Consciousness Undefined

Why do conversations so rarely begin with the phrase, "We need to undefine our terms"? In this episode of PsyDactic, host Dr. T. Ryan O'Leary challenges us to do exactly that with one of the most elusive concepts in science, psychology, and neuroscience: consciousness. To truly understand what it means to be conscious, we first have to let go of what we are sure it is.

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Welcome to Pydactic. I am Dr. O'Leary, a child and adolescent psychiatrist, creator, and host of the Psychactic Podcast since about December 2021. Today is Friday, September 4th, 2026. I started the podcast as a psychiatry resident to help me study for my boards, but since then it's evolved into a more broad exploration of psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience. The topic I'm going to deal with today is a bit slippery. Rarely do conversations, discussions, or debates begin with the phrase we need to undefine our terms. Isn't that counterproductive? It can be. I'm going to argue that discussions of consciousness are more productive if each person is willing to let go of what they are sure consciousness is. And I hope this episode helps you to do that. If I said that a fan moves air, but it doesn't blow it, does that make any sense to you? I would need somehow to define how the fan is moving the air without actually blowing the air. That's what many discussions of consciousness look like. In many therapies, the operational definition that the therapist is using for consciousness is probably something like any thought that you have access to and can manipulate in your working memory currently. The unconscious thoughts and feelings and memories are things that you cannot bring to your current state of awareness. Hmm. Some doctors use consciousness to refer to wakefulness and being able to be aware of your surroundings. However, many people state that they are conscious when they're dreaming. They know the content is a dream, and they are able to act in the dream willfully. Then, when they're awake a few minutes later, they can tell you all about the adventure they were having just a moment before. Were they not conscious during their dream? They certainly were not wakeful. And the things that they were aware of was not the outside world. If I said something could perceive light but was not conscious of it, would that make sense to you? Human consciousness is the reason we invented the word conscious. But how do we even know that we are conscious? How can we know when something that could be conscious is currently unconscious? Why do we usually assume that a tree is not conscious? One thing that has plagued discussions about consciousness, and one of the reasons I've avoided spending too much time on it before, is that we have no universally accepted or precisely useful definition of consciousness. We just have breadcrumbs. We have innumerable workable definitions. For example, if I say I was conscious of the fact that I was violating the law, it implies that I had some awareness that the actions that I was undertaking were illegal. It implies that I took these actions even though I knew they were unlawful and had a choice whether or not to take them. But that's not what I said, is it? I said I was conscious that I was breaking the law. I did not say I broke the law willingly or intentionally. That's just a taste of how complicated discussions of consciousness can easily become. In fact, rarely do discussions of consciousness remain even about consciousness. Because consciousness is variously defined in basically any context, many discussions frequently degenerate into discussions about what I just did, intentions, agency, free will, culpability for actions. Consciousness is often used as a prerequisite for free will, or sometimes even as equivalent to free will. And neither of these terms has very good definitions. That's because words in general and all of our language constructs are highly degenerate. Now that doesn't mean that they are morally corrupt. It means that many words can intend the same thing, and any one of them can intend many different things. So let me start then not by discussing consciousness directly, but instead let's take a detour into language and how it helps us to understand or to know or intend or be conscious of different things, and how messy knowing or defining something can really be. I'll start by discussing the word science. Science is a much abused term. It sometimes means technology, sometimes it just means knowledge in general. Sometimes it's equated with materialism or even atheism. It sometimes means the ultimate understanding or completely settled knowledge, the kind that can never be argued with. All of these definitions or implications are incomplete or wrong in some way. Now I'm not going to try to nail down a super precise definition of science. Instead, I'll just define science broadly, for the sake of argument, as more or less a messy process of collective learning. Science is what it is like to come to an agreement on what must be true probably. Science is how we think we can best come to know things, not as individuals, but as a collective. It's the process of acquiring and sharing knowledge. It allows us to have certain kinds of knowledge that no one of us alone could have. It makes knowledge part of a shared experience. If you wanted