It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming that consciousness is unique to humans seems like quite a high-horse proposition for us to make about our species.
The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes all the way down, i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with.
Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.
> It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious?
It's known as motivated reasoning. Specimens of our species are not known for disinterested rationality. We have deep interests in doing things to animals that animal cognition could make more unpleasant or expensive. An ancestor without this talent would have been less likely to become an ancestor. Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother. You'd still do it if you were hungry enough but would pay a greater price.
To the contrary, we (as a society) do worse things to animals when we aren't able to actually see it happening. If I were a boar, I'd rather have lived a natural life and suffered a tragic end than have been born and die in brutal slavery. Working in a factory farm setting is known to have a negative affect on the psyche [1]. The small-time farmer who just ships live animals off and the butcher who is cutting up an already-dead animal don't have this problem. To me, this signals that we do in fact see cognition in these animals, and ignoring it causes us to ignore that cognition in humans.
I think the closer you are to the actual killing of animals, the more you tend to revere them, if anything.
From my viewpoint, our current views on the killing of animals are as much a reflection of our cultural fear of death as anything.
Death used to be an ever-present part of life. Killing an animal was viewed as taking the life of something else to prolong your own. And all to often, people would die in horrific ways anyway.
Now, death is a thing we try to hide away and not talk about. So we also hide away the killing of animals for meat. Death is a taboo in our society in some ways.
> I think the closer you are to the actual killing of animals, the more you tend to revere them, if anything.
This is clearly not the case, else nobody would be willing to work for a factory farm.
The opposite appears to be true. People become desensitized - at least the ones who can handle the initial shock. Also, in some regions of the world (and in developed countries), generations have grown up with a company mentality and seem incapable of considering things from any other perspective.
Its different when you are slaughtering animals endlessly as a job versus hunting for food. The former will make you a morbid psychopath. The latter will give you reverence for the animal and the hunt and your position in it.
I think the closer you are to the actual killing of animals, the more you tend to revere them, if anything.
As someone who has recently joined that club, I agree. I have been hunting for years but this year I killed my first deer. The whole process changed something inside of me.
Because of my actions, this gentle creature went from breathing, living and doing whatever it wanted to being food.
While I was aiming my shot, she turned her head towards me and looked at me. I can clearly remember seeing her blink.
I put the arrow through her heart and lungs. I dragged her out of the woods. I gutted her and hung her up. I packed her body in ice.
These were things that I had seen done before but never did myself.
As I was field dressing the body, I looked at her and apologized, then I thanked her for providing healthy meat to feed my family.
In my mind, it changed venison from butcher paper wrapped meat that was leaner than beef into the flesh of an animal that was killed.
I don't know what she thought but I think she was, on some level, self aware.
Though, interestingly, animism seems to be more popular among cultures that live closer to the "I need to put this spear into this boar" end of the lifestyle spectrum. Meanwhile Rene Descartes, who probably wouldn't have had much trouble surviving as a vegetarian, was the one who was doing. . . interesting. . . things to dogs in order to prove a point.
Not sure exactly what that implies, but it would seem to suggest that it's hard to wrap these sorts things up with a bow.
True, in a hunter-gatherer recognition of animal cognition would improve their chances of success. "I'm getting thirsty, maybe the boar is too, let's lay for it near the water hole." Maybe labeling it "other" is enough without labeling it "inferior".
Though I understand what you mean by simpler, I would remind you that every living creature is adapted to its ecological niche, and that entails a baffling complexity that we, humans, can hardly grasp.
They have different trade-offs. We're physically weak and fragile for our size. Long life and decent endurance and stupid smart, but crappy high infant mortality rates (before modern medicine), prone to food borne illnesses, sensitive to climate, have to cook our food, etc. My dog and cat and chickens are made of tougher stuff than me.
People are soft as hell these days. Humans are not sensitive to climate any more than most animals are. We dont need to cook our food either. Physically we are not weak, we are the only animal that can throw a stone and also climb a tree. I agree with you about the infant mortality though.
If you take, for the sake of argument, that the cycle of samsara is a real thing, then it makes plenty of sense: Suffering may be inescapable, but a virtuous person would still seek to avoid causing it to others as much as possible. The more you avoid causing, the more virtuous you are.
