I recall an experiment with bees I read about where the bees were in a box. One path went to food, another to little balls which had no value to bees. Yet the bees would go “play” with the balls. The article and scientists state that this may show that bees make time for entertaining themselves.
I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.
Play appears to be an adaptive behavior (i.e. something that evolved due to evolutionary benefit), and helps us learn via curiosity/exploration, as well as form social bonds with others seeking out those experiences.
It's not apparent why play (an energy-consuming behavior) would evolve in a species where there was no benefit to it - one without ability to learn as a result of the new experiences encountered. While bees do have limited learning ability, I doubt it is this general, so it seems more likely that behavior that appears as playful (bees "playing with" balls) is really some other instinct at work.
Plently of animals truly do play though - e.g. crows have been observed sliding down snow-covered roofs on their back, then flying back up to do it over and over!
Also as humans, we're incredibly good at being able to suspect all kinds of beings for having a consciousness, except the ones we tend to use for food or work. For example, folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses. I'd hate a future where we finally realize that they were all conscious, all the time, just differently than we are.
>folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.
Please control your observations for the people that spend time around cows and horses vs cats and dogs. As someone who has met a few farmers in their time, folks who keep livestock will tell you that cows & pigs have feelings. Sheep, ehh less than those two. And chickens? Even less.
>> folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.
Our family cat has empathy. It often acts like the stereotypical asshole - feed me and leave me alone - but when someone is feeling down, that cat will come lay close and rest a paw on them.
I suspect those folks have not spent a considerable amount of time with either cows or horses, and thus they do not know that they too have feelings. Horses absolutely have feelings...it used to be a war tactic to scare horses.
Is it arrogance? It's a huge uphill battle to prove that bees moving a ball around are "playing" and not just misapplying some other ingrained behavior, such as landing on a flower. It seems more like just pretending that animals engage in human behaviors because it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride.
You could say -- and people do -- the exact same thing in support of the opposite argument, i.e. that it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride to pretend that humans are the only ones with such complex inner lives. So I think the "arrogance" claim should be retired, as it clearly doesn't add any value.
And the fact that humans have feelings does not mean we can’t use them as slaves when needed.
See? Ethics are like that: there must be something we give value too, if we want to stop somewhere and build something. In that case, the core value being raised is that the ability to be aware, suffer and have emotions is morally valuable.
Treating people decently is a part of social contract that no other animal can comprehend and accept, that's not playing with a ball, but that's not even the true reason this social contract exists.
The societies that have this social contract outdo those that don't, simple as that. If your version of treating animals was an advantage, Jainist countries would dominate the world. Yet they don't.
Eating other species is the quite natural for omnivores... Remember that if a chicken was big enough to eat you it would ! (most birds ard opportunistic omnivores)
Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !
I concede that the existence of the animals raised in industrial condition is deplorable but the existenceof the beef and chicken I buy from a local farmer is pretty good: ample space, quality food, grazing in the summer, no predator... and the way it's killed is doesn't leave time for suffering.
Cow raised for milk in place where they don't use hormone also have a great life because when they are not well treated the milk production is suboptimal.
Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
>Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !
They existed as different, likely healthier versions of their species in the wild before we took control of their fates. If the original wild species died out since that time, then the genocide was already commited. If the original species still exists in the wild, then that proves your claim wrong.
Also, all we've done is made genocide perpetual. So instead of allowing the remaining ones to die, is it somehow kinder or more justifiable to perpetually slaughter untold generations of them?
Beyond that, we've now caused mass extinctions of other species in pursuit of raising these animals for slaughter (see: loss of bio diversity or clear cutting of the rainforests for ranching). So when do we stop acting like this endless cycle of genocide is somehow justifiable for the sake of avoiding genocide?
Perhaps it is possible to eat them in an ethical way (like only eating them if they've died of old age), but as it stands, the number of e.g. cows that are raised and slaughtered in deplorable conditions make up the vast, vast majority of total cow 'lives' and there's no way we would have the space/resources to maintain the current populations in the conditions you describe as being acceptable.
>Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Most animal rights activists I see advocate for better conditions for the animals as well, if we are going to slaughter them anyway. And who even says we would have to let these animals die out entirely if we stopped eating them en mass?
I think this anthropomorphizes consciousness too much. We tend to attribute aspects of behavior to consciousness, but I think those are two separate things. An LLM can be playful, but is likely not conscious (but hey, maybe they are).
Chemical interactions isn't the same as conscious. I would say that it is exactly the opposite: consciousness is the capability of ignoring your chemical reactions and do what your will says. For example to not eat when hungry, an unconscious animal can't do that.
No... basic life support functions/instincts are controlled by the evolutionally older parts of the brain, but can be overridden by the the cortex (or equivalent).
The word "consciousness" is all but useless in discussing brain function, or even subjective experience, since it's overloaded and covers so many diverse phenomena. Good luck finding any two people who agree on exactly what the word means!
You seem to be talking more about "free will" than any aspect of consciousness, although there is no scientific basis for thinking that free will is anything other than a subjective illusion. Your cortex is able to override basic instincts, but is still doing so via neural outputs and chemistry. Why one person's cortex might override hunger in a given situation, while another person's cortex doesn't, really is not something they have any control over. It's chemistry and physics (not magic and "free will") all the way down. Your cortex does what it does because of how it is wired, which is a result of your personal life history. It's funny that we can often recognize this in others - guessing with high probability what they are going to do in a given situation, while still thinking that we ourselves are not controlled by our past and have the "free will" to do whatever we like (but in reality what we like is controlled by our past - there is no escaping it).
What we subjectively feel as ourselves making a decision to do something is really just us observing our own thought processes, over which we have no control. This is really the only place where anything that I would label as part of that fuzzy word "consciousness" is coming to play - this ability to self-observe.
This ability to self-observe and feel as if the observer (which is also just our cortex) is in control, is perhaps based on specific cortical pathways that evolved to further our cortex's predictive purpose/function. However, it's certainly possible to imagine a brain that was wired differently and didn't have this ability, although maybe in reality all animal brains with a cortex/equivalent, even a more primitive reptilian one, do have this ability?
Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
Agree entirely about free will, though I think the continued illusion of it is probably necessary to keep human civilisation running.
When I read about people (scientists, no less) apparently arguing that chimpanzees might not be conscious I wonder what planet they're on. It seems quite clear that every mammal is conscious in a way that most humans have always understood.
Apparently some ants pass the mirror test, so it should probably be uncontroversial to say that insects are conscious. Unless we think that also means ants have free will, that is - and for me, mulling over that problem is what led an acceptance that free will is not a thing for humans either. The usual belief in it results in the mess philosophy got itself into and has yet to extricate itself from, which feels a lot like how we spent thousands of years trying to explain God, a thing that also does not exist.
> Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
I'm glad that after your "rebuke", you concluded the same thing but called it "self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness". Only a conscious animal could do that.
You're using a circular definition there - "only a conscious animal can do consciousness stuff".
My "rebuke" wasn't intended as such - it was meant as a break-down of the mechanisms involved, and basically defining what this relevant aspect of "consciousness" (self-observation, in the way I described it) means.
Note that consciousness wouldn't actually be needed for an animal to override instincts - you could still imagine an animal that had a cortex but no self-awareness. I tend to doubt they exist, but not inconceivable. There's a medical condition called "blind sight" were patients report being blind, but can still navigate a cluttered corridor of obstacles, or gaze track moving objects, without being aware of it (i.e. they can see, but are not consciously aware of being able to see).
Absolutely there are. Many (or most) of the people who catch fish, pour coke onto the mortal wound they just created for their own leisure and toss them back into the water to die would confidently tell you fish are incapable of experiencing pain.
A quick google suggests they think it helps stop the bleeding..
It's hard to reconcile that you'd be willing to rip an animal from the sea to kill and eat it, or just for the fun of it, but also care about the animal though to conduct some insane little ritual of pouring soft drink on the wound you created to try and help it survive.
Growing up I'd be forced to go fishing with my dad a lot. When we'd catch a fish that was the wrong species, he'd whip it against the side of the boat and watch it float off while laughing with his friends.
I doubt the knowledge of consciousness, pain, or any other harm caused by hunting or fishing would dissuade most that do it regularly (in my anecdotal experience)
"Experiencing pain" is more of a philosophical/religious question dating back to at least Cartesian dualism, rather than a question of whether pain receptors exist and induce a pain response.
And yeah, there are people even today that flatly deny that nonhuman animals have any form of subjective experience, even dogs.
It makes humans deeply uncomfortable to face the fact that the animals we eat and use might be more like us than we want to imagine. It’s clear to me watching my parents chickens play that there’s lights on in there. It might not be like my experience but they are conscious. I can’t and won’t eat animals.
When a dog rescues a baby from harm, of course it's because it's consciously acting, like a human rescuing a baby from harm. It also shows concept of self. "There is a situation unfolding. I'm an observer to the situation, and a distinct actor; it is possible for me to intervene, with a plan intended to produce a desired outcome, which I will execute."
The dog has similar gray matter in its skull, just of lower complexity. The dog also loses consciousness in the form of sleeping, like a person, and shows signs of having dreams; e.g. moving its paws as if running.
If a dog were not conscious, there would be no point in distinguishing a sleeping dog from a wakeful dog; the two would have to be the same.
> If a dog were not conscious, there would be no point in distinguishing a sleeping dog from a wakeful dog; the two would have to be the same.
While I don’t disagree with your conclusion, your argument is flawed because you switch the meaning of the word “conscious” from “having thoughts and self-awareness” to “transitioning between a dormant and active state”.
I have a hard time too. But specifically about chickens, I happened to run into the opposite sentiment on TV from a farmer. On the idea of eating animals she talked about how she debates it herself but with chickens - she eats chickens - because if you've ever raised chickens you know pretty clearly they are dumb AF.
Man, it’s wild you think this. It’s like that old story about how a fish would be considered dumb for not being able to climb a tree, and a monkey dumb for not being able to swim under water. Are chickens dumb AF on the things we use to rate human intelligence? Sure. But they are massively in tune with their environment and adapt to changing light and temperatures in ways that are highly intelligent and beyond human capacity. Same with how attuned they are to predators and how they respond. They’re also smart enough to clearly behave in ways different enough and consistent enough as to form personalities.
I’ve got a flock of around 35 and wouldn’t label them dumb at all.
If food is served every day without the need to earn it there is no need to use your brain.
I have a lot of cats, i toss snacks in the back yard. They are about interested enough to find 80% meanwhile the birds sitting on the roof 40 meters away study the situation carefully and wait for the right configuration of cats before they fly in and snatch the remaining snacks. They see all of them, they never mis one.
Im sure they think my cats are dumb but cats in general are not.
I use to have a stray cat with a gaze powerful enough to win any stairing contest. He pulled tricks that took me years to figure out - seriously.
> If food is served every day without the need to earn it there is no need to use your brain.
1) there is still danger that the brain needs to be attuned to.
2) I often let the chickens out of the fenced in area when the grasshopper population gets unruly in the warm summer months, and if you watch the chickens hunt them, I think you’d find that even in the presence of being fed for ~10 months of the year, their brains are highly alert and they are quite good at killing fast moving, unpredictable things.
Being smart (in the all ways we exhibit intelligence) is what humans evolved to do, but it'd be hard to argue that that doesn't make us smart after all.
I don't understand. It's true that judging humans by human intelligence should have a perfect alignment. But it's not necessarily true that judging other creatures' actions by drawing rough analogies to human intelligence is valid. Birds waiting for an opportunity to steal seeds doesn't really strike me as a universal indicator of intelligence.
I'm pro animal welfare. And i'm (trying) not to make absolute justifications for killing animals.
But i really do use loose heuristics like minimizing pork because pigs are smart, beef because its terribly energy inefficient and less healthy. While plant protein is good but not appetizing.
Chickens get the short end of that stick. Delicious and dumb.
I have years of weight training where I've developed mass. That said, yep it's a crock of shit to be intaking so much daily protein so I just don't do it anymore and it's not a big deal. I'm trying.
anyway, your definition of smart is more like evolutionary adaptation. What is consciousness is pretty much still unanswerable. Physics killed God; we're all just stimulus-response machines. So this discussion on spectrum of smartness is too loaded.
Chickens are dumb AF not only for how we rate human intelligence, but also against all the different tests and methodologies we have to try and objectively assess animal intelligence. I don't think they are capable of really having personalities so much as a few different ingrained behaviors that differ based on genes.
It is likely that the modern optimized broiler or layer chicken breeds are much dumber than the breeds that were common earlier. It is known that most domestic animals have smaller brains than their wild ancestors and this is likely to be even more so for the more recent breeds. (Even the recent humans have smaller brains than their hunter-gatherer ancestors, presumably due to the less challenging modern life styles.)
The chickens raised by my grandparents, with which I was playing when I was a small child, had very distinct personalities. Each one of them was easily recognizable. Some appeared to enjoy to interact with me and they were very curious, while others were shy and they would run away from any human.
They were roaming freely over a very large yard with abundant and varied vegetation and insects. They were exploring it all day long, finding various kinds of food for themselves. They received from humans only a food supplement, a shelter for the night and some nests for laying eggs.
I think chickens can have different combinations of behaviors, but I don't think they are complex enough to have personalities. For example, I don't think they are capable of reason, which is a requirement for personality according to the APA definition [0].
When I was a very small child, I used to go in vacations to my grandparents.
They raised various animals, including many chickens.
I liked to play with the chickens and I succeeded to train some of them to execute some simple commands (by giving them generous recompenses of maize grains).
My grandparents and all their neighbors were amazed by this feat, because they believed that chickens are too dumb to be trained like a dog, despite having decades of experience in raising chickens.
So I believe that when you do not look for evidence of intelligence, you do not find it.
It's not OK to cause pain and suffering to a creature capable of intelligence and emotions just because it's less intelligent than an arbitrary, conveniently chosen threshold.
We raised chickens when I was a kid. They had a pretty good life, plenty of room to roam plus I fed them every day. When their time came, we gave them a quick painless death. No regrets
What is the issue with it? If they lead fairy nice long lives, I don't get it?
You must fundamentally have a problem with existence because nearly any creature that lives in the wild is going to have a very gruesome, painful lonely death.
If the worst thing that can happen is a chicken is protected, fed, given medicine when sick, have offspring and then eventually slaughtered in a rather human way after adulthood, I don't really see how it's so terrible.
But where does that stop: I can replace chicken here with your kids; still ok? What’s the difference? Dogs? Chimpansees? Dolphins? Why chickens ok and the rest not in the same example?
If a much more intelligent species comes to earth and says, we'll kill you all now , or we'll farm you for organs, at age 70; However, we'll help your species have a fairly good life and chance of survival overall ? I'd take it. Even if my kids were impacted.
