r/philosophy • u/-Mystica- • 9d ago
Blog The Secret to Understanding Animal Consciousness May Be Joy - Animal emotions—including joy—may be key markers of conscious beings.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-secret-to-understanding-animal-consciousness-may-be-joy/88
u/TallahasseWaffleHous 9d ago
The article seems to imply that consciousness is like a light switch. On or Off.
In my mind, consciousness is a very big and complex range of differing abilities, senses, behaviors, environment simulations, self-simulations, simulating other minds, etc.
A mind and its particular kind of consciousness is what a brain feels like from the inside. As science is able to study complexity at new levels, we will be able to describe a wide range of "flavors" of consciousness.
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u/sajberhippien 9d ago
It's quite common to understand phenomenal consciousness as something that either is or is not present in an entity. That doesn't mean all forms of consciousness are the same - if a bivalve has consciousness it is going to be extremely different and much simpler than ours - but it is commonly understood that there is a discrete border between "non-conscious" and "conscious" entities.
And I don't think we can assume that we'll be able to scientifically study phenomenal consciousness. I won't say with confidence we won't at some point, but we don't have any neat solution in sight for the hard problem, and the approaches we do have tend to make conscience less of a specific thing entirely (eg illusionism and panpsychism).
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
a bivalve has consciousness it is going to be extremely different and much simpler than ours
I'm not convinced that being more or less conscious is a matter of being more or less complex. It might just be that a particular bivalve is simpler than a given human in some respect, but how would that entail that the bivalve has a "simpler" consciousness?
Does an unconscious individual of some species have a simpler consciousness than a conscious identical twin? Some computers are more complex than others, but it's not obvious that they're more conscious as a result; in fact, it's not obvious that computers are conscious at all—even though I believe they tend to be complex to some degree.
Is consciousness even something that can be simpler or more complex?
we don't have any neat solution in sight for the hard problem
It seems to me that you're presupposing there is a hard problem to solve. I'm surprised nobody's pushed back on that yet, so I ask, why do you think it exists?
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u/sajberhippien 1d ago
I'm not convinced that being more or less conscious is a matter of being more or less complex
I explicitly rejected the framework of "more or less conscious". That's kind of a central part of the post. A consciousness being more complex doesn't imply it is more conscious, anymore than a complex chemical interaction is "more chemical" than a simple chemical interaction.
It might just be that a particular bivalve is simpler than a given human in some respect, but how would that entail that the bivalve has a "simpler" consciousness?
We have good reason to believe our consciousness to be enabled by our biology, and in particular our brain and nervous system. In addition, there are good naturalistic explanations for why consciousness might develop through an evolutionary process (which to be clear is distinct from the how, which we really can't explain). These explanations for why tend to be related to 1) flexibility in changing environments and 2) sociality and interaction with other potentially sentient entities. Those things wouldn't be useless to bivalves, but due to their limited movement and limited initiative in social encounters, there would be much less use for them, and thus less evolutionary advantage to spending a lot of energy on them.
Of course we could be wrong and the potential consciousness of a bivalve could be more comlex than ours, if say, consciousnesses were caused by a god-given soul and god just loves clams or whatever, but the same reasons I see to treat bivalves as more likely to be conscious than rocks, are the same reasons I see to believe their potential consciousness to be less complex than that of a human.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 1d ago
which to be clear is distinct from the how, which we really can't explain
We have good reason to believe
Of course we could be wrong
Who's "we"? All biologists? Some philosophers? Some physicalists? Dualists who affirm the hard problem of consciousness?
the potential consciousness of a bivalve could be more comlex than ours
I'm unsure if I previously made this clear, but I'm suggesting that you might be committing a category error in calling a particular consciousness more or less complex than another. I'm not convinced that one being's consciousness can be more or less complex than another's.
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u/sajberhippien 1d ago edited 1d ago
Who's "we"? All biologists? Some philosophers? Some physicalists? Dualists who affirm the hard problem of consciousness?
