Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness
ieet.org
ieet.org
Even if other highly-encephalized animals aren't conscious, they are still open to a wide range of experiences that we can empathize with. They can learn and play. They feel hunger and pain. Some species can even form friendships and mourn the passing of their kin.
Despite all indications that our treatment of these creatures is reprehensible, cultural inertia and the tastiness of meat are enough to prevent us from changing our behavior. To treat even 1% of humans the way we treat animals would be to perpetuate the greatest war crime in history. But do the same thing to some funny-looking microencephalitic relatives of humans and hardly anyone bats an eye.
I do agree though, and this is why I've been a vegetarian for 10 years now.
People who have power over the actions taken are responsible, pretty much the person itself and also the higher chain of command for the said person who commits whatever act to be held responsible for.
1. Those elected officials are not elected by everyone - in the case of GWB's first term (which many probably think of in this military context) it wasn't even a majority that elected him.
2. Those that do elect officials have a very small choice (lets say 2-3 people who could practically be elected). Further, I'd argue that most only vote on a few key issues, while the elected official has dominion over a vast number of issues.
I don't hold citizens as not at all responsible, but I think its at least fair to argue (in the above context) that the elected officials bear more responsibility - and blame - than the everyday citizen.
I would also disagree with politicians controlling the military -- perhaps the people in charge do have political power too, but I would argue that the political power and power over the military are rather indirect, it's not the same entity controlling the two, there are multiple people and entities with indirect relationships.
I am not responsible for an act you do with the knife I sold you last week, unless I did it in consent of you commiting the act. My parents aren't responsible for the acts I do.
Only when there's power, there's responsibility. Taxpayer does not have power over military, hence why taxpayer has no responsibility.
I'd add to the people replying to this comment, about US citizens' responsibility, they have more responsibility than the average North Korean citizen, but not much. From what I understand, challenging the status quo in the USA is pretty difficult!
[1] according to http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Rights-Current-Debates-Directio...
The assumption here is that simply because a being is conscious, it is therefore special. Let's take away that assumption, and then work forwards. Of what significance is consciousness?
Personally I have no problem with humans eating meat, in my view it's part of our nature, but I do have a problem with raising them in battery farms and people kicking their pets etc.
But 'slaughtering' misses the point. Nature is constant slaughter. Despite what we think of nature as being a cuddly, friendly thing, the animals in nature are locked in a literally deadly battle. The reasons why herbivores generally startle so easily is because if they don't, they die, and die horribly. We think it's cute, but it's literally there to keep them alive.
The issue isn't 'slaughtering' as far as I can see - since that is an exceptionally natural state for an animal - it's how the animals are treated up until they're slaughtered.
Not to mention that if we're talking about sheer numbers of organisms, the ones that are slaughtered for actual consumptions are a drop in the ocean compared to all the animals that are slaughtered in farming. Mice plague? Hell, just normal mice, no plague? You rarely hear the vegetarian protestors complaining about the huge numbers of rodents killed in farming. It increases in magnitude as you go down, too (snails etc, and increase again for insects). I think it's funny that above we have a complaint about 'not eating the cute rabbit', yet no-one champions the rights of vermin, despite them dying in far greater numbers. Generally no-one cares about them, because they die 'over there' and don't end up in line of sight.
So yeah, treat meat animals humanely, that's a tenable goal, but 'stop the slaughter'? It requires wilfully turning a blind eye.
Isn't that what biologists call symbiosis?
The sad part is, we've also made species extinct just because they weren't tasty. Dodos for instance. Taste bad, so we just killed them for fun. Then they went extinct.
This is typical human hypocrisy at work.
The worst thing I find is the "I'll eat a sausage but I couldn't possibly eat a cute bunny wabbit". The sausage in its natural form is capable of being a valuable and loyal human companion.
I haven't eaten meat since I was at university in the distant past after I got addicted to a combination of ramen noodles, mushrooms and home made pepper sauce. The ethical dilemma made it hard to go back to eating meat so I didn't bother.
Regarding tastiness, Indian vegetarian food (particular aloo, gobi is far tastier than anything with meat in and you can grow ALL the ingredients yourself if you want without having to shovel a single turd.
> Regarding tastiness, Indian vegetarian food (particular aloo, gobi is far tastier than anything with meat in and you can grow ALL the ingredients yourself if you want without having to shovel a single turd.
In your opinion.
Firstly, the problem I have with the hypocrisy is independent to a diet choice so the statement about the path is invalid.
Secondly, everything is subjective so your argument is moot (as is mine).
The worst thing I find is the "I'll eat a sausage but I couldn't possibly eat a cute bunny wabbit". The sausage in its natural form is capable of being a valuable and loyal human companion.
"Those who like sausage and respect the law should inquire into the making of neither."
