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Title says it all pretty much. To what extent do you believe animals resemble human cognition and awareness and how do you believe they ought to be treated?
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| # ? Jan 5, 2013 22:33 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 12:24 |
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Well, they do seem to have feelings and emotions in the sense that they can feel pain and suffer and alternately feel happy. Therefore, I don't think humans should cause them any unnecessary suffering unless it's in pursuit of some greater good. On the other hand, I don't think they can fully conceive of themselves as beings existing in time with plans, goals, hopes, dreams, etc., beyond the immediate, so I don't think it's wrong to kill them for food or because they're overpopulated in a particular environment.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 01:32 |
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Anyone with a dog or a cat knows that they possess pretty much the same capacity as humans to feel full spectrum of emotions. It's how we feel such empathy for them too. Losing my dog was like losing a member of the family, and I know this is pretty much how everyone else felt. They don't have the ability to speak but their actions and expressions tell us so much. It's really loving sad when man put their own self-interest before animals like the Chinese river dolphin. We are fully aware of their consciousness but as a society we don't give enough of a gently caress about it. Various sources peg the extinction per year rate at between 22000 and 27000.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 01:58 |
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Most animals - with perhaps the categorical exception of insects - are sentient and capable of feeling pain, along with other rudimentary emotions. They deserve respect and a certain amount of moral consideration as such, but are not on the same level as humans - who are sapient, rather than merely sentient - and thus could not have all of the legal and moral consideration we do. That is to say, I support animal welfare - the drive to ensure that all animals are treated humanely and morally and that negative practices with regards to animals (especially in the realm of food product manufacturing) are ended - but not animal rights - the drive to make animals legally and morally equal to humans.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 02:03 |
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Anyone with a dog or a cat knows that they possess pretty much the same capacity as humans to feel full spectrum of emotions. It's how we feel such empathy for them too. Losing my dog was like losing a member of the family, and I know this is pretty much how everyone else felt. They don't have the ability to speak but their actions and expressions tell us so much. Exactly, anyone who has observed animals for long enough knows they have their own variation of free will and ability to comprehend their situation and even feel emotions over events or other animals.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 02:05 |
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Granted, there might be case to be made that some especially intelligent animals (Dolphins, Whales, Apes) are probably closer to functional intelligence than we believe and by eating them we are cannibalizing several other intelligent species. To be frank, I feel much better about eating a chicken or a cow (pigs are an exception) than any member of the Cetacea order for very good reasons. I know if I would go as far as comparable sentience by the is a wide range in animal intelligence. (To be frank, over time I am probably eating less and less animal protein period.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 02:36 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 02:31 |
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CommieGIR posted:Exactly, anyone who has observed animals for long enough knows they have their own variation of free will and ability to comprehend their situation and even feel emotions over events or other animals. Hell some animals, like Elephants, even supposedly grieve over their dead. Elephants will also remember you and mess you up if you hurt them or their family. Elephants are pretty amazing and way more intelligent than people give them credit.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 02:40 |
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Frankly I would feel zero pain if I ate say many of the dumber animals (like insects, reptiles, and birds) compared to learning that I just ate dolphin or chimpanzee (where I would probably throw up my dinner as soon as I learned what I just ate) because those two species are probably the closest to our intellect levels; dolphins especially seem to basically be ignoring our impact on the planet entirely. 
