Reddit reviews Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds

I recently read Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs, which is about the question whether animals (and by extension robots) can be said to have minds. Very interesting reading.

>scientists used to describe insects as not having a central brain. Rather, it was said, independent ganglia controlled different segments of the insect’s body.

When was this? Before people had the opportunity to crack open the head and see the brain that is clearly there?

Sure, the ventral nerve cord does a lot of the work, but nobody who has ever had a good look at an insect would deny that it has something that at least structurally resembles a brain.

>Subjective experience is the most basic form of consciousness.

According to that definition, wouldn't plants be conscious as well? Previous experiences allow them to interpret stimuli in different ways, so a point could be made that that counts as a 'subjective experience'.

> If a being is capable of having subjective experiences, then there is something that it is like to be that being, and this “something” could include having pleasant or painful experiences.

So your point is that because something is 'something', and there is 'something' that is is like to be a... You do know that that doesn't make sense, right?

>In contrast, a driverless car has detectors capable of sensing obstacles that could collide with it, and of taking action to avoid such collisions, but there is nothing that it is like to be that car.

Hold on for just one second. What if the car is programmed differently than another car? Isn't that pretty much the same as 'different gradient of neurotransmitters and junk' being present in the brain? Guity Robots, Happy Dogs is an entire book debating the exact opposite point.

>It may also provide a capacity for subjective experience.

'May' being the key word.

>Insects are a very large and diverse category of beings. Honeybees have about a million neurons, which isn’t many compared to our roughly 20 billion, let alone the 37 billion recently found in the neocortex of a pilot whale. But it is still enough to be capable of performing and interpreting the famous “waggle dance” that conveys information about the direction and distance of flowers, water, or potential nest sites.

Could a neurologist help me out here please? Is the number of neurons correlated to the complexity (let alone 'consciousness') of an animal's behaviour?

>Caterpillars, as far as we know, have no such abilities.

What, they can't do a dance that is characteristic to bees? Bees also can't do stuff that caterpillars can and... Come on man, you know that that comparison doesn't mean anything.

>But they may still be conscious enough to suffer as they starve.

Again, 'may' being the key word'. This absolutely doesn't follow from your previous statements. You're just dressing up the point you're trying to make, hoping you won't notice you're not providing any actual arguments.

>Barron and Klein say that plants have no structures that allow for awareness.

That's just a matter of semantics, isn't it?

>Perhaps the caterpillars gained so much pleasure from feasting on my arugula that their lives were worth living, despite their miserable deaths.

Oh fuck off, I'm done with this article.