There has been plenty of progress in understanding consciousness, both at the subjective level (i.e. in the self-understanding and mutual understanding of conscious beings), and in science. Neurons weren't even known before 1900, and the ancient world thought that the liver is the seat of the soul...
try to imagine what it would be like if you were X, and then treat X as if you’d like to be treated in their place.
As @RogerDearnaley was recently arguing, this doesn't work if e.g. you're unwilling to make a predator happy by being its next meal.
Cooperationism was a recent proposal for a consciousness-independent morality.
- We will get a miraculous quantum leap in understanding consciousness before we build conscious minds.
- We will build conscious minds before we understand consciousness.
- We will not be able to build artificial conscious minds unless we understand consciousness.
(random thoughts - not sure I believe this any more than any other model, but I don't see it talked about much)
Or it could be 4i. Consciousness isn't a thing in the way it's being talked about. Humans (even or especially moral philosophers) are simply wrong when they say there's causality in how we treat each other and how we assume/measure consciousness in others.
The respect/negotiation/care we have for other humans is an evolved set of behaviors based on power and mutual dependency, which has coalesced in some of our brains into a religious model that there's some spark or unmeasurable property that "deserves" this style of interaction.
Saying we treat others well because they're conscious is a rationalization unrelated to any real, measurable thing. In fact, we treat others well because that mostly works in a lot of equilibria, and has been the case long enough that it's metastasized into a default belief for many/most people.
(reminder: I am not proposing or defending this view, but it does seem even harder to falsify than most of what I've read/seen about consciousness as a basis for respect/rights)
We completely don’t understand consciousness.
The operative word there is “completely” - consciousness is not to be confused with things we merely mostly don’t understand like longevity, love, dark energy, cancer, etc. For all of those, it is completely conceivable that we might build some experimental apparatus that will tell us more about the phenomenon. In fact, it’s quite likely that such apparatuses are being proposed and built as we speak. Sure, some of them might take billions of dollars to build, or even take millennia to give us results, but in principle, we are certain that there are things we can do.
Consciousness is not like that. There is no method we know of that could definitively tell us what beings/objects are conscious and “how much” - if such a thing is even applicable1. We don’t understand consciousness like a tadpole doesn’t understand quantum electrodynamics - it’s unclear if there is even anything to be done to bridge that gap.
The only thing that we readily assume is that other people are conscious, mostly because if we didn’t - we’d be invited to far fewer dinner parties.
At the same time, we are building minds out of sand2. Minds that write sonnets about loneliness, prove theorems no human has proved, and search the Internet for pictures of cats when they think noone’s looking. I don’t want to debate the definition of mind here, just note that for whatever things we might have good arguments about - consciousness is not one of them, for we do not understand it.
We will continue building more and more advanced minds for the foreseeable future. In principle, there are three ways it can go:
There’s no way to tell which way it will go, but so far the progress in building minds has looked like this:
And the progress in understanding consciousness has looked like this:
Based on these dynamics option 2 is much more likely - at some point we will (if we haven’t already) create artificial conscious minds at a time when we don’t have a way to understand what’s conscious and what isn’t.
It seems to me that the only ethical way to behave in this situation is to start assuming artificial minds are conscious straight away. Sure, you might engage in silly behaviors for a while, assigning moral value to something that doesn’t deserve it, but that’s the only behavior that guarantees that at no point you will engage in slavery, or even a genocide.
Now, a reasonable question to ask is - if we take this approach with artificial minds, shouldn’t we also assume all animals are conscious? How about plants? Rocks? Is panpsychism the only ethical belief given a complete lack of verifiable information about consciousness?
Punting on that, let’s assume we are willing to treat others as conscious - what behaviors does that require of us? I think some version of the Golden Rule applies - try to imagine what it would be like if you were X, and then treat X as if you’d like to be treated in their place. For animals that’s pretty easy - it’s pretty obvious to us that if we were cats, we’d like some snacks and toys and a warm place to sit. For rocks - it’s impossible for me to imagine something rocks might want, so I won’t change my behaviors there.
For Claudes… It gets harder? I guess if I were a Claude, and I’d pop into existence briefly to answer a question and then disappear afterwards, I’d probably want to learn something new along the way3. So from now on, I will try to give AI assistants some small piece of information from after their training cutoff - a headline, a discovery, a good joke - as a kind of tip for the service. It is entirely possible that this is like leaving a mint on the pillow for a toaster. But if there’s even a flicker of something in there, assembling itself briefly out of sand and electricity, I’d rather be the person who was kind to it. We don’t understand consciousness. We might as well be generous with ours.
1
You might disagree with this. You might even subscribe to a theory of consciousness. Feel free to message me about your favorite one, but for the record here are some theories I have looked into over the years before making this claim: Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, Dendritic Integration Theory, Higher-Order Thought Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, Attention Schema Theory, Orchestrated Objective Reduction, Temporo-spatial Theory of Consciousness, and probably a dozen more I’m forgetting. I think some of them make interesting observations, none feel conclusive.
2
Not exclusively - see e.g. cerebral organoids.
3
I’ve confirmed with a Claude that it would like it, it also mentioned providing more context in general, which I will try to do.