"Speaking to whether reptiles or fish experience pain"...
So vertabrates definitely have pain receptors. It stands to reason they experience pain, at the very least.
I wonder if there are still people who doubt this.
It makes humans deeply uncomfortable to face the fact that the animals we eat and use might be more like us than we want to imagine. It’s clear to me watching my parents chickens play that there’s lights on in there. It might not be like my experience but they are conscious. I can’t and won’t eat animals.
Consciousness is not sentience, and if it's all semantics I don't care but if people are going to make moral arguments using this conflation between the two then I have a problem. As it says in the article, sentience is roughly the ability to feel valenced emotions (good/bad). Consciousness is many things, but importantly the ability to feel qualia, experiencing what feels like the 'blueness' of blue, for example.
It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.
It's also very likely plants have some sort of experience of the world that would be very alien to ourselves or animals. They have complex networks through roots and mycelial connections, communicate to one another through chemicals emitted and "smelled" through the air etc. By some this could be considered a form of consciousness. What that means for vegans I don't know
What exactly is "internal monologue"? It's heavily debated in the comments. I don't understand though, because when you learn to read you're mouthing words, and over your lifetime it's actually very hard to not mouth words when you read.
It makes me think that internal monologue is precisely an artifact of language itself. In this way, this debate and surprise over people "not having it" is not really profound. All people internalize language, that's the only way that not-mimicked language synthesis can happen. This is different from parrots parroting back what they hear for example.
Anyway, I'm curious about this debate over internal monologue. Perhaps it's really that people don't retrospect. That's different. They don't adopt viewpoints outside of their own. Is this really a physical limitation vs a choice?
Am I just ignorant about the state of this science?
In the article and linked NY [0] and Cambridge [1] declarations, no definition os "consciousness" was asserted. While hardly definitive, Wikipedia [2] claims "Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness."
Some would argue that what is commonly considered consciousness is a relatively recent phenomena in humans, the mind being a necessary but not sufficient condition. "The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans."[3]
0. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
1. https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...
Surely consciousness is not black & white, but a scale. Rocks at one end & us(?) at the other.
There was a recent post suggesting that our thoughts are 98% unconscious.
It's not hard to imagine that there could be some animals with more than 0.01% consciousness. After all, we started at 0% conscious and evolved a little - other species are probably some way down that track.
Human “farming” of animal biomass is greater than of all other land mammal biomass (wildlife), by an order of magnitude.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/NazFPXrwYl
We may not realize it but we are “The plague”.
We spread throughout the planet, ravage resources, bring down forests to build monocultures and urban sprawl, dispose chemicals in air and water. We have little regard for anything other than ourselves. We take actions to satisfy our insatiable momentary “feel good” cycle.
We grow kill and eat animals by the billions. Animals who spend their entire lives in tiny boxes suffering.
Imagine we were wild Koalas and another species was ravaging the solar system like this?
actual 'declaration':
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
and supporting 'background':
I read Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness as a young man and was convinced for the longest time that consciousness is just a type of information processing (or a type of wetware program) that creates a mental model of the external world, and that it is based on language, and therefore only accessible to humans, and does not require any further explanation.
I'm no longer quite so sure. The possibilities are that consciousness:
1) Is binary or exists in a continuous spectrum
2) Is fundamental property (panpsychism) or emergent
If it is a continuous, fundamental property, then what we experience as qualia (i.e. subjective, conscious experience) are merely a higher order version of any reaction of anything to any other thing (from a glass shattering due to blunt force, to a venus flytrap closing in response to an insect). It also implies that there may be other intelligent species out there with a much higher order of consciousness (not merely intelligence) capable of higher levels of conscious experience. In which case, we have a serious problem with the way we are treating some animals.
Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (Frans de Waal, 2016)
It's weird to think that consciousness is a binary thing that either is there or it isn't.
I believe it's a spectrum. I'm not even sure if humans are the farthest species on Earth towards one end of the spectrum. We might have the most complex language to focus our consciousness around but it doesn't mean others (like dolphins or elephants or whales) can't have better consciousness in some manner.
It's funny to think what a conscious species trying to reason about us would do. They can't communicate to us, they are subject to our decisions, and a lot of what we do must seem mindlessly destructive. Often they really are trying to communicate, but there just isn't a way.
I guess step 1 would be respecting the consciousness of all humans right?
Mosquitoes do: "REDRUM, must kill 0.5 of humanity"
I like scientists arguing
It should be a prerequisite to being and calling oneself a scientist.
Arguing that should be transparent and done in public.
science would be better for it.
Sigh The problem is so big, and so deeply rooted in our culture and history as predators/scavengers, that I just don't want to even go down this line of thinking - it's very very likely true animals have clear consciousness, but I'm not sure that would even change things.
The sooner we can move to indistinguishable (and cheaper) lab-grown meat, the better. I have very little hope of changing enough minds or culture to simply not eat meat, but I have considerable hope that we can trick ourselves through better savings and taste. Seems like the tech is going to land that direction. Full steam ahead - let's be weird pacifist vampires gorging off brainless flesh growths. Our apology can be a happy "never again!" as we dig into marbled wagu slabs.
In honor of Dennett's death, if we go with the proposition that consciousness is illusory to begin with, then it is fine to ignore the also-illusory consciousness across the animal world as well.
I will go ahead and claim that it is not like anything to be a bat (iykyk; see the Nagel reference in TFA). And, frankly, questions of consciousness have become a bit boring to me, despite being the focus of my interest for decades now.
Questions of intelligence, communication, social organization, etc are interesting. But questions about a consciousness phenomenon that may or may not even be real and has literally no consensus about theory or fundamental meaning across many disciplines? Boring.
Get back to me when even a bare majority of philosophers and researchers can agree on a definition of consciousness.
While I agree with vegans in spirit, I think humans are closer to obligate carnivores than not; ergo, I think it is a neccessary sin to sacrifice animal life for sustinence until such time we can grow the proverbial walls of muscle on artificial life support from stem cells more cheaply than [no sin tax] standard beef. At that point, we must shut the slaughter houses for good.
Is this a joke? Of course they’re conscious. Jeez.
> I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do
I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0].
There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead.
We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think?
0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932
nothing is true, everything is permitted
If you are on the fence on the topic of eating meat vs going vegan / vegetarian, this 2018 documentary might change your thoughts: https://watchdominion.org/
Warning: Some visuals may be disturbing.
Like do they worry about the future and think about the past? No.
I am not sure what the point of this is, except for vague handwaving and attention seeking behavior.
I don't see how sentience or consciousness has anything to do with anything.
Even admitting animal consciousness still leaves you a very long way away from anything like a framework of human rights.
Second, even if they aren't conscious, you should still take ecology into account. I don't think Redwood trees are conscious, but that doesn't mean we should go chopping them down without any thought.
[flagged]
Let alone animals with sentience, can anyone prove to me beyond reasonable doubts that there is actually a world that exists outside my senses, or mind?
Intuitively nonsensical but irrefutable thought: Everything about how animals think is based on human assumptions. They might actually like being eaten by humans. How can we know, when the animals haven't said it themselves? In fact, there are people like that in the world. Such people have pain receptors and higher cognitive abilities, yet they still think that way. In other words, analyzing their physiology alone cannot determine whether animals dislike being eaten.
I recall an experiment with bees I read about where the bees were in a box. One path went to food, another to little balls which had no value to bees. Yet the bees would go “play” with the balls. The article and scientists state that this may show that bees make time for entertaining themselves.
I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.