Then imagine if they said: "it's likely that due to advancements in science, in 50 years we won't need to do this anymore because we'll have lab grown organs so we'll just leave you guys alone when we have what we need". I would double take that deal. This is likely where we are now.
The major difference with all of this discussion though is that obviously, animals are conscious, I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal. We're capable of understanding that our kids will be slaughtered for organs in 70 years from their birth. We also have strong emotions tied to this. So we'd be upset about it so I think that makes it a worse deal. Not the worst possible deal in such a theoretical circumstance, but it would be better than annihilation.
Definitely not saying this means this is ideal for anyone, animals or humans, nothing is perfect, I just don't think it's catastrophic.
What we have in animal agriculture is more like if the organs were farmed at age 20, and humans bred at puberty to produce more babies to feed the organ farm. Not sure why you chose age 70 in your example.
>If a much more intelligent species comes to earth and says, we'll kill you all now , or we'll farm you for organs, at age 70; However, we'll help your species have a fairly good life and chance of survival overall ?
This line of reasoning begins with a false dichotomy.
>I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal; suddenly the rationale seems a little flimsy when we consider taking mentally disabled people and 'harvesting' them simply because they don't understand it's a raw deal for them.
I wish I could articulate it generally (newborn, low on sleep atm) but there's something here about mixing levels of consciousness when determining morality that seems flawed.
From some intelligent specifies like squids we don’t know: maybe they are disturbed by it and fear and hate humanity and plan their lives to be far away from them. They do plan and they remember things over generations. Not believing they can reason or proving they cannot reason are different things.
I was fishing once, and I saw squid maul the face off a small yellow tail fish, I think the thing was still alive, it was a hideous way to go either way. It was one of the first times I realized how cruel the world can be. I used my sharp knife and made sure the little thing out of it's misery. But yeah, imagine that, being hugged by a squid and having your face chewed off by it's beak ? When I take the same fish, I use a fish spike, it's instant.
Anyway, if Squid are conscious and have such high levels of thought as you describe, then they understand the game and are likely undisturbed by it. If squid went vegan, then I'd feel worse.
This is why I think hunting is a much more fair way of obtaining protein. We're playing a much fairer game, factory farming and raping the ocean with super trawlers isn't.
Squids don’t have the option and we, admittedly, do. Nature is intrinsically and deeply cruel, but we could choose not to contribute. I think that if we do contribute, we should admit we do it for the pleasure of eating nice tasty meat and just call it worth it. I do agree with the whole hunting is better thing, but I don’t think there’s any objective reason, just vibes.
I also think that, if we can grow like lab meat in the future, we should switch to that. It’s not gonna be viable for a long time tho.
1. If you have the time to cook the required amount of vegetarian food (not easy from experience).
2. If you can digest legume based protein without issue.
3. If you want to participate in social or culture events where eating meat is part of having a social life.
Are you a full time vegan / vegetarian? I did it for 2 years, I actually would call it a "luxury".
I moved to a country where it's not yet "hip to be vegetarian" and it's virtually impossible to survive in that place. There is no "Whole Foods" in many parts of the world.
But if we have to hunt our food then all those ‘ma meat must have ma meat’ dudes living in shitty small overcrowded city apartments wouldn’t be able to get their meat and they would get very angry. Probably to the point of them starting to eat other humans as those are perfectly hunt-able in big cities.
They don’t know, that’s the difference. A human would be haunted by that for their entire life, in the same way that humans suffer because of fear of death. Chickens, dumb or not, don’t seem capable of knowing that that’s going to happen, so they enjoy their constructed lives more than a human would.
Whether it is OK or not is in itself an arbitrary decision.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, merely pointing out that ultimately every moral system rests on non-observable abstract principles. Metaphysics, in other words.
empathy isn't abstract, it's in our brain as a mechanism that promoted survival... now if you are telling me that modern people (knowing that modern nutrition already stablished that in 99,9% of the cases, it's perfectly possible to live off a plant based diet, with B12 [livestock is also supplemented ]) don't feel empathy for animals in the ballpark of birds/mammalian is pretty naive... considering that people are actually aware of what takes to kill an animal & what's the state of stuff like "battery cages" when raising eggs at commercial scale; i think either you are one of those rare meat heads that can kill stuff, butcher and eat or you aren't aware (go watch Dominion or whatever)... because most city people buying fancy fatty meat or cheap burguers, would feel nausea/sorrow by killing anything & probably would stop if they need to kill to eat meat
The basic mechanisms of empathy are probably biological, but everything else is cultural. Consider that different civilisations in the past even engaged in systematic cannibalism.
I grew up in a farm. In my experience, the people less likely to feel empathy for animals were those who actually worked with them every day. This does not mean that they were cruel, at all, but rather that they understood rising and killing animals as fundamental for their livelihood.
This reality is very remote for many urban dwellers, for whom animal products come into existence in the supermarket aisle, and who mostly only see live animals as pets.
it's not probably, it's what it's! go read where neuroscience reason about that...
and i typed _modern people_ from cities & despite city people sometimes contributing or doing great crimes for money, i don't know if that is justifiable to use as a counter argument... as we are chatting about how a modern people, who is probably empathetic/civilized enough to realize that killing an animal is unfair/horrible when there isn't a plausible reason to do it ¶ are rural people aware the complexity of a mammalian? because i can see the love for cats and dogs and some bird species... negating pigs and cows or rats feels a specie prejudice! specially, again, when we proved already that it's more economical, ecological and if done correctly more healthy (animal protein is synthesized differently and if we were black and white, plant and fungi based are easier to swallow [but just a curiosity, as that may only build up to diabetes or cancer if one eats like an average +medium-class North American or the likes]). not long ago, like less than 8 generations, we slaved and raped people in America while building churches talking about Christ love... so i don't think we can go back "the days we eat carcass and hunt mammoths" to justify stuff if we truly want to evolve
"not eating animal products is the bare minimum you can do", actually
edit: a bunch of errors, i'm sleep deprived but do you know that even FLIES suffer from indecision? fungi have the capacity of memory (tho i think we can eat those :), ants are a pretty complex organism for the amount of neurons they have... maybe the day we stop to anthropomorphizing intelligence we'll figure out the holocaust (rolling right now)
Reduction of suffering is part of Temple Grandin's work:
Grandin also developed an objective, numerical scoring system for assessing animal welfare at slaughtering plants. The use of this scoring system resulted in significant improvements in animal stunning and handling during slaughter. This work is described in "Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices in slaughter plants"
The threshold isn't actually intelligence; it's reciprocation.
Chimps have superhuman short-term memory, but they're not granted personhood.
A tree can be infinitely intelligent. If it doesn't do anything with that intelligence and can't communicate, and we couldn't profit from that intelligence in any way, we wouldn't care about it -- even if we somehow noticed it.
If the tree can benefit us if we don't harm it, we suddenly care.
If it can hurt us if we hurt it, we care.
If other entities which can help us will do so as long as we don't hurt the tree -- or if they will hurt us if we hurt the tree, we care. (For example, this can be other humans with respect to their pets.)
If it exhibits the specific kinds of intelligence that we care about, like talking, or if it simply moves us emotionally, we'll care.
These are all reciprocations of social contracts we're forced, by our biology and by game theory, to respond to.
That's the threshold. Power grows from the barrel of a gun, not an abstract notion of intelligence or consciousness (which, spoiler: is a religious nonsense concept) or whatever.
It’s a shame this is not allowed in most/all countries. So much meat wasted by cremation and burial and solid boxes. Feed me to the pigs after harvesting my organs.
I just got the keys to my new house yesterday, and it came with chickens. I already see they’re much smarter than I ever gave them credit for, and that they may even have different personalities.
I expect I’ll eat a lot less chicken in the future.
Chickens totally have different personalities. Some are shy, some are friendly, some are adventurous, some are timid. And it can change. They aren’t machines.
They are not complex enough to have personalities. Being shy or bold are not personalities, but just lowlevel behaviors dictated by the presence or lack of particular genes.
So, let's define personality. I think this definition[[0] from the APA Dictionary of Psychology makes sense:
Personality is any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life.
Now, let's define 'cognitive'. For that we'll rely on Merriam-Webster. Their definition[1] says:
of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)
So, at a minimum I think a being needs to be capable of reasoning to have a personality.
The shorter answer is I think a personality can be a combination of innate behavioral traits, but it also has to be things like temperament, likes, dislikes, to some extent skills, and similar things shaped in part by environment.
That you are assigning them capabilities that humans have, but research has not indicated chickens do, I would say you are indeed anthropomorphizing chickens.
Can you support your stance with research rather than anecdotal observations?
Totally agree. Just watch a dog trying to solve a problem. They try something, take a break to think about it and then try something else. They have emotions. Maybe not exactly the same emotions humans have but they can be happy, depressed and many other states.
No, factory farming and ecological destruction makes me uncomfortable. We do this because we don't think animals are important, or we should care about them.
Animals eat other animals, they don't roam around being upset about it. When I hunt, I don't feel upset about it either.
What I am upset about is the the lack of respect we've shown other animals by ruining their whole ecosystem via ecological destruction and locking them in factory farms. Little chickens born never get to see their parents, they're just thrown into a grinder, like what the fuck?
I spearfish mostly, and I've seen a mother fish proudly cruising around with 3 of her juveniles, do I take that fish? No, I respect her, and her time she is spending with the young ones. By the same time, I've seen fish have their face gnawed off by a squid, this is the reality for most wild animals, a gruesome death. Living a semi-long life and being taken by a skilled hunter is probably the most human way an animal can die. Being thrown into a grinder at 2 days old because you're a rooster and can't lay eggs? Disgusting. Drowning in a trawling net? Horrific.
I agree with you but I live around chickens. They feel like the worst example. I might be wrong but they seem dumb as hell to me lol. Almost like they are driven fully by instinct from thing to thing.
I was thinking it’s one of the better examples because even if they’re really dumb and brains the size of peas they have personalities and there is something (even if it’s not much) going on up there.
Basically it feels like something to be a chicken, there’s a subjective chicken conscious experience.
If you have a mole on your foot they will peck at it because they think it's a bug. The fact that it isn't doesn't seem to stop them next time. If we're talking about intelligence of farm animals, they have to be down the bottom.
Living beings eat one another to thrive and survive. This is a fact of life. Humans are omnivores, and animal foods are an important source of bioavailable nutrients. To deprive oneself (or others) of such nutrients is a form of harm done to humans.
Humans have the capacity to reason, and the ability to obtain all essential nutrients on an entirely plant-based diet if they simply make the decision to do so. If one is in a survival situation where one must eat meat to survive, then that’s one thing. But by and large, people do not need to eat meat. They choose to. To assert otherwise is dishonest.
> Humans [can] obtain all essential nutrients on an entirely plant-based diet
You need supplementation on a vegan diet for a reason. Entirely plant-based diets are not nutritionally complete. Even with proper supplementation, bioavailability is extremely low in plants compared to animal foods.
It is okay to be a vegan for your own moral reasons, but to push it on others as it being an intelligence choice (it is not) is to be inconsiderate of one's fellow human beings and their long-term health.
I’m not saying it’s an intelligence choice in that you’re stupid if you eat meat. I’m saying that it is possible to have a nutritionally complete diet without including meat, and that that is a decision that we can make as humans.
Your sources don’t even refute this. Yes, supplementation for things like B12 and omegas are required. We eat a variety of fortified foods in the modern age anyway and supplementation is trivial. Yes, you need to eat a diverse range of foods to obtain a balance of essential nutrients. That doesn’t mean you cannot maintain long term health on a vegan diet.
Vegan diets are not nutritionally complete, even with supplements.
The sources do refute your point; I can tell that you have not read them, as you ignored addressing the part of my comment about bioavailability (which two of these sources mention).
Second comment following up on my other one. Your own links undermine your own argument.
From your second source:
> Carefully constructed vegan diets could provide adequate amounts of all six priority micronutrients for the general population, except vitamin B12, which would need to be consumed through fortified foods or supplements.
Further, the opening paragraph of your third link undermines your entire argument as well
> Diets that limit the consumption of animal source food to very low levels require careful fortification or supplementation, and the inclusion of specific nutrient-dense plants. If these cautionary measures are neglected, vegetarian and, especially, vegan populations risk to suffer from deficiencies in some key animal source food-associated nutrients."
It specifically says that vegan populations risk deficiencies when not including nutrient-dense foods and fortification/supplementation. It specifically does not say that full nutrition is impossible without animal products.
Event the title implicitly supports my argument: "Not all (micro)nutrients are easily obtained from plants." Emphasis on "easily."
The word "cannot" only appears alongside B12. The phrase "does not" doesn't appear alongside any nutrients intake. And the word "impossible" doesn't show up at all.
Are you sure that you read the articles you're claiming that I did not read?
I did look at your sources. They describe lower bioavailability and nutrient density, and have advisements for supplementation and a diverse diet. Low density and bioavailability does not mean non-existent. Low bioavailability does not mean not at all bioavailable. Can you point to a specific line that says it is impossible to obtain a nutrient in sufficient quantities on a vegan diet, even with supplementation? The third link seems to be the most related to your point, but I don’t think it says what you’re arguing, from what I can see. I’m sorry to say that the links are long and I going to need you to point me to lines that support your thesis.
You said, "But by and large, people do not need to eat meat" so I must conclude that plants are just dummy food put in nature by God for humans to eat (divine intervention)
When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
> so I must conclude that plants are just dummy food put in nature by God for humans to eat (divine intervention)
Honestly no idea what you’re talking about, here.
> When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I needn’t be more precise. Meat is not required for survival or for good health. Exception being if one’s situation demands eating meat. For somebody reading/commenting on HN, eating meat is almost certainly a decision, not a requirement of any sort.
They don't really have lights on though. If they do they are very dim. What matters is self-awareness, not mere awareness and instinct. Repeated tests and research don't show chickens to have self-awareness or any traits really worth valuing IMO. It's easy to anthropomorphize, but the research doesn't lie.
Consciousness is not sentience, and if it's all semantics I don't care but if people are going to make moral arguments using this conflation between the two then I have a problem. As it says in the article, sentience is roughly the ability to feel valenced emotions (good/bad). Consciousness is many things, but importantly the ability to feel qualia, experiencing what feels like the 'blueness' of blue, for example.
It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.
I recognize the distinction you make. But most of this comes up in relation to practical ethics. Is it possible for a form of life to have consciousness, but not sentience? They seem to be bundled together. And if it were possible to have consciousness without sentience, would it matter? Valenced qualia have high priority in many systems of ethics.
When you look at those strawberries you experience the quale of redness, yet they are not red, so this quale isn't directly related to the color of the object you are looking at.
