Are animals conscious? New research

Good point.

No, I agree.

I think humans had exactly the same cognitive dissonance about slavery and racial-based discrimination (in all it's forms) for most of our history.

It wasn't so much that their HATE was so powerful that it superseded logical consistency, but rather the CONVENIENCE of this discrimination was so attractive. Classism is the same way.

We make up ipso facto justifications to continue to perpetuate inequality and exploitation that benefits us. The most recent version of this is globalization and all the arguments the west makes for how our reliance on 3rd world labour improves their livelihood. (It does; it's also more complex than that)

I'm not going to pretend that I WANT to be vegetarian or WANT to align my logical ethics with my actions. I clearly do not, I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.

But I do want to want to...

It’s very convenient to think animals aren’t conscious. Think about the ramifications: eating meat is eating a being, not just food; treating animals the way we do becomes unethical; we’re not at the top anymore; etc etc. Reassessing all these values and behaviors is hard, and we’d rather not, ergo animals aren’t conscious and are inferior to us.

I really appreciate your insight.

> I find eating meat too convenient and brings me too much joy.

Yes but then you have the question: Is your convenience worth more than someone's life? Does your joy justify someone's throat being cut?

I'd say that this is not the same as slavery or racial-based discrimination since this is someone's aliveness at stake and the only crime that they committed was being in a different body than you. This is not about forcing them to work or saying mean things, but immense pain and extreme suffering which causes the consciousness to leave the body.

> But I do want to want to...

That shows that your intelligence agrees but the mind, being connected to the senses, wants to divert attention towards sense pleasures.

Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that a human whose intelligence is stolen by the senses is no better than an animal: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. Now, I'm not saying this to be judgemental but this metaphysical system gives you a lens to see and act in the world.

What then separates us from being a human if we're no better than a pig rolling in dirt if all we know is running after one temporary sense pleasure to the next? and what if somehow after you die, your consciousness takes the body of a similar animal? (Unless of course you believe in Creatio ex nihilo).

These are questions to ask in life. The human birth is special because while being similar to literally every other species, this birth is the only kind of birth that allows one to philosophize and ask important questions in life.

Being a vegetarian is easy in today's world, especially if you're privileged to be earning more money than 5 families in South Asia combined. All it really takes, is accepting intelligence's advice, instead of letting the mind (which controls the senses) reign.

> enter a similar state

Sāṁkhya philosophy covers this. This state is called 'tamas', the state of ignorance.

> It means that being a conscious being such as a human is ridiculously improbable

Yes it is. Human birth and animal birth is similar if you notice: eating, sleeping, mating and defending. What's different then? Human birth is the only birth where it's possible to philosophize and ask questions about existence and ask about teleology, objective purposes in life. This is why human birth is rare and Sāṁkhya philosophy would say that every animal's consciousness will at one point experience the human body as consciousness keeps leveling up after each death, say from a tree to an insect to a fish to a bird to an animal to a human.

Animals are bound by their senses and instincts. They follow whatever their senses want them to so there's not much free will, it's compulsion by the senses.

Human beings have free will due to intelligence. One has 2 minds: the higher mind which is intelligence and capable of controlling the lower mind and, the lower mind which basically is connected to the senses (so mind would be like a hardware interface device controller).

The higher mind, intelligence would be like an OS scheduling tasks. When the HID Controller takes control, it allows anything and everything at once but add intelligence or OS to that equation and you have everything running in a systematic manner.

The senses would be like the hardware devices: Mouse, Keyboard, Speakers, Camera. All providing data and the HID controller trying to just take it all in, as much data as it possibly can get.

> so that life starts whenever a physical life begins

Consciousness is still consciousness. It's what enables this 'physical life' and it's what powers the 'mental life'. If you take them to be 2 different things, then that would ensue that the arrangement of subatomic particles in a particular mechanical configuration is capable of producing this 'physical life' but that is not the case.

Consciousness is the irreducible entity, separate from matter, that animates matter.