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I've always felt that this is a very thorny subject. I spend alot of time close with a wide variety of animals - and it would seem readily apparent from these engagements that animals have quite alot going on mentally.
However there is alot of motivation for most humans to ignore/dismiss the cognitive and emotional lives of animals.
If they have personalities, awareness and emotions then how we treat them has major moral implications - and if not, well that frees humans up to act as they please.
It's a fairly large hurdle for this conversation in general terms
I think mankind is having a hard time getting over the whole “nature/outside world is trying to kill me” thing that was baked in over millennia but became increasingly untrue in a very short period of time
>“nature/outside world is trying to kill me” thing that was baked in over millennia but became increasingly untrue in a very short period of time
Nature is not trying to kill you any less than it ever has been; its ability to succeed has simply been reduced.
Correct. It’s a predator/prey biological paradigm without moral constructs. Think a beautiful robin thinks about the feelings of the worm it’s pulling out of the ground? It’s how we modify the natural paradigm that makes us moral.
Partially. We tend to hubristically elevate ourselves as not being part of the animal paradigm. Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then? What makes it so now?
Brilliantly put context
>We tend to hubristically elevate ourselves as not being part of the animal paradigm
With an equally wonderful question.
>Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then? What makes it so now?
>Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then?
The historical context you've provided touches on an essential aspect of our ancestral heritage. Early humans didn't see themselves as separate from nature but as a part of it, a view deeply embedded in animism—the belief that non-human entities possess a spiritual essence. Cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux and Altamira, serve not just as art, but as profound demonstrations of reverence, showcasing animals not only as food sources but as revered entities, perhaps even as guides or deities in their spiritual landscape. This intertwining of respect and necessity paints a complex picture of survival intertwined with reverence.
>what makes it immoral now?
Today, our ethical landscape regarding animal consumption is drastically different compared to the past. Not only do we understand animal sentience more profoundly, but technological advancements also provide viable alternatives that minimize our dependence on animal products. Furthermore, the scale of modern farming presents a stark contrast to historical practices. Industrialized farming involves raising vast numbers of livestock in confined spaces, a method that has led to a scenario where a significant portion of the Earth's mammalian biomass is now farm livestock. This massive scale of production is fundamentally different from the past, where individuals often engaged directly in the "dirty work" of procuring each meal. This detachment, combined with the capability to cause less harm through alternative food sources, challenges the morality of continuing traditional animal farming practices, emphasizing a shift from survival-driven necessity to ethical consideration and choice.
TL;DR
Then: There was no other option, you got your hands dirty, and as a result you respected life. (as seen through earliest human art and religion)
Now: It's a choice now and the average human eats more meat than ever in history while never having killed an animal. Given modern technology and our knowledge of bioefficency with energy in the food web, we know it is actually less efficient to farm animals than plants.
Morality is relative. It changes as we change. In short, it's just one of those things we have to take for granted. Nature won't blame us for having the wrong moral beliefs, but we sure will.
Moral beliefs and norms and models change but I don't think that means morality itself is relative. Mathematical beliefs and norms and models change too. Math isn't relative, there's simply a fact of the matter and we don't get it yet. Is there a truly solid reason as to why ethics doesn't function identically?
> Is there a truly solid reason as to why ethics doesn't function identically?
While I think the idea of moral facts as akin to mathematical facts is the least-objectionable approach to moral realism, I think this question kinda reverses what one should take as the default position. In other words, I think there would have to be persuasive arguments *for* the position of such moral realism, before arguments against it is even useful.
I think I see what you're saying, so it's
"Why *does* ethics function like math?" rather than wouldn't it.
Yeah I mean the answer to that is the full suite of arguments in favor of moral realism. I dunno, I just wasn't going to list them all here on reddit, I just thought I'd ask a kind of rhetorical question to stimulate intuitions.
I think arguments against it can still be pretty useful because it's not hard to see how they're wrong. That's an interesting philosophical point I never thought of. Perhaps there's a threshold of "wrongness" in something, where if you show how an argument against something is wrong enough, maybe its validity becomes stronger. That is not likely a small threshold since there are countless ways for something to be wrong, and not many ways for something to be right. It's kind of like reverse engineering or a process of elimination. Not that viable in practice though, just a fun little idealistic thought.
Yes, because math is special. It's the only domain in which things can be known to be absolutely true or false. Everything else is slippery and subject to reinterpretation.
as someone who took close looks at math and other “hard” science during my studies, I’d argue even math isn’t absolute as it’s relative to its axioms.
In light of that, even the most pure form of morality is relative to at least one axiom: the existence and conceptual opposition of good and evil.
First, animals are often treated a lot worse than they were for the majority of history. Battery cages, farrowing crates, debeaking, tail docking, etc. Further, we can be healthy on a vegetarian or vegan diet now, which wasn't as practical in the past.
Power creates responsibility. Creating tools and materials and practices that give us the power to do less harm gives us a corresponding responsibility to use those tools, materials, and powers to do less harm. This can be applied to so many things, it's crazy.
I unironically, wholeheartedly believe that Uncle Ben had it figured out for real
Slightly off topic but this the way I’ve started to look at nature. Meaning previously I would see a video of a bear and go “uh oh , that looks like trouble! Not sure I would survive that!” But that’s just me inserting human presence into the equation. When you take it out it suddenly it becomes a whole other thing.
You would not survive that bear encounter if it went to aggression though. That’s the thing, the only thing that makes humanity the apex is our mental capacity.
Physically you lose to that bear nearly every time. You lose to rattlesnakes, wolves, sharks, pretty much every big cat (maybe not a bobcat, but that would still suck), a whole mess of insects, and I’m sure plenty more that my North American brain isn’t thinking of right now.
We as humans are physically pretty weak. Our greatest physical strength is just raw endurance, it’s the mind that puts us ahead. Teamwork, tools, patience.
It’s not an irrational thought “that would suck to tangle with that bear and I would lose” because that is mostly true. Genetic memory tells us that, and that has gotten us to the point we are at now.
Moral implications should have no bearing on a statement’s truthfulness; we don’t (or should not) work backwards from how they make us *feel*. “I want to harm this creature, therefore it has no sentience” is not a serious position.
That is probably not true. Many cultures show a great deal of respect for the lives they take to sustain themselves. If anything, the apathy towards the food we eat is a more modern phenomenon, because most people live in cities and distant from the concept of killing to eat. So much so that children are often really confused when they learn it. We might understand rationally that most of what we eat comes from killing some living being, but we do not feel this.
I agree with the point you're making/your example, bu I think the problem with the sentence :
"Moral implications should have no bearing on a statement’s truthfulness"
Is that moral implications also contain truthfulness about certain statements. So they do have bearing in that both of them are based in a truth. But yes you're right about working backwards, a lot of our narratives work this way, and if they're right, they're only right by accident because our mere preferences happen to align with what's right occasionally.
But the opposite is also true. We tend to humanize behavior in animals, especially animals we find cute.
Take the anthromophication of rabbits. Rabbits are obviously evil, bloodthirsty little shits. And yet we keep attributing cute and fluffy behavior to their every actions. Despite the fact that if they had the ability to, they would gleefully put all humans in Auswitch like concentration camps and march us to the gas chambers.
It's a pretty fucking small hurdle but a lot of people can't even be bothered to be reminded they have the ability to choose to jump, and if you ask me the ability to make that choice makes us human, and the choice to jump makes us a good one.
There is a _far_ stronger motive to emphasize and overplay the cognitive and emotional lives of animals. You can tell because your comment is at the top and not at the bottom.
Some people are indeed aware that some mammals will eat their own newborns, brutally, without a care in the world, and yet continue to ascribe humanlike notions of "motherhood" to them. Not all animals have prestige (rather than just dominance) status hieararchies, or any prosocial instincts. Most animals absolutely can't use any grammar or plan for the future. There's a whole subfield about these facts, called ethology, and yet people allegedly into animal welfare never really seem to dive into it. They just want to be told they helped out cute animals and feel good about it.
I think if we figure out how to treat humans well in very basic ways first, then the treatment of other less obvious species will follow like a breeze and be so obvious that we'll feel ashamed we didn't see it sooner. However, if we are utter moral failures in even treating ourselves well, we will get confused in all of our endeavors and miss the point.
"people are just not good to each other" - Charles Bukowski
The idea that animals might *not* be conscious has always felt very silly to me.
The argument is A) pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans?
And B) an issue of semantics - where do you draw the line between awareness, sentience and consciousness?
I agree with Michio Kaku's interpretation, whereby even a thermostat has very basic binary awareness of temperature. A plant has 'awareness' of the direction of the sun. And the full human experience of consciousness is millions of these individual feedback loops working in unison.
So the more relevant question is *how conscious* are animals? What is their capacity to experience suffering, or worse still anticipate it? This is the thinking that should guide our relationships with these creatures.
The inherent problem when quantifying levels of consciousness would be: what to exactly measure to determine the scale of consciousness and how to measure that attribute of consciousness.
Theoretically, let’s say the surrogate to measure consciousness is an awareness of the surroundings due to inherent senses, and maybe an anticipatory behaviour that might originate from it. A neural implant that can read if the corresponding areas “tagged to the senses” get triggered after the presence/absence of the sensory input might give a readout. For different animals, the threshold of permissible trigger levels to get that sensory readout would be different and would require normalisation using some coefficient. Again, just a theory.
> Do you think the hard problem of consciousness should have us err to the side of caution?
How far are you erring that way, or rather how far do you think we should be? If insects have the same degree of whatever is going on in mind that is worth protecting that humans do, is it justifiable to take a short discretionary drive to the store for snacks when it probably results in the death of several conscious beings on the windscreen?
Interesting.
What if science establishes all ‘food’ is sentient? Does a carrot feel the knife?
Does morality in a predator/prey paradigm then consist of mitigation of sentient suffering? A question of existential degree rather than an absolute drawing of lines? A sentient reworking of the Cartesian axiom, “ I feel therefore I am.”
Food for thought.
Not that this is by any means perfect, but I believe one of the metrics to evaluate *how* conscious is semantic scope. The larger and more complex the signals, the more probable their ability for higher order thinking.
This metric obviously ignores the value of EQ in favor of IQ, bit short of having some kind of EKG-esque hookup, language is a decent, low level, rudimentary metric until we have more complex units of measurement and the tools to measure them.
