This essay explains my version of an eliminativist approach to understanding consciousness. It suggests that we stop thinking in terms of “conscious” and “unconscious” and instead look at physical systems for what they are and what they can do. This perspective dissolves some biases in our usual perspective and shows us that the world is not composed of conscious minds moving through unconscious matter, but rather, the world is a unified whole, with some sub-processes being more fancy and self-reflective than others. I think eliminativism should be combined with more intuitive understandings of consciousness to ensure that its moral applications stay on the right track.
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My version of eliminativism does not say that consciousness doesn’t exist. […] Rather, eliminativism says that “consciousness” is not the best concept to use when talking about what minds do.
I think eliminativism should be combined with more intuitive understandings of consciousness to ensure that its moral applications stay on the right track.
Compare an insect with a human. Rather than imagining the human as conscious and the insect as not, or even the human as just more conscious than the insect, instead picture the two as you would a professional race car versus a child’s toy car.
Compare your brain with another part of your nervous system — say the peripheral nerves in your hand. Why is your brain considered “conscious” and your hand not? […] The eliminativist approach encourages us to stop thinking about neural operations as “unconscious” or “conscious”.
Those who value conscious welfare […] aim to attribute degrees of sentience to different parts of physics and then value them based on the apparent degree of happiness or suffering of those sentient minds. Because it’s mistaken to see consciousness as a concrete thing, sentience-based valuation, like the other valuation approaches, involves a projection in the mind of the person doing the valuing. But this shouldn’t be so troubling, because metaethical anti-realists already knew that ethics as a whole was a projection by the actor onto the world. The eliminativist position just adds that the thing (dis)being valued, consciousness, is itself something of a fiction of the moral agent’s invention.
Actually, calling “consciousness” a fiction is too strong.
A humanoid doll that blinks might look more conscious than a fruit fly, but the 100,000 neurons of the fruit fly encode a vastly more complex and intelligent set of cognitive possibilities than what the doll displays. Judging by objective criteria given sufficient knowledge of the underlying systems is less prone to bias than phenomenal-stance attributions.
I think attacking the core confusion about consciousness itself is quite important, for the same reason that it’s important to break down the confusions behind theism.
Viewing consciousness as a definite and special part of the universe is a systematic defect in one’s world view, and removing it does have practical consequences.
Looking at the universe from a more physical stance has helped me see that even alien artificial intelligences are likely to matter morally, that plants and bacteria have some ethical significance, and that even elementary physical operations might have nonzero (dis)value.