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 03:03 |
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Sometimes my cat is asleep. Sometimes it is awake. Sometimes it lies really still and I think it might be sleeping, but then I notice it looking at me with those judging yellow eyes. A couple of times he's been drugged, those times were pretty funny. Now, I ain't no animalogist, but I'm guessing most other small mammals have at least those levels of consciousness about. Maybe some, like monkeys, that can stay up late or drink booze have more, but no-one sane keeps a monkey as a pet anyway so we can't ask them. I think we should pet all animals, unless they don't want us to, in which case we should refrain from doing so, unless they look really, really fluffy and/or pettable. Eating them is OK, because they would also probably eat us if they could and they wouldn't even cook us first. I could talk about differences in sensation and cognitive functions or poo poo like that but then we land on the fact that the two smartest animals near me are eaten (whales and pigs) and the OP suggests this isn't that kinda thread. Zedsdeadbaby posted:Anyone with a dog or a cat knows that they possess pretty much the same capacity as humans to feel full spectrum of emotions. It's how we feel such empathy for them too. Losing my dog was like losing a member of the family, and I know this is pretty much how everyone else felt. They don't have the ability to speak but their actions and expressions tell us so much.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 03:54 |
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People tend to define it as "like a human?" but consciousness is a fairly nebulous term that mixes a bunch of non-scientific notions in with it. We don't understand what's going on with consciousness in our own bodies, it's a bit premature to start saying too much about other animals, but phenomenologically and from a neurological standpoint at least Mammalia has virtually the same underlying hardware for most types of responses. While trying to understand what it would be like to "be" another animal is putting the cart way out ahead of the horse, nonetheless we have to be willing to observe similar behavior and note similar biology, and from those two in conjunction draw a pretty damned reasonable inference that the kinds of responses that we have to pain, for example, are very broadly shared. Defined as such I think it would be extremely disingenuous to say that animals don't suffer just because they're not as clever as we are at doing human stuff, and there should be guidelines for ethical treatment which take into account the similarities in our biology and acknowledge that even a pretty dumb animal (thinking herbivores here) still has the same chemical and electric responses going on when they experience pain. Anything less pragmatic and more metaphysical is going to have to wait until we've made further advances in neuroscience to understand what our own consciousness actually is. Lot of very interesting ideas but the picture is very incomplete, and the simple Cartesian theater view is becoming extremely difficult to justify (hell, it was when philosophy of mind was still just talking about p-states and m-states and how maybe there's some basically epiphenomenal relationship between them that nonetheless allows for a vaguely causal relationship - now, philosophy of mind apart from increasingly rare holdouts has become more or less philosophy of brain science). Once we've got something more complete, we can start trying to figure out how our relationship to the world and the phenomenology of being as such compares, maps, or fails to map onto other organism with varying degrees of similarity and differences of specialization.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 04:15 |
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I find it interesting that people always bring up dogs and cats for these topics because they are not capable of self recognition. I have been out of studying animal cognition for a few years now (I have a BS in zoology and a BA in psychology and did animal cog research with chipmunks and behavioral research with house sparrows in undergrad) so I'm a little rusty on the details of the subject. My take on things is that if humans possess consciousness, then it's plausible that our evolutionary relatives (and other animals with convergent evolution) possess consciousness or some form of consciousness. I would speculate that it evolved out of increased inter-species interactions and the need to keep track of friends and foes, and for deception and deception detection. To me this really gets fun when you start looking at animals like corvids (ravens, crows, magpies, etc.). Most people know that ravens are quite intelligent and are capable of solving problems (the classic is a piece of meat on a string, hung from a branch - too high from the ground to jump and grab, too low off the branch to reach down, so the birds figure out that they should pull the string up, step on the loop of string, and then repeat until they can eat), but I always liked what happened when you had birds with different levels of dominance in the same room. Smart but weak birds would find food, and the dumb brutes would sit up on a peak and watch them. The big guys would try to coerce the food out of the subordinate birds, so when the smart birds were aware that they other birds were watching them, they would try and be deceptive to hide their food caches. This implies that they birds are aware of their competitors, but more relevant here, it implies that the