Judging Consciousness

The nicely named Mental Control Laboratory at Harvard is running surveys on how far people perceive various objects, ranging from rocks to heroin addicts, as having various mental properties. What I found interesting was that for the property “Consciousness”, people tended to rank the heron above the chicken. I too was tempted, at several times, to ascribe a higher level of consciousness to the heron, but realising that I knew no evidence for herons being in any way more mentally advanced than chickens, I resisted. Perhaps that temptation has something to do with our tendency to treat things that we consume as more object-like than animal-like. But I don’t think it’s entirely that. I would be tempted, for example, to ascribe more consciousness to a chicken than to a hummingbird. Perhaps size matters? Or perhaps that is something about the photo used that makes the heron look more intelligent — I, at least, thought that it did look more intelligent, but then I’d always thought herons and other long-necked and long-legged birds tend to look more dignified, aristocratic almost, than short-necked birds.

Other interesting results (which they will present to you after you complete the survey):

People tended to rate the toddler as more conscious than the corporate executive, and to rate Google as more conscious than the robot. I can understand the former, even if I disagree with it, but the latter is just puzzling. Perhaps it comes about from the way we talk and think about firms as though they were conscious actors? But don’t we think about robots that way just as often? Perhaps when we think of robots, their wholly mechanistic character is more salient, whereas firms have a less intimate association with mechanism.