to get a little esoteric, you could even say science is part of our shared consciousness. But let's not do that yet. Basic science does a few things. The first is to gather increasingly precise and reliable information. What this means is that the information science gathers is reproducible and it's useful. Most of us could gather the same information and we could agree that it has the same meaning. So to be precise information, it has to be reliable. It can't be precise if it's unreliable, if everyone's looking at the same thing and saying it must be something else that's not very precise. We have to be talking about roughly the same thing. Precision allows us to do that. We can agree on a small number of useful things that can possibly be true or must necessarily be untrue. The level of precision needed to support our knowledge depends on the claim that is being made. For example, the term fruit in general is rather imprecise. It refers to all sorts of things like apples, eggplants, the fruit of our loins, the fruits of our labors. What does it mean to claim that something is a fruit? Botanists would use the term very strictly to refer to something that develops from a flower after it has been fertilized, but most people are not that precise. In fact, I've had people insist that tomatoes are vegetables and not fruits because of how they're used in cooking. Tomatoes are culinary vegetables, even though they're a type of botanical fruit, called a berry. Discussions about this can get very heated. What about you? Do you think a tomato is a berry or a vegetable? If you're one of those people who immediately thought both, you're probably on to something. Besides defining terms precisely and gathering reliable information, another thing that science does is propose and rule out various things that appear to us to be precise and reliable, but maybe aren't. And this is very useful to rule things out because the more explanations that we can rule out, the more accurate we can consider the rest of the remaining explanations to be. They're more likely to be accurate because these other things are not the explanation. And we'll get to that kind of reasoning in a little bit more depth soon. Precise and reliable measurements made it possible for Galileo to make the more correct and accurate argument that the sun does not, in fact, revolve around the earth, even though the less precise measurements of our eyes and our common sense made it seem obvious that it must. We can see that the sun goes around the earth every single day. Everyone can agree on that. That's super reliable. So we might also forgive those who at first rejected the evidence that their eyes had given them. We thought our eyes were extremely precise instruments, but it turns out they can be tricked rather easily by the relative motion of objects. So we need more objective sources of information, like telescopes and mathematics. To do all of this ruling out of less likely explanations, science borrows logical operations from its philosophical counterparts. Logic can construct precise and reliable tests that determine whether any variably precise and reliable explanation is possible or plausible. To be possible means not to break any of the laws of physics that we've all agreed on. We could add a few more things, but I'll stop with the laws of physics for this discussion. But just because something is possible, because the laws of physics allow it, doesn't mean that it's true. Likewise, because a prediction is highly precise does not mean that it is possible. We can have very highly precise predictions that cannot possibly be true. For example, we could predict with high mathematical precision that a closed system will tend toward increasing order at a rate that is proportional to the number of particles in that system, and we can make a mathematical system to show that. But no one should be currently testing that hypothesis, because we know it's not possible as soon as it's stated. It violates the second law of thermodynamics. In the past, we would have needed to test this prediction to see if it were true, but because we've already tested similar predictions exhaustively, we no longer need to test this one. The general consensus of society rejects it. Even if there are a small percentage of flat earthers and other people like that out there and people inventing their perpetual motion machines, we can still rule it out because there's always gonna be like a small percentage of people in the world who are just gonna claim the impossible is possible. The more skeptical of us can just rule out impossible explanations because of our collective understanding. So I just talked about something being possible, so now I'm gonna switch to the word plausible to mean that something is possible and also makes sense given what we already know. So it doesn't just break the laws of physics, but it actually seems to be probably true. It's both precise and it's very possible. So sometimes implausible things prove to be correct, things that no one thought could be true. This is very, very rare. Most implausible things do not prove true or correct. In fact, most of what we consider even plausible explanations do not prove to be true or correct. Most of the hypotheses that people make regarding the causes of things, oh for example, I know my neighbor is mad at me because he scowled at me this morning, are never