471–480 of 544 posts
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The first animal in orbit was Laika, a Soviet space dog. She was launched aboard Sputnik 2 on November 3, 1957. The first animals in space were fruit flies, launched by the United States aboard a V-2 rocket on February 20, 1947.
I wonder whether some large asteroid hit the earth and blasted some poor animal into space some millions of years ago...
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Ability to reflect non-heuristically on stimuli and not fall back into stress-reflex behaviour like schizophrenia. A animal that things god/the government/everyone is after them like a mice, is less concious then somebody able test that hypothesis and leave that fear filled fever dream. Its a scale though, and in my opinion, with considerable overlap, depending on situation and adaption.
Afaict, you are describing intelligence, not consciousness.
I once witnessed a spider controlling a motion activated flood light to catch prey. At first I assumed the flood light in my backyard was just being triggered by the wind, as a spider had built a web in front of the sensor, however I then noticed that the light would turn on even when there wasn’t any wind. Upon closer inspection, I found that the spider had created a singular strand of webbing, thicker than the rest…
To each web clung a small black spider, patiently waiting for its small prey to come along.
Not that the spiders had any awareness of being “patient.” A spider had no special skill other than building its web, and no lifestyle choice other than sitting still. It would stay in one place waiting for its prey until, in the natural course of things, it shriveled up and died. This was all genetically predetermined. The spider had no confusion, no despair, no regrets. No metaphysical doubt, no moral complications. Probably.
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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
Symbolic communication is much more precise.
Just like people thinking low-code or diagram based software development should be better. It isn’t an it was tried multiple times already.
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I'm sure that consciousness is a spectrum and that big mammals are near us on it, if there's any difference at all except for intelligence levels. At the same time I have no issues with animal resource factories. I justify their existence by the fact that I'm a carnivore and needed meat and fats to properly operate since forever, no need for complex philosophy here. The necessity to justify that against ethics usuall…
If you're human, you aren't an obligate carnivore, because humans can live healthily on a fully vegan diet. Animal products (meat, dairy, eggs) certainly gave pre-industrial humans a big boost as a dense and (at times) readily available source of calories and protein, but that's a far cry from "needing" it. Modern usage of animal products for food is purely for convenience and pleasure. A point could be made that tha…
But my main point (which I started to write above but seemingly decided to omit, to my own confusion) is that this fear-cold-hunger-devour-alive-die-young bs is how wild nature works every day for eons. I am its creature and should see no guilt except for true sadism.
I agree with regulating bad farms away, but suffering through reduction of my already small demand to zero barely helps anything.
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Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediat…
This is why the concept of consciousness is largely nonsense. The person that is blacked out is not unconscious. They just are not storing memories in order to remember the experience after the fact. Can you see it? It is right in front of you that consciousness doesn't exist. It is right in your own example. It is a 21st century superstition and English language flaw. People cling to this idea the way people use to…
Even if you are the only object in the universe that isn't a p-zombie, you still have it at your end. Why doesn't your physical body operate without "you" being in it most of the time?
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Afaict, you are describing intelligence, not consciousness.
I agree. I also agree with the article that "consciousness" is an overloaded term. I believe you and I would agree to it as something more akin to "sentience" but that is not the case for everyone. I feel this topic always seems to unknowingly devolve into disagreements on first principals.
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I once watched a spider in a web have to rapidly run around it's web and scoop up it's little baby spiders to escape a flame that was coming close to it. The reaction did not appear to be some kind of mechanical automated reaction - it very clearly had awareness of the danger, and an awareness of it's offspring, and made a coordinated effort to rescue them and move them away to safety. To me - as someone who is not a…
Just FYI, all the it's es you used in this comment are the wrong ones. Should have been its
> Attributing consciousness to animals based on their responses was seen as a cardinal sin. The argument went that projecting human traits, feelings, and behaviours onto animals had no scientific basis and there was no way of testing what goes on in animals’ minds. What's always been funny to me about the scientific approach to animal consciousness/emotions/empathy is that in a perfectly rational world the default as…
How about the rest of the world, since this is not universal? The fact that we mame, kill, and consume them probably has more to do with treating them as "less" and "other", otherwise you feel sad every lunch. I think it's simple avoidance, at a grand scale. Many cultures that do embrace the experience of other animals are also vegetarian, otherwise they would feel sad every lunch.
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Ever met a person who was blackout drunk? Easy example. They are very often not conscious but still emotional. You could easily imagine animals that exist in this state continuously without requiring chemical assistance. It makes sense on a neurological level as well. The more robust and evolutionarily older parts of the brain like the brain stem take much more ethanol to inhibit. The PFC is inhibited almost immediat…
Huh? You can absolutely have long in-depth discussions with a blackout drunk person about their current experiences. Are you claiming there’s some level of inebriation where you become a p-zombie? Of course, there’s also ’incoherently drunk’ which is getting closer to that.
After a brain injury, I had my memory truncated to around 30 seconds for a short time. I would claim I was probably less conscious because the time I could perceive and predict was truncated so incredibly small that I couldn't make sense of the past or future. I could perceive the present just fine, but it relatively meaningless/without context, so couldn't be extrapolated. I think something related to that will end up being a definition of consciousness: meaningful extrapolation of past experience. Or, maybe simply, a meaningful persistent world model, with an update loop.