Plants are not usually thought to be very active behaviorally, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Moreover, in stressful situations, plants produce numerous chemicals that have painkilling and anesthetic properties. Finally, plants, when treated with anesthetics, cannot execute active behaviors such as touch-induced leaf movements or rapid trap closures after localizing animal prey
Only humans can report feeling pain. In contrast, pain in animals is typically inferred on the basis of nonverbal behaviour. Unfortunately, these behavioural data can be problematic when the reliability and validity of the behavioural tests are questionable. The thesis proposed here is based on the bioengineering principle that structure determines function.
FRI believes in analytic functionalism, or what David Chalmers calls “Type-A materialism”. Essentially, what this means is there’s no ’theoretical essence’ to consciousness; rather, consciousness is the sum-total of the functional properties of our brains. Since ‘functional properties’ are rather vague, this means consciousness itself is rather vague, in the same way words like “life,” “justice,” and “virtue” are messy and vague.
And if consciousness is all these things, so too is suffering. Which means suffering is computational, yet also inherently fuzzy, and at least a bit arbitrary; a leaky high-level reification impossible to speak about accurately, since there’s no formal, objective “ground truth”.
The necessary features for consciousness in prominent physical theories of consciousness that are actually described in terms of physical processes do not exclude panpsychism, the possibility that consciousness is ubiquitous in nature, including in things which aren’t typically considered alive. I’m not claiming panpsychism is true, although this significantly increases my credence in it, and those other theories could still be useful as approximations to judge degrees of consciousness. Overall, I’m skeptical that further progress in theories of consciousness will give us plausible descriptions of physical processes necessary for consciousness that don’t arbitrarily exclude panpsychism, whether or not panpsychism is true.
The non-eliminativist view of consciousness is the view that consciousness is real and that its existence cannot reasonably be doubted. All the beliefs we are aware of appear in consciousness, and hence to express disbelief in the existence of consciousness amounts to reading off and trusting at least some aspect of one’s conscious experience – the thing believed not to exist – which renders such disbelief nonsensical. To deny the existence of consciousness, the non-eliminativist position holds, is to deny one’s own existence. At most, one can utter the words.
What Does Consciousness Realism Entail? To be a realist about consciousness is to insist that whether someone is conscious, and what their conscious experience is like, is a fact of the world. If someone is experiencing torture, there is no amount of interpretation an outside observer can make that changes what it is like to undergo that experience. The experience is an inherent property of the world, like physical pressure, that is independent of external observers. It is an objective fact of the world that subjective, first-person facts are a feature of reality.
“Thus the existence of a real object outside me is never given directly in perception, but can only be added in thought to what is a modification of inner sense as its external cause, and hence can only be inferred.”
(Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 1781)
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
(Edgar Allan Poe)
“Perception” is a useful word. It’s also systematically misleading. This is because the term suggests that each of us enjoys direct access to our local surroundings, including one’s extra-cranial body. “Cross-modally matched real-time egocentric world-simulation” might be more apt; alas, it’s a mouthful. Either way, the external environment may be inferred; it’s not accessed. The mind-independent world powerfully selects the subjective content of one’s waking world-simulation; the mind-independent world doesn’t create it.
Agency is the capacity for some entity to be considered an independent actor with the ability to interact on our shared sociophysical fabric. Agents process information signals from their environment, which can be conceptualized as sensory input or data. These sensory perceptions are internalized into information representations.
Entities with agency can analyze and process these to inform its actions. Agents have a degree of autonomy but do not exist in isolation. They must have independence and the ability to influence their environment. They may or may not be self-aware. They may understand the exact consequences of their actions or may not, but it is impossible for any entity to fully understand its influence on its environment, regardless of how self-aware it is.