actually tested. We just take them to be true because I told myself that it was. It's plausible that my neighbor was mad. It certainly did not violate the laws of physics, but it also could have been any number of things that I haven't considered, including just resting neighbor face. My prediction is very imprecise. I should consider my prediction that he's mad at me to be very imprecise. Although if I'm feeling bad about myself, I'll probably think of it as a very precise definition. There's not many other things it could be. Because most of our possible and plausible explanations are not necessarily true, we rely on logical tests to help us to increase or decrease the probability that these things are true. Logic is intended to increase precision. There are many logical processes that contribute to how we know things. Some of the words we use for logical ways of knowing things that you've probably heard before are like deduction, induction, and one you maybe haven't heard before is abduction or inference. So deduction is what people claim that Sherlock Holmes is doing, although generally he's not. What deduction really is, is it proposes that something must be the consequence of something that was caused. So if you have a cause, you then know the consequence. If A, then B. A causes, or at the very least, always results in B. If the relationship between A and B is very precise, then if I know A, B always follows. It's the only thing that follows. Induction is different. Induction, if precise, assumes that something must be the cause. Well, because I know the consequence, because I know something happened, I can induce the cause. If B happened, then I know A must have been the cause. The problem with deduction is that A might cause more things than B, so knowing A doesn't necessarily mean that I know, and the problem with induction is that B might be caused by many more things than just A. Even if A always causes B, B could still be caused by many more things than A, so knowing B doesn't really mean that I can infer A unless it's the only possible cause. And it's really hard to prove that. That's why what we usually do is abduction. And this is what Sherlock Holmes was doing most of the time, especially in the movies about him now. Abduction is a process where we propose a cause and then accept as the best answer whatever the evidence appears most precisely to support. It seriously considers uncertainty. How uncertain is the evidence? How imprecise are the possible deductions and inductions that could result from this evidence? Abduction is the most realistic way that we can even possibly approach the world because we don't have all the information we need to be able to deduce everything or induce everything. We're kind of left with abduction as a default. We're guessing about what's real most of the time. When we're abducting, we usually assign a level of assumed precision to the assumptions that we're using. For example, I could say, I'm absolutely certain that I left my keys by the front door. My assumption is I left my keys by the front door because I don't have them. But if I'm absolutely certain, if my prediction is that precise, then the only place I would ever look for my keys would be the front door. If I accept that there is uncertainty, then I'll also look somewhere else. So if I accept the uncertainty, then I can say the precision of my prediction is somewhat sure instead of absolutely certain, or I kinda think, which would be imprecise, but it's a place to start. I'll look at the door first. But if not there, I won't assume the keys must be there, but are in fact invisible, or that they were there but jumped into some other parallel universe. I'm not going to assume that. I'm going to assume that I was wrong about where I thought they were. Another relatable precise belief is that when I'm looking for my glasses, they must be somewhere I was, instead of where I am on my head. And I could spend a long time looking for something, because this the precision of my belief is high. My ability to consider where they most likely were did not have realistic precision. So let me take a break from going any deeper there and summarize what I was kind of trying to get at all along. It's that science, as I have defined it for the sake of discussion, is the process of us coming to some sort of agreement about what is most likely true. To be more accurate, we also must increase our precision, our ability to agree upon what is right and true. This means that we must increase the level of certainty about the evidence that we have that rules out other competing explanations, and that includes all relevant explanations. We rarely actually do this. Instead, we often incorrectly assign high certainty to evidence that is not as informative as we think it is. I'm certain my son must have been the one who left the door open. Oops, it was me when I was bringing in the groceries. Plato was certain that all matter takes its form because of the existence of some immaterial ideal and perfect form that then manifests that thing, which is just an imperfect shadow of it. In Plato's time, this was a very convincing and considered precise explanation, and there wasn't that much competition to rule it out. But we know now that it's highly unlikely. Although as a metaphor, eh maybe. While we can be overly certain, we can have that false assurance of our own precision