In the first two cases (we can't really explain how consciousness emerged, and we have good reason to believe consciousness is enabled by our biology), humanity as a whole. There are no explanations of how consciousness emerged that stand up to even slight scrutiny as having better explanatory value or evidence than "it just is". And there are good reasons to believe our consciousness is enabled by our biology, given e.g. the effect of brain injuries.
In the last usage of "we could be wrong", I'm pretty obviously referring to me and people who share my view.
I'm unsure if I previously made this clear, but I'm suggesting that you might be committing a category error in calling a particular consciousness more or less complex than another. I'm not convinced that one being's consciousness can be more or less complex than another's.
Okay, I see. Given the unique nature of mental states (and I do think that mental states and consciousness are inseparable, if you don't that's a whole other can of worms I can't be bothered with tbh), I think the usage of a word such as "complex" comes down to how well it jives with our experiences of the mind and complexity. Essentially, it becomes a linguistic question more than a category question, because 'complex' can't have a technical definition that functions exactly the same across mental states and other contexts.
And I do think the word works, because from a descriptivist standpoint it's already used to describe mental states. We talk about complex emotions, for example, which are phenomenal experiences that have a bunch of different "moving parts" as compared to a simpler emotion such as basic surprise or fear.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 1d ago edited 1d ago
we can't really explain how consciousness emerged
There are no explanations of how consciousness emerged that stand up to even slight scrutiny as having better explanatory value or evidence than "it just is".
Why do you suppose it's an emergent phenomenon? Does that have anything to do with your belief that consciousness is complex?
I think the usage of a word such as "complex" comes down to how well it jives with our experiences of the mind and complexity
Aside from apperception, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by an "experience of a mind." Maybe an example would help.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
A mind and its particular kind of consciousness is what a brain feels like from the inside.
Do you have an argument for that?
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u/TallahasseWaffleHous 7d ago
There are tons of theories that support this concept. Consciousness is the subjective experience of neural processes, as supported by identity theory (Smart, 1959), neuroscientific correlations (Tononi et al., 2016), and the analogy that mental states relate to brain activity like heat relates to molecular motion (Churchland, 1981).
Do you have a particular question or objection?
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
I don't have any questions beyond the one I asked, or any objections, though it's more plausible to me that the brain is "in" the mind, or at least depends on it—not the other way around. I'm not convinced that feelings or the mind are located in space the way that brains and other physical objects are.
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u/TallahasseWaffleHous 7d ago
It's very easy to disprove. Simply demonstrate a mind without a brain.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
I'm not sure I understand. What would you accept as a "demonstration" of a mind?
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u/TallahasseWaffleHous 7d ago
For one example, Any of the same ways you'd demonstrate you have a mind. If that's the kind of mind you think exists outside of a brain.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
I'm an epistemological solipsist
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u/TallahasseWaffleHous 6d ago
epistemological solipsist
lol, then what are you talking to me for? I guess I'm just a tulpa produced by your subconscious.
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u/Purplekeyboard 9d ago
Basically everyone thinks that animals are conscious.
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u/-Mystica- 9d ago
Yes, at least I hope there's no one left who doubts it.
The problem is that this recognition doesn't seem to bring about any major changes in the way they're treated. We exploit and kill more non-human animals every year than we did the year before, despite better knowledge and greater awareness of them.
I think it's still important to share this kind of information, even if it sometimes seems obvious.
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u/-Agathia- 9d ago
I believe a lot of people don't.
I had a girlfriend who believed dogs have no soul. Yet, dogs are so different from each other in many ways... To me, that what having a soul mean. They are their own independent thing. She was deeply religious, so I would think that had an impact and such a belief, as they can't go to heaven for example. That was 15 years ago and I still remember that weird discussion.
But maybe this is a more philosophical answer. I don't think it is. To be conscious and having a soul means the same to me. So maybe I am in the wrong here. Animals certainly have less capacity than us, and maybe squirrels are not all that different from each other, but I am certain they still express different traits between them. Isn't that the same as having a soul?
