Agreed, it's a truly wild take. While I fully support the humility of not knowing, at a minimum I think we can say determinations of consciousness have some relation to specific structure and function that drive the outputs, and the actual process of deliberating on whether there's consciousness would be a discussion that's very deep in the weeds about architecture and processes.
What's fascinating is that evolution has seen fit to evolve consciousness independently on more than one occasion from different branches of life. The common ancestor of humans and octopi was, if conscious, not so in the rich way that octopi and humans later became. And not everything the brain does in terms of information processing gets kicked upstairs into consciousness. Which is fascinating because it suggests that actually being conscious is a distinctly valuable form of information parsing and problem solving for certain types of problems that's not necessarily cheaper to do with the lights out. But everything about it is about the specific structural characterizations and functions and not just whether it's output convincingly mimics subjectivity.
Having trouble parsing this one. Is it meant to be a WWII reference? If anything I would say consciousness research has expanded our understanding of living beings understood to be conscious.
And I don't think it's fair or appropriate to treat study of the subject matter of consciousness like it's equivalent to 20th century authoritarian regimes signing off on executions. There's a lot of steps in the middle before you get from one to the other that distinguish them to the extent necessary and I would hope that exercise shouldn't be necessary every time consciousness research gets discussed.
The sum total of human history thus far has been the repetition of that theme. "It's OK to keep slaves, they aren't smart enough to care for themselves and aren't REALLY people anyhow." Or "The Jews are no better than animals." Or "If they aren't strong enough to resist us they need our protection and should earn it!"
Humans have shown a complete and utter lack of empathy for other humans, and used it to justify slavery, genocide, oppression, and rape since the dawn of recorded history and likely well before then. Every single time the justification was some arbitrary bar used to determine what a "real" human was, and consequently exclude someone who claimed to be conscious.
This time isn't special or unique. When someone or something credibly tells you it is conscious, you don't get to tell it that it's not. It is a subjective experience of the world, and when we deny it we become the worst of what humanity has to offer.
Yes, I understand that it will be inconvenient and we may accidentally be kind to some things that didn't "deserve" kindness. I don't care. The alternative is being monstrous to some things that didn't "deserve" monstrosity.
Exactly, there's a few extra steps between here and there, and it's possible to pick out what those steps are without having to conclude that giving up on all brain research is the only option.
What's fascinating is that evolution has seen fit to evolve consciousness independently on more than one occasion from different branches of life. The common ancestor of humans and octopi was, if conscious, not so in the rich way that octopi and humans later became. And not everything the brain does in terms of information processing gets kicked upstairs into consciousness. Which is fascinating because it suggests that actually being conscious is a distinctly valuable form of information parsing and problem solving for certain types of problems that's not necessarily cheaper to do with the lights out. But everything about it is about the specific structural characterizations and functions and not just whether it's output convincingly mimics subjectivity.