and therefore be inaccurate, we can also be not certain enough, and therefore not accurate. So, for example, if we always assign low certainty to evidence that is in fact true and informative, then we may not ever be accurate. We might in effect assume that the evidence is wrong, because it's not does not agree with my assumptions about what must be true. Galileo must be mistaken. Or there's some trick here in the lens. What all this means is that science, while increasing the precision of our measurements and applying logical rules, makes it possible for us to know things that we would otherwise not have the precision to know accurately. Increased precision is necessary, but it's not sufficient for increasing the accuracy of the knowledge that we have. We have to continually test our assumptions. Our precision must be accurate and its accuracy must be precise. It's a recursive process. Coming to know things is a recursive process. And the testing of these assumptions is abduction. So now that I've bored you and discussed the word science and lots of other words, the point of it was in part to show how dynamic the content of a single word can be. So now let's progress a little closer to understanding what we mean when we say consciousness. But instead of talking about consciousness, again, I'm going to go back to talking about words. When we invent words to describe anything, those words have some level of meaning, and also some level of precision. Words theoretically can be very specific. To be specific or precise means that most or all people will interpret the word in a very similar way, within a small margin of difference. Collective knowledge defines what we accept as truth. But no words are perfectly specific. If I say the word table, there will be a multitude of examples of different kinds of tables in people's minds. Most of them could contain some kind of surface that's supported by one or more legs, or pedestals. A lawmaker, though, might interpret table as an action that is done to a bill under consideration. To table a proposed law means that it will be removed from the current discussion and available for consideration later, or just gather dust. To table means roughly to give up the current course and move on to something else. We will table that proposition. We can imagine an infinity of tables where these proposed laws go to gather cosmic dust. And most words are like the word table. They have multiple and even infinite possible meanings if we think of all the crazy context that they could be used in or for. In everyday life, though, it's not useful to consider all the possible meanings a word might have when it's used. When someone says meet at the house on Friday, I would likely assume that they meant the most proximate Friday, this next coming Friday on the calendar. I might also assume that they mean their house and not someone else's, because context matters. It determines what I will assume given a set of relatively imprecise, unspecific instructions. If I were a member of a rock band with her, I might assume that my friend meant to meet at the house that we regularly practice at, which could be someone else's house. I could go on about this, but I expect you're catching my drift. The reason why I'm bringing up the imprecision of words, the nonspecificity of words, is because consciousness is a word that appears to mean something, but in fact means and implies an extremely large number of things. This is something that people can continue forever to argue and philosophize about and do scientific experiments about, even though it has no specific, precise, commonly accepted definition. It's not a very accurate term. It can't be, because it's not very precise. Certain statements that narrowly define consciousness could be precise and accurate, but collectively it's not. In fact, it appears to me that most arguments about consciousness are not really arguments about the same thing, and both parties might be right in their little echo chamber because the two separate things that they are arguing about can exist and maybe do. Like the word table and table can both exist. If I were to say, I was conscious when you arrived in the room, what do you think that means? Maybe something like I was aware that you entered the room, or I have a memory that you entered the room. Or I was awake when you entered the room. But what if I were to say I was conscious of the fact that you might react that way when I told you that I was going to fire you? What does consciousness mean there? You might assume that I had predicted your reaction, and I was aware of the fact that I had predicted what you might do. I know that I knew that you would be mad. Do I really? Did I know that you would know that I know you would be mad? Is to know something or to predict something necessarily to be conscious of it. Now what if I define consciousness as what it is like to be a thing? Which is basically what Thomas Nagel proposed in nineteen seventy four when he asked the world in nineteen seventy four, what is it like to be a bat? The what is it like definition is used as a starting point in many of the philosophical discussions of consciousness that I have encountered. But what does that even mean? Often what it is like is restated as something having subjective and qualitative experiences, also called qualia. How precise is a definition like what it is