It frankly seems no more or less odd to me than any other form of religious asceticism. From a purely practical perspective, sweeping the ground in front of you is probably not any more of a nuisance than the vow of silence that some Christian monks and nuns take. I'd personally find it to be less of one.
I find this whole argument entirely specious. If one causes suffering to others merely by existing, clearly suicide or donation of ones body as food to the hungry predators is the quickest way to salvation..
Wait..So it's confirmed? I swear I had no idea, and had no clue on what I was supposed to Google to find it.
Interesting.
But I'm not budging on the paranoia statement. If your beliefs make you worry about killing random things you can't even see, say "bye" to any semblance of good mental health.
Too many people who aren't "paranoid" about killing little insects even sweep the murder of humans under the rug. We also have no real answer to the fact that in a century, there might be no more insects, with all the further extinction of other species that'll entail. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19129378
Even when we're extremely selfish and petty, if we take too much effort to take care of ourselves, that's generally fine, as long as it's legal and not too annoying -- but when others worry "too much" about yet others, and change their own behaviour accordingly, they can't possibly have "any semblance of good mental health"? Come on..
The insects at least actually exist, what of caring about random people that don't even exist yet, wouldn't that be even crazier?
> Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.
> Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother.
I wouldn't put a spear into a boar, but from a detached and clinical perspective I don't see why its sentience would make a difference. Advanced societies like China, the Europeans and the United States don't generally have any problem fielding an aggressive expeditionary army of people nominally willing to kill sentient humans, so I suspect the blocks are more economic and cultural norms than innate.
It also seems plausible that time and breeding has equipped a large number of people with limited emotions precisely so they can stab things without worrying too much about the philosophical aspects.
It takes a great deal of training to turn the average person into a willing and able killer, and during every war on record there have been significant propaganda efforts (or religious indoctrination) to make sure the enemy is seen as less than human.
Furthermore, the soldiers who serve in the armies of the nations you mention who actually have to do any killing often end up with PTSD and sky-high suicide rates.
Humans may be more naturally hesitant to kill their fellow human beings than you think.
Panpsychism is pretty clearly not true even in animals. Many insect minds seem to act like finite state machines, and some can even be forced into an infinite loop, like the golden digger wasp, which will repeat the same three actions forever if you move its prey as it checks its nest for invaders: https://youtu.be/YNvi_j2z96w
Haha this is so interesting. Is this a phenomenology that has been studied or has been classified? I assume the wasp will continue infinitely, at least, until some other stimuli takes greater precedence, like getting tired for example.
I don't know if I personally believe this is a good argument against panpsychism. The wasp may have a fractionally sized working memory in comparison to ours, yet still be conscious. I find it unlikely that panpsychism is realistic; rocks don't have nervous systems, for example, so the likelihood of them having the sensory peripherals necessary for creating experiences is unlikely in my perspective. As far as the wasp goes, I'm probably agnostic as to the answer to that.
If the panpsychist believes that a rock experiences consciousness, then I doubt a particularly predictable insect would be especially persuasive against his position.
I think that you probably cut pretty close to the crux of the matter right there at the end.
It's a popular viewpoint because, from an ethical perspective, it's extremely convenient to hold. It limits your exposure to the sorts of tricky and uncomfortable questions that got me kicked out of Sunday school at a young age.
I mean, really, if we contemporary humans are still very capable of considering other humans less-than, it's no surprise that we're capable of much worse concerning animals.
'Consciousness', as a word denoting a concept, has at least two problems: firstly, it means different things to different people and in different circumstances; secondly, it is often assumed to be a binary attribute, rather than a continuum.
I once read something about flies exhibiting signs of consciousness. It made some sense to me; you try and swat them, they fly off in a direction of their choosing.
It crossed my mind recently in respect to AI consciousness, that all animals appear to be conscious at least to an extent - there aren't any that appear to be zombies I can think of, maybe they all got killed off. It made me wonder if consciousness as we know it, rather than requiring some step change for AI, is simply an inevitable outcome of sufficient processing, information storage, evolution and maybe some other factors. And therefore very much a continuum.
