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Asked by totaldestruction to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 13 Mar 2013.
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Jen Todd Jones answered on 13 Mar 2013:
This is actually a great question because for scientists the word ‘prove’ isn’t well liked! Very rarely to we have direct evidence or proof that something does or does not exist, so we tend to say that our research or experiments ‘support’ an idea or theory!
But if i had to give an answer, i guess it’d be my own existence? If you think about it, the brain is an organ that processes our experience of the world *only* through electrical signals. We know we’ve touched a table, or tasted a sugary treat, or heard a voice because our brain tells us so – but who is to say that that world is actually physically there, or is conjured by our brain alone?
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Susanna Martin answered on 13 Mar 2013:
As Jen mentioned prove is a hard word in science, in psychology we use a probability rule to see whether we think our results could have occurred by chance. if it’s less than 5% likely we say we have found something.
For example, group A is given chocolate and Group B is given nothing. If Group A performs better, we need to decide whether it is because they had chocolate or if it is likely that they would have performed better anyway.In answer to your question some of the things i’d like to research I can’t because we can’t find ways to measure them accurately. For instance how can you measure how motivated someone is? We can ask them or we could look and see how much time they spend doing it, but we would struggle to measure motivation by itself, because of this it’s really hard to prove whether things have an effect upon it. So I guess I believe that some of my experiments have an effect but I can’t 100% prove it because I can’t measure it well enough.
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Ben Brilot answered on 18 Mar 2013:
I think Jen and Susanna are right, in that ‘proving’ something is very difficult. What we tend to do is ‘disprove’ something instead: there are usually at least a couple of different theories (often our favoured theory and an alternative theory) competing to explain the phenomenon we’re interested in. Through experiments we try and say that the data we have is very unlikely to be explained by the alternative theory, so, for now at least, the experiments say that our favoured theory seems to be the best explanation. Of course the data sometimes tell us that our favoured theory is rubbish, then it’s time for a rethink….
Anyway, as to your original question: I personally believe that consciousness isn’t an all-or-nothing phenomenon: I don’t believe that humans are conscious and all other animals aren’t. I think that gradations of consciousness are potentially possible and that allows other animals to have ‘experiences’ that, while not exactly like ours, are certainly enough to be able to say that we should care about how they’re ‘feeling’. Unfortunately we are a long way off being able to even design experiments that might show this. So for now it’s just a wild guess.
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James Stovold answered on 18 Mar 2013:
I believe in a theory called `liftable intelligence’, which essentially says that something doesn’t have to be alive in order to be intelligent. This is something that we can’t really prove because we don’t really know what causes intelligence, and have no way of measuring most of the time.
The alternative argument is that because something is not alive (such as a computer program), it can’t actually be intelligent in the same way as something that is alive, but there are very few ways of attacking either side of this argument, so the discussion continues along a very philosophical vein…
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