bird is aware of itself and that it is competing with this other animal. Even animals that are thought of as pretty stupid, like squirrels, will make deceptive food caches if it knows a competitor (i.e. another squirrel is watching). You could say that this is just a simple evolved mechanism, but the squirrels actually differentiate between competitors - if they know that a bird is watching they don't bother making false caches because, presumably, they know that the bird can take flight and see if the cache is real or fake. So you could make the argument here that the squirrel must have some form of consciousness or knowledge of self (thought I think that could be a stretch). Anyway. I think that self-recognition is stronger evidence of consciousness because the animals actively do self-exploration of their bodies, looking at places that they otherwise wouldn't be able to see (like their face), and these actions mimic human children reaching the stage of self-recognition at like 18 months. However, dogs and cats and pigs, for as "human" and "emotional" as they seem, are incapable of recognizing themselves in a mirror. Even some primates, like gorillas, cannot self-recognize (one theory posits that self-recognition was selected against because gorillas that sat on the edge of water looking at themselves and thinking were all eaten by crocodiles) even though they have many other features of animals capable of self-recognition. Furthermore, the fact that "dumb" animals like ravens and magpies can self-recognize throws a wrench in some people's conceptions of consciousness. I think that dogs and cats are bad examples to use with consciousness because they have been domesticated and bred alongside humans for so long that our artificial selection has mixed what we humans want out of the animals with what the animals are actually capable of. Not even really knowing what consciousness is in the human brain doesn't help things either. I guess something like the ascending reticular activating system is a structure that could be thought of as the basis of consciousness since if you damage its input or output you're in a coma, but even that doesn't cover everything. I guess the whole point of this rambling post (aside from a distraction from studying the development of testicles and vaginas) is that the answer to animals possessing consciousness is complicated. Some animal cog people think that "lower" animals lack consciousness and therefore cannot feel pain. I think that's a lovely view. I think respecting all animals for what they are is a reasonable approach, regardless of whether you think they are conscious or not. The fact is that we just don't know and probably never will. Laminator fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 04:23 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 04:20 |
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Sometimes my cat is asleep. Sometimes it is awake. Sometimes it lies really still and I think it might be sleeping, but then I notice it looking at me with those judging yellow eyes. A couple of times he's been drugged, those times were pretty funny. Monkey's and primates are kept as pets in other parts of the world, just as dogs and horses are food in other parts of the world. Making broad assumptions of where animals fall in their relationship to humans based off western sensibilities is nuts, monkey's as pets is not. Hell some breeds make amazing helper animals. As for the dog, we know that. There is a famous story about an Akita (very affectionate dogs) in Japan who showed up to the same train station everyday to grieve his dead master/wait for him to come back, right up till the dog dropped dead. Dogs are odd though in that we played god with them and they evolved with us to an extent that hasn't happened in history before. I think that because we turned the canine into what is, we have a moral responsibility to our creation. We can't get around the fact that we played god up to the point we had a completely obedient servant that's capable of understanding us and looks to us for direction. By contrast I don't think we have any sort of obligation to say a dolphin, a turkey, or even a wolf.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 04:33 |
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Anyone with a dog or a cat knows that they possess pretty much the same capacity as humans to feel full spectrum of emotions. It's how we feel such empathy for them too. Losing my dog was like losing a member of the family, and I know this is pretty much how everyone else felt. They don't have the ability to speak but their actions and expressions tell us so much. Hold up. I have a dog that I love very much, but I sure as hell don't think he possesses the same range of emotion that I do. Canine body language is relatively sophisticated, but nowhere near the level of our own. Their actions and expressions are much simpler than ours, and convey nothing like the range of information with body language that humans can. Don't also overlook or underestimate the human tendency to read emotion and expression in the faces of animals that is by no means actually there. I'm not even saying they're definitely not. I'm saying that we don't know much regarding the capacity of non-human animals for human-like emotions and conscious self-direction, nor do we possess the means to find much more out. Furthermore, our thinking on this issue tends to be fuzzier and more fraught with confirmation bias and other errors of reasoning, probably because we attach ourselves so closely to many of the animals we're talking about. For instance: SilentD