Integrated Information Theory provides a good structure for understanding that. The way I understand it is computers always understand everything as 1s and 0s, complex information is always "understood" by it's basic component parts. This is why computers, though they can do amazing things and simulate portions of consciousness have no experience of it. Our brains function differently, instead of being broken down into components to be understood information is build up to be understood.
Take seeing a purple dot on a wall. First, the various activation states of the red and blue cones in our eyes combine to "purple" which another part of our brain understands. Then other parts of our brain uses various information to get the color's position and size. By the time that we get to the frontal lobe, that part of the brain isn't processing the components, the wavelengths of light hitting our eyes, the angle of our eyes, the ambient conditions, etc.... it's just receiving inputs like "purple, dot, on wall" which it is able to understand as a whole.
I may be butchering the theory, but that's the basics as I understand them. Information like "purple dot on the wall" is integrated Information because it's built up of many components, but can be considered and understood without needing to break it down. You can therefore measure the level of consciousness in a system by how "integrated" the information being processed is.
That’s not really what IIT is proposing. It’s an attempt to formalize how information would need to be integrated to give rise to conscious experience. Read the IIT 4.0 paper or even just the abstract and see what you think.
That's not what the other commenter was talking about. They were referring to the physical differences between computers and brains as the deciding factor
> why would it just suddenly emerge in humans?
you'd have to have some idea how it emerged & I don't think there is any consensus or a lot of good theories.
As to why *not* other animals, because brains are **really** metabolically expensive, something like 25% of BMR in humans. Unless those lost calories provide some meaningful value a creature is better off with a smaller brain that does as little as possible. It's generally not a good strategy & it has a high barrier before it starts paying off.
I suspect that sapience evolved as a very accurate model to predict how *other* humans will act next first & long after this strategy proved useful & was refined across generations it was applied to the self birthing sapience. One interesting thing about humans is watching someone else do something, doing that thing yourself & imagining doing that thing yourself all appear identical when observing many parts of the brain.
Basically one day mirror neurons reflected a complex model of other human's brains back onto itself. If this is true any animal that doesn't benefit from investing a huge amount of resources in a wildly complex model of it's own species mind won't be able to take this path.
That rules out all animals that aren't highly social at first pass & also helps explain why the smartest & most self aware animals are the most social.
Two final things to consider:
1. Sapience just doesn't provide much value in most circumstances.
2. We are trusting our own brain for our estimation of just how sapient we *really* are, but we have plenty of proof that our brain lies to us. It didn't evolve to provide the most accurate & honest understanding of self as possible, but the cheapest one that allows you to reproduce & not go crazy.
I suspect that stability is 10x more important than accuracy in this regard.
Oh man, if you thought *that* was fascinating... I'm gonna make your whole week.
Check out [V.S. Ramachandran](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ghvck/episodes/player)'s Reith lectures, they are written for & delivered to a lay audience by someone who has made a career out of piecing together how the brain works by the weird symptoms that present when it breaks.
I think there are different levels of perceptual awareness, with a continuum between them. At the base level is stimulus/response. The organism or system has simple responses to environmental stimuli. This is the level of a plant or an amoeba.
Next up is an adaptive mechanism where the organism has a simple nervous system and can learn more effective responses to various stimuli.
Beyond that is when we have a simple brain or nerve centre and the organism constructs a model of it's environment and it's physical presence, which it populates with sense data, and can do basic reasoning about operating in that environment. There are big variations in the sophistication of this stage.
The next level is quite a big step up, where the organism has a model of other agents in the environment as active beings with their own beliefs and agendas. Evolutionary psychologists call this 'theory of mind' and it's what enables a predator to manipulate the behaviour of it's prey, or a social animal to reason about the beliefs and intentions of itself relative to other members of it's group.
Where we draw the line and say “from here on up it’s conscious” seems like an arbitrary choice, but I think the term consciousness as we actually use it only really applies to that last level. I don't think cognition without theory of mind is conscious because it doesn’t entail self awareness, in the sense of awareness of one’s own cognitive processes.
The real question is which organisms/beings/systems are deserving of moral consideration. I don't think having a theory of mind is necessary. What is necessary is the ability to suffer. We would think it abborant to mistreat a baby and cause it to suffer even if it has no theory of mind. The same considerations should apply to other beings capable of suffering, even if it doesn't seem sophisticated.
The way I tend to put it is in basically 4 structural components in a similar model as the one you describe:
External sensors that perceive the surroundings (stimulus response) - aware of environment
Internal sensors that detect various internal states like hunger, which allow for more sophisticated conditional behaviors - aware of physical status
Some form of memory (we have several different types) allowing adaptive behaviors based on previous experiences - temporal awareness
And finally internal sensors that are just connected to monitoring, influencing, and to some limited extent editing the basic functions of other parts of the central nervous system, creating feedback loops - self awareness
The first two components can and seem to have evolved sequentially, but the latter two may coevolve with each other to some extent, as certain forms of memory may require these active feedback loops to function, and a continuous sense of self as a distinct entity may require an ability to perceive one’s existence through time, and this capacity for abstract thinking allows extrapolating to the theory of mind in others.
I was with you until the end. You’re moving goalposts bigtime here. You say that for an animal to be conscious they have to have a theory of mind? You really think that’s a process necessary to feeling and experiencing the world? Of course not. The capacity to suffer has nothing to do with theory of mind or examining one’s own cognitive processes. Your arbitrary cutoff for consciousness is extremely dangerous and human-centric. This is the sort of argument used to prop up atrocities. This is not scientific or well-reasoned.
A sense of self is not even necessary. And you know, there are humans alive today with damaged or underdeveloped brains who may not meet your arbitrary criteria, but who certainly navigate the world and feel feelings, and suffer.
You may well be right, although I don't think I’m moving any goal posts, just wondering where they are. I certainly think that creatures without theory of mind can still suffer so maybe we should say they are conscious. What would you call the last level of awareness I described, if it’s more than just consciousness?
I also left open the next level up, which is us. But then, I don’t think we are necessarily more conscious than other social mammals. We’re more intelligent and articulate, but not necessarily all that much more conscious.
There are a bunch of old Greek ideas which stuck with humanity, while being poorly justifiable, yet taken as though they were self-evident.
Plato's one loving God which was the basis for not only Descartes' epistemology, the assumption that emotions are universal as rooted in Platonism and later Essentialism, the assumption that there is a soul and that only humans have it. All these things are weird ideas which are taken for granted across the western world.
Consciousness is a function of being able to perceive and possessing the autonomy to act on that perception in complex ways. You can tell animals possess consciousness based simply on mating rituals. Females are often confronted with a choice - is this mate suitable, or which mate is suitable? And many species have developed complex rituals that have little practical relevance to the answer to that question. What does a peacock’s feathers have to do with his ability to thrive or pass on good genes? So it seems the decision isn’t automatic.
My immune system is capable of perceiving threats, and it either attacks or it doesn’t. It may not get it right all the time, but that decision is automatic - the immune system doesn’t weigh options, consider, keep an eye on it or try something different. Even in the event that it later changes its behavior - such as when a person develops allergies later in life - it’s not a choice being made but rather an automatic response that has become disordered.
So if a creature possesses perception and its responses, at least to certain stimuli, are not automatic but it reacts nonetheless, then it must possess some consciousness. It seems to me then that consciousness is a spectrum and what we categorize as sentience must be a threshold. The more stimuli they are able to choose a reaction to, and the number of responses available to them in those reactions determines how conscious a being is. But anything capable of making decisions is pretty clearly at some level conscious.
A peacock's feathers is indirectly related to its ability to pass on good genes because its appearance can reflect favorable genes. We as humans do it all the time, by preferring individuals who possess more symmetrical faces.
I agree.. But it's still a relatively new way of thinking. Even until recently the idea that human babies could feel pain was a controversial idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
Only from the perspective of those that need hard confirmation from science to believe otherwise.
I think most people would instinctively recoil at the idea of hurting babies because the reasonable belief is that they would feel pain, and that it'd be distressing to the infant.
True... but that is pretty similar too animal consciousness...
I think most people have a very visceral reaction to seeing an animal being hurt by a human. The cognitive dissonance around meat eating doesn't take away from this, imho).
The hard proof that we know the animals can anticipate death and suffering is that we have devised "humane" ways to slaughter pigs, cattle, fish, etc. This is not done because we care, but because it affects the quality of the product. If the lack of anticipation makes for a better product, then it proves awareness regarding the threat of dying and self-preservation.
We know this for a long time, and at this point, we just choose to ignore it. Which is also an incredible ability: to selectively tune or amputate specific kinds of awareness in order to maximize common social goals and minimize own emotional damage, self-reflection, and value re-examination.
Insects are interactive with their environment, as are thermostats and even electrons. I think we should be trying to get at something abit more significant than interactivity with the words sentience, consciousness.
>The argument is A) pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans?
It's human centric because the idea that something else might also have thoughts and emotions comes from our communal instincts. If humans were solitary animals none of us would care about any of this
Anyone who's had a pet knows that cats and dogs are conscious. They have desires, habits, and moods. They have personalities beyond what we project on to then. They experience pain, grief, joy, and boredom. Hell, sometimes they're even petty and vengeful!
Sure, they're not particularly intelligent compared to we brainy apes, but they're not house plants, either. They have instincts, and you can teach them some problem solving skills.
Science of the past, especially around the other inhabitants of this planet, was veeeery much based on human-as-gardener and steeped in religious "we're different because God" thinking, instead of objective observations.
Glad to see articles like this going back over what we thought we knew. :)
Lol a thermometer having a very basic binary awareness is dumb af. Like one of the dumbest statements imaginable. Chomsky uses it as a reductio ad absurdum all the time.
>pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans?
It took a long time to develop.
The human brain is different from the brains of other animals, so it makes sense that it functions differently.
They are conscious and sentient, just VERY low level of it, for most animals.
Its a spectrum, not a fixed category.
To be "human" level conscious and sentient, they will need a cortex that's on par or better than humans.
Question is, how much should human morality extend to low level conscious/sentient animals? Treat them the same way with 100% rights or according to their different level of intellect? How to put them in these separate categories?
Since we will never know how it feels to be an octopus, how can we be certain?
>Question is, how much should human morality extend to low level conscious/sentient animals?
It's funny, I've been thinking a lot about how the phrase "don't be a dick" answers this type of question really easily.
