Do people not have dogs? They have more emotional intelligence than most humans and love, fear, play, plan, think, reason and communicate well. This is true for many animals. I'd say that most animals are just like human in terms of consciousness but less advanced in thinking and communicating (without debating about whales, dolphins, octopuses etc.)
Less advanced in symbolic thinking and communicating. There are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify that I would bet on elephants).
92 Billion animals are killed each year for food.[1] That doesn't include the 110 million that are killed each year for science. [2] These animals must not be conscious, or we would never do such a thing, right? Oh, and we keep over a billion pets in our homes and call them our friends. But they can't be conscious. The science must be flawed. /s [1] https://www.humanesociety.org/blog/more-animals-ever-922-bil... [2]…
Why is killing conscious stuff bad?
I see absolutely no reason for that. And if you do, that won’t be normative, because you’re a fallible person just like me and there’s no reason for why I should live my life according to your reasoning instead of mine.
The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could t…
I don't think it's really the case that "much of this discussion assumes" certain behaviors as being indicative of consciousness. Rather, it has been the case until recently that behaviorists pointed to various behaviors as being unique to humans, and jumped to the conclusion that this indicates that humans are conscious and other animals aren't. What has been happening recently is that one by one these behaviors have been show as not being truly unique to humans. It is becoming more and more undeniable that even when humans are fairly unique in the quantity of some of these characteristics, none of them are completely absent in all other animals, and many can be found to some degree even in very simple animals.
consciousness is a spectrum. Humans are more conscious than animals.
I agree but would word that as "...more conscious than most other animals." Humans are animals, and we don't have an agreed upon definition of consciousness that would allow us to quantify it so precisely that we can be sure of the way you worded it. Many of the smarter animals may have just as much (but somewhat different) consciousness as humans, and you we can definitely come up with a reasonable definition of con…
Some animals have better senses than humans (as you pointed out) but that doesn't make them more conscious than us. Maybe 2 aspects to measure degree of consciousness is intelligence and metacognition.
Do people not have dogs? They have more emotional intelligence than most humans and love, fear, play, plan, think, reason and communicate well. This is true for many animals. I'd say that most animals are just like human in terms of consciousness but less advanced in thinking and communicating (without debating about whales, dolphins, octopuses etc.)
Less advanced in symbolic thinking and communicating. There are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify that I would bet on elephants).
Orcas are better at communicating than humans are, their languages more directly resembles telepathy than the “encode thoughts into grunts that then need to be decoded” that we have. They are essentially beaming waveform pictures to each other
This doesn't add up to me. The majority of scientists really thought that animals didn't feel or experience things? That can't be true for scientists that actually observed animals. I can see how there might some type of conflict with a dualist or religious view of the soul though. But not a scientific conflict.
Yes.
It is considered normal to make a statement that all animals don't have self-awareness.
Because, well, you can't ask them and prove they do, right?
Scientist are even afraid to make those statements as they would be ostracized by the scientific community. (I've read an actual elephant-studying scientist's book which told exactly that).
The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could t…
It is indeed a hard question that one could also apply to humans. There is no way to know if someone else is conscious. It might be obvious for all people, but what about babies or people with advanced stages with dementia or certain types of brain damage? What about people with mental disabilities? (I have experienced some of these in family members.)
The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could t…
It is indeed a hard question that one could also apply to humans. There is no way to know if someone else is conscious. It might be obvious for all people, but what about babies or people with advanced stages with dementia or certain types of brain damage? What about people with mental disabilities? (I have experienced some of these in family members.)
Even for "normal" humans, the point is that consciousness is by definition unobservable from the outside, so everyone else but you can be un-conscious and you would have no way of telling. It's the p-zombies thought experiment.
The trouble I have with much of this discussion is it assumes many traits of animal behavior are indicative of consciousness. Bees play with balls, therefore consciousness? You can't just jump straight to that conclusion. There is so much our brains do that is subconscious, that we are not aware of. Heck, even signs of self awareness may not be indicative of consciousness. Arguably we are at the point that we could t…
92 Billion animals are killed each year for food.[1] That doesn't include the 110 million that are killed each year for science. [2] These animals must not be conscious, or we would never do such a thing, right? Oh, and we keep over a billion pets in our homes and call them our friends. But they can't be conscious. The science must be flawed. /s [1] https://www.humanesociety.org/blog/more-animals-ever-922-bil... [2]…