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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] MDWolinski|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] isodev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] VS1999|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] topherclay|1 year ago|reply
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4
[+] [-] Anotheroneagain|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Trasmatta|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] meiraleal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] magnoliakobus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brigade|1 year ago|reply
And yeah, there are people even today that flatly deny that nonhuman animals have any form of subjective experience, even dogs.
[+] [-] blcknight|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] apsurd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tiltowait|1 year ago|reply
I expect I’ll eat a lot less chicken in the future.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bamboozled|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smokeydoe|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] srid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] DEADMINCE|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lolcust|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cybercephas|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] satchlj|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] retrac|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] hx8|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] HarHarVeryFunny|1 year ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] ravetcofx|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] apsurd|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] adolph|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] garspin|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nojvek|1 year ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] nickburns|1 year ago|reply
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
and supporting 'background':
https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/background
[+] [-] hliyan|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oezi|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] llamaimperative|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] meristohm|1 year ago|reply
https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1159842012
[+] [-] scotty79|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] motohagiography|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tacocataco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] reify|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dogcomplex|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] checkyoursudo|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rustcleaner|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sneakay|1 year ago|reply
It's been the position of the ADA for the past 10+ years that humans are not obligate carnivores.
[+] [-] CaptainNegative|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cybercephas|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chahex|1 year ago|reply
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.