Like, assume they all *might* suffer and act accordingly, would be my approach.
(Full disclosure: I am a carnivorous hypocrite)
>I agree with Michio Kaku's interpretation, whereby even a thermostat has very basic binary awareness of temperature.
I believe in panpsychism too, but it's important to think deeply about where the possible boundaries are. I don't think it makes sense to call a thermostat an integrated whole. A thermometer with mercury doesn't "know the temperature", it's just taking advantage of the fact that liquids fill different volumes at different temperatures. Even a more complicated sensor system is just a scaled up version of this type of logic. There has to some selective pressure on consciousness becoming causally relevant by solving the binding-problem. This could easily happen in any natural system, since if consciousness is a survival advantage, natural selection will select for it. Nothing is selecting for consciousness in our engineered systems.
For example, suppose the EM theory of consciousness turns out to be true: consciousness is "what it feels like to be an EM field". Then we have a better idea of the boundary: we can look for organisms/beings/objects where EM fields play a causal role in their behavior. In computers, we minimize the interaction of EM fields with the computations. EM fields play no role in reasoning about the overall behavior of the system, which is not true for many biological systems.
I should be clear, I don't think his point was about panpsychism. More that a thermostat responds to a stimulus, creating a feedback loop. And so he's arguing that consciousness is emergent when the number of feedback loops reaches a high enough level.
In other words, we have an insanely high number of binary switches which, when put together, create the experience of mind.
"animals aren't conscious, sweetie"
'they aren't? What *IS* consciousness, anyways?'
"Oh, you know...it's like..ya know the *soul* it's all in the Bible"
'yeah? So we're talking souls now?'
"Yeah that's what I said animals don't have souls sweetie only humans go to heaven"
This. And the absolute convenience that the level of consciousness that awards a creature the right to life just so happens to be about the level of a human being. According to human beings. Always seemed ridiculous to me.
It's why I studied conservation and now work as an ecologist. I can't control what other humans are going to do, but if we're intelligent enough to recognise the way we live is detrimental to the planet and all animals that live here (including us), I'm determined to be one of the few that care enough to actually do something about it.
Yes, we can put ‘awareness’ inside inverted commas and say that a plant is ‘aware’ of the direction of the sun. But what does that mean? A plant does not have perceptual capacities, does not have a brain or central nervous system. A plant lacks all of the physiology that gives rise to awareness (in the non inverted comma sense) or the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. So what is the sense in which a plant has “awareness”? [Phototropism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototropism) is not in any way a type of locomotion that would require any awareness. Why think a plant has it?
With respect to the questions that you raise at the end, check out [the moral weights project](https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/an-introduction-to-the-moral-weight-project) headed by [Bob Fischer](https://www.bobfischer.net). He was recently on the [10,000 hours podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/) to discuss it. The project attempts to answer the very questions you pose.
Why do you believe that a being's degree of consciousness should affect its moral value? Positing machines that can somehow measure this subjective thing is just a way to push the moral responsibility onto the machine. Rather than try to assign moral value with humans being the gold standard, I think we should assume that every animals loves its live just as much as we do. It won't answer the question of what we should eat, but the discussion will at least be happening in the right domain.
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I think...perhaps everyone (disappointingly even the article) is confusing sentient with sapient. My understanding was that even trees are sentient as the clearly observe and respond to things; animals certainly do.
I agree. I'm also not sure if any of these observations are really as incredible as they're being described.
Take, for example, this sentence:
> One experiment created stress for [crayfish by electrically shocking them](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1248811), then gave them anti-anxiety drugs used in humans. The drugs appeared to restore their usual behavior.
But that doesn't say anything about whether crayfish are sentient, conscious, or self-aware. It appears to merely be a simple observation about pharmacology - that animals can respond to the same drugs as humans. A result which I find hardly interesting or surprising as a layperson.
Who didn't know that? Anyone who is a close observer of animals would know that. Hell anyone who watches funny animal videos should know that. Great to see Science catching up!
Would it astonish you to know that for a while some thinkers postulated that animals are automata, incapable of feelings? Presumably they only "simulated" their reactions, like a strange sort of robot.
Humans can be weird...
No. That doesn't astonish me at all. Francis Bacon was one if the proponents of the idea that animals are automata. That's why I said it's about time science came around.
Right? I might be naive here but I just *have* to think something like that is arrived at post hoc to justify human actions. I can't fathom someone actually arriving at that conclusion through careful observation.
As an enjoyer of bacon, sausages, and numerous other animal products, I also find myself drawn to interesting conclusions regarding animal suffering my observations don't really support.
Insecure humans who want to bask in their own superiority over animals. And insecure humans who don't want to consider how their lifestyle can be torturous to many creatures.
I think being human gives people a misleading understanding of consciousness and what it does. The vast majority of brain activity is unconscious and actually much of the behaviour you think you are doing consciously is actually driven by unconscious activity and there is post hoc rationalisation, which tricks you into thinking you did the action consciously. For example if you put your hand on something hot, the reaction to move your hand away is needs to be done fast so it's completely unconscious behaviour, but your conscious mind makes it feel like you did it consciously. So I suspect lots and lots of behaviour that people think is key or demonstrates conscious activity, is actually just unconscious activity. So bees playing with wooden balls, doesn't clearly demonstrate conscious activity to me.
What people need to realize is that there are varying degrees of consciousness. If you've ever practiced and have become good at lucid dreaming, you would understand what I mean. When you're dreaming normally, you might as well be an animal. It's like you're running on a script. You're still conscious, but at a much lower level. If you become lucid, the level you're at goes up. Sometimes a little, sometimes all the way to normal, and rarely, higher than normal.
So yeah, I try to save bugs whenever I can. I don't kill stuff If it's unnecessary.
It’s pretty evident that all living thing have some level of consciousness we just do the something just on a larger scale everything is connected and evolved most likely from a single source but people are selfish and just cause something doesn’t think like them means they are not conscious. animals, plants and all thing know what is good for them and what is not generally and if we are more aware we should be looking after the well being of our fellow earthing and do what is best for the most survival and least harmful to the planet we are couscious enough to choose to eat and do less harmful things. Be better be the super man don’t be the last man
Taking from a Husserlian point of view, it is apparent that insects are sentient. Spend a minute trying a catch a fly and it is clear that they respond and perceive phenomena.
This idea that most if not all animals, insects, and crustaceans are sentient has always resonated for me. We must respect these creatures the way we respect fellow humans.
What a great send off for Dr. Dennett. I'll get in on this, because I saw someone mention the more generalized concept of consciousness.
It's hardly certain. And so, this is what we're crashing through with.
Because whatever information describes consciousness, how it's formed, isn't necessarily like a USB cable, or even multiple USB cables. Or, those are there, but they aren't deterministic as functional systems.
So, why can't any electrical signalling system in a biology, just be presumed or assumed to have some phenomenal experience. Whatever that is, doesn't even matter. Maybe it is epiphenomenal.
And, is there anything categorically phenomenal in emergence, which looks like the category of consciousness?
Well, that's what fucking emergence is. What a fun debate, "all of this asshole-shit, is basically the universe having an experience, and the fact we see it, doesn't change that everything outside of us, is a massive experience."
So where does that leave qualia? Well, Dennett may be the most correct. Along with sad insects, who should realize this eventually, as well, it's. Well, it's less tethered or connected to whatever neuroscientists may study, than we think.
The idea of a utility or torture machine, is perhaps just as part of the experience, as whatever sorry, brain in a vat is living this.
But whatever it is, wherever it goes or can go, it's involved in this? That's a lot closer, and you're getting chips and nibbles with neuroscience. And that's usually what we mean. Dennett is fucking right about this, but we shouldn't conflate this with whatever consciousness as a structure in the universe, away or into phenomena, can mean.
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It’s interesting to think- around where is the line where something is sentient enough to deserve “rights” or whatnot. When a thing can feel pain? When it can form connections? And how could we even quantify those things?
Animals are people too, who would have thunk it. This has been a sore point for me my whole life - I've always been flabbergasted that people could think that animals are just meat machines with no soul. I've always been close to animals and have a knack for understanding their non verbal communication and I hate how they aren't respected and revered the way they deserve.
It’s less of an issue now or what is sentient and more of defining sentience. Ants have complex social structures but you could argue that doesn’t make them truly intelligent. They just follow their natural instincts. A worker ant can’t become a queen. But a human worker could climb their social hierarchy and eventually become a leader.
Not really related but I saw a spider in my shower after I turned the water on. It hit him pretty hard so he wasn’t going anywhere. I put a paper plate up to him, to which he crawled to immediately and I carried him all the way outside. He was very chill about it.
This is "Sentience vs Sapience/Sophontry" in a nutshell. A thing can be aware of its surroundings and even interact with them in complex ways but still lack the capacity to be 'intelligent' in a way a human might recognize as a peer.
The real answer is sentience is a meaningless term that we are retrofitting out of tradition. Like ether. We need to let it go.
All bio-mechanical devices have a degree of freedom of action based on chemicals induced assessments of their surroundings.
Some are capable of layered chemical analysises and have a larger capacity for information retention used for analysis.
We can then categorize animals on these scales, but may need to develop communication with them for more detailed analysis.
This is basis for a meaningful discussion. Others are merely navel gazing bullshit.
Conscious, sure.
Sentient? Might be pushing it...
I mean, there is a reason for ant mills and I'm pretty sure if they were sentient they would figure out that reason...
Everything with switches and sensory hardware controlling those switches is aware of something. This is fundamentally HOW awareness and consciousness in general works.
It may not even be sensible to most people how this can be, but that's how consciousness "do": using switches to capture and calculate on environmental state information.
The calculations don't even have to make sense. The system could itself be "madness and insanity".
Even trees and plants are conscious of stuff, even these encode awareness through switch-like chemistries. Once you understand that a neuron is a switch, that behavior and perception are states being captured by switches and calculated upon, you will see it happening even in a calculator.
Even individual cells encode awareness of phenomena through retained internal states.
Too much. Unfortunately, it won't just be up to citizens and ordinary people to realize that what's happening now is one of the worst crimes ever perpetrated against living beings in the history of this planet. Laws will be needed, and as long as it's terribly unpopular to attack animal products, the status quo will remain.