The qualia of colors is just a result of our ability to differentiate surfaces based on the differing inputs our brain receives, but as illusions like this show this is really a function of memory/prediction rather than actual color. The (subjective) quale of redness is something that your mind creates by comparison/recall. You see those strawberries as red because it reminds you of red strawberries. Different colors have to look like something, and since color is basically just a differentiator, it only has any meaning in relation to things of other (similar or different) colors. Grass-green leaves have the quale of grass-green because they remind you (same neural input) of grass.
It's interesting to note how arbitrary (and poor!) our perception of color is, since we only (usually) have three color detectors (retinal cones) tuned for overlapping portions of the frequency spectrum.
Even if we're looking at a pure red object (say 600-650nm light wavelenth), our green (center frequency) detector is also firing too, since that's just the way our eyes are built - we're not really directly detecting colors but just have those three detectors firing to different degrees, which allows us to differentiate a lot of colors. Some people have 4 types of cone rather than 3, and are therefore able to differentiate colors that would look the same to normal people... There is nothing absolute about our perception of color - just an ability to differentiate so some degree or another.
It's interesting to contrast our poor color detection with our much better auditory frequency detection. Our ear basically has a whole bunch of specific frequency detectors (hair cells of the inner ear), almost like doing an FFT of the input signal. Our color sensing "could" have been like this too, but instead evolution has found out that, for us, these three overlapping light frequency detectors is good enough, but for sounds we need to be much more discriminative.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what it would be like if we had another way to differentiate surfaces other than by color (or texture). Imagine if we had an ability to remotely detect (see) surface temperature, but not by a thermal imaging device that maps temperature to colors. You could imagine someone making goggles that had directional temperature sensing ability and tracked our gaze direction, such that it output temperature data for a patch around our center of gaze, and fed this data into some part of our cortex via a neural-link like device. What would the qualia of this new sense be like?! Just like color, it would have to "look" like something, and different temperatures would have to look different, but the resulting quales of "hot" and "cold" surface properties would just be whatever our mind recalled when exposed to those inputs. I'd guess that all hot objects would just look "hot" and remind us other other hot objects, just as all red objects look "red".
The illusion works even when the "red" items are blobs, not strawberries, so I think this has more to do with color differentiation than the actual objects in the image.
But we can differentiate grey from red, so there'd have to be something more to a specific grey blob to make us see it as red rather than grey (which is how we'd normally see a grey blob).
It doesn't have to be a strawberry (or rather a strawberry as part of a consistently lit scene), but it has to be something that makes our brain predict it is red.
The phenomena behind the illusion is "color constancy" - they way we (learn to?) see objects as being of a consistent color regardless of how they are illuminated.
If I blur the strawberry image enough that all the objects are unrecognizable, reducing everything to blobby abstract shapes, how would color constancy apply? The areas that used to be strawberries still look reddish. Is the suggestion that certain amorphous blob shapes trigger our brain to predict they are red, and all the strawberries in the image, when blurred, are members of that set of shapes?
Really interesting. If I reproduce the same colors (plate, strawberry lit, strawberry shadow) but with simple squares, the colors that were associated with strawberries do still look a little bit red to my eyes. The more I stare at it, the more red it looks, I would assume because there's so much green and blue, saturating those cones, and causing the relatively neutral "lit strawberry" color to appear red by contrast (like the negative afterimage effect). But even more interesting is that if I glance back and forth at the strawberry image, my "lit strawberry" square starts to look a _lot_ more red.
The strawberry illusion is really cool, thanks for sharing.
I guess the way to test that would be to sample all the colors in the illusion scene, and use them to randomly color squares in, say, a square grid, and see if any look red, and if so whether it's the same color(s) that looked red in the original illusion.
I believe color constancy is partially based on adjacency of colors as well as whole scene and lighting.
Depending on how you blobbified the image, it may still recall a plateful of something, and the same colors will still be adjacent to each other, so doing the randomized grid test would tell you if it's just the mix of colors or are the other hints coming to play.
It's possible it is just the mix of colors - same way if you wear color tinted glasses (or ski goggles) and the color of everything changes, but in a consistent way, and (maybe after a few min adaptation) you can still discern the colors reliably.
Edit: On second thought that colored goggles example doesn't prove it's just mix of colors - that's just general color constancy more like the strawberry illusion itself.
Yeah, I think you're right. I replied to my other comment describing the effect on my perception of using squares. The blobs did retain an association with the original image, either because I'd just looked at it, or that the shapes were still ever-so-remotely still strawberryish. Since all I did was severely blur the image, the effects of the original lighting would still be very present.
It's also very likely plants have some sort of experience of the world that would be very alien to ourselves or animals. They have complex networks through roots and mycelial connections, communicate to one another through chemicals emitted and "smelled" through the air etc. By some this could be considered a form of consciousness. What that means for vegans I don't know
What exactly is "internal monologue"? It's heavily debated in the comments. I don't understand though, because when you learn to read you're mouthing words, and over your lifetime it's actually very hard to not mouth words when you read.
It makes me think that internal monologue is precisely an artifact of language itself. In this way, this debate and surprise over people "not having it" is not really profound. All people internalize language, that's the only way that not-mimicked language synthesis can happen. This is different from parrots parroting back what they hear for example.
Anyway, I'm curious about this debate over internal monologue. Perhaps it's really that people don't retrospect. That's different. They don't adopt viewpoints outside of their own. Is this really a physical limitation vs a choice?
Am I just ignorant about the state of this science?
oh that's what i mean though, mouthing, in your head, same thing as in "it's somewhere" that's internal to you. That's why i can't understand how everyone doesn't have an internal monologue.
We can't know what other people experience in their head, only how they describe it.
To me inner dialogue is whenever we express a thought to ourselves using language. Like I think "now would be a good time to make coffee".
When someone says they don't have an inner monologue I'm very skeptical. I imagine how it would work is either they only picture such a thing (getting up to get coffee) or its just like a high dimensional emotion of hunger and movement. Which I suppose is how it must work for animals.
But how this can work for more complex and abstract things like analytical philosophy is beyond me. For advanced math I can imagine just seeing equations.
In the article and linked NY [0] and Cambridge [1] declarations, no definition os "consciousness" was asserted. While hardly definitive, Wikipedia [2] claims "Opinions differ about what exactly needs to be studied or even considered consciousness."
Some would argue that what is commonly considered consciousness is a relatively recent phenomena in humans, the mind being a necessary but not sufficient condition. "The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans."[3]
Surely consciousness is not black & white, but a scale.
Rocks at one end & us(?) at the other.
There was a recent post suggesting that our thoughts are 98% unconscious.
It's not hard to imagine that there could be some animals with more than 0.01% consciousness. After all, we started at 0% conscious and evolved a little - other species are probably some way down that track.
We spread throughout the planet, ravage resources, bring down forests to build monocultures and urban sprawl, dispose chemicals in air and water. We have little regard for anything other than ourselves. We take actions to satisfy our insatiable momentary “feel good” cycle.
We grow kill and eat animals by the billions. Animals who spend their entire lives in tiny boxes suffering.
Imagine we were wild Koalas and another species was ravaging the solar system like this?
I read Julian Jaynes' Origin of Consciousness as a young man and was convinced for the longest time that consciousness is just a type of information processing (or a type of wetware program) that creates a mental model of the external world, and that it is based on language, and therefore only accessible to humans, and does not require any further explanation.
I'm no longer quite so sure. The possibilities are that consciousness:
1) Is binary or exists in a continuous spectrum
2) Is fundamental property (panpsychism) or emergent
If it is a continuous, fundamental property, then what we experience as qualia (i.e. subjective, conscious experience) are merely a higher order version of any reaction of anything to any other thing (from a glass shattering due to blunt force, to a venus flytrap closing in response to an insect). It also implies that there may be other intelligent species out there with a much higher order of consciousness (not merely intelligence) capable of higher levels of conscious experience. In which case, we have a serious problem with the way we are treating some animals.
Panpsychism doesn't strike me as particular helpful. Everything is emergent once you move beyond the lowest levels of physics.
I think the best approach to consciousness is to consider it a feedback loop of certain brain processes into perception circuits. This is why consciousness is often tied to senses such as hearing / language and imagery.
It certainly is continous as it develops even in humans.
What's unhelpful about it? Noting that everything is emergent is a simple way to understand that its unlikely that our consciousness is not, and to empathize with the rest of the universe more.
A comatose person can still have thoughts and consciousness, even trapped in their mind, though your definition of perception circuits might allow this. But even having "senses" is not a requirement for thought imo, it just gives it a framing that makes a lot more sense to us.
My understanding was that panpsychism means that consciousness isn't emergent (for instance from scaling neuronal tissue), but a fundamental property of space (something astral or soul like).
I am 100% in alignment with you on a comatose person being able to be 100% conscious.
Has this author ever interacted with e.g. a monkey or a dog? Utterly insane to think consciousness is dependent upon language, oh and also good luck defining language: lots of animals communicate perfectly sufficiently for their purposes. Is gesture not a language? Then are ASL speakers (?) not conscious?
Glad you arrived at the right question nonetheless. Personally I think panpsychism is (inconveniently and rather alarmingly) the only viable theory of consciousness I’ve ever heard. There’s just no sensible place to draw a line between conscious and not conscious in the development of an organism or in the development of a species.
Language has pretty notable differences from animal communication that are actually very well studied.
One aspect is that language can string together small particles to produce arbitrarily complex meanings. In contrast, most animal communication is extremely simplistic - typically one sound or gesture corresponds with one piece of meaning, and the order or number of repetitions has no additional meanings. There may be some exceptions or at least grey areas (whale song, dolphin sound+dance, bee dances, some apes and birds), but the vast majority of animals have an extremely simplistic communication scheme.
Another huge difference between animal communication and human language is that animals communicate in response to direct internal or external stimuli (hungry - > chirp, see dangerous animal -> distress call). In contrast, humans communicate about much more complex feelings, and can choose when to exteriorize their language use.
Note that humans also communicate in ways that aren't language. Our "body language", our cries of pain, baby's cries, grimaces, winking, etc are the equivalent of animal communication and are not language. Sign langauge is absolutely langue though, and you'll notice it fully ticks the two boxes I was mentioning earlier.
Prairie dogs are another example that likely goes against your understanding. They also serve as an example of how we might miss complex communication in other species: researchers had to slow down their chirps and calls in order to find the patterns that made up their syntax and grammar. I imagine that LLMs will be useful in the future in helping us to find patterns in behavior or vocalization that might serve as language or language-like communication.
Also, in response to your second point: most people with domesticated pets could give examples of deception or signalling intent.
Perhaps indeed we are missing a lot of more complex communications. We will maybe learn more with LLMs, we'll see.
Related to deception or intent - those are still at best second order reactions to internal/external stimuli. The fact remains that dogs or even chimps don't, for example, tell stories to their friends about what a fun ball they saw yesterday or how sad they've been last week.
Nobody claimed that they did. The argument is that we have no reason to think these are categorical differences so much as differences of degree.
For example, there are clear relationships between a baby’s gesturing and their language development. These appear to be different enactments of the same systems (also people born blind will gesture while they speak).
Even the “at best second order reactions to internal/external stimuli.” Every human thought and action is at best an Nth order reaction to internal/external stimuli. Differences of degree.
But there is a vast gulf between humans, even those with severe developmental disabilities, and the smartest animals. Only a handful of animals can even pass the simplest knowledge to other, or learn by seeing others of their kind do something. Humans can't even function if we don't use language to communicate with others about things which aren't pressing concerns. There is plenty of room in that gulf to say THIS side is conscious and THAT side is not. Just like an analog-to-digital converter can get clean 0s and 1s out of a continuously varying noisy signal if it is sufficiently clean, but we don't claim that digital electronics doesn't exist just because there is some spectrum.
I do agree that there is some continuum of conscious experience between certain animals up to humans. I even believe there is an extremely remote but real possibility that other organisms such as plants, fungi, even bacteria, have some sliver of internal life that could resemble our consciousness.
But panpsychism goes WAY beyond this into a mush that makes no sense. Rocks and atoms very obviously are not conscious, and any non-religious theory of consciousness that posits that they have to be, even a tiny little bit, is in my opinion self-evdiently wrong (e.g. IIT).
Of course, if we want to posit that some form of god exists beyond physical phenomena, panpsychism is valid again.
>But there is a vast gulf between humans, even those with severe developmental disabilities, and the smartest animals. Only a handful of animals can even pass the simplest knowledge to other, or learn by seeing others of their kind do something.
You're not doing your argument any favors with this kind of hyperbole. Many animals mourn and communicate that mourning. Many animals have been shown to pass along information to others about helpful or hurtful humans, good places to hunt or forage, even elements of culture like behavior or personal calls. African wild dogs will die of a syndrome akin to heartbreak if separated from and unable to communicate with their group.
It's not too much to say that humans and other animals think and communicate differently. Most do not have the physiological capacity for certain types of advanced and abstract thought that are central to our own experience of reality. But that's a far cry from having no semblance of conscious cognition. Too many animals exhibit behavior indicating an awareness of the self as a separation from the other and the environment for your characterization to be unequivocally correct.
Sure there’s space for one side being conscious and one not being: tell me where the line is. Tell me what does it. Then tell me where the same line is between a cluster of cells and an embryo and a baby and an adult. When does consciousness “happen,” and where does it come from?
It doesn't prove anything but I do think it's very interesting that many people report feeling part of a universal and all pervasive consciousness as part of a psychedelic experience.
It's weird to think that consciousness is a binary thing that either is there or it isn't.
I believe it's a spectrum. I'm not even sure if humans are the farthest species on Earth towards one end of the spectrum. We might have the most complex language to focus our consciousness around but it doesn't mean others (like dolphins or elephants or whales) can't have better consciousness in some manner.
It's funny to think what a conscious species trying to reason about us would do. They can't communicate to us, they are subject to our decisions, and a lot of what we do must seem mindlessly destructive. Often they really are trying to communicate, but there just isn't a way.
Sigh The problem is so big, and so deeply rooted in our culture and history as predators/scavengers, that I just don't want to even go down this line of thinking - it's very very likely true animals have clear consciousness, but I'm not sure that would even change things.
The sooner we can move to indistinguishable (and cheaper) lab-grown meat, the better. I have very little hope of changing enough minds or culture to simply not eat meat, but I have considerable hope that we can trick ourselves through better savings and taste. Seems like the tech is going to land that direction. Full steam ahead - let's be weird pacifist vampires gorging off brainless flesh growths. Our apology can be a happy "never again!" as we dig into marbled wagu slabs.
In honor of Dennett's death, if we go with the proposition that consciousness is illusory to begin with, then it is fine to ignore the also-illusory consciousness across the animal world as well.
I will go ahead and claim that it is not like anything to be a bat (iykyk; see the Nagel reference in TFA). And, frankly, questions of consciousness have become a bit boring to me, despite being the focus of my interest for decades now.
Questions of intelligence, communication, social organization, etc are interesting. But questions about a consciousness phenomenon that may or may not even be real and has literally no consensus about theory or fundamental meaning across many disciplines? Boring.