Indeed - you only have to watch infants grow up to see them moving through the continuum, and something analogous probably happened in the evolution of our various hominin ancestors.
In the former case, and probably the latter, there is a definite acceleration when they begin to appreciate the power of language.
That is true, but it also often leads to an increase in unproductive noise and diversion, such as the suggestion that there is a definition of consciousness that rocks can meet.
The main reason we have often assumed that animals lack consciousness is that animals appear to lack language. And language is an integral part of how humans think. How would you "think" without language? It's not clear.
Perhaps animals think without language and experience a state that could be termed consciousness despite not having language. Sure, why not? But my point is that there is at least some grounds for this "high-horse proposition" because there is at least one important dimension along which humans differ from all other known animals.
So, in music there’s the concept of vocalization. Literally conveying emotion without formed words or formal specifics.
Anecdotally, I definitely am thinking first and later applying words to the underlying concept. It takes practice, but it is possible to introduce a lag, of sorts.
Further, the best hunters, I’ve heard, are the most empathic. All the better to manipulate prey.
Even more, my cat is very expressive despite not having English. I can even identify patterns in his speech that clearly repeat for similar reasons. I spook him, there’s a meow for that. He’s hungry, there’s a meow for that. He’s tried and I’ve ignored 2 attempts of his to ask me for something and he’s pathetically resigned to his fate, there’s a meow for that. (Gets me every time)
A language is just a system of symbols intended to represent objects and things. Any thinking creature must have some system of representing real objects with some abstraction in its brain. Language is only a question of scale.
You can also think without words. You do that any time you visualize something. Imagine an apple floating in an empty black space. Just reading these words probably put that image in your head. Now turn the apple around, look at it from all sides, above and below. I can definitely give you directions on what to do, but I have no idea how to think that visualization in words.
> A language is just a system of symbols intended to represent objects and things.
This isn't what I meant, or what is generally meant, by language.
Humans are distinguished by our ability to generate and understand novel sentences. This isn't a question of scale -- it's not a question of the number of things we have names for. It's a question of the ability to create and understand sentences that have never been created before. No other animal does this, as far as we know.
> You can also think without words. You do that any time you visualize something.
I'm not sure I can visualize something without naming it or describing it.
Say you're drawing a picture, paying attention to what looks good or not and making small corrections. You're thinking in terms of the picture, not in terms of a language.
Say you're playing basketball. You're thinking in terms of the ball, the net, the other players, and so on, not thinking in terms of a language.
I can imagine that (for example) a bird building its nest finds itself in a similar situation. It's thinking in terms of the nest -- what shaped sticks to gather and where to place them -- even though it doesn't have any capacity for language.
My point didn't have anything to do with birds in particular. You can think about a cat planning how to pounce on a bird instead if you want. The pouncing cat is thinking in terms of its body, the space around it, and the movement of the bird, without really involving language.
> since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain
Only if approached from a materialist perspective. The thing about consciousness -- which is to say the experience of being that people believe separates them from, say, a brick -- is that it can only be verified subjectively. I have consciousness because I experience it, I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.
> I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.
The materialist(?) view that consciousness is entirely contained within the "material things" seems pretty clean and consistent. If you're experiencing consciousness, and I seem to be experiencing consciousness, and our brains - to the best we can tell - are essentially the same "sufficiently complicated automatons", then you can assume I'm experiencing consciousness too.
The problem with that view is that it assumes consciousness is correlated with mind. It may seem reasonable that, since I have consciousness and a mind, and you have a mind, I can assume you have consciousness, but there is no way to prove this. Does someone with Down Syndrome, who has a less functional mind than you or I, correspondingly have less consciousness? Perhaps, but we have no way of knowing.
I think this is a good point. It's not popular in the ultra-secular tech world, but materialism is not necessarily the only explanation of consciousness, there is very serious non-materialist philosophy. Personally I think Materialism is incoherent -- Daniel Dennett is sort of its logical extension: he argues that consciousness is a myth, a "folk psychology" that doesn't exist, since only material things exist. So we falsely believe that we are conscious. This seems patently absurd to me, but I'm not sure what the right answer is.
