A map of theories, approaches and paradigms related to consciousness, sentience and identity

Some theories, approaches and paradigms related to consciousness, sentience and identity

Theories and hypotheses about the ability to feel

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See also this other map

In this image I try to present in a global way some of the theories and approaches on sentience / consciousness / identity, and in general, on reality, grouped into four large groups. The enumeration is not exhaustive and several of these theories could be classified in more than one group at a time. I have tried to give meaning to the position of each label, although in some cases it has not been easy to decide where to place it.

The first group are what I call theories or worldviews of the GOD type, which refer to beings or realities superior to ours, and which in some way determine it, such as religions.

The second group is called PARTICLE and it is about those theories or hypotheses that consider necessary, for the existence of the capacity to feel, some component in particular (usually, material), such as, for example, biological, humid components, based on the carbon.

The third group of theories are EMERGENCIES, the most popular among modern scientists, who consider that, based on a material basis, sentience emerges if certain conditions are met.

The fourth group I call MATRIX, because according to these theories nothing is what appears and they put in doubt our intuitions about sentience and reality in general.

The theories of the upper part are the most CONVENTIONAL while those of the lower part are the most BOLD. I have tried to place on the right those theories with a more empirical approach and on the left the most CREATIVE ones.

Both historically and on a personal level, it is common to observe an evolution of beliefs in the indicated order, which I have illustrated with an arrow: GOD, PARTICLE, EMERGENCY and MATRIX. In some way, this intellectual journey returns to the starting point.

If you asked me about the probability that I assign to each of the four types of theories, I would say something like: 1%, 25%, 75%, and 99%. The sum of the probabilities does not necessarily have to be 100%, given that several hypotheses can be true at the same time.

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Update 09/2024

When there was not much interest in the issue of digital sentience I dedicated myself to promoting taking it seriously (approx. at the end of the last century and beginning of this one).

I spent a lot of time working on genetic algorithms and evolutionary algorithms. I expected them to be the key to computing in the next few years, but instead neural networks were more successful.

Digital sentience implies some kind of emergentism. But I think there are two very different kinds, and the great success of massive models (like neural networks) has eclipsed evolutionary models. When making predictions, I think we need to distinguish between these two kinds:

* Evolutionary, bottom-up emergentism, like the one we come from, which requires a lot of time and space, which can more probably generate sentience, but of which we have hardly any examples. I call it the Evolutionary Emergentist Paradigm.

* Simply massive emergentism, with some bottom-up elements but largely top-down. AI companies do not create primordial soups in which they expect intelligence to emerge. These scenarios seem much less likely to me in terms of generating sentience. We could call it the Non-Evolutionary Emergentist Paradigm, or Massive Emergentist Paradigm.

In recent years I have changed my mind and in this framework for classifying and making predictions about theories of sentience, my odds are now GOD=1%, PARTICLE=75%, EMERGENCY=25%, and MATRIX=99%

In short, I think that sentience comes from some basic component of the universe, like a particle (PARTICLE=75%), which we don’t understand and when we do understand it, it will blow our minds (MATRIX=99%). It is true that it may all be just information, but in that case I see it as much more likely with an evolutionary process (Evolutionary Emergentist Paradigm – EMERGENCY=25%). In the case of current AI, my assessment is much lower (Massive Emergentist Paradigm = 5%).

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Some theories, approaches and paradigms related to consciousness, sentience and identity

 

As for the moral models (prototypes) of each quadrant, I think that more or less could be as follows.

Quadrant 1 (GOD)

The moral prototype of those who hold these beliefs is solidarity people, altruists, those concerned about human rights,  those against torture and the death penalty and those who collaborate with humanitarian organizations. They consider and value all human beings equally regardless of their intelligence, culture, country, age, sexual identity, sexual preferences, political preferences, race, skin color, abilities, etc. They are contrary to (involuntary and harmful) experimentation with human beings.

Quadrant 2 (PARTICLE)

These people share the moral concerns of quadrant 1, but they also include all animals with a central nervous system. They are defenders of animal rights. They try to minimize the suffering of all beings that feel. They are contrary to experimentation with animals, and also with biological neural systems, since these could generate sentience and suffering.

Quadrant 3 (EMERGENCY)

In addition to assuming the moral positions of quadrants 1 and 2, these people consider the possible emergence of sentience in machines and therefore robot rights, computer simulations and, in general, software, which has been constructed in a similar way or under similar conditions like those under which we -biological beings that feel-, have been built. In particular, they prevent the implicit risk in the construction of very complex physical or digital systems, capable of reasoning and / or capable of evolving.