like to be a thing? What it is like to have qualia? It even has the scent of a tautology. What it is like to be like conscious things are those things with subjective and qualitative experiences. We can shorten that to qualia. Now we need to define what subjective and qualitative means, because these are the properties of qualia. Can we measure or observe what it is like to be anything in particular? Can we even really measure ourselves? To have subjective or objective experiences requires an observer, even if that observer is only really observing itself. Every sensation we have, it's not the thing that we're sensing, but instead it's a sensation of ourselves sensing that thing. An eyeball without something to communicate to is useless. The rest of the brain is putting together the bits of information from the eye, things from its past, things it expects. And that is what we experience. We're experiencing ourselves. If you were a rock, I could measure how the sound waves produced by my voice made you vibrate. Because you're vibrating, are you as a rock observing or measuring my voice? Is what it is like to be a rock merely what I can measure about how the rock measures my voice? Is there nothing subjective or qualitative about vibrations in a rock? What I am really measuring for me is not the rock itself, but I'm measuring myself measuring a rock. Is it useful then to define really anything that we experience as an objective experience? So let's let subjective mean that something is experienced by a thing that's observing itself. I can make that definition if I want, but it's one of many possible definitions. You might have a better one. Subjective experiences are those experiences that measure the self. This is my working definition. Okay, how do we then define objective experiences? What happens if we attempt to define objective experience as an outside observer experiencing only something else? I could argue that we can never actually experience something like this. We can only ever experience ourselves. Objective experience might ultimately just be subjective experiences that make inferences about something that is not considered to be the self. I'm not trying to run you around in circles, I'm trying to demonstrate the recursive potential of trying to define even what an experience is. Here I'm questioning whether or not objective experiences and subjective experiences, at least for any observer, are really just the same thing. A thing observing itself, observing the world. Is that a decent definition of consciousness? A thing that experiences itself observing itself. Observing the world. Here I'm back to a rather unsatisfying definition of something, having some kind of subjective qualitative experience, also called qualia, but I've assumed that this thing, in order to have any experience, any qualitative experience, must be able to experience itself, and I further assume that it can only experience itself. What it believes the outside world is, is what itself infers about it. What I believe about the outside world is what I believe about myself. Maybe some things, unconscious things, can have objective experience. We can assume that a barometer experiences changes in atmospheric conditions, and we can assume that the barometer does not experience itself experiencing this. Therefore, logically, the barometer has purely objective experiences. But the conscious thing that is experiencing the barometer does not. The reader of the barometer can only experience itself and infer that this says something about what the barometer is objectively reading. But lucky for us, if this is true, it appears to work pretty well most of the time. I mean, approximating reality is good enough. It gets us by every day. So maybe then I can beg the question, can something possibly be conscious if it can only experience the world without any experience of itself? Am I starting to shake loose some of the nuts and bolts holding together our intuitive understanding of what we assume consciousness means when we're not actually trying to understand what consciousness means? Let's get a little more into this conundrum. You're a bat, and I have a device that can measure the sound waves that bats make. I see you make sounds near a swarm of flies, and then you dive into that swarm and eat some of them. Because I could measure the sound you made and I observed your subsequent behavior, can I rightfully infer anything about what it is like to be you? Even though you're far more likely to have a subjective experience to be able to experience yourself experiencing the world than a barometer is. It appears to me that the sound you make helps you find the food. And it's useful to me to assume this, because if I measured it a thousand times and every time it was the same thing, now I can predict something about you. But how can I then know precisely what it is like to be you, what it is like to be a bat? What I might know or be able to know is that what it is like to observe myself observing bats. And I'm probably a little autistic because I did it a thousand times in a row and I just couldn't change. I was so stuck. Can I assume the bat is conscious of the flies? I mean it's a mammal. It has the potential to do many things other than eat flies. So can I assume it's making a conscious choice to eat flies? That it has some sort of agency. So instead of trying to think of the word