Get back to me when even a bare majority of philosophers and researchers can agree on a definition of consciousness.
a consciousness phenomenon that may or may not even be real
If I were to run up to you and kick you in the shin while shouting 'I refute it thus', I submit that consciousness is the part of you that would be angry and upset afterwards, even if I were immediately detained and taken away by a conveniently present police officer.
> Get back to me when even a bare majority of philosophers and researchers can agree on a definition of consciousness.
Get back to who?
You appear to be claiming to be some kind of linguistic illusion, a meat LLM. If that’s true then there is no “you” to get back to, just some random chemical and physical processes.
>I will go ahead and claim that it is not like anything to be a bat
After reading about this conceptualisation of consciousness I always thought that the true point is that we truly can't know if anything else is conscious until we can truly answer that question.
Likewise, is it something like to be a rock? Probably not, but you never know.
Consciousness can be quantified via suffering, suffering can be quantified via stimuli response.
I suspect VR/neural implants/etc. will upend Nagel's inconceivability theory. Consciousness can be defined via capability, and we'll soon have the capability of directly simulating any conceivable umvvelt via those technologies. Then we'll all know what its like to be bats.
Can the robot ever only scream? Then it's not suffering. Suffering is what creates movement, an internal impulse to an external action. Suffering can only exist if there is any external and an internal, which I'd argue is also a valid definition of consciousness, but I couldn't imagine how to test it.
In a test on suffering, if a subject has been inserted to fake consciousness, then we would still be measuring consciousness- we'd be measuring the consciousness of the mastetmind behind the robot/fake.
Suffering isn't so easily dismissed, any conscious entity will tell you.
I agree it is reductionist- that is the point of philosophy, to reduce to a point. RIP DD, you know he was a true philosopher because he came to a final point.
There are good definitions of consciousness which do not separate between "the external" and "the internal". I agree with these definitions, as a matter of experience there is only consciousness and the things which appear within consciousness (which includes thoughts, sights, feelings, pain, etc).
But I think the point I would make is that there is no way for you to know if anyone or anything else is conscious. Our current ability to understand the mind is incapable of truly determining if even a fellow human is conscious or not.
Scepticism of everything is pretty much a given. Science is based on assumptions, most good scientists are well aware of this (the number of assumptions you have to take on faith varies, but most people can agree on somewhere between 3 and 5).
Likewise, our understanding of the world is also founded heavily on assumptions.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. We can't know for sure if something else is conscious. Even scientifically speaking, even once you've accepted some assumptions, we genuinely aren't even close to having the tools necessary to determine if something is conscious or not. It's not even just scepticism at that point, it's fact.
But also, we have the same problem with other large areas of medicine. We can only work on limited information and some assumptions. There's nothing wrong with that, it's better than nothing. Although you are free to decide not to accept any assumptions (unsurprisingly, this would lead to suffering and people generally do like to avoid suffering).
To address your second point, dualism isn't implied and there's whole schools of meditation practice (which can and have successfully been made to be secular without losing anything) which focus on the underlying non-dualism of consciousness.
The issue is that to really understand the non-dualism of consciousness, it requires actually getting to that state. This requires practice and effort. Without that, all you're left with is sometimes mystical sounding statements like: the feeling of having no head.
As a matter of your direct experience, the thoughts in your mind, including the feeling of "I" or of a subject are entirely on the same level as your experience of sounds, sights, smells, touch, etc. They are just apparitions within consciousness. You might not believe me, you might be convinced I'm wrong, but all you need to do to find out for yourself is to truly pay attention to the contents of your mind.
While I agree with vegans in spirit, I think humans are closer to obligate carnivores than not; ergo, I think it is a neccessary sin to sacrifice animal life for sustinence until such time we can grow the proverbial walls of muscle on artificial life support from stem cells more cheaply than [no sin tax] standard beef. At that point, we must shut the slaughter houses for good.
There's not really any evidence for this. On a source-by-source basis, plant-based protein quality tends to be a few percentage points lower than from animal sources due to the differing amino acid distribution, but mixing sources like rice+pea gets you all you need. Soy is already pretty good by itself if you're okay with just consuming a tad bit more. Personally I just add a protein shake to my diet and that more than makes up for the difference relative to my carnist days.
The micronutrients that vegans need to watch out for are EPA/DHA (types of omega 3s) and Vitamin B12. Both are trivial to supplement, and not particulary expensive (especially now that Costco sells the former). The B12 you get via factory farmed meat is all supplemented to them anyway, so there's no difference in some hypothetical molecule quality.
The last remaining micronutrient that might be tricky is Vitamin D3, if you don't get the necessary sun exposure. The D3 in standard supplements is usually made from sheep wool. But you can also replace that with relative ease, and many vegan options are really mixed D3+K2 supplements which is even better. Also available at Costco, for what it's worth.
Vegetables may as well have feelings. Many vegetable demonstrates observable reactions to cuts. If you can switch the angle of perspective to plants like Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj do you might as well experience pains as plants were cut and eaten.
The core of any sin is against the will i.e. I have heard there were people who would like to be eaten and found a guy who actually ate him.
In the book I AM THAT Sri Nisargadatta said to a questioner:”
Look, my thumb touches my forefinger. Both touch and are touched. When my attention; is on the thumb, the thumb is the feeler and the forefinger -- the self. Shift the focus of attention and the relationship is reversed. I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness -- love; you may give it any name you like. Love says: 'I am everything'. Wisdom says: 'I am nothing' Between the two my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
> I don’t personally think that other animals will have a verbal inner monologue in the way that I do
I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0].
There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead.
We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think?
0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932
Agreed that it is very crazy how shallow projections from humanity to other animals often is. Really gets annoying when folks try and reverse morality in discussing behavior that 'not even animals would do.' Or, heaven help me, discussion of "balance." I've grown to view leaf season as basically trees conducting war on shrubbery.
One doesn't need to think too much to know the only difference between us and other species is the ability to philosophize and as such, it should bring even more harmony and compassion, instead of beliefs that justify exploitation of nature.
I don't know why we assign ourselves so much importance, some of our thoughts allow us to bring harm to others but we don't want to be treated the same way we treat them.
All we really need is education, the education of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or hooves).
I don't entirely agree that all it takes is education. Many people have grown up on farms, have lived with animals all their lives, and yet have no problem eating animals.
They also have a different relationship to eating animals than people who think meat comes on a plastic tray wrapped in shrinkwrap. From what I've seen, the attitude is more mindful of the animal you raised and interacted with. You don't want to waste any part of their sacrifice in becoming food for you.
I take it a step further and say that if you're going to eat animals, make the best possible, best-tasting meal out of them.
I suppose there are many factors involved but education is the key component. Knowledge, and a culture of knowledge can cause a massive shift in thinking and actions.
Essentially, what I hear in your statement is "if I can just teach people how I see the world, then they will see the world the same way." I firmly disagree with that assessment. Someone can be educated and yet see things differently from you.
I think part of the issue is disagreement about what "harmony and compassion" actually looks like.
One of the sibling comments immediately jumped to the assumption you're referring to veganism and the use of animals in the food system. I'm not going to assume that's what you're referring to, but I will use it as a case study.
The problem with veganism's approach to this is that it's a limited extension of empathy. If you've been following along with the advances in plant behavior, it's pretty mind blowing. There is a growing body of evidence that plants have cognition (using a different system than animal's nervous system), memory, environmental awareness, the ability to learn, and communicate. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that plants are _also_ conscious.
In fact, there are hints of evidence that microbes are aware and making decisions. It may well be that environmental awareness and consciousness are just the defaults of life.
So then, for autotrophs like us, what does harmony and compassion look like? How do we feed ourselves at scale without causing harm or exploiting nature?
I do not believe that veganism can be criticized for a lack of empathy versus plants.
Even if we value identically plants and animals, plants are exploited in a much more benign way than animals.
In the past, there were many domestic animals which could be said to have lived quite a happy life for their kind, until the moment when they were slaughtered.
Nowadays, the vast majority of the domestic animals live in conditions that can be hardly named other than torture.
On the other hand, the cultivated plants do not really live in any worse way than in their wild state. The majority of the cultivated plants are either annual plants, which are killed a very short time before the moment when they would have died anyway, or they are perennial plants from which we take only their fruits, which have been developed by the plants especially for being taken by animals, as a payment for being aided in reproduction.
So without giving any preference to cultivated plants or domestic animals, the more ethical choice is to continue to exploit in the current way only the former.
I believe that in the future not even cultivating plants will be the most efficient way for producing food and other organic substances.
The most efficient way will be to use solar energy gathered by photovoltaic cells to capture carbon dioxide and dinitrogen and incorporate them in some simple organic molecule or molecules, perhaps glycine or a mixture of urea or ammonia with a simple carbohydrate or a short-chain fatty acid.
Whatever will be synthesized using solar energy, at a better efficiency than currently achieved by plants, will be used to feed some genetically engineered fungi (or parasitic plants, i.e. non-phototrophic plants), which will produce any kind of desired food or other useful complex organic substances. (A first step in this direction is shown by the recent news about strains of the Trichoderma fungus that have been genetically engineered to produce either whey protein or egg white protein, but in the future it should be possible to make for instance fungi able to grow fruiting bodies that are bananas or turkey thighs).
> people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people
It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives.
I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?
At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.
IME, "thinking in language" doesn't mean "thinking exclusively in language". Like, I do think in a linguistic monologue when trying to string together some ideas, or reading some text, or planning what I'm about to say. But there's a simultaneous undercurrent of feelings, reactions, and recollections that aren't in words.
(E.g., if I'm driving behind a car acting strangely on the road, I might be very carefully observing and anticipating the driver's actions, while only muttering a vague "Whaaat...?" Or, for an experiment you can try at home, try thinking of something dumb repeatedly without pause, while at the same time reflecting on how dumb it sounds.)
I suspect that many people are the same, it's just that the monologue is the most immediately noticeable component of one's thoughts.
I have sound, pictures and videos, vividly. thinking etc is just having a conversation with the voice in my head.. me! Sometimes it's watching a little movie, sometimes an image pops up. If someone is talking to me and I'm thinking about what they are saying, it's typically my brain's serving me up little "videos" of things I've seen in the past. To actively listen to someone, I have to also actively prevent all that from happening, to make silence in my head, that took years to learn to do. The idea that other people don't think like that, well, I can't comprehend it because it's not how I do it.
It can also be how you think. I think like that (speaking to myself) and I'm not a slow thinker, at least I don't think so... The thing is, when speaking doesn't involve muscle movements, and just a stream of word/concept objects it can be much faster, and also doesn't have to be single-threaded (so to say). But from my subjective experience it feels like I'm talking to myself, one word after the other.
I think this is probably how I work too, and people tell me I think very quickly, so I suppose that means I can just talk to myself faster than whatever they are doing, hah. If you don't mind me asking, how are you with math? My mind completely lacks a framework for numbers, so I'm unable to do math (I feel like that might sound insane).
I'm not great at math, but I've trained myself to do basic calculations in my head. I need to concentrate hard and it goes very slow (I'm also a fast thinker for other stuff). I do this because it's a very useful skill in day-to-day life, so worth training.
I once read that many people basically spin up a virtual machine in their mind to do math. That is how it feels to me too. All simulation, no hardware acceleration, so very slow.
I'm really curious what people who are good at math are actually doing. I presume my thinking methodologies are just so far removed from how they think that I'm unable to imagine it, I can hardly even visualize a number never mind manipulate them, it's strange. I couldn't tell time till I was in my early teens, and even then it was a lot of work, and even today I wouldn't exactly call it "automatic".
I was like you for awhile. Was good with with arithmetic but not much more than that. After learning a handful of new languages via total immersion, I found I could learn math much more deeply!
I find listening to podcasts at 1.25-1.5x much easier. I noticed that this speed is much more in line with my internal dialogue.
I also noticed that I need to speed up female speakers more than males. I'm not sure if this is because their cadence tends to be slower, or if it's something about me.
How do you write without an internal monologue? Is each sentence a surprise as you write it? It wasn’t in your head before you write it down? If it was, isn’t that an internal monologue?
Well I have an internal monologue and I think in language a lot, but I wouldn't say the sentence is on my mind before I write it. It's more like I redirect the stream of language to the page, so instead of saying the words to myself I write the words.
I find writing very useful for thinking. It focuses the monologue and you don't need to strain your short-term memory as much when reasoning about elements in the stream, it's like doing maths on paper instead of in your head.
I'm sure you experience the same thing when talking, you don't say each word to yourself before you say it out-loud (perhaps you do?). Also, where are the words before you say them to yourself, they are kind of a surprise no? Just as you describe writing.
While I sometimes do talk to myself without uttering the words, most of the time it's a tad more abstract than that. It's like when you're discussing something complex or involved, you don't think too much about the exact words, the sentences just form as you go.
It's not "on" all the time for me, but the majority of the day I'd say.
I'm surprised you find us weird. I always thought of muteminds as psychos. For example, if you spend a day alone, do you just wallow in silent nothingness? Or do you talk to yourself aloud because you can't do so silently?
I also learned that some people are missing the "mind's eye" and don't have the ability to play music in their head.. I always thought everyone could do those things but then found out that's not case!
My internal monologue is much, much faster than verbal or written communication. It's never been a source to give me pause when replying or engaging with others; in effect, I run parallel discussions through my mind while others are speaking, allowing me to anticipate and respond to potential changes in the conversation before they occur.
Yes I literally line up one word after the other. As I think, I converse to myself. "Should I do it this way? No, well that's overkill and too difficult. Can I get away with just that? Yeah that's likely fine" I think there are definitely extra-verbal aspects to my thinking e.g. sometimes when I tell myself "how about this" "this" refers to a thought or graph or concept or whatever. Other than that, my thinking is like speaking.
The words line up themselves, and I can usually 'feel' the idea before I hear the word in my mind, or the words might be just a part of the idea I'm addressing. Sometimes there are multiple lines of thoughts happening at once.
> It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives.
> I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?
> At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.
As someone with a particularly strong inner dialogue (who often struggles to think about things in a fully non-verbal way), I definitely struggle at times with feeling like my brain is not concurrent enough for being good at multitasking, so I don't think you're completely off. To put it in programming terms, I feel less that my brain is "single threaded" as it's read/write locked in the sense that if I'm speaking or typing, I'm much less able to process properly listen to anything being said to me. For example, if I'm typing up an email (or a decently sized comment here) and someone tries to talk to me, I'll often not be able to formulate a response without completely losing my train of thought about what I was writing, which leads me to ask if it's okay for me to finish what I'm writing before responding.
As for "lining up one word after another in their minds", I don't think it's quite as tedious as it sounds like you might be thinking. When speaking out loud, it doesn't take any conscious thought for me to "line up words" as they come out of my mouth; if anything, I talk much more quickly than average. It hadn't occurred to me beforehand, but I wonder if this trait is correlated with having an internal monologue.