Little kids are cute and cuddly, so killing (and eating) anything cute and cuddly ought to be at least somewhat distasteful. If you recognize that logically this association doesn't make sense, you can either desensitize yourself or take advantage of your natural tendency to "out of sight, out of mind" and deliberately not think about what that venison steak looked like before it was a steak.
This. Times a thousand.
Paul Graham's article "Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas" has this quote, which I love:
"One of my tricks for generating startup ideas is to imagine the ways in which we'll seem backward to future generations. And I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future, it will seem barbaric that people in our era waited till they had symptoms to be diagnosed with conditions like heart disease and cancer."
When I look to the future and imagine what will seem backwards, two of the big things in my mind are what PG mentions and what you mention.
This isn't about kindness and cruelty, this is about awareness. As long as we perceive other living beings as The Other, we're not truly aware -- we can't empathize, we can't be compassionate, we can't be a complete human being. Condemning people for barbarism is a subtler form of separation, of saying "those people are not us." But they are, just as we're growing as a species and society to be aware of non-human awareness.
If you want to start treating animals with the same sanctity as humans, you need to watch out. Countries that use the death penalty should be executing all the carnivores for mass murder.
And what does "the way we treat animals" mean anyway? Plenty of pets are doted on and loved to bits. Plenty of wild animals are left alone, ignored, or even unknown. Plenty of animals are treated inhumanely. Overgeneralisations are an enemy to progress.
I don't eat or kill other humans, not just because I know they would dislike it, but because if we didn't all generally keep to that rule of not doing so, I run a higher risk of being eaten or killed myself. It's a behavioural contract, not some innate universal rule that suffering is bad.
For me, the question of what to eat is solely one of sustainability. Under that line of reasoning, veganism is better than vegetarianism which is approximately equivalent to eating no red meat, which are both better than eating red meat. How sentient the animal is doesn't factor into the decision.
Edit: </sarcasm>
Good luck with that. Maybe it happens, but I'm not holding my breath.
> To clarify...
I recommend not doing this again.
Why do you connect consciousness and not killing? Not killing all humans is fairly new concept for us and we always knew they were conscious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Neural_correlate...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness#Defining_conscio...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory
It gets worse. When you look at it closely there's no useful reason to restrict any of these measures with arbitrary criteria to the things we consider candidates for consciousness, other than to reaffirm our prejudices.
In other words, there's no such thing as a good scientific definition without the philosophical context. You can have as accurate an arbitrary measure as you like, but that doesn't imbue it equally arbitrarily with your desired meaning.
There might never be a philosophically satisfactory definition of consciousness. Our subjective experience that we call consciousness might be an amalgamate of very different things happening at the brain level and a single definition might just not do. Meanwhile the operational definitions like the ones I mentioned allow us to make useful predictions and draw conclusions, for example that the brain activity that happens when we experience states most people would describe as consciousness also happens in certain animals. It is not perfect philosophically, but again, you could also have a long philosophical debate about what gravity is and you would never go anywhere scientifically - that's precisely what people did before the scientific revolution.
If you look at the formulation it starts out as a magical-seeming property, yet the definitions and processes do nothing to demystify that property. If you look at that process carefully you'll find the deceit: this is not an answer to the question of consciousness as asked. With the right philosophical treatment there might be hope of reconciliation, but without it the concept is just going to remain magical, without meaningful conclusions.
Aether is a great example, one I had in mind. Consciousness is very much like aether in some ways. It may well be that the only useful scientific thing to say about it at the end of the day is: it is not a useful concept to science. Much better than the contrivances offered up with no compelling connection to the subject.
The last word in TFA is 'qualia'. This is the problem. Canonical definitions of that term describe it as impossible to measure, or simply ineffable, which effectively puts it off the table for a scientific treatment. Regardless of what you think of what should constitute a scientific concept, the implication that these measurements alone elucidate an ineffable phenomenon is exactly the kind of thing that stinks of bullshit.
My only point is really that the lack of a great definition of consciousness doesn't diminish the value of research like the one cited here.
I don't deny that at all, in fact it is quite precisely what I endorse. Notice that the term consciousness lies on the left side, the excluded part. On the right side, you use the better-defined term, awareness. A definition that comes with better philosophical understanding. TFA, however, talks of qualia.
We might need to first answer to such questions before we gain any new insights of more philosophical nature.
I would say "different" rather than "more." Philosophy doesn't mean "weird stuff we don't really understand" and it can often be as boring as the implications of simple arithmetic or even the logic used in scientific endeavors. I wouldn't want to throw that out in the name of progress either.
I cannot agree the results are meaningless or "only reaffirm our prejudices".
The results described by the article and supported here are of the form "consciousness is X" where no question was asked that is answerable directly in terms of X, and no reconciliation has been made. That is the sense of meaninglessness I'm talking about. If you're still in doubt, or think that's somehow unimportant, grab the bull by the horns and deal with the implication that this is somehow ultimately a measure of qualia.