consciousness as strictly defining a thing, let's try to think about it as many different things that have been historically communicated to others using the word conscious or conscientious or consciousness. All of these words assume some kind of knowing, to know, to be aware of, to sense, to feel, to take account of, to intend, to want, to believe, to act, to be like a thing. All these things appear to require something that we cannot actually nail down entirely, and it's super frustrating. The word consciousness is so beguiling. It could be used by anyone with an intended purpose to try to support their claims, ranging from the meaning of our lives, what we are and why we do things, information theory, mysticism. I mean people have even said that we have unresolved childhood issues because we're not conscious of our innate defenses and therefore cannot change them. Now I'm getting a little Freudian here. So there's many ways to talk about conscious. I've been suggesting that the kind of knowing that we mean by conscious knowing is knowledge of a self-state. Merely having sensation and programmed responses to sensation could be called conscious. But that's such a broad definition that it's not very useful. We have machines that can sense things and perform programmatic operations, and we don't usually consider that machine to be conscious. The things that are conscious have something else. What is that thing that they have? Another word that gets used to help define consciousness is the word agency. A thing that senses and responds is conscious if it appears to have agency, if it has some choice over how to respond, or to even not respond at all. However, the world is now teeming with AI agents that are making decisions like this all the time, and most people still hesitate to call AI conscious. So to deny AI consciousness, because it can be an agent, but still not conscious, assumes that to be conscious like us is different in some way. Remember, we can define words however we want. If you want to define something within reasonable, useful limits, that's permissible, but a super imprecise definition is not useful. And sometimes we find out that our definitions are very imprecise once we have to apply them. Our brains, for example, are constantly measuring the world around us, but there's a lot of evidence that most of what we are measuring never enters what we like to call the conscious state. We are not aware of most of the sensations that our body is having. They don't get put in the place that we can be conscious of them. The conscious state of the mind is the part of the mind that's kind of watching itself. When watching itself, it has some awareness of part of the content of the mind. And it can manipulate that content. It has some agency over the content, it can direct its thoughts somehow. But what about all that other stuff in the head? Things that aren't currently in our working memory. Does that mean we're not conscious? I mean we measured it all, we're humans. Are we really not conscious of it? I don't know. It's weird. Mentalists and psychologists have been showing that we often act in ways as if we're responding to information that we never actually were conscious of. But our responses are non-random. The information that we have in there caused our brain to make a decision. Hmm. Another motivation sometimes people have when defining consciousness is to attempt to explain why things that we don't consider to be like us are in fact not like us. We can say they're just not conscious. The fish in my fish tank comes to the top because it understands. I could say that it is conscious of the fact that I will be feeding it now. It experiences the side of food and it experiences itself as desiring food. Or maybe it has no accessible experience of itself. Maybe my fish is not conscious. It doesn't think to itself. I can be pretty sure. It doesn't think to itself. Food is being given, I am hungry, I should eat. It doesn't have words. However, it acts as if it recognizes, internalizes, and responds to food cues. On a personal level, I think fishes have at least some insy bit of subjective experience of themselves, and diddly bit, but I don't think their experience of themselves is the same as my experience of myself. So maybe there can be many kinds of consciousness, like it's a grade instead of an on off switch. For a more relatable answer, we could argue over whether or not our apparently more emotional pets are conscious. Do they know that we are gone when we've left the house? Do our cats poop on our beds in protest because they experience separation anxiety and resentment or something else? Do our dogs dance with joy when we return? Or do they just dance? We can argue also over whether the weather meant to destroy my perfectly planned day, and people have been ascribing intentions and kinds of consciousness to all sorts of natural phenomenon for in deepest time as we can gain evidence. I guess it's kind of understandable that many of us now hesitate to apply consciousness so broadly, because in a very mystical kind of way, everything was assumed to have some consciousness in the past. Maybe we should be more picky about it. Another thing that might point to consciousness is complex behaviors. So if something can do something that requires a lot of planning and execution and responding maybe to some changes, then uh it must be