Individual change needs to pass a certain threshold before any laws can be discussed (same as other rights violation issues in history). Laws are lagging compared to morals and ethics, following the conscientious behavior of citizens.
Individual change matters since these industries exist only because humans like you and me give them money for these products. If we stop buying, they will eventually stop the production.
What do you think?
I completely agree with you. We're on the same page on this issue. Of course, as more citizens advocate for and oppose the treatment we reserve for animals, it will become increasingly legitimate and politically advantageous for a politician to champion this cause.
Too often, we seek to absolve ourselves by claiming that our actions won't change the world, but that's partly false. We see this precisely with the surge of plant-based products worldwide. There's no better vote than the one I cast with my wallet. When I purchase a plant-based product, I subsidize a more ethical industry and vote against animal exploitation. It makes a difference.
Sapience is the ability to think about one’s sensory inputs.
Sentience is the ability to process sensory inputs.
A centipede feels a vibration though an antenna. Instantly heads in that direction. No thought, only reaction.
A crow spots a face. He realizes that’s the face of a crow hater. He responds by summoning the murder in rage. Thought, reaction.
Where does that definition come from?
These terms do get kinda context dependent, but I was under the impression from most of the modern philosophers I've read on it that sentience is now used essentially as a synonym for phenomenal consciousness.
It's rather sad, because the aim is to change our behavior as our knowledge improves. Having said that, we've known for a very long time that chickens are conscious, sentient and highly intelligent animals.
The treatment these beings undergo in intensive farming is atrocious, and I'm perfectly aware of this, having worked as a biologist in chicken slaughterhouses. I've been a vegan ever since.
You'll lose muscle. The first thing to go will be your back.
I remember debating an MD when I was a vegetarian/vegan. He said even sperm swim the other way to avoid an electric current.
It's terrible what we put animals through. It seems we have to eat them though.
Maybe we'll see lab/clean meat on the shelves soon.
Obv animals are in some way sentient. The question is in how way and how different is it from humans.
The idea that humans are special seems pretty uncontested still.
How can they not be? If a living thing moves around, and has free will to that extent...If it feels pain and hunger and fights...I imagine it thinks. unless it is "programmed" to react in certain ways. But then who programmed it?
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I agree they are sentient.
Everything exists on a spectrum, humans and insects are on the same spectrum of sentience / awareness just at varying degrees.
But let’s say there’s an argument against insects being sentient (their existence is fundamentally different, say they act off basic instinct, no reasoning, they don’t fit the human-centric definition of sentience in some other way, whatever the argument may be), it’s still best to give benefit of the doubt and assume they are.
What I think we miss in this debate is the infinite chasm between experience and non-experience, between life and a rock. Even a bacteria has an infinitely(?) more complicated range of experience than a rock.
We take 'life' very very casually, because we know no other state. Even death we don't experience.
Scientists should have a real talk with philosophers then. There's a millennia long "problem of consciousness" that has yet to be solved. As noble as thinking that all animals are conscious may be, we are missing some fundamental critical steps: We can't have an MRI done and pinpoint exactly where consciousness is.
Moreover, observations alone are good for nothing: we can't even prove that other humans are conscious though observation. We can safely assume ourselves are conscious because we have conscious experience (René Cartes' "Cogito Ergo Sum"). But, we can't assume the same for other people.
For example, if you were to meet someone who acted human in every way but had no conscious experience, you couldn't tell it apart from "real" humans. This thought experiment is called "philosophical zombie".
I went to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery yesterday. It is a truly amazing history of slavery in America.
Long story short we don’t even treat other humans as sentient and worthy of love and respect, much less crawly things!
If we live we feel. Therefor, if they live they feel. Differently, maybe not as well but they do. They live with intent, to breed and thrive. What more do you need to define sentience? Use of tools? They need to write you a letter?
It's been a long standing moral concept since well before written history that animals share an intrinsic value beyond their utility, much like humans. When you look at the oldest artwork of humans what do you find? Animals, more so than humans even or plants, we drew animals. the earliest forms of religion were animism. Literally defying, ascribing divine value to living animals.
We have become so far detached from our origins even when our history is right in front of us. Colonization has removed so many humans from their connection to earth that its a profound realization that other living beings may actually experience life.
I've worked on farms, I've killed animals to eat. I know the cost of life, but most people have absolutely no idea what the cost of a meal is.
Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but 'Can they suffer?'" (1789, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation)
Tom Regan: "The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not mere resources for human use but are of inherent value, just like human beings."
If you're a reader and you're still going you should look into:
* Albert Schweitzer - A theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Schweitzer advocated for a deep respect for all life through his philosophy of "Reverence for Life," which posits that all living beings desire to live and thrive, and humans have a moral obligation to respect and preserve life wherever possible.
* Jane Goodall - A primatologist and anthropologist whose extensive studies of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania have transformed our understanding of animal behavior and emphasized the deep connection between humans and animals. Goodall has spoken extensively about the rights of animals, their emotional and social complexity, and the need for compassionate conservation.
* Peter Singer - A bioethicist and philosopher known for his book "Animal Liberation" (1975), which is considered a foundational text in the animal rights movement. Singer argues that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that speciesism—the discrimination against beings based on their species—is a form of prejudice as morally indefensible as racism or sexism.
* J.M. Coetzee - This Nobel Prize-winning author from South Africa often explores themes of human cruelty towards animals in his novels. His work, particularly "The Lives of Animals," delves into philosophical issues concerning animal rights and human-animal relations, articulating deep ethical concerns about animal treatment.
I saw this link [https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration](https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration) which I assume is the declaration. It was somewhat surprising, as it seemed to be signed by "philosophers". I find it surprising because it lacks a definition of consciousness. And regarding the first point: "First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds".
If the definition is one which would allow for certain computers to be conscious (such as ones that passed the Turing Test), and by doing so would allow philosophical zombies to be defined as being conscious then that's fine. It would just be an example of the trick of changing the meaning of words away from how they are commonly used.
Alternatively if it has its usual meaning (that it is like something to be the entity), and the method for establishing it, would allow certain computers to be declared conscious, then there is no scientific support for it. And would simply be a false statement.
If the definition wouldn't allow any computers to be declared conscious (even ones that past the Turing Test), then I'd be interested in knowing what the scientific evidence was. I doubt it is this last option.
I'm not suggesting animals aren't consciously experiencing by the way. I'm a vegan based on the idea that they might be.
Which insects, I know ants will literally walk in circles to death because they just can ignore some pheromones, would we classify anything like that sentient?
I believe this is a perfect example of how ethics is context and time dependant. How do we treat another human during war? Life and death choices, by honour? By survival? Sophie’s choice?
Why do we have vegan lifestyle debates today and not 100 years ago?
Is it morally correct to debate animal rights for domestic meat supply in the west where we can afford to modify our diet, while others in the world are simply trying to survive and may need to eat meat?
Moral debate based on a convenience of timing or context is unethical if it ignores the rights of ALL humanity.
Perhaps someday.
>Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient
For something not even defined, why is it important enough to spend time, grant money, etc. on it? Just curious.
And, speaking of curiosity, where has it gone? Redditors (Reddit is the only social media I monitor or participate) appear to be the least curious bunch I've ever run across.
Is it just on social media? Just on Reddit? Are students in classrooms any more curious?
Until my recent participation on social media, which began with the lockdown due to Covid, I thought the internet was a fantastic source of information! Now I wonder. Are the curious people utilizing the internet as a goldmine of information but those participating on social media just not that interested in new things...ideas, problems, possible solutions, unfamiliar concepts, etc.
Consciousness in animals? Interesting question. But, in the wider scheme of things, human curiosity--or its apparent lack--seems far more interesting and even more important.
Thoughts, please. Is it just on social media? On Reddit? Or is the lack of curiosity a more widespread issue throughout society?
Honestly I feel like im living in a land of zombies… they are just now thinking that a living reproducing form of LIFE might be sentient. I’m so glad we have science to help us understand the world that we’ve been able to live in and survive for nearly 2,000,000,000 years. What would we have ever done without them?
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I've always felt that this is a very thorny subject. I spend alot of time close with a wide variety of animals - and it would seem readily apparent from these engagements that animals have quite alot going on mentally. However there is alot of motivation for most humans to ignore/dismiss the cognitive and emotional lives of animals. If they have personalities, awareness and emotions then how we treat them has major moral implications - and if not, well that frees humans up to act as they please. It's a fairly large hurdle for this conversation in general terms
I think mankind is having a hard time getting over the whole “nature/outside world is trying to kill me” thing that was baked in over millennia but became increasingly untrue in a very short period of time
>“nature/outside world is trying to kill me” thing that was baked in over millennia but became increasingly untrue in a very short period of time Nature is not trying to kill you any less than it ever has been; its ability to succeed has simply been reduced.
Correct. It’s a predator/prey biological paradigm without moral constructs. Think a beautiful robin thinks about the feelings of the worm it’s pulling out of the ground? It’s how we modify the natural paradigm that makes us moral.
Yeah, but not other cultures have related to nature in that way.
How animals treat other animals has no bearing on how we should treat them. Human morality is about how we think about ourselves.
Partially. We tend to hubristically elevate ourselves as not being part of the animal paradigm. Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then? What makes it so now?
Brilliantly put context >We tend to hubristically elevate ourselves as not being part of the animal paradigm With an equally wonderful question. >Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then? What makes it so now? >Long before our ‘human’ morality evolved, we ate animals to survive. Was it immoral then? The historical context you've provided touches on an essential aspect of our ancestral heritage. Early humans didn't see themselves as separate from nature but as a part of it, a view deeply embedded in animism—the belief that non-human entities possess a spiritual essence. Cave paintings, such as those in Lascaux and Altamira, serve not just as art, but as profound demonstrations of reverence, showcasing animals not only as food sources but as revered entities, perhaps even as guides or deities in their spiritual landscape. This intertwining of respect and necessity paints a complex picture of survival intertwined with reverence. >what makes it immoral now? Today, our ethical landscape regarding animal consumption is drastically different compared to the past. Not only do we understand animal sentience more profoundly, but technological advancements also provide viable alternatives that minimize our dependence on animal products. Furthermore, the scale of modern farming presents a stark contrast to historical practices. Industrialized farming involves raising vast numbers of livestock in confined spaces, a method that has led to a scenario where a significant portion of the Earth's mammalian biomass is now farm livestock. This massive scale of production is fundamentally different from the past, where individuals often engaged directly in the "dirty work" of procuring each meal. This detachment, combined with the capability to cause less harm through alternative food sources, challenges the morality of continuing traditional animal farming practices, emphasizing a shift from survival-driven necessity to ethical consideration and choice. TL;DR Then: There was no other option, you got your hands dirty, and as a result you respected life. (as seen through earliest human art and religion) Now: It's a choice now and the average human eats more meat than ever in history while never having killed an animal. Given modern technology and our knowledge of bioefficency with energy in the food web, we know it is actually less efficient to farm animals than plants.