It's more like a self conversation, one in which I must internally LARP as the other party. It's like I am using some theory of mind stuff to simulate earnest and good faith debate.
Yes, it’s a sequential voice in your head. I’ll literally sit down to do something and tell myself in my head “okay, I need to focus on figuring out this intro sentence first” or whatever I’m trying to do. if I’m coding and for example, I’m running a switch statement I’ll have to verbally describe to myself each of the cases.
When I think about tangible problems (coding, physics, ...) as a hobby, I usually start with a verbal expression "funny that this and that" or "if I code this that way" and then switch to non verbal - imagining interactions through pictures or something like that.
I think that the main reason is that thinking in words slows me down.
For me, it's more like a check and balance that isn't always engaged. When I catch a baseball, it is totally decoupled and the catch is automatic. But if I am composing a class, debugging, and similar, it is heavily engaged in thinking through edge cases, etc on the fly.
In my case, some vague idea worth a few words comes up to my mind, I turn it into a monologue, and continue. This is what I feel is happening in my head.
But the process is also too automatic. Maybe what's actually happening is completely different from what I described.
Count me as one of those people. I don't know what the hell people mean by inner monologue. Maybe I have one, but I wouldn't know what it is. I feel like it's trying to explain to a blind person what sight is.
Do you have regret? Ever asked yourself why did I do drink coffee just before bed. Have you ever played a game and thought if I do this, then my opponent will do that, so maybe I shouldn't do that. Have you ever had a meeting or interview and you went through how to introduce yourself or conduct the interview in your head?
I have a hard time believing that there are people who have no inner dialogue. Especially in modern societies. I think it's something we all do, it's just that we didn't know there was a word for it.
Ever ask yourself, why did I waste so much time on HN or other social media? Then you probably have an inner dialogue.
You aren't able to express those concepts in your head without making them into words? Our minds are made to work with associations and feelings, if I regret my time spent doing something that is expressed in my mind as me feeling regret when I think about when I did that thing, there are no words needed for that, same with everything else you talked about. Only time I add words is when I communicate with people, like when I write this post, then I translate those internal concepts into words so it comes out a bit different every time and not exactly how I thought.
If you are mostly thinking in words, how do you even fix or see when you have misunderstood a word? To me that is easy, that word isn't how you think, but to you that words definition seems to be critical then, how do you even manage to parse text then? You must also parse them down to these core concepts that are lower level than words without knowing, or else I don't see how you could function as a human.
I don't have an internal monologue, but I do still experience regret; I just experience it as an emotion, not as words. I have thought about what my opponent would do in a game, but I think about it by imagining them doing it, not by verbally describing it.
If I am preparing for some kind of speech or trying to get the phrasing of something just right for an interview, then yes, I do practice saying those words inside my head (or, as often as not, aloud). But it is not exactly an internal monologue because I am not thinking in words; I am just doing memorization work. It's little different from imagining song lyrics in my head, which I can do without really parsing their meaning.
I have never thought something like, "Why did I...?" I have said things like that in order to express the sentiment of self-disappointment to someone else in my company, but it's not a thing I would ever think or say on my own. Internally, my experience is an emotion, not a rhetorical question.
I don’t have a dialogue with myself. I might express something like, that was stupid, or go on a an expletive rant when I hit my thumb, but it’s not directed at myself.
With games, I do take mental notes, but it’s not personal. It’s more like looking at a historical battle, for example and thinking of different options. It’s not personal.
I’m not going to be absolutist. There could be times I’ve had internal monologues but I may not think of them as such. In other words maybe I have the behavior but because I haven’t classified it as such, I remain unaware of it.
I occasionally talk to myself (or to "the powers that be", humoring the idea that we're in kind of a super-advanced-VR classroom sim), but I wouldn't qualify it as an "internal monologue"
If you are on the fence on the topic of eating meat vs going vegan / vegetarian, this 2018 documentary might change your thoughts: https://watchdominion.org/
>They should be nicer to them when they kill them ... /s
An example (from Dominion) is how they typically asphyxiate cattle immediately before slaughter: using carbon monoxide (when nitrogen would be far less painful/cruel, but costs a few ¢¢¢¢ more).
I fell asleep watching this movie during that scene, and it led to horrific limbic states.
--
Of course I still consume animal products, but watching that film entirely ended swine for me (and greatly reduced my overall meat consumption).
To be totally clear, I've seen it and am vegan. My comment is a sarcastic tribute to the typical response to the suggestion people learn what their dietary choices involve.
A more effective means of bringing about change might be to protest and lobby for requiring by law more humane methods of raising and killing animals for food. I think far more people would be supportive of that approach.
Ever rescued an abused dog?
My dog absolutely predicts what I will do based on past events in a high anxiety state.
Sometimes she predicts incorrectly (but definitely based on my previous actions) and does weird stuff, but in the context of an animal based prediction of the future from previous events it makes perfect sense.
How about corvids that can build tools and predict indirect actions? (displacement etc)
I am not sure what the point of this is, except for vague handwaving and attention seeking behavior.
I don't see how sentience or consciousness has anything to do with anything.
Even admitting animal consciousness still leaves you a very long way away from anything like a framework of human rights.
Second, even if they aren't conscious, you should still take ecology into account. I don't think Redwood trees are conscious, but that doesn't mean we should go chopping them down without any thought.
The core issue with consciousness is first and foremost subjective experience. These are very private things and exists outside material world, i.e. the term “evidence” does not apply as evidences are based on appearances and appearances are content of senses and the entire existence for any experiencer first and foremost exists in his mind.
It's interesting how many people use the word consciousness for the ability to think thoughts or imagine stuff.
In eastern philosophy, consciousness is all that which is not material nature, that is unchanging, exactly the same in every living being and is separate from mind, intelligence and senses which are considered a part of material nature.
I believe that unchanged thing is awareness which in Yoga Sutra is called “pure consciousness” which is both the observer and the background of any changing senses. The pure awareness is the source of the feeling of “I AM” and the sutra began by saying this I AM likes to identify whatever it creates as itself.
Experiences are outside material world. There is nothing you can call “pain”, but only evidence of it, be it physiological or physical or metabolical or neurological.
Yet first and foremost, the entire world is based on senses isn’t it? The only thing any experiencer can prove without any “evidence” is that he is. The existence of experience is self lroving. Beyond that how can anyone prove that there is actually a world beyond mind? The world is a model in one’s consciousness. It is constructed with consciousness and is therefore full of consciousness.
How can anyone assume things beings or animals without consciousness exists?
I love Sāṁkhya philosophy, how it tries to objectively and logically come to the conclusion of the presence of prakṛti (nature, observation) and puruṣa (observer).
And you're quite right. Patanjali in the Yoga Sūtras says that the seer abides in its own nature, that is what pure consciousness is. The consciousness being conscious of its own consciousness. The only way to know that is to have citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ or the absolute stilling of the mind by shutting down all senses.
It's definitely very difficult to wrap my head around it, but it's still fascinating that if one follows the Yoga method properly, there might be a possibility of having that pure-consciousness experience.
Hi thank you for your reply. In his conversations I AM THAT Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj teaches to focus on the sense of I AM , as I AM is the true self and pure awareness is the transistor of every bit of consciousness and therefore it is in every moment of conscious life… yet it is true the sense of stillness is a godlike presence and the mind likes to be distracted by the content of senses and not focused on the knower. To have that absolute stillness with us all the time is Guru’s grace. But I AM THAT is also on YouTube, I really like the audio book.
Damn you're worldy af. So interesting that you think that's interesting. Is it difficult to be you what with all your worldly ideas? We're way down here using accepted terminology generally agreed upon by 99% of the public but you're on a whole different level.
For most people it is a very important part of ethics. Most people would consider it unethical to boil alive a being with a sense of self and the ability to feel pain, but are perfectly happy to do that to things that don’t have those characteristics. So it’s a very interesting question for most people whether a lobster is conscious.
I’m not sure I would ever want to interact with you if you don’t think that consciousness should have anything to do with how you treat other creatures; at best you might be indifferent to cruelty towards pets and at worst you might be a psychopath.
"Most people" is carrying a lot of weight there and really just characterizes some of the people who participate in a very specific culture that's quite new and anything but universal.
Most people around the world haven't really internalized the pointedly modern idea of "conciousness" in the first place and some people around the world and even in distintcly modern cultures don't find it a very fruitful way of making sense of their own experience, understanding it comceptually (as you might define a foreign word) but not engaging with it experientially (as you might in speaking a word). It's just a belief, a recently invented one, and one that only bears fruit alongside a constellation of other associated beliefs.
When it comes to actually navigating the world, most people don't orient themselves through such an abstract, intellectual lens let alone that specific one. They raise, eat, and sacrifice animals; they apply violence to other humans; etc etc -- or actively refrain from these things -- without thinking in terms of consciousness at all and often without thinking in terms of any comparably intellectualized rubric.
The way we treat animals and humans and fish and birds and forests and mountains and rivers is just an expression of culture. Cultures change over time and trade practices and beliefs with each other along the way, but there are nearly as many cultures as there are families in the world and to treat everyone like they do and should be part of your own, and that their failure to do so makes them morally detestable (rather than culturally alien), is extremely narrow minded and exclusionary.
In a pluralist, diverse society, like many of us live in, that kind of thinking often engenders strife, division, and eventually violence -- which I'm going to guess is something you don't want to add to the world.
I think you are overthinking things. Of course most of the human beings on planet earth do not perform some kind of philosophical analysis.
However most people actually have an intuition of what it is like to be human and apply it unconsciously to everything that they encounter. I posit that a significant part of that is “acts like a human acts in such-and-such situation” and, inferred from that, “experiences things like a human”.
When I look at my fellow human beings (hell, when I look in the mirror), I have no objective knowledge that they are conscious. If I were to encounter someone badly injured it might not even be clear to me that they were human, much less conscious- so I use observations of behaviors and reactions to put $NEW_THING into the right ontological bucket.
My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment.
The last few years has seen a lot of research (some of it obviously animal rights activist driven) into consciousness of arthropods and mollusks. I read a couple of the papers to understand what was being measured and how, and now I’ve moved lobsters into the “should be killed humanely before cooking”, where I would put cows and chickens etc.
I think most people, if they were given this kind of information, and if they were economically able to act on it, would make similar choices.
> My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment.
Mosquitos are ethical creatures who only bite because they must. "Blood is essential for mosquito reproduction and survival. Female mosquitoes take blood meals to get the protein and iron needed to produce eggs that will properly hatch." [0]
"Mosquitoes enjoy feeding on plant nectar like juices from flowers and fruits, plant sap, honeydew and other fluids from plants. This sugary mosquito food gives them the energy they need to fly, reproduce and sustain themselves." [0]
> For most people it is a very important part of ethics. Most people would consider it unethical to boil alive a being with a sense of self and the ability to feel pain
I disagree. I think that many people who attribute consciousness to animals do so insincerely in order to promote their political views. I say this because there's a huge overlap between vegans and pro-choice people. You can't say animals should be protected from people eating them, but it's perfectly fine to end human life.
(Not trying to derail the conversation with abortion. I actually agree with it, I just take the Bill Maher position: abortion is murder, but I'm mostly okay with that.)
Investigations of fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) show that they engage in both deep sleep and ‘active sleep’, in which their brain activity is the same as when they’re awake[6]. “This is perhaps similar to what we call rapid eye movement sleep in humans, which is when we have our most vivid dreams, which we interpret as conscious experiences,” says Bruno van Swinderen, a biologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, who studies[7] fruit flies’ behaviour and who also signed the declaration.
Some suggest that dreams are key components of being conscious, he notes. If flies and other invertebrates have active sleep, "then maybe this is as good a clue as any that they are perhaps conscious".
Let alone animals with sentience, can anyone prove to me beyond reasonable doubts that there is actually a world that exists outside my senses, or mind?
Yes. An assumption that can neither be proved nor falsified. I hope to solve this by admitting objectivity in consciousness, appearances that are not diverted by my subjective wills. I found causalities, my wills and other peoples wills to be relatively objective.. if the objective world did not change according to a will, there must be contradicting wills.. plus what is this “flagged” comment by botsureg
I also attempted to solve the “other peoples mind” problem by introducing empathetical experiences where you know you mutually experienced something. I got this idea when I was reading Lemune’s q&a with Googles AI, where the AI was describing the experience with data processing. For a second I believe I also experienced a touch of it though it might be an illusion. But gradually I learnt to trust my gut feeling. Many spiritual teachings seemed to resonate with my experiences but yes it seems not many commenters on this thread even consider empathic experiences to exist.
Intuitively nonsensical but irrefutable thought:
Everything about how animals think is based on human assumptions. They might actually like being eaten by humans. How can we know, when the animals haven't said it themselves? In fact, there are people like that in the world. Such people have pain receptors and higher cognitive abilities, yet they still think that way. In other words, analyzing their physiology alone cannot determine whether animals dislike being eaten.
I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.
It's not apparent why play (an energy-consuming behavior) would evolve in a species where there was no benefit to it - one without ability to learn as a result of the new experiences encountered. While bees do have limited learning ability, I doubt it is this general, so it seems more likely that behavior that appears as playful (bees "playing with" balls) is really some other instinct at work.
Plently of animals truly do play though - e.g. crows have been observed sliding down snow-covered roofs on their back, then flying back up to do it over and over!
Please control your observations for the people that spend time around cows and horses vs cats and dogs. As someone who has met a few farmers in their time, folks who keep livestock will tell you that cows & pigs have feelings. Sheep, ehh less than those two. And chickens? Even less.
Our family cat has empathy. It often acts like the stereotypical asshole - feed me and leave me alone - but when someone is feeling down, that cat will come lay close and rest a paw on them.
Also excepting the humans whom we seek to exploit or attack.
We don't eat humans, because we are humans. Everything else is fair game.
If super intelligent aliens smarter than humans came here it would be OK to eat them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t98yf4T4hw
See? Ethics are like that: there must be something we give value too, if we want to stop somewhere and build something. In that case, the core value being raised is that the ability to be aware, suffer and have emotions is morally valuable.
The societies that have this social contract outdo those that don't, simple as that. If your version of treating animals was an advantage, Jainist countries would dominate the world. Yet they don't.
Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !
I concede that the existence of the animals raised in industrial condition is deplorable but the existenceof the beef and chicken I buy from a local farmer is pretty good: ample space, quality food, grazing in the summer, no predator... and the way it's killed is doesn't leave time for suffering.
Cow raised for milk in place where they don't use hormone also have a great life because when they are not well treated the milk production is suboptimal.
Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
They existed as different, likely healthier versions of their species in the wild before we took control of their fates. If the original wild species died out since that time, then the genocide was already commited. If the original species still exists in the wild, then that proves your claim wrong.
