stellar-mass body isn't any more conscious than a water droplet or a pendulum under this theory. (Admittedly, that's more than zero, but still below the threshold of independent moral significance.) Kinematics keep them in a stable equilibrium, but there's no mechanism for maintaining a consistent chemical composition, or proactively seeking to avoid things that haven't disrupted the body but might soon. Drop some tungsten into a star, and it'll be a star with some tungsten in it until nuclear physics says otherwise. Feed tungsten to a mammal, you get some neurological symptoms until most of the excess metal is expelled via the kidneys over the next few days.
It's not about the magnitude of possible disruption which can be absorbed on any one axis, or even really the precision with which that variable is controlled, but the number of different axes along which optimization occurs.
It seems to me, though, that there are quite a few axes on which it would be hard to disturb a star's equilibrium. That still keeps it included in your definition. Also, since tungsten is not disruptive to the star's homeostasis, it has no reason to expel it. I appreciate your rational answers, because I'm actually helping you steel-man your theory, it only looks like I'm being a dork.
Adding tungsten, or any heavy element, increases the star's density, thereby marginally shortening the star's lifespan. It's only "not disruptive to the star's homeostasis" in the sense that the star lacks any sort of homeostasis with regard to it's chemical composition. You are firing armor-piercing bullets into an enormous compost heap, and calling it a composite-laminate reinforced bunker just because they don't come out the other side.
I say again, it's not about the equilibrium being hard to disturb, it's about there being a subsystem which actively corrects and/or prevents such disturbances. Yes, a star scores above a brick on this scale, as do many other inanimate objects, automated industrial processes, and extremely simple lifeforms which nonetheless fall well below any commonsensical threshold of consciousness.
Well, now it sounds like you found a useful definition of life; at what point on this spectrum, then, would you consider something conscious? Since it's processes you are looking for, there is probably a process that, without which, you could clearly classify as un-conscious.
If I know how many grains of sand there are, their relative positions, and have a statistical profile of their individual sizes and shapes, I no longer need to know whether it counts as a "heap" or not. If I know an object's thermal mass, conductivity, and how many degrees it is above absolute zero, I don't need to know whether it's "warm" or "cold."
The term "consciousness" is a pointer to something important, but lacks precision. My understanding was that we were trying to come up with a more precise, quantifiable pointer to the same underlying important thing.
What is it that makes consciousness, or the thing that it points to (if such a thing is not ephemeral), important? You already said that knowing the exact quantities negates the need for categorization.
I am not in a position to speculate as to why consciousness, or the underlying referent thereto, is so widely considered important; I simply observe that it is. Similarly, I wouldn't feel qualified to say why a human life has value, but for policy purposes, somebody out there needs to figure out how many million dollars of value a statistical human life is equivalent to. Might as well poke at the math of that, maybe make it a little more rigorous and generalized.
Unless you're trying to decide whether its article on Wikipedia belongs in Category:Heaps ;-)
For what purpose are you labeling something conscious? Strange7 has already stated that water droplets and pendulums have nonzero "consciousness", and I would agree. But so what? What does it matter if it turns out that rocks are conscious too?
Taboo the word 'conscious' please.
If we taboo "conscious" then we just got some arbitrary and thus almost certainly useless real number assigned to systems. edit: speaking of which, why would it be a real number? It could be any kind of mathematical object.
Even if it's useless for philosophy of consciousness, some generalized scale of "how self-maintaining is this thing" might be a handy tool for engineers. That's the difference between a safe, mostly passive expert system and a world-devouring paperclip maximizer, isn't it? Google Maps doesn't try to reach out and eliminate potential threats on it's own initiative.
But we're only interested in some aspects of self maintenance, we're not interested in how well individual molecules stay in their places (except when we're measuring hardness of materials). Some fully general measure wouldn't know what parameters are interesting and what are not.
Much the same goes for "integrated information theory" - without some external conscious observer informally deciding what's information and what's not (or what counts as "integration") to make the premise seem plausible (and carefully picking plausible examples), you just have a temperature-like metric which is of no interest whatsoever if not for the outrageous claim that it measures consciousness. A metric that is ridiculously huge for e.g. turbulent gasses, or if we get down to microscale and consider atoms bouncing around chaotically, for gasses in general.