Spot the dinosaur

Academia is not a place I feel very comfortable and I tend not to visit very often but today I had another go at the Adventures in Consciousness Season, this time in the Museum of Natural History (a building I love) at the Conscious Planet Symposium, exploring how we define and understand different states of consciousness, from plants, humans and other animals, to AI'.

The panellists were:
Plant biologist and Head of Science at Oxford Botanic Garden, Chris Thorogood,
Fellow of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, who focuses on how the digital revolution is causing power structures to crumble and evolve, Carl Miller,
Psychologist and Director of the University of Oxford Mindfulness Centre, Willem Kuyken,
Anthropologist with wide-ranging interests including big cat-human interactions, Nayanika Mathur,
Journalist focusing on technology, society, big data and AI, Kenneth Cukier,
A psychologist not named in the programme who was probably brought in late when they realised the others were mostly men.

The 'define your terms' bit that you usually get at the beginning of anything academic was done by the audience of about 100 facilitated by Hot Poets. They asked us to call out one word that 'consciousness' made us think of, then two words, then a simile, then they turned all that into an impressive on-the-hoof poem which they read out before the panel was let loose. It's impossible to know what would have happened otherwise, but I think that was very effective at breaking down barriers between the 'experts' and the rest of us. A clever idea.

So what happened? Some disparate presentations; a summary of where different disciplines agree and disagree; a growing consensus that we have to 1) recalibrate our relationships with other entities and beings in the world and end anthropocentrism, in order to 2) change our behaviour to save the planet - for its own sake not for the (anthropocentric) sake of our descendants.

Along the way there were claims that machines (AI) and ballpoint pens (specific example) do not have consciousness but that tigers do (anthropologist's argument: when you put trail cameras in the jungle tigers take selfies (!) or destroy them because they don't like being observed) and plants do (biologist's argument: 'they fight each other for light').

I was a bit taken aback by these two claims and the one contribution I made was to say that we (anthropos) can try very hard to escape anthropocentrism but need to understand that we can't succeed because we are, by definition, the centre of our own viewpoints, e.g. 'fight' is an anthropocentric way to describe how plants respond to a stimulus. (I didn't bother to address the consequences of tigers inspecting unfamiliar objects in their habitat - that anthropocentric observation seemed beyond silly to me.)

I didn't expect that three of the panellists in their summing-up would agree with me.

Was it worth attending? Yes, the interdisciplinarity was interesting. I like seeing artificial subject barriers crumbling.
Did I learn anything? Sadly, no.
Did I change my mind about anything? No, and I am still glad I never tried to be an academic.