Quadrant 4 (MATRIX)

Those who consider these hypotheses, in addition to taking into account the three moral positions described above, take into account other possibilities related to the physics and philosophy of suffering that can be very unintuitive and could even be considered improbable, but whose implications in relation to prevention of suffering, if true, would be immense; and therefore consider it morally correct and necessary to devote at least a part of the resources available to investigate about these possibilities.

 

The answer to the question about the possible sentience in machines, according to each one of the quadrants, with nuances, seems to me to be the following:

Quadrant 1 (GOD)

“The question is absurd, machines can not feel, nonhuman animals can do it, but it is not very relevant, since the only relevant being is the human being, made in the image and likeness of God, the chosen people, anointed of divinity, what legitimizes we humans to use animals for our benefit and of course, also machines.”

Quadrant 2 (PARTICLE)

“Dry machines, made of metal and plastic, can not feel, whereas a biological machine, built using artificial cells, could do it.”

Quadrant 3 (EMERGENCY)

“We humans, as well as other animals and all living beings, are, in short, machines, therefore, what are known as robots, and in general machines built by humans and even artificial simulations can feel if met certain conditions of complexity and evolution in an appropriate environment, as has happened with us, animals.”

Quadrant 4 (MATRIX)

“Not only robots could feel. Atoms and even ideas could feel. We do not understand reality well and we do not know what is possible.”

 

References of Quadrant 1 (GOD):

  • Simulation Argument: Nick Bostrom
  • Belief Map
  • Quote about God, sentience and animals: “I will defend the thesis that a class of animals … will not only be resurrected at the eschaton, but will be deified in much the same way that humans will be. That they will become, in the language of Narnia, ‘talking animals.’ Language is the characteristic mark of high intelligence. So I am suggesting that they will become full-fledged persons (rational substances) who can look back on their lives — both pre- and post-personal — and form attitudes about what has happened to them and how they fit into God’s plan. If God is just and loving, and if they are rational and of good will, then they will accept, though with no loss of the sense of the gravity of their suffering, that they were an important part of something infinitely valuable, and that in addition to being justly, lavishly rewarded for it, they will embrace their role in creation. In this embrace, evil is defeated.” (p. 3). https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-problem-of-animal-pain-a-theodicy-for-all-creatures-great-and-small/
  • “I don’t find improbable that there are some kind of superior being for whom we can be some kind of property or a creation. But as we give random details (or based on our fears or desires) of that superior being, it becomes more and more improbable.” Manu Herrán
  • Panspermia: Fred Hoyle

References of Quadrant 2 (PARTICLE)

References of Quadrant 3 (EMERGENCY)

  • Thalamo-cortical loops: Francis Crick, Anil Seth
  • Emergentism
  • Functionalism
  • Robert Daoust‘s “Descriptive Eemrgentism”: Sentience is what it feels like to be a wave-particle structure that emerges within the field of forces that permeates the nervous system of an organism with the appropriate highly negentropic neural elements. Those elements represent (are linked to) their physical substrates, interrelate in a theater-like play of data-sharing, and are able to give rise to characters within an affective narrative, i.e. a valuative mental story, i.e. a “consciousness theater” where characters (i.e. qualia) are linked through tensions that become intentions because the characters mean something to one another in the emerging stream of phenomenal occurrences. Thus, during evolution of species as well as in a newly formed individual, protosensory, protocognitive and protovolitional processes are happening in an organism without consciousness until they are caught in some toroidal wave field where those processes interact and give rise to quite another kind of processes: sentience processes. Those are fast and complex, but let’s say ultra-simplistically that they transform, for instance, a certain visual sensory neural impulse into the color red, a quale, a consciousness theater character that cognitively means, after many evolutionary repetitions, ‘good to eat’ to another quale, a certain visceral sensory impulse transformed into a hunger feeling character, and to yet another quale, a certain cognitive representation of a motor impulse transformed into a feeding behavior character.
  • Brian Tomasik‘s The Eliminativist Approach to Consciousness
  • What is sentience? – Jacy Reese eliminativism
  • Eliminative materialism
  • Charvaka
  • IIT – Integrated Information Theory (Giulio Tononi)
  • Symmetry Theory of Valence (Mike Johnson & Andrés Gómez Emilsson)

References of Quadrant 4 (MATRIX)

Posted by Manu Herrán

Founder at Sentience Research. Chief Advisor at The Far Out Initiative,

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