> The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate.
I don't think it goes 'all the way down'. In order to have consciousness we need a few ingredients: one of them is learning, another is having a task to accomplish - like finding food and fending predators. Another important characteristic is evolution and its requirement, self replication - without evolution there is no way to get to consciousness. That would restrict the places where it can apply, but notably it can apply to AI agents living in virtual worlds just as well as it applies to humans and animals.
In my view consciousness is that which protects the genes and the body (life and procreation). In the case of AI agents, genes could be related to architecture and hyper-parameters, and procreation could be an evolutionary algorithm. It's a simple and concrete definition which also asserts a purpose - the purpose of consciousness is to exist and to multiply.
One should err on the side of caution and assume consciousness for sake of ethical decision-making, whenever possible.
That said, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume everything has consciousness just because you do. We are not all alike. You might have had a fever when you were young, and your consciousness emerged because of that fever. And people who didn't have that fever, don't have consciousness. A pretty silly possibility, but no sillier than "consciousness emerges from sufficiently many interacting neurons". Right now we basically have no clue, and it's arrogant to pretend otherwise.
To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children.
> To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children.
this is not necessarily as hard of a moral conundrum as it seems. some people draw a distinction between deliberately killing a being that can survive on its own and withdrawing support that a being requires to live. this is somewhat analogous to the trolley problem: is it worse to kill than to allow to die?
By that same logic, I can walk into a hospital, go to someone on life support who can't currently "survive on their own", and unplug their systems, thus "withdrawing the support they require to live". If they die, is it really any different from killing them any other way?
To make the analogy even more accurate, let's say you are in a coma and will come out of it in 9 months. You can't survive without support now, but we know for a fact that you will come out of the coma after the 9 months have passed and will then be able to do so. Is it fine for me to shut down your life support half way through?
Good point. To make it closer to leetcrew's point, we could further imagine that while I'm lying in bed in the 9-month coma, you're the one paying my medical bills, and it's almost driving you bankrupt. Or: you need a heart transplant or you will die, and my heart is the only viable candidate.
to clarify, by "withdrawing support" I meant withdrawing support that you personally are providing, not just running around yanking ladders out from under people.
in the specific case of pregnancy, the support is given at significant personal cost and risk, which is not captured in either of your analogies.
Fair enough, let's assume that in the previous analogy I am actually the parent footing the hospital bill. If I know for certain that you are going to recover, and I can afford it, but decide to let you die anyway, is that really significantly better?
However, I do acknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances, such as the birth posing a health risk to the mother, both mother and child being likely to die if delivery is attempted, etc. That would be the case of "not being able to afford it" in my analogy, or the significant personal risk you mention (at least I assume that's what you mean, as normal pregnancy is nowhere near a significant risk, with the current maternal death rate being 1 in 10,000). In those cases, I'd be willing to agree with you.
It's less that they think it's virtuous or support killing unborn children, and more that they believe a woman's right to choose to do so trumps the rights of those unborn children to be born.
> responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli
I still think I'm conscious, but this “Diagram of All Space and Time” by Carl Sagan suggests the stimuli available to us is small, alarmingly small,
and perhaps nothing to boast about really. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357)
One comment says, "What humans can directly experience is of course small compared to the “all time” and “all space” and it would be invisible without the logaritmic scales used."
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841)
I'd ignore the neurons and focus on the information processing aspect. There's nothing we know so far suggesting that it's not possible to replicate all the computations the brain is doing in a non-neural, or even "non-material" structure.
(Non-material in the sense where water flowing downhill vs. CPU computing gradient descent is material vs. non-material computation.)
I’m not sure emergent phenomena and “rocks are conscious” are the only two options. You can imagine, for instance, an underlying and fundamental “ether” or force of consciousness which, by chance and evolution, animal brains are somehow able to exploit. Distinguishing it from an emergent phenomena would be difficult but I don’t think impossible.
There is also the need to understand the underlying goal of cells. Like is it simply "throw enough neurons in a substance and they start questioning the universe", or what?
The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes all the way down, i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with.
Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.