'Irresponsible' to ignore consciousness across animal world scientists argue
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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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Or that’s just what “playing” is. It sure seems like my cat’s way of playing is to “hunt” me.
Also excepting the humans whom we seek to exploit or attack.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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"
Were they mature?
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
After fasting for 3-5 days I have crazy focus, I see and hear everything. I also have aggresive tendencies that are totally alien to my normal personality. Punching an annoying coworker all of a sudden seemed like a perfectly normal response. He is always like that, it takes no effort to ignore it.
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.
My grandma had a rooster that ran many circles every morning and eventually flew to a nearby tree branch. The chickens would follow one by one, the last one needed 15 minutes worth of warming up until she was finally able to fly. I dont know what the point was but it seemed important to her? They all sat there watching until she made it.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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-....
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?
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.
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.
The strawberry illusion is really cool, thanks for sharing.
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...
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':
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)"
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Half jokingly, maybe we don’t, and human society develops morality that is not compatible with the continued existence of humans.
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).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_erro...
That probably explains so much.
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.
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.
It's not "on" all the time for me, but the majority of the day I'd say.
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.
(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 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 also think and dream in code, fwiw.
But the process is also too automatic. Maybe what's actually happening is completely different from what I described.
I think that the main reason is that thinking in words slows me down.
Owners of cats and dogs get a reasonable idea from observation. But yeah, doing all species is tricky.
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 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.
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.
Warning: Some visuals may be disturbing.
/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.
Just because a lot of people use a word a lot, doesn't mean the word is well defined.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...