Also, all we've done is made genocide perpetual. So instead of allowing the remaining ones to die, is it somehow kinder or more justifiable to perpetually slaughter untold generations of them?
Beyond that, we've now caused mass extinctions of other species in pursuit of raising these animals for slaughter (see: loss of bio diversity or clear cutting of the rainforests for ranching). So when do we stop acting like this endless cycle of genocide is somehow justifiable for the sake of avoiding genocide?
Perhaps it is possible to eat them in an ethical way (like only eating them if they've died of old age), but as it stands, the number of e.g. cows that are raised and slaughtered in deplorable conditions make up the vast, vast majority of total cow 'lives' and there's no way we would have the space/resources to maintain the current populations in the conditions you describe as being acceptable.
>Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.
This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Most animal rights activists I see advocate for better conditions for the animals as well, if we are going to slaughter them anyway. And who even says we would have to let these animals die out entirely if we stopped eating them en mass?
Or that’s just what “playing” is. It sure seems like my cat’s way of playing is to “hunt” me.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4
The word "consciousness" is all but useless in discussing brain function, or even subjective experience, since it's overloaded and covers so many diverse phenomena. Good luck finding any two people who agree on exactly what the word means!
You seem to be talking more about "free will" than any aspect of consciousness, although there is no scientific basis for thinking that free will is anything other than a subjective illusion. Your cortex is able to override basic instincts, but is still doing so via neural outputs and chemistry. Why one person's cortex might override hunger in a given situation, while another person's cortex doesn't, really is not something they have any control over. It's chemistry and physics (not magic and "free will") all the way down. Your cortex does what it does because of how it is wired, which is a result of your personal life history. It's funny that we can often recognize this in others - guessing with high probability what they are going to do in a given situation, while still thinking that we ourselves are not controlled by our past and have the "free will" to do whatever we like (but in reality what we like is controlled by our past - there is no escaping it).
What we subjectively feel as ourselves making a decision to do something is really just us observing our own thought processes, over which we have no control. This is really the only place where anything that I would label as part of that fuzzy word "consciousness" is coming to play - this ability to self-observe.
This ability to self-observe and feel as if the observer (which is also just our cortex) is in control, is perhaps based on specific cortical pathways that evolved to further our cortex's predictive purpose/function. However, it's certainly possible to imagine a brain that was wired differently and didn't have this ability, although maybe in reality all animal brains with a cortex/equivalent, even a more primitive reptilian one, do have this ability?
Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).
When I read about people (scientists, no less) apparently arguing that chimpanzees might not be conscious I wonder what planet they're on. It seems quite clear that every mammal is conscious in a way that most humans have always understood.
Apparently some ants pass the mirror test, so it should probably be uncontroversial to say that insects are conscious. Unless we think that also means ants have free will, that is - and for me, mulling over that problem is what led an acceptance that free will is not a thing for humans either. The usual belief in it results in the mess philosophy got itself into and has yet to extricate itself from, which feels a lot like how we spent thousands of years trying to explain God, a thing that also does not exist.
I'm glad that after your "rebuke", you concluded the same thing but called it "self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness". Only a conscious animal could do that.
My "rebuke" wasn't intended as such - it was meant as a break-down of the mechanisms involved, and basically defining what this relevant aspect of "consciousness" (self-observation, in the way I described it) means.
Note that consciousness wouldn't actually be needed for an animal to override instincts - you could still imagine an animal that had a cortex but no self-awareness. I tend to doubt they exist, but not inconceivable. There's a medical condition called "blind sight" were patients report being blind, but can still navigate a cluttered corridor of obstacles, or gaze track moving objects, without being aware of it (i.e. they can see, but are not consciously aware of being able to see).
So vertabrates definitely have pain receptors. It stands to reason they experience pain, at the very least.
I wonder if there are still people who doubt this.
I've fished. Never felt great about it. But most fish at the fresh water angler level can be caught and released without mortal wounds.
It's hard to reconcile that you'd be willing to rip an animal from the sea to kill and eat it, or just for the fun of it, but also care about the animal though to conduct some insane little ritual of pouring soft drink on the wound you created to try and help it survive.
I doubt the knowledge of consciousness, pain, or any other harm caused by hunting or fishing would dissuade most that do it regularly (in my anecdotal experience)
And yeah, there are people even today that flatly deny that nonhuman animals have any form of subjective experience, even dogs.
The dog has similar gray matter in its skull, just of lower complexity. The dog also loses consciousness in the form of sleeping, like a person, and shows signs of having dreams; e.g. moving its paws as if running.
If a dog were not conscious, there would be no point in distinguishing a sleeping dog from a wakeful dog; the two would have to be the same.
While I don’t disagree with your conclusion, your argument is flawed because you switch the meaning of the word “conscious” from “having thoughts and self-awareness” to “transitioning between a dormant and active state”.
Dreams are a mangled replay of conscious perception of the world.
Then he rescued another kid, then another.
Observations shown that the dog learned to push kids into the river to rescue them for reward.
Also a very human and conscious behavior.
Man, it’s wild you think this. It’s like that old story about how a fish would be considered dumb for not being able to climb a tree, and a monkey dumb for not being able to swim under water. Are chickens dumb AF on the things we use to rate human intelligence? Sure. But they are massively in tune with their environment and adapt to changing light and temperatures in ways that are highly intelligent and beyond human capacity. Same with how attuned they are to predators and how they respond. They’re also smart enough to clearly behave in ways different enough and consistent enough as to form personalities.
I’ve got a flock of around 35 and wouldn’t label them dumb at all.
I have a lot of cats, i toss snacks in the back yard. They are about interested enough to find 80% meanwhile the birds sitting on the roof 40 meters away study the situation carefully and wait for the right configuration of cats before they fly in and snatch the remaining snacks. They see all of them, they never mis one.
Im sure they think my cats are dumb but cats in general are not.
I use to have a stray cat with a gaze powerful enough to win any stairing contest. He pulled tricks that took me years to figure out - seriously.
1) there is still danger that the brain needs to be attuned to.
2) I often let the chickens out of the fenced in area when the grasshopper population gets unruly in the warm summer months, and if you watch the chickens hunt them, I think you’d find that even in the presence of being fed for ~10 months of the year, their brains are highly alert and they are quite good at killing fast moving, unpredictable things.
But i really do use loose heuristics like minimizing pork because pigs are smart, beef because its terribly energy inefficient and less healthy. While plant protein is good but not appetizing.
Chickens get the short end of that stick. Delicious and dumb.
I have years of weight training where I've developed mass. That said, yep it's a crock of shit to be intaking so much daily protein so I just don't do it anymore and it's not a big deal. I'm trying.
anyway, your definition of smart is more like evolutionary adaptation. What is consciousness is pretty much still unanswerable. Physics killed God; we're all just stimulus-response machines. So this discussion on spectrum of smartness is too loaded.
The chickens raised by my grandparents, with which I was playing when I was a small child, had very distinct personalities. Each one of them was easily recognizable. Some appeared to enjoy to interact with me and they were very curious, while others were shy and they would run away from any human.
They were roaming freely over a very large yard with abundant and varied vegetation and insects. They were exploring it all day long, finding various kinds of food for themselves. They received from humans only a food supplement, a shelter for the night and some nests for laying eggs.
[0] https://dictionary.apa.org/personality
They raised various animals, including many chickens.
I liked to play with the chickens and I succeeded to train some of them to execute some simple commands (by giving them generous recompenses of maize grains).
My grandparents and all their neighbors were amazed by this feat, because they believed that chickens are too dumb to be trained like a dog, despite having decades of experience in raising chickens.
So I believe that when you do not look for evidence of intelligence, you do not find it.
It's not OK to cause pain and suffering to a creature capable of intelligence and emotions just because it's less intelligent than an arbitrary, conveniently chosen threshold.
You must fundamentally have a problem with existence because nearly any creature that lives in the wild is going to have a very gruesome, painful lonely death.
If the worst thing that can happen is a chicken is protected, fed, given medicine when sick, have offspring and then eventually slaughtered in a rather human way after adulthood, I don't really see how it's so terrible.
Then imagine if they said: "it's likely that due to advancements in science, in 50 years we won't need to do this anymore because we'll have lab grown organs so we'll just leave you guys alone when we have what we need". I would double take that deal. This is likely where we are now.
The major difference with all of this discussion though is that obviously, animals are conscious, I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal. We're capable of understanding that our kids will be slaughtered for organs in 70 years from their birth. We also have strong emotions tied to this. So we'd be upset about it so I think that makes it a worse deal. Not the worst possible deal in such a theoretical circumstance, but it would be better than annihilation.
Definitely not saying this means this is ideal for anyone, animals or humans, nothing is perfect, I just don't think it's catastrophic.
This line of reasoning begins with a false dichotomy.
>I don't believe they're capable of reasoning where they would be disturbed or troubled by such a deal
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal; suddenly the rationale seems a little flimsy when we consider taking mentally disabled people and 'harvesting' them simply because they don't understand it's a raw deal for them.
I wish I could articulate it generally (newborn, low on sleep atm) but there's something here about mixing levels of consciousness when determining morality that seems flawed.
There are humans with significantly reduced cognition that one could also argue would not be troubled by such a deal;
Families would care
Anyway, if Squid are conscious and have such high levels of thought as you describe, then they understand the game and are likely undisturbed by it. If squid went vegan, then I'd feel worse.
This is why I think hunting is a much more fair way of obtaining protein. We're playing a much fairer game, factory farming and raping the ocean with super trawlers isn't.
1. If you have the time to cook the required amount of vegetarian food (not easy from experience).
2. If you can digest legume based protein without issue.
3. If you want to participate in social or culture events where eating meat is part of having a social life.
Are you a full time vegan / vegetarian? I did it for 2 years, I actually would call it a "luxury".
I moved to a country where it's not yet "hip to be vegetarian" and it's virtually impossible to survive in that place. There is no "Whole Foods" in many parts of the world.
Were they mature?
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, merely pointing out that ultimately every moral system rests on non-observable abstract principles. Metaphysics, in other words.
I grew up in a farm. In my experience, the people less likely to feel empathy for animals were those who actually worked with them every day. This does not mean that they were cruel, at all, but rather that they understood rising and killing animals as fundamental for their livelihood.
This reality is very remote for many urban dwellers, for whom animal products come into existence in the supermarket aisle, and who mostly only see live animals as pets.
The banality of evil. Enron executives' behaviour was also fundamental to their livelihood.
2. That's irrelevant on multiple levels
3. Cognitive abstractions aren't beings, can't have a morality to evaluate.
"As moral as Darwinian Evolution" is not a good look, particularly in regards to livelihood rather than survival.
and i typed _modern people_ from cities & despite city people sometimes contributing or doing great crimes for money, i don't know if that is justifiable to use as a counter argument... as we are chatting about how a modern people, who is probably empathetic/civilized enough to realize that killing an animal is unfair/horrible when there isn't a plausible reason to do it ¶ are rural people aware the complexity of a mammalian? because i can see the love for cats and dogs and some bird species... negating pigs and cows or rats feels a specie prejudice! specially, again, when we proved already that it's more economical, ecological and if done correctly more healthy (animal protein is synthesized differently and if we were black and white, plant and fungi based are easier to swallow [but just a curiosity, as that may only build up to diabetes or cancer if one eats like an average +medium-class North American or the likes]). not long ago, like less than 8 generations, we slaved and raped people in America while building churches talking about Christ love... so i don't think we can go back "the days we eat carcass and hunt mammoths" to justify stuff if we truly want to evolve
"not eating animal products is the bare minimum you can do", actually
edit: a bunch of errors, i'm sleep deprived but do you know that even FLIES suffer from indecision? fungi have the capacity of memory (tho i think we can eat those :), ants are a pretty complex organism for the amount of neurons they have... maybe the day we stop to anthropomorphizing intelligence we'll figure out the holocaust (rolling right now)
Grandin also developed an objective, numerical scoring system for assessing animal welfare at slaughtering plants. The use of this scoring system resulted in significant improvements in animal stunning and handling during slaughter. This work is described in "Objective scoring of animal handling and stunning practices in slaughter plants"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin
Chimps have superhuman short-term memory, but they're not granted personhood.
A tree can be infinitely intelligent. If it doesn't do anything with that intelligence and can't communicate, and we couldn't profit from that intelligence in any way, we wouldn't care about it -- even if we somehow noticed it.
If the tree can benefit us if we don't harm it, we suddenly care.
If it can hurt us if we hurt it, we care.
If other entities which can help us will do so as long as we don't hurt the tree -- or if they will hurt us if we hurt the tree, we care. (For example, this can be other humans with respect to their pets.)
If it exhibits the specific kinds of intelligence that we care about, like talking, or if it simply moves us emotionally, we'll care.
These are all reciprocations of social contracts we're forced, by our biology and by game theory, to respond to.
That's the threshold. Power grows from the barrel of a gun, not an abstract notion of intelligence or consciousness (which, spoiler: is a religious nonsense concept) or whatever.
I expect I’ll eat a lot less chicken in the future.
Personality is any person's collection of interrelated behavioral, cognitive and emotional patterns that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life.
Now, let's define 'cognitive'. For that we'll rely on Merriam-Webster. Their definition[1] says:
of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)
So, at a minimum I think a being needs to be capable of reasoning to have a personality.
The shorter answer is I think a personality can be a combination of innate behavioral traits, but it also has to be things like temperament, likes, dislikes, to some extent skills, and similar things shaped in part by environment.
[0] https://dictionary.apa.org/personality
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cognitive
In this case though we have decades of research into chicken cognition and nothing to indicate they have self-awareness or an ability to reason.
The simplest answer is not that chickens have personalities, but that some humans anthropomorphize chickens.
Can you support your stance with research rather than anecdotal observations?
Animals eat other animals, they don't roam around being upset about it. When I hunt, I don't feel upset about it either.
What I am upset about is the the lack of respect we've shown other animals by ruining their whole ecosystem via ecological destruction and locking them in factory farms. Little chickens born never get to see their parents, they're just thrown into a grinder, like what the fuck?
I spearfish mostly, and I've seen a mother fish proudly cruising around with 3 of her juveniles, do I take that fish? No, I respect her, and her time she is spending with the young ones. By the same time, I've seen fish have their face gnawed off by a squid, this is the reality for most wild animals, a gruesome death. Living a semi-long life and being taken by a skilled hunter is probably the most human way an animal can die. Being thrown into a grinder at 2 days old because you're a rooster and can't lay eggs? Disgusting. Drowning in a trawling net? Horrific.
Basically it feels like something to be a chicken, there’s a subjective chicken conscious experience.
You need supplementation on a vegan diet for a reason. Entirely plant-based diets are not nutritionally complete. Even with proper supplementation, bioavailability is extremely low in plants compared to animal foods.
https://www.diagnosisdiet.com/full-article/meat
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.80656...
https://aleph-2020.blogspot.com/2019/05/animal-source-foods-...