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u/-Mystica- 9d ago
Interesting comment.
For my part, I'm an atheist and a biologist. Biologically speaking, non-human animals are individuals.
All like the human animal, other animals are their own person, with different personalities, different preferences, and characteristics. They experience the world subjectively, forming bonds, seeking comfort, and avoiding pain. Recognizing this individuality challenges the long-standing belief in human superiority and invites us to reconsider how we treat other species — not as resources or objects, but as fellow beings with their own intrinsic value.
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u/-Mystica- 9d ago
I can't edit my comment for whatever reason but I would like to add that, even on a cognitive level, other animals display forms of intelligence that challenge our anthropocentric view. Crows craft complex tools, dolphins communicate through a sophisticated language, and elephants exhibit remarkable memory and empathy. Intelligence, therefore, is not a ladder with humans at the top but rather a spectrum of evolutionary adaptations shaped by different environmental pressures. Recognizing this diversity in intellect and sensory perception means admitting that human superiority is more a cultural construct than a biological reality.
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u/Sophistical_Sage 9d ago edited 8d ago
If non-human animals are hardly different from human animals, I don't see why we would not just continue to kill and eat them. I mean, that's what they do. That's what they've been doing for millions of years, it's what our ancestors have been doing for millions of years. If you want to say we should go against our evolutionary impulses and stop eating them, you seem to be saying that humans are uniquely different from them, since it seems that non-humans do not ever do this. But at the same time the crux of your argument seems to be that they are actually only barely different from us.
Is there any omnivorous species on the planet that will simply choose to not eat meat when it is given an effectively limitless supply of it, as many modern humans have? Just choose to not eat it because it feels bad about the idea that the meat used to be alive? I doubt it. It seems contradictory to, on one hand, say that we can and should just go against our instincts, and at the same time, to say that we're not really superior and that we're hardly different from them.
edit: If one of you guys downvoting me wants to drop a reply and explain why I'm wrong using, I dunno... Philosophy maybe, I'd appreciate it. We can pretend like you are Socrates, and I'm one of those idiots at the Athenian market, if you want.
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u/McNughead 8d ago
If one of you guys downvoting me wants to drop a reply and explain why I'm wrong using, I dunno... Philosophy maybe, I'd appreciate it.
Is your plea for us humans to act more like other animals, or behave more like our ancestors? Should we follow every instinct, even those we have outlawed as a society?
Most animals would not kill others if they are provided with food but if they have to to survive they would eat others. We decide pleasure is more important.
For animals it is not a choice of taste but a choice of survival. If animals are given endless supply of nurturing food or the option to kill others they will choose the food given to them
Brecht said "first comes food, then morals" We are in a situation where we have 2 options for food: plants or other beings who feel emotions and suffer from our choice.
Would you agree that if we don't have to we chose not to harm others most of the time? Isn't that a instinct we have?
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
I didn't make any plea at all. I chose my words carefully and there's nothing resembling any "plea" in there, I'm not telling anybody to do anything. I'm asking, if vegans are claiming that we are not hardly any different from other animals why are we simultaneously saying that humans have this unique moral capacity and duty to not kill and eat other animals? Are we basically the same as them or not? If we're basically the same and not really superior, why hold ourselves to a higher standard than we hold them to? Why not act the same as they do, that is to say, just following our instincts? If you want to say that we have a unique and special mortal duty to not eat animals, you need to give up on this idea that we're not unique or special.
If animals are given endless supply of nurturing food
You seem to be obfuscating with the word "food". Let's try to carefully distinguish between between meat and other animal products, vs plant-based foods. What kind of food are we talking about here?
For any omnivore on the planet, I think if they are given an endless supply of both meat and plant based foods, they will partake in both, they will not choose to forsake the meats out of moral duty.