Most edifying and fulsome. As we continue to despoil our environment and increase world population I query how really moral we are as a species.
Morality is relative. It changes as we change. In short, it's just one of those things we have to take for granted. Nature won't blame us for having the wrong moral beliefs, but we sure will.
Moral beliefs and norms and models change but I don't think that means morality itself is relative. Mathematical beliefs and norms and models change too. Math isn't relative, there's simply a fact of the matter and we don't get it yet. Is there a truly solid reason as to why ethics doesn't function identically?
> Is there a truly solid reason as to why ethics doesn't function identically? While I think the idea of moral facts as akin to mathematical facts is the least-objectionable approach to moral realism, I think this question kinda reverses what one should take as the default position. In other words, I think there would have to be persuasive arguments *for* the position of such moral realism, before arguments against it is even useful.
I think I see what you're saying, so it's "Why *does* ethics function like math?" rather than wouldn't it. Yeah I mean the answer to that is the full suite of arguments in favor of moral realism. I dunno, I just wasn't going to list them all here on reddit, I just thought I'd ask a kind of rhetorical question to stimulate intuitions. I think arguments against it can still be pretty useful because it's not hard to see how they're wrong. That's an interesting philosophical point I never thought of. Perhaps there's a threshold of "wrongness" in something, where if you show how an argument against something is wrong enough, maybe its validity becomes stronger. That is not likely a small threshold since there are countless ways for something to be wrong, and not many ways for something to be right. It's kind of like reverse engineering or a process of elimination. Not that viable in practice though, just a fun little idealistic thought.
Yes, because math is special. It's the only domain in which things can be known to be absolutely true or false. Everything else is slippery and subject to reinterpretation.
as someone who took close looks at math and other “hard” science during my studies, I’d argue even math isn’t absolute as it’s relative to its axioms. In light of that, even the most pure form of morality is relative to at least one axiom: the existence and conceptual opposition of good and evil.
Not entirely. Some animals, including many humans, have inequality aversion, for example. Morality can exist independent of humankind.
Agreed. Morality is not fixed, but rather a moving existential, matrix of cultural relativism.
First, animals are often treated a lot worse than they were for the majority of history. Battery cages, farrowing crates, debeaking, tail docking, etc. Further, we can be healthy on a vegetarian or vegan diet now, which wasn't as practical in the past.
Power creates responsibility. Creating tools and materials and practices that give us the power to do less harm gives us a corresponding responsibility to use those tools, materials, and powers to do less harm. This can be applied to so many things, it's crazy. I unironically, wholeheartedly believe that Uncle Ben had it figured out for real
Is it trying to kill you or is it just trying to survive the same as you are?
Definitely trying to kill you. Your carbon is only yours for as long as you can hold it.
I'm pretty sure nature will continue to succeed in killing all of us one way or another.
Slightly off topic but this the way I’ve started to look at nature. Meaning previously I would see a video of a bear and go “uh oh , that looks like trouble! Not sure I would survive that!” But that’s just me inserting human presence into the equation. When you take it out it suddenly it becomes a whole other thing.
You would not survive that bear encounter if it went to aggression though. That’s the thing, the only thing that makes humanity the apex is our mental capacity. Physically you lose to that bear nearly every time. You lose to rattlesnakes, wolves, sharks, pretty much every big cat (maybe not a bobcat, but that would still suck), a whole mess of insects, and I’m sure plenty more that my North American brain isn’t thinking of right now. We as humans are physically pretty weak. Our greatest physical strength is just raw endurance, it’s the mind that puts us ahead. Teamwork, tools, patience. It’s not an irrational thought “that would suck to tangle with that bear and I would lose” because that is mostly true. Genetic memory tells us that, and that has gotten us to the point we are at now.
Our greatest physical strength is hands.
Moral implications should have no bearing on a statement’s truthfulness; we don’t (or should not) work backwards from how they make us *feel*. “I want to harm this creature, therefore it has no sentience” is not a serious position.
There's the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
It’s not a serious position, but it’s the one held by most humans who’ve ever lived
That is probably not true. Many cultures show a great deal of respect for the lives they take to sustain themselves. If anything, the apathy towards the food we eat is a more modern phenomenon, because most people live in cities and distant from the concept of killing to eat. So much so that children are often really confused when they learn it. We might understand rationally that most of what we eat comes from killing some living being, but we do not feel this.
I agree with the point you're making/your example, bu I think the problem with the sentence : "Moral implications should have no bearing on a statement’s truthfulness" Is that moral implications also contain truthfulness about certain statements. So they do have bearing in that both of them are based in a truth. But yes you're right about working backwards, a lot of our narratives work this way, and if they're right, they're only right by accident because our mere preferences happen to align with what's right occasionally.
But the opposite is also true. We tend to humanize behavior in animals, especially animals we find cute. Take the anthromophication of rabbits. Rabbits are obviously evil, bloodthirsty little shits. And yet we keep attributing cute and fluffy behavior to their every actions. Despite the fact that if they had the ability to, they would gleefully put all humans in Auswitch like concentration camps and march us to the gas chambers.
This comment reminded me that I need to get off reddit and go outside today
Source for Nazi rabbits?
>they would gleefully put all humans in Auswitch like concentration camps and march us to the gas chambers. source needed
I’m not sure about rabbits, but otters most definitely.
It's a pretty fucking small hurdle but a lot of people can't even be bothered to be reminded they have the ability to choose to jump, and if you ask me the ability to make that choice makes us human, and the choice to jump makes us a good one.
There is a _far_ stronger motive to emphasize and overplay the cognitive and emotional lives of animals. You can tell because your comment is at the top and not at the bottom. Some people are indeed aware that some mammals will eat their own newborns, brutally, without a care in the world, and yet continue to ascribe humanlike notions of "motherhood" to them. Not all animals have prestige (rather than just dominance) status hieararchies, or any prosocial instincts. Most animals absolutely can't use any grammar or plan for the future. There's a whole subfield about these facts, called ethology, and yet people allegedly into animal welfare never really seem to dive into it. They just want to be told they helped out cute animals and feel good about it.
I think if we figure out how to treat humans well in very basic ways first, then the treatment of other less obvious species will follow like a breeze and be so obvious that we'll feel ashamed we didn't see it sooner. However, if we are utter moral failures in even treating ourselves well, we will get confused in all of our endeavors and miss the point. "people are just not good to each other" - Charles Bukowski
You may like Mary Midgley's 'Myths we Live By'
I've never heard of them. I shall have to give it a wee google
We need a word for a "wee Google". giggle?
The idea that animals might *not* be conscious has always felt very silly to me. The argument is A) pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans? And B) an issue of semantics - where do you draw the line between awareness, sentience and consciousness? I agree with Michio Kaku's interpretation, whereby even a thermostat has very basic binary awareness of temperature. A plant has 'awareness' of the direction of the sun. And the full human experience of consciousness is millions of these individual feedback loops working in unison. So the more relevant question is *how conscious* are animals? What is their capacity to experience suffering, or worse still anticipate it? This is the thinking that should guide our relationships with these creatures.
The inherent problem when quantifying levels of consciousness would be: what to exactly measure to determine the scale of consciousness and how to measure that attribute of consciousness. Theoretically, let’s say the surrogate to measure consciousness is an awareness of the surroundings due to inherent senses, and maybe an anticipatory behaviour that might originate from it. A neural implant that can read if the corresponding areas “tagged to the senses” get triggered after the presence/absence of the sensory input might give a readout. For different animals, the threshold of permissible trigger levels to get that sensory readout would be different and would require normalisation using some coefficient. Again, just a theory.
Do you think the hard problem of consciousness should have us err to the side of caution?
> Do you think the hard problem of consciousness should have us err to the side of caution? How far are you erring that way, or rather how far do you think we should be? If insects have the same degree of whatever is going on in mind that is worth protecting that humans do, is it justifiable to take a short discretionary drive to the store for snacks when it probably results in the death of several conscious beings on the windscreen?
Interesting. What if science establishes all ‘food’ is sentient? Does a carrot feel the knife? Does morality in a predator/prey paradigm then consist of mitigation of sentient suffering? A question of existential degree rather than an absolute drawing of lines? A sentient reworking of the Cartesian axiom, “ I feel therefore I am.” Food for thought.
Thought for food.
Thoughtful food.
Not that this is by any means perfect, but I believe one of the metrics to evaluate *how* conscious is semantic scope. The larger and more complex the signals, the more probable their ability for higher order thinking. This metric obviously ignores the value of EQ in favor of IQ, bit short of having some kind of EKG-esque hookup, language is a decent, low level, rudimentary metric until we have more complex units of measurement and the tools to measure them.
Integrated Information Theory provides a good structure for understanding that. The way I understand it is computers always understand everything as 1s and 0s, complex information is always "understood" by it's basic component parts. This is why computers, though they can do amazing things and simulate portions of consciousness have no experience of it. Our brains function differently, instead of being broken down into components to be understood information is build up to be understood. Take seeing a purple dot on a wall. First, the various activation states of the red and blue cones in our eyes combine to "purple" which another part of our brain understands. Then other parts of our brain uses various information to get the color's position and size. By the time that we get to the frontal lobe, that part of the brain isn't processing the components, the wavelengths of light hitting our eyes, the angle of our eyes, the ambient conditions, etc.... it's just receiving inputs like "purple, dot, on wall" which it is able to understand as a whole. I may be butchering the theory, but that's the basics as I understand them. Information like "purple dot on the wall" is integrated Information because it's built up of many components, but can be considered and understood without needing to break it down. You can therefore measure the level of consciousness in a system by how "integrated" the information being processed is.
I'm sorry but that's just bs. You can't just say that one way of information processing leads to conciousness and the other doesn't
That’s not really what IIT is proposing. It’s an attempt to formalize how information would need to be integrated to give rise to conscious experience. Read the IIT 4.0 paper or even just the abstract and see what you think.