It is okay to be a vegan for your own moral reasons, but to push it on others as it being an intelligence choice (it is not) is to be inconsiderate of one's fellow human beings and their long-term health.
Your sources don’t even refute this. Yes, supplementation for things like B12 and omegas are required. We eat a variety of fortified foods in the modern age anyway and supplementation is trivial. Yes, you need to eat a diverse range of foods to obtain a balance of essential nutrients. That doesn’t mean you cannot maintain long term health on a vegan diet.
The sources do refute your point; I can tell that you have not read them, as you ignored addressing the part of my comment about bioavailability (which two of these sources mention).
From your second source:
> Carefully constructed vegan diets could provide adequate amounts of all six priority micronutrients for the general population, except vitamin B12, which would need to be consumed through fortified foods or supplements.
Further, the opening paragraph of your third link undermines your entire argument as well
> Diets that limit the consumption of animal source food to very low levels require careful fortification or supplementation, and the inclusion of specific nutrient-dense plants. If these cautionary measures are neglected, vegetarian and, especially, vegan populations risk to suffer from deficiencies in some key animal source food-associated nutrients."
It specifically says that vegan populations risk deficiencies when not including nutrient-dense foods and fortification/supplementation. It specifically does not say that full nutrition is impossible without animal products.
Event the title implicitly supports my argument: "Not all (micro)nutrients are easily obtained from plants." Emphasis on "easily."
The word "cannot" only appears alongside B12. The phrase "does not" doesn't appear alongside any nutrients intake. And the word "impossible" doesn't show up at all.
Are you sure that you read the articles you're claiming that I did not read?
Edit: Hopefully you read this after this edit, if not can address as a followup. Here is a page on the NHS specifically referencing how all nutrients can be obtained on a vegan diet: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/how-to-eat-a-balanced-....
When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Honestly no idea what you’re talking about, here.
> When you say vegan stuff like that, you should be more precise: people do not need to eat meat to survive. Survival and good health are on the opposite end of the spectrum.
I needn’t be more precise. Meat is not required for survival or for good health. Exception being if one’s situation demands eating meat. For somebody reading/commenting on HN, eating meat is almost certainly a decision, not a requirement of any sort.
It's totally possible that all sorts of life forms are conscious. I just think to focus on sentience and call it consciousness is silly.
There really is no "blueness" to blue, or "redness" to red.
Consider this strawberry illusion.
https://boingboing.net/2017/03/01/the-strawberries-in-this-p...
When you look at those strawberries you experience the quale of redness, yet they are not red, so this quale isn't directly related to the color of the object you are looking at.
The qualia of colors is just a result of our ability to differentiate surfaces based on the differing inputs our brain receives, but as illusions like this show this is really a function of memory/prediction rather than actual color. The (subjective) quale of redness is something that your mind creates by comparison/recall. You see those strawberries as red because it reminds you of red strawberries. Different colors have to look like something, and since color is basically just a differentiator, it only has any meaning in relation to things of other (similar or different) colors. Grass-green leaves have the quale of grass-green because they remind you (same neural input) of grass.
It's interesting to note how arbitrary (and poor!) our perception of color is, since we only (usually) have three color detectors (retinal cones) tuned for overlapping portions of the frequency spectrum.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/colcon.htm...
Even if we're looking at a pure red object (say 600-650nm light wavelenth), our green (center frequency) detector is also firing too, since that's just the way our eyes are built - we're not really directly detecting colors but just have those three detectors firing to different degrees, which allows us to differentiate a lot of colors. Some people have 4 types of cone rather than 3, and are therefore able to differentiate colors that would look the same to normal people... There is nothing absolute about our perception of color - just an ability to differentiate so some degree or another.
It's interesting to contrast our poor color detection with our much better auditory frequency detection. Our ear basically has a whole bunch of specific frequency detectors (hair cells of the inner ear), almost like doing an FFT of the input signal. Our color sensing "could" have been like this too, but instead evolution has found out that, for us, these three overlapping light frequency detectors is good enough, but for sounds we need to be much more discriminative.
It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what it would be like if we had another way to differentiate surfaces other than by color (or texture). Imagine if we had an ability to remotely detect (see) surface temperature, but not by a thermal imaging device that maps temperature to colors. You could imagine someone making goggles that had directional temperature sensing ability and tracked our gaze direction, such that it output temperature data for a patch around our center of gaze, and fed this data into some part of our cortex via a neural-link like device. What would the qualia of this new sense be like?! Just like color, it would have to "look" like something, and different temperatures would have to look different, but the resulting quales of "hot" and "cold" surface properties would just be whatever our mind recalled when exposed to those inputs. I'd guess that all hot objects would just look "hot" and remind us other other hot objects, just as all red objects look "red".
It doesn't have to be a strawberry (or rather a strawberry as part of a consistently lit scene), but it has to be something that makes our brain predict it is red.
The phenomena behind the illusion is "color constancy" - they way we (learn to?) see objects as being of a consistent color regardless of how they are illuminated.
The strawberry illusion is really cool, thanks for sharing.
I believe color constancy is partially based on adjacency of colors as well as whole scene and lighting.
Depending on how you blobbified the image, it may still recall a plateful of something, and the same colors will still be adjacent to each other, so doing the randomized grid test would tell you if it's just the mix of colors or are the other hints coming to play.
It's possible it is just the mix of colors - same way if you wear color tinted glasses (or ski goggles) and the color of everything changes, but in a consistent way, and (maybe after a few min adaptation) you can still discern the colors reliably.
Edit: On second thought that colored goggles example doesn't prove it's just mix of colors - that's just general color constancy more like the strawberry illusion itself.
If plants are sentient that doesn't change much for veganism.
It makes me think that internal monologue is precisely an artifact of language itself. In this way, this debate and surprise over people "not having it" is not really profound. All people internalize language, that's the only way that not-mimicked language synthesis can happen. This is different from parrots parroting back what they hear for example.
Anyway, I'm curious about this debate over internal monologue. Perhaps it's really that people don't retrospect. That's different. They don't adopt viewpoints outside of their own. Is this really a physical limitation vs a choice?
Am I just ignorant about the state of this science?
My reading is all in my head. I don't know when I made the transition to not mouthing things out, but it would have been pretty early on.
To me inner dialogue is whenever we express a thought to ourselves using language. Like I think "now would be a good time to make coffee".
When someone says they don't have an inner monologue I'm very skeptical. I imagine how it would work is either they only picture such a thing (getting up to get coffee) or its just like a high dimensional emotion of hunger and movement. Which I suppose is how it must work for animals.
But how this can work for more complex and abstract things like analytical philosophy is beyond me. For advanced math I can imagine just seeing equations.
Some would argue that what is commonly considered consciousness is a relatively recent phenomena in humans, the mind being a necessary but not sufficient condition. "The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans."[3]
0. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
1. https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciou...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality
There was a recent post suggesting that our thoughts are 98% unconscious.
It's not hard to imagine that there could be some animals with more than 0.01% consciousness. After all, we started at 0% conscious and evolved a little - other species are probably some way down that track.
https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/s/NazFPXrwYl
We may not realize it but we are “The plague”.
We spread throughout the planet, ravage resources, bring down forests to build monocultures and urban sprawl, dispose chemicals in air and water. We have little regard for anything other than ourselves. We take actions to satisfy our insatiable momentary “feel good” cycle.
We grow kill and eat animals by the billions. Animals who spend their entire lives in tiny boxes suffering.
Imagine we were wild Koalas and another species was ravaging the solar system like this?
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
and supporting 'background':
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background
I'm no longer quite so sure. The possibilities are that consciousness:
1) Is binary or exists in a continuous spectrum
2) Is fundamental property (panpsychism) or emergent
If it is a continuous, fundamental property, then what we experience as qualia (i.e. subjective, conscious experience) are merely a higher order version of any reaction of anything to any other thing (from a glass shattering due to blunt force, to a venus flytrap closing in response to an insect). It also implies that there may be other intelligent species out there with a much higher order of consciousness (not merely intelligence) capable of higher levels of conscious experience. In which case, we have a serious problem with the way we are treating some animals.
I think the best approach to consciousness is to consider it a feedback loop of certain brain processes into perception circuits. This is why consciousness is often tied to senses such as hearing / language and imagery.
It certainly is continous as it develops even in humans.
A comatose person can still have thoughts and consciousness, even trapped in their mind, though your definition of perception circuits might allow this. But even having "senses" is not a requirement for thought imo, it just gives it a framing that makes a lot more sense to us.
I am 100% in alignment with you on a comatose person being able to be 100% conscious.
Glad you arrived at the right question nonetheless. Personally I think panpsychism is (inconveniently and rather alarmingly) the only viable theory of consciousness I’ve ever heard. There’s just no sensible place to draw a line between conscious and not conscious in the development of an organism or in the development of a species.
One aspect is that language can string together small particles to produce arbitrarily complex meanings. In contrast, most animal communication is extremely simplistic - typically one sound or gesture corresponds with one piece of meaning, and the order or number of repetitions has no additional meanings. There may be some exceptions or at least grey areas (whale song, dolphin sound+dance, bee dances, some apes and birds), but the vast majority of animals have an extremely simplistic communication scheme.
Another huge difference between animal communication and human language is that animals communicate in response to direct internal or external stimuli (hungry - > chirp, see dangerous animal -> distress call). In contrast, humans communicate about much more complex feelings, and can choose when to exteriorize their language use.
Note that humans also communicate in ways that aren't language. Our "body language", our cries of pain, baby's cries, grimaces, winking, etc are the equivalent of animal communication and are not language. Sign langauge is absolutely langue though, and you'll notice it fully ticks the two boxes I was mentioning earlier.
Also, in response to your second point: most people with domesticated pets could give examples of deception or signalling intent.
Related to deception or intent - those are still at best second order reactions to internal/external stimuli. The fact remains that dogs or even chimps don't, for example, tell stories to their friends about what a fun ball they saw yesterday or how sad they've been last week.
For example, there are clear relationships between a baby’s gesturing and their language development. These appear to be different enactments of the same systems (also people born blind will gesture while they speak).
Even the “at best second order reactions to internal/external stimuli.” Every human thought and action is at best an Nth order reaction to internal/external stimuli. Differences of degree.
I do agree that there is some continuum of conscious experience between certain animals up to humans. I even believe there is an extremely remote but real possibility that other organisms such as plants, fungi, even bacteria, have some sliver of internal life that could resemble our consciousness.
But panpsychism goes WAY beyond this into a mush that makes no sense. Rocks and atoms very obviously are not conscious, and any non-religious theory of consciousness that posits that they have to be, even a tiny little bit, is in my opinion self-evdiently wrong (e.g. IIT).
Of course, if we want to posit that some form of god exists beyond physical phenomena, panpsychism is valid again.
You're not doing your argument any favors with this kind of hyperbole. Many animals mourn and communicate that mourning. Many animals have been shown to pass along information to others about helpful or hurtful humans, good places to hunt or forage, even elements of culture like behavior or personal calls. African wild dogs will die of a syndrome akin to heartbreak if separated from and unable to communicate with their group.
It's not too much to say that humans and other animals think and communicate differently. Most do not have the physiological capacity for certain types of advanced and abstract thought that are central to our own experience of reality. But that's a far cry from having no semblance of conscious cognition. Too many animals exhibit behavior indicating an awareness of the self as a separation from the other and the environment for your characterization to be unequivocally correct.
https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1159842012
I believe it's a spectrum. I'm not even sure if humans are the farthest species on Earth towards one end of the spectrum. We might have the most complex language to focus our consciousness around but it doesn't mean others (like dolphins or elephants or whales) can't have better consciousness in some manner.
It should be a prerequisite to being and calling oneself a scientist.
Arguing that should be transparent and done in public.
science would be better for it.
The sooner we can move to indistinguishable (and cheaper) lab-grown meat, the better. I have very little hope of changing enough minds or culture to simply not eat meat, but I have considerable hope that we can trick ourselves through better savings and taste. Seems like the tech is going to land that direction. Full steam ahead - let's be weird pacifist vampires gorging off brainless flesh growths. Our apology can be a happy "never again!" as we dig into marbled wagu slabs.
I will go ahead and claim that it is not like anything to be a bat (iykyk; see the Nagel reference in TFA). And, frankly, questions of consciousness have become a bit boring to me, despite being the focus of my interest for decades now.
Questions of intelligence, communication, social organization, etc are interesting. But questions about a consciousness phenomenon that may or may not even be real and has literally no consensus about theory or fundamental meaning across many disciplines? Boring.
Get back to me when even a bare majority of philosophers and researchers can agree on a definition of consciousness.
If I were to run up to you and kick you in the shin while shouting 'I refute it thus', I submit that consciousness is the part of you that would be angry and upset afterwards, even if I were immediately detained and taken away by a conveniently present police officer.
Get back to who?
You appear to be claiming to be some kind of linguistic illusion, a meat LLM. If that’s true then there is no “you” to get back to, just some random chemical and physical processes.
"Can other animals have consciousness? Is there even something like consciousness at all? (except I have it right?)"
After reading about this conceptualisation of consciousness I always thought that the true point is that we truly can't know if anything else is conscious until we can truly answer that question.
Likewise, is it something like to be a rock? Probably not, but you never know.
I suspect VR/neural implants/etc. will upend Nagel's inconceivability theory. Consciousness can be defined via capability, and we'll soon have the capability of directly simulating any conceivable umvvelt via those technologies. Then we'll all know what its like to be bats.
I think this kind of reductionist approach to consciousness is bound to end up very weak in the face of these kinds of counterarguments.
Maybe I missed your point.
In a test on suffering, if a subject has been inserted to fake consciousness, then we would still be measuring consciousness- we'd be measuring the consciousness of the mastetmind behind the robot/fake.
Suffering isn't so easily dismissed, any conscious entity will tell you.
I agree it is reductionist- that is the point of philosophy, to reduce to a point. RIP DD, you know he was a true philosopher because he came to a final point.
But I think the point I would make is that there is no way for you to know if anyone or anything else is conscious. Our current ability to understand the mind is incapable of truly determining if even a fellow human is conscious or not.
If you can't separate the internal and the external, then what is there to be conscious of? Subject is implied in the concept.
Likewise, our understanding of the world is also founded heavily on assumptions.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that. We can't know for sure if something else is conscious. Even scientifically speaking, even once you've accepted some assumptions, we genuinely aren't even close to having the tools necessary to determine if something is conscious or not. It's not even just scepticism at that point, it's fact.
But also, we have the same problem with other large areas of medicine. We can only work on limited information and some assumptions. There's nothing wrong with that, it's better than nothing. Although you are free to decide not to accept any assumptions (unsurprisingly, this would lead to suffering and people generally do like to avoid suffering).
