>"People tend to instinctively anthropomorphize, and this instinct is particularly strong when it comes to our offspring."
I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?
I don't want to come across as snide when I ask this, but why would it be wrong to anthropomorphize a fellow human being?
Likewise, a baby may look like a person, may even behave in some ways like a person, but not yet actually be one.
Again I have to emphasize: I am not saying this is the case, only that it is a possibility that needs to be taken into account when doing the moral calculus.
An important thing to note about babies is that at some point in the past few months they objectively couldn't feel anything, despite having a human body.
So the question is when those various things switch over, not if.
Is that actually true (if by "human body" you mean a humanoid body, rather than the vacuous-in-this-context sense of a body of a human)? I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to feel developed earlier than the human-like body.
Maybe it looked like a fish at the time, I wasn't trying to be specific in that way.
There's a very good chance 'humanoid' comes before 'feeling' but I don't want to get too deep into the weeds.
Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't bother with more than the tip. But if you're a glaciologist, examples of sailors getting spooked by fake plastic iceberg tips would not lead you to question whether natural icy marine bodies (especially ones that usually develop into icebergs!) have any mass below sea-level. Or if you're studying carcinization, the fact that robot crab decoys can pass for real tells you exactly nothing about why unrelated phylogenetic lines independently develop crab-like features.
And the "people" in "dead people" refers to real people, who die. A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". Mourning, including respectful treatment of remains, is symbolic. None of that is anthropomorphism.
It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. Are babies "a system [that] responds to painful stimulus" but feels no pain? Occam's Razor says no. I see zero downside to reckoning that possibility out of the moral calculus.
Yes.
> I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies.
I'll take that bet. Why do you think human children play with dolls?
> People can be tricked.
Indeed.
> A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice".
You're kind of making my point for me here. A corpse is an inanimate object. An inanimate object cannot be a person. A corpse was a person, but when that person died it ceased to be a person just as when ice melts it ceases to be ice. When a person dies, when ice melts, they cease to exhibit any of the distinguishing properties that made them a person or that made them ice.
> It is established that human babies develop into human adults.
Sure, but that in and of itself does not make them people any more than the fact that people die makes live people corpses. A live person will some day become a corpse, but while it is alive it is not yet a corpse. A baby will some day become a person, but while it is a baby it may or may not be a person.
> Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly.
That's simply not true. A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood, whereas in adults these are pretty easily distinguished. But even if it were true, so what? You could make an automaton that mimicked adult responses to pain, but that automaton would not feel pain. You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone.
Look, I'm not saying that babies don't feel pain. I think they probably do. All I'm saying is that it's not the slam-dunk that many people here seem to think it is.
Do children "play" with dolls? I don't think that is a slam-dunk. As far as we know, children may be mindless automata and what we call "doll-play" may be unfeeling mirroring of adult anthropomorphizing behavior absorbed through something like blindsight.
> You're kind of making my point for me here.
Not at all. My point was that calling a puddle "melted ice" has nothing to do with mistaking it for any kind of ice or ascribing characteristics of ice to it. Likewise with "dead people".
> A baby's response to pain is all but indistinguishable from its being, say, hungry, or just in a bad mood
That's simply untrue, even in neonates (not to mention babies several months older). Look into the abundant research applying the Facial Action Coding System and derived systems to infants and their pain vs. other distress responses.
> You can't conclude anything about subjective experience from I/O behavior alone.
This is a denkverbot, not productive skepticism. We can draw robust, valuable conclusions about subjective states without enjoying deductive certainty.
Seriously?
> As far as we know, children may be mindless automata
Yes, that's possible. You can't prove that humans in general are not philosophical zombies. But I have memories of being self-aware around age 4 or so, so from my own personal experience I put that as an absolute upper bound on where humans might not be persons yet.
On the other hand, I also remember exhibiting I/O behavior that would cause an outside observer to conclude that I was experiencing much more intense pain than in retrospect I was actually experiencing.
> Facial Action Coding System
Of course it is possible to create a taxonomy of facial expressions and how those correlate to physical stimulus. What you can't do is know the subjective experiences that those expressions correspond to because no adult knows what it is like to be a baby. If anyone actually knew that, we would not be having this discussion at all.
> We can draw robust, valuable conclusions about subjective states without enjoying deductive certainty.
I don't deny that. What I'm saying is that you cannot draw those conclusions simply by observing a system's I/O behavior. You have to take the underlying mechanism into account. If you doubt this, look at this photo:
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/91YBjzSRmnL...
The subject of that photo appears to be in distress, but it is not in fact in distress. The way I know this is that the subject of that photo is actually a doll (look at the eyebrows), and dolls cannot be in distress. So there is an existence proof that merely because a physical system appears to be in distress that is not enough evidence to conclude that it is in fact in distress. You need something else.
So there may well be value in minimizing the pain of infants even if they don't actually experience pain. The policy decisions do not turn exclusively on the answer to the philosophical question.
But it's not a no-op either, because if you are going to (say) administer anesthetic to a baby you'd better be sure that the net benefits outweigh the costs to the baby.
We don't need to factor into the moral calculus the possibility that no pain is felt since the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that infants do feel pain. What reason could there possibly be to believe that they don't that isn't some stretched exersize in special pleading and evasion? The baby is human!
> the most reasonable and rational conclusion is that
In the context of science, this statement is a very dangerous one to make. There's many many many many things that people thought were "reasonable and rational conclusions" that turned out to be completely wrong after some actual rational experimentation and application of the scientific method.
The general idea of anthropomorphising, here, is to attribute characteristics and experience that we only know from our own experience as conscious, self-aware creatures capable of complex cognition and complex communication of that experience.