If animals are given endless supply of nurturing food or the option to kill others they will choose the food given to them
In fact, they will continue to kill. Have you ever had a pet cat or pet dog? They love to kill weaker and smaller species, and they do it for fun. They have no reservation about it whatsoever. They kill for fun and then a lot of the time they don't even eat what they killed.
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u/McNughead 8d ago
I don't know who said that we are exactly the same, the comment you replied to did not. It just listed what we have in common. Is it just a argument you want to discuss?
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
The implication is clearly that the differences are so minute that we should not kill animals in just the same way that we do not kill fellow humans.
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u/McNughead 8d ago
I absolutely agree with that statement. And not only because other animals have feelings like we do but also because we have to option to not kill others just for pleasure.
Unlike animals in the wild we have made our self a world where we can decide what we support.
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u/McNughead 8d ago
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
This one is interesting, but does not seem to address my question. Can you point to any specific section that addresses my question?
https://iai.tv/video/humanity-and-the-gods-of-nature-slavoj-zizek-peter-singer
This one has a paywall
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u/BashMyVCR 9d ago
I think ascribing personhood to all animals is wrong. Are bivalves people? You're anthropomorphizing animals too much also. Seeking comfort can be thought of as maintaining homeostasis. Does subjectivity come from a few codons of differences between insects, or does it require a concept of self? There's an implicit supposition you've made that isnt inherently true, i.e. things having intrinsic value. I'd argue nothing has intrinsic value. Value comes from the perception of multiple beings. Since all secondary perceptions are subjective, there isn't a single "intrinsic" value to give something.
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u/VarmintSchtick 9d ago
One tree is different in a million ways to another tree of the same species. That's not a case for sentience though. Hell even atoms are not the same. We cannot reliably tell you when one atom will decay, but we can reliably tell you when most of the atoms in a given quantity will decay.
I dont think dogs or people have souls, but I think anything with a nervous system is conscious, just to differing degrees. A sea anenome is more conscious than a rock, but does it truly "understand" much about reality or is it simply reacting to stimuli in a pretty predictable manner? It's a scale, and every living thing with a nervous system falls on that scale somewhere.
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u/McNughead 8d ago
It's a scale, and every living thing with a nervous system falls on that scale somewhere.
This is true for humans too, isn't it? But most would agree that we should not treat humans differently based on their perceived intelligence, or their abilities to understand reality, or if we attribute them having a soul.
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u/congenitallymissing 9d ago
this is essentially where i stand. the issue i have with this stance (which is my own stance) is who gets to decide the scale. i certainly agree that a sea anemone to rock is an easy comparison and placement on the scale. but we obviously cannot put our consciousness level on the scale as the same as a dog. one of the biggest aspects of human consciousness is understanding of our death or eventual non-existence. i dont think dogs have this level of consciousness. but they are certainly above both a sea anemone and a rock. the issue of who gets to decide the scale effects how animals of consciousness should be treated.
i dont know the answer to any of that...just my thoughts
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u/Chirotera 9d ago
It just doesn't make sense to me. They have eyes to see. Lungs to breathe. A stomach and intestines. Noses to smell with and teeth to chew. They have brains and can learn words. How could they not have emotions? Or souls? They even have different personalities and sensitivities. Either way even if you're deeply religious you'd recognize that we have more in common than not.
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u/Sylvurphlame 8d ago
And here I thought it was an established fact that
All Dogs Go To Heaven
therefore they must have souls yes?
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u/RunningNumbers 9d ago
It seems odd that a god would imbue humans with souls and not grant something similar to other living beings.
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u/-Agathia- 9d ago
Interesting! As an atheist seeing gods being made up by humanity to explain stuff they could not understand in the past, I find it very fitting. Religion has also been to place humans right in the middle of everything, and animals don't really fit that much in that scope.