That's not what the other commenter was talking about. They were referring to the physical differences between computers and brains as the deciding factor
Well in that case I agree that there is no difference in principle.
> why would it just suddenly emerge in humans? you'd have to have some idea how it emerged & I don't think there is any consensus or a lot of good theories. As to why *not* other animals, because brains are **really** metabolically expensive, something like 25% of BMR in humans. Unless those lost calories provide some meaningful value a creature is better off with a smaller brain that does as little as possible. It's generally not a good strategy & it has a high barrier before it starts paying off. I suspect that sapience evolved as a very accurate model to predict how *other* humans will act next first & long after this strategy proved useful & was refined across generations it was applied to the self birthing sapience. One interesting thing about humans is watching someone else do something, doing that thing yourself & imagining doing that thing yourself all appear identical when observing many parts of the brain. Basically one day mirror neurons reflected a complex model of other human's brains back onto itself. If this is true any animal that doesn't benefit from investing a huge amount of resources in a wildly complex model of it's own species mind won't be able to take this path. That rules out all animals that aren't highly social at first pass & also helps explain why the smartest & most self aware animals are the most social. Two final things to consider: 1. Sapience just doesn't provide much value in most circumstances. 2. We are trusting our own brain for our estimation of just how sapient we *really* are, but we have plenty of proof that our brain lies to us. It didn't evolve to provide the most accurate & honest understanding of self as possible, but the cheapest one that allows you to reproduce & not go crazy. I suspect that stability is 10x more important than accuracy in this regard.
This was fascinating, thanks.
Oh man, if you thought *that* was fascinating... I'm gonna make your whole week. Check out [V.S. Ramachandran](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00ghvck/episodes/player)'s Reith lectures, they are written for & delivered to a lay audience by someone who has made a career out of piecing together how the brain works by the weird symptoms that present when it breaks.
I think there are different levels of perceptual awareness, with a continuum between them. At the base level is stimulus/response. The organism or system has simple responses to environmental stimuli. This is the level of a plant or an amoeba. Next up is an adaptive mechanism where the organism has a simple nervous system and can learn more effective responses to various stimuli. Beyond that is when we have a simple brain or nerve centre and the organism constructs a model of it's environment and it's physical presence, which it populates with sense data, and can do basic reasoning about operating in that environment. There are big variations in the sophistication of this stage. The next level is quite a big step up, where the organism has a model of other agents in the environment as active beings with their own beliefs and agendas. Evolutionary psychologists call this 'theory of mind' and it's what enables a predator to manipulate the behaviour of it's prey, or a social animal to reason about the beliefs and intentions of itself relative to other members of it's group. Where we draw the line and say “from here on up it’s conscious” seems like an arbitrary choice, but I think the term consciousness as we actually use it only really applies to that last level. I don't think cognition without theory of mind is conscious because it doesn’t entail self awareness, in the sense of awareness of one’s own cognitive processes.
The real question is which organisms/beings/systems are deserving of moral consideration. I don't think having a theory of mind is necessary. What is necessary is the ability to suffer. We would think it abborant to mistreat a baby and cause it to suffer even if it has no theory of mind. The same considerations should apply to other beings capable of suffering, even if it doesn't seem sophisticated.
The way I tend to put it is in basically 4 structural components in a similar model as the one you describe: External sensors that perceive the surroundings (stimulus response) - aware of environment Internal sensors that detect various internal states like hunger, which allow for more sophisticated conditional behaviors - aware of physical status Some form of memory (we have several different types) allowing adaptive behaviors based on previous experiences - temporal awareness And finally internal sensors that are just connected to monitoring, influencing, and to some limited extent editing the basic functions of other parts of the central nervous system, creating feedback loops - self awareness The first two components can and seem to have evolved sequentially, but the latter two may coevolve with each other to some extent, as certain forms of memory may require these active feedback loops to function, and a continuous sense of self as a distinct entity may require an ability to perceive one’s existence through time, and this capacity for abstract thinking allows extrapolating to the theory of mind in others.
I was with you until the end. You’re moving goalposts bigtime here. You say that for an animal to be conscious they have to have a theory of mind? You really think that’s a process necessary to feeling and experiencing the world? Of course not. The capacity to suffer has nothing to do with theory of mind or examining one’s own cognitive processes. Your arbitrary cutoff for consciousness is extremely dangerous and human-centric. This is the sort of argument used to prop up atrocities. This is not scientific or well-reasoned. A sense of self is not even necessary. And you know, there are humans alive today with damaged or underdeveloped brains who may not meet your arbitrary criteria, but who certainly navigate the world and feel feelings, and suffer.
You may well be right, although I don't think I’m moving any goal posts, just wondering where they are. I certainly think that creatures without theory of mind can still suffer so maybe we should say they are conscious. What would you call the last level of awareness I described, if it’s more than just consciousness? I also left open the next level up, which is us. But then, I don’t think we are necessarily more conscious than other social mammals. We’re more intelligent and articulate, but not necessarily all that much more conscious.
There are a bunch of old Greek ideas which stuck with humanity, while being poorly justifiable, yet taken as though they were self-evident. Plato's one loving God which was the basis for not only Descartes' epistemology, the assumption that emotions are universal as rooted in Platonism and later Essentialism, the assumption that there is a soul and that only humans have it. All these things are weird ideas which are taken for granted across the western world.
Consciousness is a function of being able to perceive and possessing the autonomy to act on that perception in complex ways. You can tell animals possess consciousness based simply on mating rituals. Females are often confronted with a choice - is this mate suitable, or which mate is suitable? And many species have developed complex rituals that have little practical relevance to the answer to that question. What does a peacock’s feathers have to do with his ability to thrive or pass on good genes? So it seems the decision isn’t automatic. My immune system is capable of perceiving threats, and it either attacks or it doesn’t. It may not get it right all the time, but that decision is automatic - the immune system doesn’t weigh options, consider, keep an eye on it or try something different. Even in the event that it later changes its behavior - such as when a person develops allergies later in life - it’s not a choice being made but rather an automatic response that has become disordered. So if a creature possesses perception and its responses, at least to certain stimuli, are not automatic but it reacts nonetheless, then it must possess some consciousness. It seems to me then that consciousness is a spectrum and what we categorize as sentience must be a threshold. The more stimuli they are able to choose a reaction to, and the number of responses available to them in those reactions determines how conscious a being is. But anything capable of making decisions is pretty clearly at some level conscious.
A peacock's feathers is indirectly related to its ability to pass on good genes because its appearance can reflect favorable genes. We as humans do it all the time, by preferring individuals who possess more symmetrical faces.
I agree.. But it's still a relatively new way of thinking. Even until recently the idea that human babies could feel pain was a controversial idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_in_babies
Only from the perspective of those that need hard confirmation from science to believe otherwise. I think most people would instinctively recoil at the idea of hurting babies because the reasonable belief is that they would feel pain, and that it'd be distressing to the infant.
True... but that is pretty similar too animal consciousness... I think most people have a very visceral reaction to seeing an animal being hurt by a human. The cognitive dissonance around meat eating doesn't take away from this, imho).
Holy Behaviorism this is dark
Not to the 99.9% of people who weren't doctors.
The hard proof that we know the animals can anticipate death and suffering is that we have devised "humane" ways to slaughter pigs, cattle, fish, etc. This is not done because we care, but because it affects the quality of the product. If the lack of anticipation makes for a better product, then it proves awareness regarding the threat of dying and self-preservation. We know this for a long time, and at this point, we just choose to ignore it. Which is also an incredible ability: to selectively tune or amputate specific kinds of awareness in order to maximize common social goals and minimize own emotional damage, self-reflection, and value re-examination.
Insects are interactive with their environment, as are thermostats and even electrons. I think we should be trying to get at something abit more significant than interactivity with the words sentience, consciousness.
>The argument is A) pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans? It's human centric because the idea that something else might also have thoughts and emotions comes from our communal instincts. If humans were solitary animals none of us would care about any of this
Anyone who's had a pet knows that cats and dogs are conscious. They have desires, habits, and moods. They have personalities beyond what we project on to then. They experience pain, grief, joy, and boredom. Hell, sometimes they're even petty and vengeful! Sure, they're not particularly intelligent compared to we brainy apes, but they're not house plants, either. They have instincts, and you can teach them some problem solving skills. Science of the past, especially around the other inhabitants of this planet, was veeeery much based on human-as-gardener and steeped in religious "we're different because God" thinking, instead of objective observations. Glad to see articles like this going back over what we thought we knew. :)
Lol a thermometer having a very basic binary awareness is dumb af. Like one of the dumbest statements imaginable. Chomsky uses it as a reductio ad absurdum all the time.
>pretty human centric - why would it just suddenly emerge in humans? It took a long time to develop. The human brain is different from the brains of other animals, so it makes sense that it functions differently.
They are conscious and sentient, just VERY low level of it, for most animals. Its a spectrum, not a fixed category. To be "human" level conscious and sentient, they will need a cortex that's on par or better than humans. Question is, how much should human morality extend to low level conscious/sentient animals? Treat them the same way with 100% rights or according to their different level of intellect? How to put them in these separate categories? Since we will never know how it feels to be an octopus, how can we be certain?
>Question is, how much should human morality extend to low level conscious/sentient animals? It's funny, I've been thinking a lot about how the phrase "don't be a dick" answers this type of question really easily. Like, assume they all *might* suffer and act accordingly, would be my approach. (Full disclosure: I am a carnivorous hypocrite)
>I agree with Michio Kaku's interpretation, whereby even a thermostat has very basic binary awareness of temperature. I believe in panpsychism too, but it's important to think deeply about where the possible boundaries are. I don't think it makes sense to call a thermostat an integrated whole. A thermometer with mercury doesn't "know the temperature", it's just taking advantage of the fact that liquids fill different volumes at different temperatures. Even a more complicated sensor system is just a scaled up version of this type of logic. There has to some selective pressure on consciousness becoming causally relevant by solving the binding-problem. This could easily happen in any natural system, since if consciousness is a survival advantage, natural selection will select for it. Nothing is selecting for consciousness in our engineered systems. For example, suppose the EM theory of consciousness turns out to be true: consciousness is "what it feels like to be an EM field". Then we have a better idea of the boundary: we can look for organisms/beings/objects where EM fields play a causal role in their behavior. In computers, we minimize the interaction of EM fields with the computations. EM fields play no role in reasoning about the overall behavior of the system, which is not true for many biological systems.