To address your second point, dualism isn't implied and there's whole schools of meditation practice (which can and have successfully been made to be secular without losing anything) which focus on the underlying non-dualism of consciousness.
The issue is that to really understand the non-dualism of consciousness, it requires actually getting to that state. This requires practice and effort. Without that, all you're left with is sometimes mystical sounding statements like: the feeling of having no head.
As a matter of your direct experience, the thoughts in your mind, including the feeling of "I" or of a subject are entirely on the same level as your experience of sounds, sights, smells, touch, etc. They are just apparitions within consciousness. You might not believe me, you might be convinced I'm wrong, but all you need to do to find out for yourself is to truly pay attention to the contents of your mind.
It's been the position of the ADA for the past 10+ years that humans are not obligate carnivores.
The micronutrients that vegans need to watch out for are EPA/DHA (types of omega 3s) and Vitamin B12. Both are trivial to supplement, and not particulary expensive (especially now that Costco sells the former). The B12 you get via factory farmed meat is all supplemented to them anyway, so there's no difference in some hypothetical molecule quality.
The last remaining micronutrient that might be tricky is Vitamin D3, if you don't get the necessary sun exposure. The D3 in standard supplements is usually made from sheep wool. But you can also replace that with relative ease, and many vegan options are really mixed D3+K2 supplements which is even better. Also available at Costco, for what it's worth.
The core of any sin is against the will i.e. I have heard there were people who would like to be eaten and found a guy who actually ate him.
In the book I AM THAT Sri Nisargadatta said to a questioner:”
Look, my thumb touches my forefinger. Both touch and are touched. When my attention; is on the thumb, the thumb is the feeler and the forefinger -- the self. Shift the focus of attention and the relationship is reversed. I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, I become the very thing I look at and experience the kind of consciousness it has; I become the inner witness of the thing. I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness -- love; you may give it any name you like. Love says: 'I am everything'. Wisdom says: 'I am nothing' Between the two my life flows. Since at any point of time and space I can be both the subject and the object of experience, I express it by saying that I am both, and neither, and beyond both.
I find it funny that this article and the quotes within state that humans have a "dense internal monologue" as if that is some requirement of the species. Some quick Googling indicates that people with internal monologues might only make up 30%-50% of people [0].
There are frequent Reddit posts with some variation of "TIL people [have|don't have] an internal monologue" full of comments of people from both sides, and a significant portion of people who don't have the classic internal monologue, but something in between instead.
We can't even begin to truly describe our own minds, how could we possibly know how all species would think?
0: Hurlburt, R.T., Alderson-Day, B., Kuhn, S. & Fernyhough, C. (2016). Exploring the ecological validity of thinking on demand: Neural correlates of elicited vs. spontaneously occurring inner speech. PLoS One, 11(2), e0147932. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147932
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...
One doesn't need to think too much to know the only difference between us and other species is the ability to philosophize and as such, it should bring even more harmony and compassion, instead of beliefs that justify exploitation of nature.
I don't know why we assign ourselves so much importance, some of our thoughts allow us to bring harm to others but we don't want to be treated the same way we treat them.
All we really need is education, the education of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes (or hooves).
I take it a step further and say that if you're going to eat animals, make the best possible, best-tasting meal out of them.
The flip side is that I also have no quasi-romantic attachment to it being "real" meat.
One of the sibling comments immediately jumped to the assumption you're referring to veganism and the use of animals in the food system. I'm not going to assume that's what you're referring to, but I will use it as a case study.
The problem with veganism's approach to this is that it's a limited extension of empathy. If you've been following along with the advances in plant behavior, it's pretty mind blowing. There is a growing body of evidence that plants have cognition (using a different system than animal's nervous system), memory, environmental awareness, the ability to learn, and communicate. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that plants are _also_ conscious.
In fact, there are hints of evidence that microbes are aware and making decisions. It may well be that environmental awareness and consciousness are just the defaults of life.
So then, for autotrophs like us, what does harmony and compassion look like? How do we feed ourselves at scale without causing harm or exploiting nature?
Even if we value identically plants and animals, plants are exploited in a much more benign way than animals.
In the past, there were many domestic animals which could be said to have lived quite a happy life for their kind, until the moment when they were slaughtered.
Nowadays, the vast majority of the domestic animals live in conditions that can be hardly named other than torture.
On the other hand, the cultivated plants do not really live in any worse way than in their wild state. The majority of the cultivated plants are either annual plants, which are killed a very short time before the moment when they would have died anyway, or they are perennial plants from which we take only their fruits, which have been developed by the plants especially for being taken by animals, as a payment for being aided in reproduction.
So without giving any preference to cultivated plants or domestic animals, the more ethical choice is to continue to exploit in the current way only the former.
I believe that in the future not even cultivating plants will be the most efficient way for producing food and other organic substances.
The most efficient way will be to use solar energy gathered by photovoltaic cells to capture carbon dioxide and dinitrogen and incorporate them in some simple organic molecule or molecules, perhaps glycine or a mixture of urea or ammonia with a simple carbohydrate or a short-chain fatty acid.
Whatever will be synthesized using solar energy, at a better efficiency than currently achieved by plants, will be used to feed some genetically engineered fungi (or parasitic plants, i.e. non-phototrophic plants), which will produce any kind of desired food or other useful complex organic substances. (A first step in this direction is shown by the recent news about strains of the Trichoderma fungus that have been genetically engineered to produce either whey protein or egg white protein, but in the future it should be possible to make for instance fungi able to grow fruiting bodies that are bananas or turkey thighs).
Half jokingly, maybe we don’t, and human society develops morality that is not compatible with the continued existence of humans.
Owners of cats and dogs get a reasonable idea from observation. But yeah, doing all species is tricky.
It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives.
I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?
At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.
(E.g., if I'm driving behind a car acting strangely on the road, I might be very carefully observing and anticipating the driver's actions, while only muttering a vague "Whaaat...?" Or, for an experiment you can try at home, try thinking of something dumb repeatedly without pause, while at the same time reflecting on how dumb it sounds.)
I suspect that many people are the same, it's just that the monologue is the most immediately noticeable component of one's thoughts.
I'm not great at math, but I've trained myself to do basic calculations in my head. I need to concentrate hard and it goes very slow (I'm also a fast thinker for other stuff). I do this because it's a very useful skill in day-to-day life, so worth training.
I once read that many people basically spin up a virtual machine in their mind to do math. That is how it feels to me too. All simulation, no hardware acceleration, so very slow.
I also noticed that I need to speed up female speakers more than males. I'm not sure if this is because their cadence tends to be slower, or if it's something about me.
I find writing very useful for thinking. It focuses the monologue and you don't need to strain your short-term memory as much when reasoning about elements in the stream, it's like doing maths on paper instead of in your head.
I'm sure you experience the same thing when talking, you don't say each word to yourself before you say it out-loud (perhaps you do?). Also, where are the words before you say them to yourself, they are kind of a surprise no? Just as you describe writing.
It's not "on" all the time for me, but the majority of the day I'd say.
I also think and dream in code, fwiw.
> I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?
> At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.
As someone with a particularly strong inner dialogue (who often struggles to think about things in a fully non-verbal way), I definitely struggle at times with feeling like my brain is not concurrent enough for being good at multitasking, so I don't think you're completely off. To put it in programming terms, I feel less that my brain is "single threaded" as it's read/write locked in the sense that if I'm speaking or typing, I'm much less able to process properly listen to anything being said to me. For example, if I'm typing up an email (or a decently sized comment here) and someone tries to talk to me, I'll often not be able to formulate a response without completely losing my train of thought about what I was writing, which leads me to ask if it's okay for me to finish what I'm writing before responding.
As for "lining up one word after another in their minds", I don't think it's quite as tedious as it sounds like you might be thinking. When speaking out loud, it doesn't take any conscious thought for me to "line up words" as they come out of my mouth; if anything, I talk much more quickly than average. It hadn't occurred to me beforehand, but I wonder if this trait is correlated with having an internal monologue.
I think that the main reason is that thinking in words slows me down.
But the process is also too automatic. Maybe what's actually happening is completely different from what I described.
That probably explains so much.
I have a hard time believing that there are people who have no inner dialogue. Especially in modern societies. I think it's something we all do, it's just that we didn't know there was a word for it.
Ever ask yourself, why did I waste so much time on HN or other social media? Then you probably have an inner dialogue.
If you are mostly thinking in words, how do you even fix or see when you have misunderstood a word? To me that is easy, that word isn't how you think, but to you that words definition seems to be critical then, how do you even manage to parse text then? You must also parse them down to these core concepts that are lower level than words without knowing, or else I don't see how you could function as a human.
If I am preparing for some kind of speech or trying to get the phrasing of something just right for an interview, then yes, I do practice saying those words inside my head (or, as often as not, aloud). But it is not exactly an internal monologue because I am not thinking in words; I am just doing memorization work. It's little different from imagining song lyrics in my head, which I can do without really parsing their meaning.
I have never thought something like, "Why did I...?" I have said things like that in order to express the sentiment of self-disappointment to someone else in my company, but it's not a thing I would ever think or say on my own. Internally, my experience is an emotion, not a rhetorical question.
With games, I do take mental notes, but it’s not personal. It’s more like looking at a historical battle, for example and thinking of different options. It’s not personal.
I’m not going to be absolutist. There could be times I’ve had internal monologues but I may not think of them as such. In other words maybe I have the behavior but because I haven’t classified it as such, I remain unaware of it.
Warning: Some visuals may be disturbing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)
/s
An example (from Dominion) is how they typically asphyxiate cattle immediately before slaughter: using carbon monoxide (when nitrogen would be far less painful/cruel, but costs a few ¢¢¢¢ more).
I fell asleep watching this movie during that scene, and it led to horrific limbic states.
--
Of course I still consume animal products, but watching that film entirely ended swine for me (and greatly reduced my overall meat consumption).
Sometimes she predicts incorrectly (but definitely based on my previous actions) and does weird stuff, but in the context of an animal based prediction of the future from previous events it makes perfect sense.
How about corvids that can build tools and predict indirect actions? (displacement etc)
I don't see how sentience or consciousness has anything to do with anything.
Even admitting animal consciousness still leaves you a very long way away from anything like a framework of human rights.
Second, even if they aren't conscious, you should still take ecology into account. I don't think Redwood trees are conscious, but that doesn't mean we should go chopping them down without any thought.
In eastern philosophy, consciousness is all that which is not material nature, that is unchanging, exactly the same in every living being and is separate from mind, intelligence and senses which are considered a part of material nature.
Experiences are outside material world. There is nothing you can call “pain”, but only evidence of it, be it physiological or physical or metabolical or neurological.
Yet first and foremost, the entire world is based on senses isn’t it? The only thing any experiencer can prove without any “evidence” is that he is. The existence of experience is self lroving. Beyond that how can anyone prove that there is actually a world beyond mind? The world is a model in one’s consciousness. It is constructed with consciousness and is therefore full of consciousness.
How can anyone assume things beings or animals without consciousness exists?
Objectivity?
And you're quite right. Patanjali in the Yoga Sūtras says that the seer abides in its own nature, that is what pure consciousness is. The consciousness being conscious of its own consciousness. The only way to know that is to have citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ or the absolute stilling of the mind by shutting down all senses.
It's definitely very difficult to wrap my head around it, but it's still fascinating that if one follows the Yoga method properly, there might be a possibility of having that pure-consciousness experience.
cit is definitely consciousness, citta is not, it's a part of prakṛti.
What you're probably referring to is citta. There's a difference between citta and pure consciousness.
Just because a lot of people use a word a lot, doesn't mean the word is well defined.
In the UK we mostly admit to animal consciousness and have a framework something like human rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_welfare_in_the_United_K...
I’m not sure I would ever want to interact with you if you don’t think that consciousness should have anything to do with how you treat other creatures; at best you might be indifferent to cruelty towards pets and at worst you might be a psychopath.
Most people around the world haven't really internalized the pointedly modern idea of "conciousness" in the first place and some people around the world and even in distintcly modern cultures don't find it a very fruitful way of making sense of their own experience, understanding it comceptually (as you might define a foreign word) but not engaging with it experientially (as you might in speaking a word). It's just a belief, a recently invented one, and one that only bears fruit alongside a constellation of other associated beliefs.
When it comes to actually navigating the world, most people don't orient themselves through such an abstract, intellectual lens let alone that specific one. They raise, eat, and sacrifice animals; they apply violence to other humans; etc etc -- or actively refrain from these things -- without thinking in terms of consciousness at all and often without thinking in terms of any comparably intellectualized rubric.
The way we treat animals and humans and fish and birds and forests and mountains and rivers is just an expression of culture. Cultures change over time and trade practices and beliefs with each other along the way, but there are nearly as many cultures as there are families in the world and to treat everyone like they do and should be part of your own, and that their failure to do so makes them morally detestable (rather than culturally alien), is extremely narrow minded and exclusionary.
In a pluralist, diverse society, like many of us live in, that kind of thinking often engenders strife, division, and eventually violence -- which I'm going to guess is something you don't want to add to the world.
However most people actually have an intuition of what it is like to be human and apply it unconsciously to everything that they encounter. I posit that a significant part of that is “acts like a human acts in such-and-such situation” and, inferred from that, “experiences things like a human”.
When I look at my fellow human beings (hell, when I look in the mirror), I have no objective knowledge that they are conscious. If I were to encounter someone badly injured it might not even be clear to me that they were human, much less conscious- so I use observations of behaviors and reactions to put $NEW_THING into the right ontological bucket.
My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment.
The last few years has seen a lot of research (some of it obviously animal rights activist driven) into consciousness of arthropods and mollusks. I read a couple of the papers to understand what was being measured and how, and now I’ve moved lobsters into the “should be killed humanely before cooking”, where I would put cows and chickens etc.
I think most people, if they were given this kind of information, and if they were economically able to act on it, would make similar choices.
Mosquitos are ethical creatures who only bite because they must. "Blood is essential for mosquito reproduction and survival. Female mosquitoes take blood meals to get the protein and iron needed to produce eggs that will properly hatch." [0]
"Mosquitoes enjoy feeding on plant nectar like juices from flowers and fruits, plant sap, honeydew and other fluids from plants. This sugary mosquito food gives them the energy they need to fly, reproduce and sustain themselves." [0]
https://www.orkin.com/pests/mosquitoes/what-do-mosquitoes-ea...
I disagree. I think that many people who attribute consciousness to animals do so insincerely in order to promote their political views. I say this because there's a huge overlap between vegans and pro-choice people. You can't say animals should be protected from people eating them, but it's perfectly fine to end human life.
(Not trying to derail the conversation with abortion. I actually agree with it, I just take the Bill Maher position: abortion is murder, but I'm mostly okay with that.)
Torture and death are very different things.
[7] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00709-7