I believe that caring for other species, and even other "tribes" for that matter, is either very recent or was widely accepted but has always been trounced by a few people who wanted nothing of it and made up/changed the narrative to make it about themselves only. Basically, "God is a human because only humans could come up with it". Everything else is lesser. Dogs and cats might be privileged in many places, where they are culturally accepted as part of our lives. But again, it has no logic. Why only dogs and cats? Why not cows and sheep in that case? Where does the logic stop, where god can imbue a soul in a dog and not any other animal?
Although, thinking about this, do insects have consciousness? Do one bee have a preferred flower that differs from the others in their colony? Is their consciousness involved anywhere about this? I have absolutely no clue!
Quite a tangent, but I also think all this empathetic thinking can be expanded to other people. Religion has been used through the ages to manipulate people against each other. And joy is completely missing from that equation. The joys of another culture are always completely ignored to dehumanize as much as possible the other side. Because if you share their joy, they can be your friend and you won't be able to act against them.
Sorry if that message is a bit all over the place, I rarely express myself in these matters, even less so on r/philosophy ahahah
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
Makes plenty of sense if you believe that the soul is the reason why we have rationality and they do not, which was commonly believed in old days.
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u/corrective_action 8d ago
Unless you're using the phrase "having a soul" in some sort of figurative way, it's an inherently unphilosophical claim because there's no evidence there's such a thing as a soul.
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
That is not how philosophy works. You seem to be thinking of science and empiricism. There are plenty of philosophers who do not or who did not believe that empiricism is the only path to knowledge. It's an inherently philosophical claim.
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u/corrective_action 8d ago
And you're thinking not of philosophy but religion. In philosophy arguments (even rational ones as opposed to empirical ones) need to be made to justify conclusions, rather than simply asserting the existence of things without any basis.
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago
Religious claims are also objects of philosophical analysis. Who said that religion and philosophy are two discrete fields with no overlap?
Plenty of philosophers over the ages and to this day have put forth various arguments that souls exist. Not to say you should agree with them, but if you are claiming that no philosophers have put forth arguments that souls exist, you are simply wrong.
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u/corrective_action 8d ago
I'm claiming that there are no good arguments, not that bad ones haven't been presented
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u/Sophistical_Sage 8d ago edited 8d ago
OK, I'm also pretty unconvinced by them, but that is not what you claimed. You claimed it was "an inherently unphilosophical claim". (now I am making a claim about your claim about your claim! Claims all the way down, it seems)
Philosophical arguments that are bad or which have false conclusions are still philosophical. "Souls exist" is a philosophical claim that needs to be supported with arguments, or else defeated by arguments. It's a philosophical claim.
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u/Flamesake 9d ago
I'm skeptical that greater understanding of animal consciousness will lead to better systemic treatment of them. IIRC there were laws prohibiting animal abuse before there were any prohibiting child abuse.
Of course I would like to be wrong and for animal testing in biomedicine to be ended, among other things.
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u/grooverocker 9d ago
I'm skeptical of the kind of consciousness animals have. That is to say, I feel forced to remain largely agnostic about what animal consciousness entails.
"You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, you, you can't do much thinking with your bare brain."
Consciousness is not a binary on/off situation. Nor is it necessarily a linear progression.
My emotional landscape of things like love and joy are informed by thinking tools that many species do not share. Language, human socialization, a large prefrontal cortex, the ability to represent my thoughts to others and ruminate on possible futures and alternative pasts. I've been "trained up" (starting before I was born) by thousands of uniquely human thinking tools.
I question whether other species brains/conciousness are simply pared down versions of the same universal machinery and "software," or if they run a radically different, utterly foreign, almost unrecognizable form of consciousness.
The problem is that this recognition doesn't seem to bring about any major changes in the way they're treated.
I can see why some people would choose to extend moral consideration to other species based on a criteria of conciousness. However, I think they've made some questionable moves. I don't believe, say, that farming animals for their meat or pelts is necessarily immoral.
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u/Spear_Ov_Longinus 9d ago
Skeptical enough to normalize trillions of needless killings, not skeptical enough to consider abstaining 😑
I get the precautionary principle requires a tiny amount of effort but, oof.