My only point is really that the lack of a great definition of consciousness doesn't diminish the value of research like the one cited here.
In that phrasing I am almost in agreement, if it wasn't for some of the claims made. Some very interesting things are being measured, but to go from these measurements to things like qualia is a leap I can't justify. A correlation between these measures and alertness, intelligence and kinds of awareness are easy to establish or contradict, and better yet: given those connections who is going to say "yeah but what are these results over here? it looks like manifest experience!"—?
Why doesn't the concept of, say, 'the gene' also need this backup? Or maybe all of those geneticists are also stumbling around in the dark without philosophers to guide them...
Gravity is arguably a more compelling concept to someone falling off a ladder than to a student in a high school physics class. But, so? Does gravity lose meaning on a scale that is too large or too small to fit human experience?
I'm not looking for a why—the common complaint about gravity—I just want all the whats to match up. The meaninglessness is in reference to the question of consciousness. If you supply this to the asker, they could rightly ask, "sure, but what about my question?" Perhaps there is no reconciliation and you might want to complain that the question is nonsense—that complaint would make a better answer than a collection of irrelevant facts.
And there are good argumnts suggesting that there'll never be such definition (summary: consciousness is inherently subjective).
But too many people can't tell the difference between supporting an idea and publishing a repeatable experiment to test a falsifiable hypothesis in a peer reviewed journal.
To a philistine the Mona Lisa is nothing but a bunch of pigments applied to a surface. That's what makes him a philistine, after all.
Only we think we are more.
Perhaps we're not and the thought is just part of that feedback loop.
Art, wine, music, maths. It's all just more inputs...
It takes a true nerd living in a nerd bubble to interpret a human being as a data processing device.
We're just maths if you go far enough down. So are machines.
At what point do you draw the line. "This machine doesn't feel pain, it just responds to damage signals." could apply to a simple robot or a cockroach. At some point, biological computers become complicated enough that we deem pain to have arrived, but that point is fairly arbitrary. Why aren't we just biological machines?
If you go by the broader definition of feel, which includes "to have a sensation of something", then I'd argue that the line is far more blurred.
If you accept that a rat is capable of feeling pain, then surely you must accept that a functionally identical machine with a neural network functionally the same as a rat's brain can also feel pain? There's no real fundamental physical reason stopping us constructing a computer which functions in the same way as a rat's brain does. Does the computer we constructed suddenly stop being a machine?
"To have a senseation of something" isn't really helpful definition, because "have a sensation" is just another word for "feel". It's like saying that the definition of "to buy" is "to purchase".
Physics cannot, even in theory, explain my subjective experience of pain. Why do I feel pain, when my brain's atoms are in specific positions?
You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question?
I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life.
- Einstein (as quoted in Mein Weltbild, Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1934)
When babys brain grows up it reassimilates most of the neurons that it grew. Architecture of the brain is shaped by funcion during development. The brain begins as generic structure that undegoes optimisations for the sole purpose of probably energy efficiency.
That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.
Even if we arrive at a TOE, how do we justify that the universe will always obey those laws in the future? Physical reductionism is easy to understand but upon closer inspection seems to lack a strong foundation.
Also, the laws of physics have zero consequence on logic and mathematics upon which the enterprise of physics rests on along with empirical data.
I am still unable to reconcile my "internal" conscious experience with our current understanding of Physics. I'm a materialist, however I'm trending towards the believe that consciousness is an emergent physical property of massively interconnected systems; that is, our "internal" conscious experience is part of the "fabric of reality" and simply comes into being once matter is of a certain level of interconnectedness.
In essence, all matter has some degree of internal conscious experience. However, only groupings of matter that have massive interconnectedness (i.e. animal brains) experience what we would typically describe as consciousness. Perhaps, at a global scale, the internet is weakly "conscious". Perhaps, once we forge ahead with bio-mimetic arrays of neural networks, we'll start to induce artificial conscious experience in "dumb" matter.
Christof Koch has an excellent book "Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist" along these lines.
I will try and read up the book you suggested. And I will point towards a very interesting theory I happened to have worked on (as a software developer) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Information_Theory which tries to quantify consciousnesses based on this interconnectedness.
How do you know that?
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#5
At this stage of our knowledge saying "computation X will be conscious" is just a statement of belief or a simple definition as there is no consciouness-meter that I can use to test it. Such statements are unfalsifiable.
Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.
It would be nice if you presented at least one reason for believing this.
That was sarcastic for reference - I think the guy is a crackpot.
I honestly don't think the "animals have conscious thought" is the most effective way to change agriculture, but I will struggle to deny that gorilla whose eyes I looked into at Aspinalls was not looking back at me with the same understanding and knowledge.