“The fact of synesthesia (the experience of multiple and unusual sense modalities associated with events that are commonly experienced with one sense modality) shows that there need not be any connection between physical conditions and consciousness. Someone might play a piano and see musical notes at the same time, and that would be a form of synesthesia, but they are still seeing something visible and hearing something audible. I think it’s useful to distinguish visible (Aesthetic Qualia) from optical (Anesthetic Physical Mechanism) and audible (AQ) from sonic (APM). All sense qualia can be separated from physics or information this way.”
One of the most controversial aspects of Mancuso’s work is the idea of plant consciousness. As we learn more about animal and plant intelligence, not to mention human intelligence, the always-contentious term consciousness has become the subject of ever more heated scientific and philosophical debate. “Let’s use another term,” Mancuso suggests. “Consciousness is a little bit tricky in both our languages. Let’s talk about awareness. Plants are perfectly aware of themselves.” A simple example is when one plant overshadows another – the shaded plant will grow faster to reach the light. But when you look into the crown of a tree, all the shoots are heavily shaded. They do not grow fast because they know that they are shaded by part of themselves. “So they have a perfect image of themselves and of the outside,” says Mancuso.
If we are sentient robots, without will, sentience is not useful. And if it’s useful, how can it be?
When it is stated that sentience has a purpose, this idea is usually explained by indicating that sentience is useful because it motivates doing certain things and avoiding others. In addition, in this explanation, it is usually indicated that sentience motivates but does not force. That is, under this explanation, sentience is not simply the cause and behavior the consequence, but sentience motivates to strive to make the best possible decision, under the threat of pain and the reward of pleasure. According to this explanation, sentient beings would make better decisions and will be selected (“better”, from an evolutionary point of view).
But we can also consider that it is possible that we are sentient robots, but without will, that we simply do what we have been programmed for, even though we have the feeling that we make free decisions, so that sentience really does not play any role in the evolution in form of motivation.
So, is sentience useful or inevitable?
My best intuition is that sentience is probably inevitable when certain conditions are met. So, sentience would be inevitable. Not useful. But let’s assume for a moment that sentience is useful. If sentience were useful, then sentience must incorporate some element that goes beyond classical physics, to be really useful. For example, related to quantum physics or the multiverse.
Why?
Because if sentience had a positive effect (in the form of motivation) on survival, in some way that can be explained by classical chemistry and physics, for example, thinking faster, taking better decisions, or being able to escape running faster than a predator, this behavior, that would be evolutionarily selected, would have to compete with another behavior that would also be evolutionarily selected, which is to do exactly the same, following the laws of chemistry and classical physics, but without the sentience.
I will give an example to try to illustrate all this.
Suppose we have a DNA chain that “reproduces as much as possible” and that follows the laws of classical physics. This chain does not feel.
By the way, when I say that the chain “reproduces as much as possible” I am not assigning agency, but summarizing in that phrase what is happening on a physical level. That chain that “reproduces as much as possible” is simply matter following the laws of physics. The phrase “reproduces as much as possible” is a summary way of describing what is happening.
We also have a second strand of DNA also formed by physical particles and obviously also that “reproduces as much as possible.” However, this DNA chain does feel: it feels pleasure every time it reproduces and frustration if it can not. Which motivates it to reproduce as much as possible.
This second strand of DNA is motivated to reproduce, but in what physical way would it be able to do it better than the chain that does not feel, and therefore is not “motivated”?
Whichever way we imagine that this second chain can do something better than the first chain, if it is following the laws of physics, it is something that chains like the first one could also perform. That is, evolution could always create chains that do not feel, like the first one, and that would have that characteristic of being more efficient, like the second one. Then both types of chain could exist: those that feel and those that do not feel. Motivation would not have any differential advantage.
If instead of DNA chains we think about complete individuals like us, the example works the same.
Obviously, if we consider that from a certain level of complexity or when certain functions appear, all the chains (or individuals) feel, then it would seem that sentience plays a role in evolution, but simply what would be happening is that sentience is a byproduct of something else. And it is that other thing (complexity, function) the thing that is being selected, not sentience. Sentience would not be useful: it would be inevitable.
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