These 3 Tests Will Help Determine if a Person, Animal or Thing Is Really Conscious

How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness?

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Tau.Neutrino said:

These 3 Tests Will Help Determine if a Person, Animal or Thing Is Really Conscious

How can you know that any animal, other human beings, or anything that seems conscious, isn’t just faking it? Does it enjoy an internal subjective experience, complete with sensations and emotions like hunger, joy, or sadness?

more…

> Over the last two decades, scientists have proposed various ways to probe cognition and consciousness in unresponsive patients. In such cases, there aren’t any behaviors to observe or any creative products to assess. You can check for the neural correlates of consciousness, though. What’s physically going on in the brain? Neuroimaging tools such as EEG, MEG, fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation (each with their own strengths and weaknesses), are able to provide information on activity happening within the brain even in coma and vegetative patients.

Is that obvious? It’s very useful, but does it or does it not rely on a neural network? For instance, what would happen if you applied such tests to a Venus flytrap?

> You know that a massive range of human behaviors are accompanied by conscious experience. So when you see similar behaviors in other animals or even non-animals, can you reasonably infer the presence of consciousness?

I’ve seen a video of a pre-implantation human embryo (blastocyst with ~100 cells) exhibit a sudden contraction that looked to me exactly like fear.

> you can look to creative outputs for clues that would indicate consciousness.

Like this? These are the creative outputs of single cells, two foraminifera and a coccolithophore