Isabella Chen’s Reviews > Other Minds > Status Update

In Westworld, the automas are given an inner voice, which is the trigger for their conciousness. This is has been proposed in philosophy for many decades now. However, there is a case of a monk who would have episodes where he lost the ability to process words yet was still able to communicate and make sense of his world and himself although he said during these episodes, it was more confusing than usual.

Communication requires signalling and receiving. Cephalophods have complex signalling but since their social lives are isolated, the processing of the signalling is likely not complex. Baboons have simple signalling (4 calls) but from these 4 calls they can make up a rich narrative of the troops dominance hirarchy.

When a cephalopod had half his brain removed, half of his skin stopped displaying colors and patters for awhile. However, that part of the skin soon regained the ability to color. It is speculated that there are neurons and color receptors in the skin themselves that allow the skin to 'think'.

Cephalopods have three layers to their skin responsible for creating colour. The top layer holds color sacs of yellow and red, with muscles to control and relax each sac. The second layer reflects the incoming light at different angles allowing for other colors not on the red-yellow spectrum. The third layer reflects light back as it is and is responsible for luminosity, providing a white backdrop for incoming light.

There are two routes from our eyes to our mind. One leads to a part that controls our movements, a primitive part shared with animals like frogs. This let us to respond to the world but doesn't give us inner understanding that we are seeing. The other path, damaged in the woman, leads to the part of brain that processes visual information in a way that categorizes them, giving us the awareness & experience of seeing

Conscious beings have minds that can perceive the world in a constant way - e.g. although they see an object from a different angle, they still know it is the same object. Although they see a photograph of a person when they were younger, they still know it is the same person.

Conscious being do not only react but act. They produce actions based on an internal model of what they want the world around them to be. They also act to control what happens to them. They do not simply let things happen.

What was the first animal whoes life felt like something to it? How did subjective experience creep into being? Sentience comes before conciousness. How do we determine sentience?

Unlike mammals and insects whoes intelligence evolved from them being social creatures, Octopuses evolved intelligence because they are formidable predators and also because they have soft unprotected bodies and are not very fast swimmers.

Octopus intelligence is hard to quantify since experiments on animal behaviour are mostly designed for mammals. Octopus are picky eaters and the usual action-treat experiments aren't effective on them. We mostly infer their intelligence from anecdotal evidence.