posted:As for the dog, we know that. There is a famous story about an Akita (very affectionate dogs) in Japan who showed up to the same train station everyday to grieve his dead master/wait for him to come back, right up till the dog dropped dead. This is also wholly anecdotal and utterly absurd as any sort of support for a thesis about the sentience of animals. "There is a famous story about some dog" is not a feature of any argument worth making. D&D is probably one of the most rational and intelligent ethical and political think-tanks in the world, let alone on the internet. But start talking about whether or not animals have feelings or if it's OK to eat them and a large portion of the communal capacity for rigorous enquiry goes out the loving window. Everyone has a strong opinion and nobody has a good argument on either side of either fence. Get it together, people. We don't know poo poo about animals' minds, and it is very dumb to be making sweeping claims about why they behave the way they do like the one quoted above. VVV: So? This supports the claim to which I was responding - that dogs have as wide a range of emotions and as large a capacity to communicate them non-verbally as humans do - how? What 'difference' with dogs? Speak sense, man. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 05:01 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 04:42 |
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Smudgie Buggler posted:Hold up. I have a dog that I love very much, but I sure as hell don't think he possesses the same range of emotion that I do. Canine body language is relatively sophisticated, but nowhere near the level of our own. Their actions and expressions are much simpler than ours, and convey nothing like the range of information with body language that humans can. The difference with dogs though is that through breeding we evolved them to read our body language and to respond with body language we can read. The difference between what a dog can read and show to us compared to a wolf is massive. They certainly aren't as sophisticated as we are, but the emotion and expression we read from them is often stuff we bread into them so we can communicate with them better. Outside of other humans, nobody understands us better than dogs.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 04:46 |
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While it's an interesting question I tend to feel it is also a bit of a side issue to the OP's second question. Why does widening our circle of compassion to include non human animals need to be predicated on something as broad as the range of animal consciousness? Does it follow that a cow, pig, chicken, or fish needs to understand Nietzsche before we stop accepting the brutal things we do to them based on their utility as a product first, animals with a capacity for pain second? If we accept that we can feel emotional attachment to animals regardless of their intelligence or innate worth, is it not worth elimating unneccesary pain regardless of an animals ability to reason like humans?
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 05:52 |
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MiltonSlavemasta posted:On the other hand, I don't think they can fully conceive of themselves as beings existing in time with plans, goals, hopes, dreams, etc., beyond the immediate, so I don't think it's wrong to kill them for food or because they're overpopulated in a particular environment. A dog waiting for its owner to come home suggests that they do have some understanding of time as well as how their own situation might change (their hopes be realized) as it passes. I don’t imagine that dogs think very far ahead, but what would they think about? Their ability to enact any plans that they might formulate is limited by their being a dog and their ability to make useful plans is limited by their inability to communicate complex ideas with others, regardless whether or how capable they are of complex ideas and planning. I think we’re throwing loaded dice if we judge their level of consciousness by the presence or absence of mental skills that aren’t useful to them. Tied in here is the notion that humans are the only animals aware of their own mortality. Okay, maybe, but what would you think about your own impending death if nobody told you about it (or told you anything)? I wonder whether feral children understand that they’re not immortal. Animals don’t like being physically harmed and sometimes they harm other animals even of their own species such that those other animals die. Do they think “I’m one of those and that can happen to me”? I don’t know, but learning through mimicry is common. But using consciousness as a foundation for moral statements is a little tricky. Doing so means guessing about the conscious state of everyone other than yourself (human and animal) and perhaps demoting some humans from personhood. It also means making the assumption that all consciousnesses are fundamentally similar such that they are either ‘more’ or ‘less’, not ‘better’ or ‘different’.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 06:03 |
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Humans' advanced ability to anticipate and predict the future causes us to feel anxiety about future suffering, which is itself a form of suffering. It doesn't appear that our companion animals like dogs, cats etc. are capable of this, their suffering tends to be "in the moment". They unquestionably experience emotions and attachment and pain, and take pleasure in being touched and cared for, I think that's universal to all mammals.