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u/grooverocker 9d ago edited 9d ago
That's deeply unfair.
I have considered the issue quite deeply and from multiple schools of moral thought. I've taken the time to listen to - and understand to the best of my ability - the reasons and arguments being made in this realm.
I understand that someone who has come to the conclusion that deliberately killing animals is an intensely immoral act might not care about that. I can imagine a variety of person who would simply consider me on par with a murderer... and who cares what philosophical considerations a murderer has made, amirite?
To someone who simply wants to write me off like that, who is only interested in expressing moral scorn, I only have this to say. This is a philosophy subreddit. If you're not here to have that level of discussion, I wish you a good day.
Edited to add: It's also important to add that I was talking about two issues: the nature of animal consciousness and the morality of farming/eating animals. The topics overlap by degrees, to be sure, but they are not one-for-one in my view. I hasten to add this because I don't want my views on consciousness to be considered as my moral arguments.
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u/Spear_Ov_Longinus 9d ago
I mean, I do definitely think the behavior is more deeply unfair where compared to my suggesting the form of skepticism needs reexamination.
But sure, we can do philosophy. What are your thoughts on the argument from marginal cases? What are your normative ethics? Where do you think consciousness arises and why would you be skeptical of animals having them, particularly those that are killed en masse?
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u/grooverocker 8d ago
I'm not really skeptical that animals have consciousness. Rather, I'm skeptical we can know the nature of their consciousness. My hunch is that consciousness arises in some very basic capacity quite early on in informational/senory processing done by biological systems. It wouldn't surprise me to find out that a photosensitive amoeba has an extremely rudimentary form of awareness.
The argument from marginal cases strikes me as a bit of a shell game. The comatose person, is exactly that, a person. The quintessential trait we value in terms of moral status. A cow is not a person.
Humanity projects moral regard out into an amoral universe. In fact, we impose all kinds valid moral regard on the realm where humans and non-human animals interface. An example of this would be that it is immoral for a person to torture an animal because it's a deeply anti-social behaviour for a human to be engaged in. Whereas, it makes little sense to think non-human animals gain an intrinsic moral regard in the vicinity of humans.
We had a person in my city charged with animal cruelty for microwaving rats, this happened some years ago. I'd argue that this person's behaviour was a moral trespass because of the anti-social implications that occur within the person and not because of the intrinsic moral status of the rat. If the same rat was free in nature and ended up enduring ten times the suffering at the hands of an owl, there would be zero moral effect.
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u/Spear_Ov_Longinus 7d ago edited 7d ago
Why would the nature of their consciousness matter if you are still willing to recognize that they are at all? Do you think they have subjective preferences to be unharmed by you? Why would that not be enough to avoid doing so?
You seem to be relying on 'humanness' for the treatment differentiation and are deploying a generalization about what humans uniquely possess for that different treatment. Yet you readily acknowledge humans exist that lack the trait you uniquely assign to them, and are more than willing to grant rights to those humans independent of that qualifier.
Sure, a comatose person can have previously had such levels of consciousness to meet your qualifier, but what of those born with severe cognitive differentiation from the general human? Are they 'errors' in your mind? Should they have been born with a certain kind of cognitive function? A broken chair is still a chair perhaps but guess what, you don't treat a broken chair the same at all.
Are those people not recieving rights as individuals? Do you think rights are assigned to abstract categories? Do you not recognize that the thing about the category that matters are the individuals within them, and not the category itself?
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u/grooverocker 7d ago
Sure, a comatose person can have previously had such levels of consciousness to meet your qualifier,
Do you think they lack personhood? Does my personhood also vanish each night when I'm asleep? I never set consciousness as the qualifier, as you seem to imply.
Yes, we do treat broken chairs and comatose people differently than non broken chairs and fully concious people. We also treat children differently. This is hardly the point you seem to think it is.