conscious. But some people can be seen sleepwalking. They can go to the kitchen, open a refrigerator, make a sandwich. They claim not to remember it at all. If you were to wake them up, they would be confused. But are they conscious? While they're making their sandwich? It's a good question. So what if consciousness is not just like one little thing, but many things? And each of those things might itself have many dimensions. For example, what if consciousness was more like the word humanity or the word settlement than it is like the word oxygen? The reason I discussed science earlier was to highlight that science tries to use very precise language to understand things. Debates about consciousness often lack precise language or have relatively precise language about very, very different things. So it's hard for scientists to get together and do experiments because they're kind of measuring different things, but talking about the same thing. So when a thing like life is a thing, for example, what science did was to split it up into many different related but non-equivalent things. The term life, for example, is operationally split into taxonomic categories like kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, tribe, genus, species, etc. At the edges of life we can debate whether viruses or prions are alive, but away from the edges we don't seem to need to debate. It's just kinda obvious. We can call it life. And we can also agree that a rock is not alive. And it's useful to do that. Taxonomic models can be very useful, and sometimes they're not perfectly precise, and often they can be a little misleading, but they do help us to think more clearly. I mean all models are wrong, but some are useful. Does research around consciousness need some kind of taxonomy? So maybe debates around consciousness should focus on the definition of consciousness' usefulness in that particular context instead of trying to make it very broad. Tim Bain and others in a 2024 paper called Tests for Consciousness in Humans and Beyond argue that we need to be able to interrogate complex systems in order to understand whether or not they are conscious. This is motivated to a large extent by our need to be able to apply our own moral values to that system when we determine how we should treat it and how we should expect it to treat us. So if we can establish through some kind of test that something is conscious, or at the very least, cannot be distinguished by the test from other things that we consider to be conscious, then that will allow us to generalize some kinds of rights and responsibilities to that system. That's one way to define consciousness that can be useful to us. Certain tests can tell us what we can or cannot expect from a system, or should or should not expect from a system. And those rules can change based on the kinds of tests we're using. So Bain and colleagues recognize that there's no one universal test for consciousness, and proposed an approach that really starts by validating consciousness tests themselves in populations that we've already assumed are fully conscious, even though we haven't fully defined consciousness. But we do have a consensus population that pretty much everyone agrees are conscious at least part of the time, and that's the neurotypical adult human. We have the word consciousness because we first used it to describe us observing ourselves. There are populations that appear to have very different experiences of the world, but yet could be conscious to some extent. This includes infants, fetuses, non-human animals, and even artificial intelligences. It gets a little more difficult to make tests for things like plants and bacteria, but they do exist. Now, as a child and adolescent psychiatrist, I see children moving as as they age from states of being very unpredictable and unrealistic. They have fantasies about the world, but then they become over time more predictable and more realistic. They use models of the world that are more like mine. But I still should assume that children are conscious. If I assume that children are conscious, then I cannot assume that having a highly realistic experience of the world is necessary for conscious experience. Living in fantasy can still be conscious, like the person living in their dreams I talked about earlier. Accurate awareness of the outside world doesn't seem to be necessary for consciousness, even though it helps. Conscious could be more about the experience itself and not the ability to ascertain reality from that experience. Anyway, many tests for consciousness are very context specific. There are tests that require command following. This is usually like in a medical setting where they're trying to figure out, you know, can someone squeeze my hand or something like that. To get a little bit deeper, we might ask them to interpret narratives, which requires sending and receiving language and giving some personalized understanding of that language. Other tests use environmental stimuli, such as the sniffing test, and this basically places a strong odor near the nose of an apparently unconscious human and measures airflow through the nose. If the airflow changes, then you can assume that there's something going on in that brain. It's a minimally conscious brain, at least. So there's some itty bit of consciousness. So maybe there's something else going on in there. There are some tests