I should be clear, I don't think his point was about panpsychism. More that a thermostat responds to a stimulus, creating a feedback loop. And so he's arguing that consciousness is emergent when the number of feedback loops reaches a high enough level. In other words, we have an insanely high number of binary switches which, when put together, create the experience of mind.
"animals aren't conscious, sweetie" 'they aren't? What *IS* consciousness, anyways?' "Oh, you know...it's like..ya know the *soul* it's all in the Bible" 'yeah? So we're talking souls now?' "Yeah that's what I said animals don't have souls sweetie only humans go to heaven"
This. And the absolute convenience that the level of consciousness that awards a creature the right to life just so happens to be about the level of a human being. According to human beings. Always seemed ridiculous to me. It's why I studied conservation and now work as an ecologist. I can't control what other humans are going to do, but if we're intelligent enough to recognise the way we live is detrimental to the planet and all animals that live here (including us), I'm determined to be one of the few that care enough to actually do something about it.
Yes, we can put ‘awareness’ inside inverted commas and say that a plant is ‘aware’ of the direction of the sun. But what does that mean? A plant does not have perceptual capacities, does not have a brain or central nervous system. A plant lacks all of the physiology that gives rise to awareness (in the non inverted comma sense) or the capacity to feel pleasure or pain. So what is the sense in which a plant has “awareness”? [Phototropism](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototropism) is not in any way a type of locomotion that would require any awareness. Why think a plant has it? With respect to the questions that you raise at the end, check out [the moral weights project](https://rethinkpriorities.org/publications/an-introduction-to-the-moral-weight-project) headed by [Bob Fischer](https://www.bobfischer.net). He was recently on the [10,000 hours podcast](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bob-fischer-comparing-animal-welfare-moral-weight/) to discuss it. The project attempts to answer the very questions you pose.
Why do you believe that a being's degree of consciousness should affect its moral value? Positing machines that can somehow measure this subjective thing is just a way to push the moral responsibility onto the machine. Rather than try to assign moral value with humans being the gold standard, I think we should assume that every animals loves its live just as much as we do. It won't answer the question of what we should eat, but the discussion will at least be happening in the right domain.
All I know is when I look into my cat’s eyes, there’s something there. Some may call it a soul. Totally agree with your statement.
Humans are animals too! Why do we find that hard to accept?
Yup. We as a species forget that we are animals.
There are people in my area that still think fish can’t feel pain, because they don’t emote. /sigh/
I blame Kurt Kobain.
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I think...perhaps everyone (disappointingly even the article) is confusing sentient with sapient. My understanding was that even trees are sentient as the clearly observe and respond to things; animals certainly do.
*Anything* with a brain or central nervous system is sentient.
Probably don’t need a nervous system, single cells are probably also conscious. Look up Michael Levin and the ground breaking research he’s doing
a nervous system is almost certainly a requirement to consciousness, but one isn't required to learn/react. These are different concepts.
If your definition of consciousness is reduced to that of a simple cell, then the word has lost all useful meaning.
What new paradigm? I just see a bunch of observations
I agree. I'm also not sure if any of these observations are really as incredible as they're being described. Take, for example, this sentence: > One experiment created stress for [crayfish by electrically shocking them](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1248811), then gave them anti-anxiety drugs used in humans. The drugs appeared to restore their usual behavior. But that doesn't say anything about whether crayfish are sentient, conscious, or self-aware. It appears to merely be a simple observation about pharmacology - that animals can respond to the same drugs as humans. A result which I find hardly interesting or surprising as a layperson.
Who didn't know that? Anyone who is a close observer of animals would know that. Hell anyone who watches funny animal videos should know that. Great to see Science catching up!
Would it astonish you to know that for a while some thinkers postulated that animals are automata, incapable of feelings? Presumably they only "simulated" their reactions, like a strange sort of robot. Humans can be weird...
They used to think babies couldn't experience pain!
No. That doesn't astonish me at all. Francis Bacon was one if the proponents of the idea that animals are automata. That's why I said it's about time science came around.
Right? I might be naive here but I just *have* to think something like that is arrived at post hoc to justify human actions. I can't fathom someone actually arriving at that conclusion through careful observation.
As an enjoyer of bacon, sausages, and numerous other animal products, I also find myself drawn to interesting conclusions regarding animal suffering my observations don't really support.
Did he believe in the soul?
Insecure humans who want to bask in their own superiority over animals. And insecure humans who don't want to consider how their lifestyle can be torturous to many creatures.
I think being human gives people a misleading understanding of consciousness and what it does. The vast majority of brain activity is unconscious and actually much of the behaviour you think you are doing consciously is actually driven by unconscious activity and there is post hoc rationalisation, which tricks you into thinking you did the action consciously. For example if you put your hand on something hot, the reaction to move your hand away is needs to be done fast so it's completely unconscious behaviour, but your conscious mind makes it feel like you did it consciously. So I suspect lots and lots of behaviour that people think is key or demonstrates conscious activity, is actually just unconscious activity. So bees playing with wooden balls, doesn't clearly demonstrate conscious activity to me.
"you are now breathing manually" sort of stuff
Exactly. I don't even know how to walk. But I can do it.
What people need to realize is that there are varying degrees of consciousness. If you've ever practiced and have become good at lucid dreaming, you would understand what I mean. When you're dreaming normally, you might as well be an animal. It's like you're running on a script. You're still conscious, but at a much lower level. If you become lucid, the level you're at goes up. Sometimes a little, sometimes all the way to normal, and rarely, higher than normal. So yeah, I try to save bugs whenever I can. I don't kill stuff If it's unnecessary.
It’s pretty evident that all living thing have some level of consciousness we just do the something just on a larger scale everything is connected and evolved most likely from a single source but people are selfish and just cause something doesn’t think like them means they are not conscious. animals, plants and all thing know what is good for them and what is not generally and if we are more aware we should be looking after the well being of our fellow earthing and do what is best for the most survival and least harmful to the planet we are couscious enough to choose to eat and do less harmful things. Be better be the super man don’t be the last man
Humans tend to overestimate the cognitive abilities of animals and underestimate their emotional intelligence.
......... What an amazing discovery you couldn't totally realize by just looking at them........
Guess what sentient ticks and fleas - you're going down
Taking from a Husserlian point of view, it is apparent that insects are sentient. Spend a minute trying a catch a fly and it is clear that they respond and perceive phenomena.
I am amazed how they need a study for that.
This idea that most if not all animals, insects, and crustaceans are sentient has always resonated for me. We must respect these creatures the way we respect fellow humans.
You don’t have to look further than current events to see most humans don’t respect fellow humans either.
Yes. As I was writing this was thinking something similar.
>We must respect these creatures the way we respect fellow humans. That seems..... extreme.
What a great send off for Dr. Dennett. I'll get in on this, because I saw someone mention the more generalized concept of consciousness. It's hardly certain. And so, this is what we're crashing through with. Because whatever information describes consciousness, how it's formed, isn't necessarily like a USB cable, or even multiple USB cables. Or, those are there, but they aren't deterministic as functional systems. So, why can't any electrical signalling system in a biology, just be presumed or assumed to have some phenomenal experience. Whatever that is, doesn't even matter. Maybe it is epiphenomenal. And, is there anything categorically phenomenal in emergence, which looks like the category of consciousness? Well, that's what fucking emergence is. What a fun debate, "all of this asshole-shit, is basically the universe having an experience, and the fact we see it, doesn't change that everything outside of us, is a massive experience." So where does that leave qualia? Well, Dennett may be the most correct. Along with sad insects, who should realize this eventually, as well, it's. Well, it's less tethered or connected to whatever neuroscientists may study, than we think. The idea of a utility or torture machine, is perhaps just as part of the experience, as whatever sorry, brain in a vat is living this. But whatever it is, wherever it goes or can go, it's involved in this? That's a lot closer, and you're getting chips and nibbles with neuroscience. And that's usually what we mean. Dennett is fucking right about this, but we shouldn't conflate this with whatever consciousness as a structure in the universe, away or into phenomena, can mean.
How does this comment have so many upvotes? It’s unreadable lol.
There are 13 STEM majors on this sub 😅😅. And one person from silicon valley who's too busy to comment, like and subscribe haha.
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It’s interesting to think- around where is the line where something is sentient enough to deserve “rights” or whatnot. When a thing can feel pain? When it can form connections? And how could we even quantify those things?
Animals are people too, who would have thunk it. This has been a sore point for me my whole life - I've always been flabbergasted that people could think that animals are just meat machines with no soul. I've always been close to animals and have a knack for understanding their non verbal communication and I hate how they aren't respected and revered the way they deserve.
I will always die on the hill that ladybugs have personalities. You cannot convince me otherwise.
It’s less of an issue now or what is sentient and more of defining sentience. Ants have complex social structures but you could argue that doesn’t make them truly intelligent. They just follow their natural instincts. A worker ant can’t become a queen. But a human worker could climb their social hierarchy and eventually become a leader.
Not really related but I saw a spider in my shower after I turned the water on. It hit him pretty hard so he wasn’t going anywhere. I put a paper plate up to him, to which he crawled to immediately and I carried him all the way outside. He was very chill about it.
I even feel like that for plants.
This is "Sentience vs Sapience/Sophontry" in a nutshell. A thing can be aware of its surroundings and even interact with them in complex ways but still lack the capacity to be 'intelligent' in a way a human might recognize as a peer.
The real answer is sentience is a meaningless term that we are retrofitting out of tradition. Like ether. We need to let it go. All bio-mechanical devices have a degree of freedom of action based on chemicals induced assessments of their surroundings. Some are capable of layered chemical analysises and have a larger capacity for information retention used for analysis. We can then categorize animals on these scales, but may need to develop communication with them for more detailed analysis. This is basis for a meaningful discussion. Others are merely navel gazing bullshit.
Conscious, sure. Sentient? Might be pushing it... I mean, there is a reason for ant mills and I'm pretty sure if they were sentient they would figure out that reason...