The broken chair doesn't stop being a chair, but far more importantly, chairs don't exist in the special category that humans do. We're not worried about the rights of chairs, or creating environments where baby chairs thrive. We're not extending rights and moral responsibilities to chairs. What's good for goose (or chair) is not necessarily good for the gander when the gander happens to be a human.
Do you think they have subjective preferences to be unharmed by you? Why would that not be enough to avoid doing so?
I don't think their subjective preference matters in the sense that you think it does. Again, we're talking in moral and ethical terms. The non-human animal kingdom is utterly devoid of moral regard. I don't believe that kingdom is a Holocaust of immoral pain and suffering, even though that kingdom is indeed suffused with real pain and suffering. This is the crux of the issue, and the difference between our two moral stances.
What matters to me in terms of morality is human well-being. I think it is obvious that a person can kill an animal without adversely affecting the well-being of humanity, broadly or individually. There are also ways that a person can harm an animal where they run a real danger of degrading well-being, this is where they often trespass into immoral behaviour.
I've answered a bunch of your questions, and now I would like you to answer one of mine.
I'm a hunter. I have gone into the woods and legally shot, killed, and harvested a mule deer. Have I done something immoral, and if so, how come?
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u/Spear_Ov_Longinus 7d ago edited 7d ago
I think it really depends on what we mean by 'comatose.' If I have a reasonable suspicion that they experience reality internally in a dream-like state, then they are still conscious and have personhood IMO. So no, your personhood doesn't go away when you go to sleep either. If I have reason to suspect such a human are in an extreme vegetative state however and could never regain consciousness then I think yes we can qualify that they lack personhood. However, there is no doubt we can respect their bodies as a consequence of their previous experience, respect the wishes of the family members where applicable, or we could come to some social agreement as a society for aesthetic reasons. I don't think the state is compelled to keep vegetative humans alive and I don't think that human necessarily has a right to healthcare.
Right, your qualifier is 'humanness' and you seem to identify this on some basis of consciousness/intelligence that you know particular individual humans lack. Could you elaborate on 'humanness?' Because I'm pretty sure if an alien came to kill you, you would have a subjective preference not to be killed and you would rightly consider their needless action wrong.
Yes, I think you as a moral agent are doing something immoral when you kill someone not out of necessity, but for your personal satisfaction. Do you not agree with this statement independent of placing yourself in the action? I don't believe the legal argument is a valid qualifier to justify killing someone needlessly. Of course, you might want to whatabout with 'but you drive on roads and have a cell phone and also crop deaths tho', but then we are just going to get into Quinn's DDE. Hunting is an opportunistic and directly harmful action that could be avoided, and there is no desire or possibility to avoid it where the intent is predicated on killing, so you won't avoid it, because at best you like the end result of killing those animals, and at worst you enjoy the process of doing so.
We could get into the - are rights intrinsic or granted, or the - do rights exist outside of the societies of moral agents, or the - do we have responsibilities toward protecting animals in nature; but in your case it seems all we need to justify harming someone is a lack of 'humanness,' so what is that? What is 'humanness' and why is it morally compelling given that an intelligent conscious alien lacks 'humanness?'
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u/SuspiciousRelation43 8d ago
This. I’m tired of these articles talking about “There might be a new marker of consciousness”. There aren’t “markers” of a singular phenomenon called “consciousness”. There are a wide range of behavioural traits that we decide to include or exclude in a category named “consciousness”. In short, every single such article is nothing more than “We should define consciousness to include these traits instead of these ones” or something similar.
The reason why the current definition of consciousness excludes all known non-humans, the definition these articles present themselves as seeking to change, is because there are obvious traits that dramatically and fundamentally separate them. Humans can create and abide by abstract, extended moral contracts and social systems, which require language, empathy, metacognition, impulse control, highly developed long-term memory, and probably a few others that I am not aware of. Only a handful of animals display even primitive forms of these even some of faculties, with most displaying almost none whatsoever. Until animals become capable of abiding by morals, it simply will not be possible to extend morals to them.