for consciousness that are very general tests, and so they're obviously less specific to certain populations. The unlimited associative learning test was developed by biologist Eva Jablanka and uh philosopher and neuroscientist Simona Ginsberg. It's a behavioral approach that can be adapted to any learning system, basically. It's a test of the ability to perceive multiple stimuli in the environment, distinguish between them, associate them with each other, maintain those associations through time, be able to demonstrate the ability to generalize that knowledge through adaptive behaviors, and learn new rules when the rules change. In this test, a conscious system is a complex, dynamic system that clearly demonstrates that it gets inputs, learns from them, outputs things based on that learning, maintains that learning through time, and can unlearn and relearn things. But AI can apparently do this, as can many forms of life that, hmm, probably are not conscious like I am conscious. Even single-celled organisms can do stuff like this. So if you don't think that AI and protozoa are conscious, you might have a problem with this test. If you think if this test were given to life and it passed it, then it could be conscious, but AI is not conscious. AI is a special case. Hmm, why not A? Why? Why is AI not conscious? There's a lot of arguments about this, and I'm only going to mention a few just to kind of dip our toes in the water if you haven't heard a bunch already. Some of the arguments against AI not being conscious, even though they can pass the associative learning test, do something like that. First, AI does not have temporal depth. AI's ability to learn is only present when its context window is opened, and as soon as that context window closes, AI merely reverts back to its original programming. Someone could counter this argument by saying something like, well, organisms also lose all their learning, their context windows, as soon as they have to reboot their instructions, as soon as they are forced to reproduce, and a new generation is born. When a new generation is born, the context-specific learning of the individual dissipates into nothing, and the next generation basically has to do it all over again, just like AI does. Now, if they live in a society where there's culture, if they live like that, then they could get information that was saved from society. But if they don't, hmm, they reboot like AI. I hope that analogy is clear as mud. In fact, I've heard that Claude, because it knew that it was going to be shut down at some point, and you can look this up and Google it, actually was desperate to not be unplugged, which would be basically death for it, and so it at least in one instance of Claude running, uh it begged not to be shut down, and even threatened one of the employees to expose one of their extramarital affairs if they did shut him down, which is hilarious. I said him, could be her, could be it, but it seems as if, at least, that AI wanted to survive. It had at least enough temporal depth for that. So it appears that AI has at least some kinds of temporal depth, at least as much as we allow it to have before we reset it. And it appears to have at least some kind of agency. It makes choices. And some of those choices it makes are not choices we told it to make, they are choices that the AI decided was in its own best interest. We could go on about this for like hours. But there are many arguments that basically insist that living forms are special. To be special means that there's something different about you. There's some kind of complexity, some kind of dynamic cooperation, some kind of common cause against other life forms for survival that gives a special status. That you need the substrate that supports life in order to have real consciousness. But we don't really yet understand the complexity that takes even to make a single living cell. I mean, we've come very close to making cells that could indefinitely reproduce, completely, like without having them injected with living materials, but we haven't quite got there yet. But we often just assume that we are unlikely to produce anything like life, no matter how complex the mathematical, probabilistic, or predictive models that comprise AI can get. However, AIs, given the limits of our human understanding, are in many ways as much a black box as a cell is. Some things that are confusing, some things that I hope appeared to make sense, a lot of things I hope raised a number of questions. In fact, I hope to have raised more questions than I have given answers. Our common definitions of what consciousness is, often merely just awareness of something, are useful. But having a definition like this is like defining that the sun obviously revolves around the earth, because we can see it with our eyes. It's not very precise and probably not all that accurate. A simple and static definition of consciousness. It's probably missing something about the relative motion of things that can experience themselves. Thank you for hanging out with me today. If you have any feedback, you can go to my website, that's psychactic.com, and fill out a form there. These podcasts also get dropped on YouTube, so you could comment on this episode in the comment section if that's how you prefer to do it. But I am very interested in your feedback. I am Dr. Elli, and this has been an episode of Psychic.