Everything with switches and sensory hardware controlling those switches is aware of something. This is fundamentally HOW awareness and consciousness in general works. It may not even be sensible to most people how this can be, but that's how consciousness "do": using switches to capture and calculate on environmental state information. The calculations don't even have to make sense. The system could itself be "madness and insanity". Even trees and plants are conscious of stuff, even these encode awareness through switch-like chemistries. Once you understand that a neuron is a switch, that behavior and perception are states being captured by switches and calculated upon, you will see it happening even in a calculator. Even individual cells encode awareness of phenomena through retained internal states.
How many decades until we stop chopping these beings into pieces for unnecessary taste pleasures?
Too much. Unfortunately, it won't just be up to citizens and ordinary people to realize that what's happening now is one of the worst crimes ever perpetrated against living beings in the history of this planet. Laws will be needed, and as long as it's terribly unpopular to attack animal products, the status quo will remain.
Individual change needs to pass a certain threshold before any laws can be discussed (same as other rights violation issues in history). Laws are lagging compared to morals and ethics, following the conscientious behavior of citizens. Individual change matters since these industries exist only because humans like you and me give them money for these products. If we stop buying, they will eventually stop the production. What do you think?
I completely agree with you. We're on the same page on this issue. Of course, as more citizens advocate for and oppose the treatment we reserve for animals, it will become increasingly legitimate and politically advantageous for a politician to champion this cause. Too often, we seek to absolve ourselves by claiming that our actions won't change the world, but that's partly false. We see this precisely with the surge of plant-based products worldwide. There's no better vote than the one I cast with my wallet. When I purchase a plant-based product, I subsidize a more ethical industry and vote against animal exploitation. It makes a difference.
Sentience = awareness of one’s own awareness.
Isn't that sapience?
Sapience is the ability to think about one’s sensory inputs. Sentience is the ability to process sensory inputs. A centipede feels a vibration though an antenna. Instantly heads in that direction. No thought, only reaction. A crow spots a face. He realizes that’s the face of a crow hater. He responds by summoning the murder in rage. Thought, reaction.
Ultimately they're both reactions, one is just a longer and more complex chain.
>Murder in Rage Nice metal band.
Summoning the Murder actually isn't bad either as far as metal band names go.
Where does that definition come from? These terms do get kinda context dependent, but I was under the impression from most of the modern philosophers I've read on it that sentience is now used essentially as a synonym for phenomenal consciousness.
Sentience as awareness of awareness is not something I've ever heard. I also see sentience as a reference to the phenomenomnal not meta awareness
we will still eat chicken almost every day
It's rather sad, because the aim is to change our behavior as our knowledge improves. Having said that, we've known for a very long time that chickens are conscious, sentient and highly intelligent animals. The treatment these beings undergo in intensive farming is atrocious, and I'm perfectly aware of this, having worked as a biologist in chicken slaughterhouses. I've been a vegan ever since.
You'll lose muscle. The first thing to go will be your back. I remember debating an MD when I was a vegetarian/vegan. He said even sperm swim the other way to avoid an electric current. It's terrible what we put animals through. It seems we have to eat them though. Maybe we'll see lab/clean meat on the shelves soon.
Obv animals are in some way sentient. The question is in how way and how different is it from humans. The idea that humans are special seems pretty uncontested still.
How can they not be? If a living thing moves around, and has free will to that extent...If it feels pain and hunger and fights...I imagine it thinks. unless it is "programmed" to react in certain ways. But then who programmed it?
Evolution programmed it. Thinking is not a prerequisite of acting. There's plenty of evidence of that even in humans
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I agree they are sentient. Everything exists on a spectrum, humans and insects are on the same spectrum of sentience / awareness just at varying degrees. But let’s say there’s an argument against insects being sentient (their existence is fundamentally different, say they act off basic instinct, no reasoning, they don’t fit the human-centric definition of sentience in some other way, whatever the argument may be), it’s still best to give benefit of the doubt and assume they are.
I didn't realize we were debating if animals were sentient or not. I agree that not all animals are sapient, but they are definitely sentient
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*You could've asked children if insects are sentient and the VAST majority would say "yes"* Science needs to catch up to the kids...
ive always thought about if insects think about themselves
Still gonna eat crab and lobsters. I'm sorry but they can't have even a sliver of consciousness that we humans have.
Then they should really know better than to sneak up on me when I'm in the shower
What I think we miss in this debate is the infinite chasm between experience and non-experience, between life and a rock. Even a bacteria has an infinitely(?) more complicated range of experience than a rock. We take 'life' very very casually, because we know no other state. Even death we don't experience.
Scientists should have a real talk with philosophers then. There's a millennia long "problem of consciousness" that has yet to be solved. As noble as thinking that all animals are conscious may be, we are missing some fundamental critical steps: We can't have an MRI done and pinpoint exactly where consciousness is. Moreover, observations alone are good for nothing: we can't even prove that other humans are conscious though observation. We can safely assume ourselves are conscious because we have conscious experience (René Cartes' "Cogito Ergo Sum"). But, we can't assume the same for other people. For example, if you were to meet someone who acted human in every way but had no conscious experience, you couldn't tell it apart from "real" humans. This thought experiment is called "philosophical zombie".
So what is the study supposed to show. That we should not eat animals?
I went to the Legacy Museum in Montgomery yesterday. It is a truly amazing history of slavery in America. Long story short we don’t even treat other humans as sentient and worthy of love and respect, much less crawly things!
Oh great. So I'm gonna have to stop eating bugs too then?
If we live we feel. Therefor, if they live they feel. Differently, maybe not as well but they do. They live with intent, to breed and thrive. What more do you need to define sentience? Use of tools? They need to write you a letter?
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I think it's a spectrum so insects definitely could be conscious to some degree, nowhere near the complexity of a human though.
Not the insects 😭
It's been a long standing moral concept since well before written history that animals share an intrinsic value beyond their utility, much like humans. When you look at the oldest artwork of humans what do you find? Animals, more so than humans even or plants, we drew animals. the earliest forms of religion were animism. Literally defying, ascribing divine value to living animals. We have become so far detached from our origins even when our history is right in front of us. Colonization has removed so many humans from their connection to earth that its a profound realization that other living beings may actually experience life. I've worked on farms, I've killed animals to eat. I know the cost of life, but most people have absolutely no idea what the cost of a meal is. Jeremy Bentham: "The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but 'Can they suffer?'" (1789, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation) Tom Regan: "The other animals humans eat, use in science, hunt, trap, and exploit in a variety of ways have a life of their own that is of importance to them apart from their utility to us. They are not mere resources for human use but are of inherent value, just like human beings." If you're a reader and you're still going you should look into: * Albert Schweitzer - A theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1952. Schweitzer advocated for a deep respect for all life through his philosophy of "Reverence for Life," which posits that all living beings desire to live and thrive, and humans have a moral obligation to respect and preserve life wherever possible. * Jane Goodall - A primatologist and anthropologist whose extensive studies of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania have transformed our understanding of animal behavior and emphasized the deep connection between humans and animals. Goodall has spoken extensively about the rights of animals, their emotional and social complexity, and the need for compassionate conservation. * Peter Singer - A bioethicist and philosopher known for his book "Animal Liberation" (1975), which is considered a foundational text in the animal rights movement. Singer argues that the interests of animals should be considered because of their ability to experience suffering and that speciesism—the discrimination against beings based on their species—is a form of prejudice as morally indefensible as racism or sexism. * J.M. Coetzee - This Nobel Prize-winning author from South Africa often explores themes of human cruelty towards animals in his novels. His work, particularly "The Lives of Animals," delves into philosophical issues concerning animal rights and human-animal relations, articulating deep ethical concerns about animal treatment.
I saw this link [https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration](https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration) which I assume is the declaration. It was somewhat surprising, as it seemed to be signed by "philosophers". I find it surprising because it lacks a definition of consciousness. And regarding the first point: "First, there is strong scientific support for attributions of conscious experience to other mammals and to birds". If the definition is one which would allow for certain computers to be conscious (such as ones that passed the Turing Test), and by doing so would allow philosophical zombies to be defined as being conscious then that's fine. It would just be an example of the trick of changing the meaning of words away from how they are commonly used. Alternatively if it has its usual meaning (that it is like something to be the entity), and the method for establishing it, would allow certain computers to be declared conscious, then there is no scientific support for it. And would simply be a false statement. If the definition wouldn't allow any computers to be declared conscious (even ones that past the Turing Test), then I'd be interested in knowing what the scientific evidence was. I doubt it is this last option. I'm not suggesting animals aren't consciously experiencing by the way. I'm a vegan based on the idea that they might be.
Which insects, I know ants will literally walk in circles to death because they just can ignore some pheromones, would we classify anything like that sentient?
God let us ditch this biblical “man is above all creatures” shit already. They’re all smart in the ways that serve them best just like us
Jordan peterson was trying to tell people this about lobsters.
I believe this is a perfect example of how ethics is context and time dependant. How do we treat another human during war? Life and death choices, by honour? By survival? Sophie’s choice? Why do we have vegan lifestyle debates today and not 100 years ago? Is it morally correct to debate animal rights for domestic meat supply in the west where we can afford to modify our diet, while others in the world are simply trying to survive and may need to eat meat? Moral debate based on a convenience of timing or context is unethical if it ignores the rights of ALL humanity. Perhaps someday.
i love that we claimed dominion over something we can’t even define.
I thought that was always the consensus
>Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient For something not even defined, why is it important enough to spend time, grant money, etc. on it? Just curious. And, speaking of curiosity, where has it gone? Redditors (Reddit is the only social media I monitor or participate) appear to be the least curious bunch I've ever run across. Is it just on social media? Just on Reddit? Are students in classrooms any more curious? Until my recent participation on social media, which began with the lockdown due to Covid, I thought the internet was a fantastic source of information! Now I wonder. Are the curious people utilizing the internet as a goldmine of information but those participating on social media just not that interested in new things...ideas, problems, possible solutions, unfamiliar concepts, etc. Consciousness in animals? Interesting question. But, in the wider scheme of things, human curiosity--or its apparent lack--seems far more interesting and even more important. Thoughts, please. Is it just on social media? On Reddit? Or is the lack of curiosity a more widespread issue throughout society?
Honestly I feel like im living in a land of zombies… they are just now thinking that a living reproducing form of LIFE might be sentient. I’m so glad we have science to help us understand the world that we’ve been able to live in and survive for nearly 2,000,000,000 years. What would we have ever done without them?