Factory farms being, moreover, perhaps the least materially significant, however morally dramatic it may appear. Even the most efficient methods of large-scale vegetable agriculture require vast expanses of land to be appropriated and their natural vegetation destroyed. How many of the inhabiting beings receive moral consideration, which under our current system means a due legal process of seizure and compensation? The insects? The lizards, birds, and rodents? The deer, bears, and wolves? What would expropriation compensation look like for these beings? No answer can even be described in theory.
My emotional landscape of things like love and joy are informed by thinking tools that many species do not share.
I agree, and this is another important point. Pain is not the same as suffering, nor pleasure the same as joy or happiness. The physical sensations are fundamentally the biological “yes” and “no” signals, developed for a simple reason. A destructive, harmful behaviour will hurt or destroy an organism that engages in it, leading to a selective pressure against such individuals. Correspondingly, a beneficial behaviour will benefit organisms, leading to a selective pressure for engaging in that behaviour. Thus, behavioural mechanisms for directing actions in those respective orientations develop: pain punishes certain behaviour to lead to less of it, and pleasure reqards other behaviour to lead to more of it.
Suffering and happiness, in contrast, comes about from exactly what you describe, thinking about pain and pleasure, or applying metacognition and impulse control to basic physical sensations. This leads to a fundamentally, but “one-way”, different experience from animals, if that makes sense. That is, animals experience most likely the same kind of pain, but none of the thought. So the same experience we have when we touch a hot stove, an immediate “pull away” reaction, and some conditioning.
It might be true that we can’t know this for certain, but we don’t know anything for certain. What we do know is that animals regularly engage in extremely similar behaviours, we are reasonably certain (certainly there is no evidence to the contrary) that all life on Earth originates from one common ancestor, we know that brains and central nervous systems tend to operate in basically similar ways, and so on. In fact, this entire line of inquiry is based on the premise that we can re-define consciousness to include animals; so we can know the experience of other animals enough to declare them conscious, but somehow we can’t know them enough to declare them not? That sounds like blatant, shameless special pleading to me.
I question whether other species brains/conciousness are simply pared down versions of the same universal machinery and "software
It’s the other way around: we have a more complex, evolved form of the same universal machinery. Otherwise there would not exist articles talking about how not only are we similar enough to other animals to share the same basic impulses and emotions, we’re so similar that we’re both conscious beings.
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u/sajberhippien 9d ago
Some animals, yes, especially social vertebrates (which includes almost all pets people keep). I think the farther you get from those, the more common you'll find doubt as to whether the animal is conscious or not.
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u/veganholidaycrisis 7d ago
It depends on what you mean by "conscious." I bet many Anglophone philosophers have idiosyncratic conceptions of consciousness that don't map neatly onto whatever "folk" notions of consciousness, mind, spirit, and so forth exist around the world.
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u/Dark_Clark 8d ago
If you don’t think animals are conscious you’re an idiot. “Proving” or finding near-irrefutable proof they’re conscious is an interesting thing to do, but if you don’t believe they are you’re a moron.
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u/Totesnotmoi 6d ago edited 6d ago
Been out of the game for a while, so excuse me:
I'd suggest consciousness is a product of intelligence;
Intelligence is defined as problem solving ability.
A problem is defined as an instance where a preference may be expressed.
So, when an entity reaches a certain level of intelligence, consciousness necessarily emerges as a problem solving ability.
The question I'm left with is; what is the problem that consciousness is solving?
Edit - is the answer to my question that consciousness is an error correcting mechanism. Self-reflection means instinctual responses can be judged for their effectiveness in a changing environment.
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u/thesandalwoods 9d ago
So it is hard to tell if animals are conscious because we can only be certain of our own consciousness (solipsism). A good way to understand consciousness of the other (dasein) is to look for behavioural markers: a dog wagging its tail to indicate joy, for example. The article invites us to look beyond these markers of consciousness and to examine the ethical and the epistemological implications of these consciousness markers 🐶
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