Yes they are as conscious and thoughtful as humans, but humans are as unthinking and hard-wired as animals
That being said, I am concerned about how animals are treated during their lifetime.
That's why we domesticated our prey, which is what everyone seems to be complaining about now.
I don't understand. Ultimately it ends up in someone's stomach and provides sustenance. How is it any different?
Also, this is a ridiculous justification for meat eating, since lions cannot reason about morality.
If both lions and gazelles have conscious awareness, and we do not condemn the lion for eating a fellow conscious awareness holder, then why should we hold ourselves to higher standards? If we believe that the taking of any conscious life is wrong, then we should see that the lion is wrong, and punish him. Lion prison anyone?
I'm unclear what level of moral justification is needed. I want to survive. There are weaker animals for me to eat. My gut can process their meat. My teeth can rip their flesh.
I guess I haven't transcended nature and evolution the way vegetarians have.
These two statements do not have a direct and necessary relationship, since "eating weaker animals" is not required for our survival or health. Also, you must be a nihilist if you think your actions do not require moral justification. Ethical vegetarians have not and do not claim to have "transcended" anything, and are simply following the dictates of their consciences. Most people, I think, believe that it is wrong to cause unprovoked suffering in another being (who can suffer); ethical vegetarians are just a subset of this group who are more consistent in keeping their actions true to this moral axiom.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5866404
As I understand it the theory posits that consciousness is only a very recent development in humans.
How can we ascribe consciousness to any other form of life when we do not even understand what it means for ourselves ?
However, please note that there have been a few individuals in human history who did have complete understanding of consciousness. The story of this world is that nobody wanted to learn from those people when they were alive.
The reasons that modern scientists do not understand consciousness is that
1. they do not apply a specific principle to their research (In math, when we want to solve a question, we apply the equality to operate the question.) and because
2. their research only investigates half of the set of existent relevant phenomena - that which can be seen with the naked eye.
Once a human recognizes the simple law that governs natural phenomena it is simple to recognize what consciousness is.
At the very least, the genetically built neural machinery that our species would've had 3000 years ago is still likely to reward behaviors such as assuming gods and spirits in almost everything, enthralling oneself in crowd dynamics, and yielding to charismatic authorities.
http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious...
Conscience is an aptitude, faculty, intuition or judgment of the intellect that distinguishes right from wrong. Moral judgment may derive from values or norms (principles and rules). In psychological terms conscience is often described as leading to feelings of remorse when a human commits actions that go against his/her moral values and to feelings of rectitude or integrity when actions conform to such norms.[1] The extent to which conscience informs moral judgment before an action and whether such moral judgments are or should be based in reason has occasioned debate through much of the history of Western philosophy.[2]
The connection between consciousness as an idea expressed by this declaration, and general extant environment is an interesting philosophical pursuit. I didn't think conscience so much, as an anterior attribute. But apologies if I appeared curt. I need practice.
But do realise this, since I'm not a moral relativity apologist. I'm going to say that moral systems are not equal and some backward societies need to get their systems fixed.
Worth a read.
What about « If "everybody" (who I identify with to at least such-and-such a degree) did X, would it harm me or my family/descendants? »?
See debate on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHXKLRKzg
EDIT: to clarify, the title is very confusing because it makes you think they just signed it. It should be completed by a "2012" in the end. That's why I was disappointed when following the link. Nothing new.
What if there was some way to discuss things ?
That's because neurological substrates don't generate consciousness. There is no evidence to the effect that they do. However, when we understand the structure of the system of consciousness it's very easy to see how consciousness is generated and maintained.
The role of all neural systems is
1. to transmit to the consciousness what the body sees, hears, learns, etc., and
2. to express what is in consciousness through the body.
That said, they don't talk much about whether they can prove degrees of conscious awareness. There may be homologous structures, but are they as large as in humans? If they're not, then perhaps you'd expect the animal to have a comparable and yet less-detailed experience.
But it seems irresponsible, and possibly self-serving for the NCC research crowd, to escalate this evidence to the level of proof on consciousness in animals. There is just no way to know what it is like to be any creature other than yourself. It seems reasonable to assume other humans with the same anatomy and physiology, with whom we can communicate extensively, are also likely conscious. But we just can't ever tell what the experience is like to be any other creature.
Signing a such a statement smacks of an attempt at bullying policy with scientific credentials. This is bad because then in other areas, such as global warming, it gives opponents with ulterior motives fodder for claiming scientists shouldn't be trusted since they are prone to the same irrational belief systems as other people.
It would be better to present their story for mainstream consumption with an attitude of Isn't this a compelling story? Maybe even educate people and attract people to the field of neuroscience in the process. But claiming they've figured it out and we all need to get on board will only have negative repercussions.