Torka fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 06:16 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 06:13 |
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The extreme level of skepticism applied to the emotions of pet animals here could very easily be applied to other human beings. I'm not saying you can't go full-bore solipsist, it is a remarkable position to argue against. But despite my inability to actually know whether other human beings are actually thinking, emotional creatures I get a whole bunch of pretty damned clear signals that such is the case. I fail to see why the same criteria shouldn't be applied to other animals. A grieving widow visits her husband's grave everyday. That is a true statement. But do we really know she is sad? BEEP BOP. VOTE RON PAUL. quote:Humans' advanced ability to anticipate and predict the future causes us to feel anxiety about future suffering, which is itself a form of suffering. It doesn't appear that our companion animals like dogs, cats etc. are capable of this, their suffering tends to be "in the moment". They unquestionably experience emotions and attachment and pain, and take pleasure in being touched and cared for, I think that's universal to all mammals. I really don't know about that. When I visit my cats, they take a while to warm back up to me. They clearly remember me and know who I am, but they take a while to warm back up to me, to get close to me. Then, when I leave again, they stop eating for a few days and act despondently. Whether or not they actually warmed up to me during the stay. Which is a pretty good mirror of how children act with absentee parents. I'd the fact that they are reluctant to get close to me when I may leave them again pretty strongly suggests an ability to predict future events. Plus, I mean, come on, being able to predict future events is a pretty damned useful trait. I'm pretty sure it did independently arise in humanity. It is something that I'd expect most higher mammals to have. Even if they are occasionally mystified by laser pointers. Shbobdb fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 07:00 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 06:56 |
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The same criteria shouldn't be applied to other animals because other animals are not humans. You associate visiting someone's grave every day with mourning because that is how humans behave; on what grounds do you assume that dogs have the same mourning behavior?
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 06:59 |
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How are humans different from other animals? The assumption of a clear divide between humans and animals is pretty much magical thinking at this point.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:01 |
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Humans are a different species than other animals. Not even all humans mourn in the same way, so why do you think that you can reliably recognize mourning behavior in other species by going "that's what I would do!"
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:06 |
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Our brains all share a common ancestor I'd be shocked if much of our experience on a basic level isn't similar, even if animals don't have our capacity to express it or reflect upon it.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:16 |
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I'm a vegetarian but I'm super uncomfortable with anthropomorphism. I don't think human consciousness works anywhere near the way that folk psychology would lead us to believe it does and I certainly think trying to use naive observation to conclude that animals are "the same as us" is ridiculous; furthermore I actually think it's very very dangerous to base animal rights arguments off of ideas like this because they're on such shaky ground. The difference between humans and other animals isn't "magical thinking" because I doubt very much, say, spiders and dogs experience the world and consciousness in the exact same way - all animal species are different for any number of reasons and saying that "all animals are the same" is very silly to me. Especially since I think embodiment is a very important aspect of how consciousness works or is experienced or whatever. I think recognizing forms of intelligence or consciousness which are radically different from those of humans and granting those forms of consciousness the respect they deserve is very important. I also think that this will potentially become an issue if and when artificial (or, to be pre-emptively politically correct, "alternative") intelligence becomes a reality.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:22 |
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I think that multicellular animals possess consciousness much like humans. Granted, it may be to a much lesser extent in most cases but I do believe that it is a difference of degree, not of kind.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:26 |
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My understanding of creatures like insects and spiders was that they're essentially simple machines, with nerve clusters firing automatically based on certain inputs, and no brain or mind to speak of. But that's based on things I read almost 20 years ago, has our understanding changed?
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:33 |
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Shbobdb posted:Plus, I mean, come on, being able to predict future events is a pretty damned useful trait. I'm pretty sure it did independently arise in humanity. It is something that I'd expect most higher mammals to have. Even if they are occasionally mystified by laser pointers. To clarify, I'm not saying that other animals can't anticipate the future, I'm saying that our ability to do so is a lot more powerful than theirs and therefore we are vulnerable to certain types of suffering that they aren't. Ditto self-awareness. You can't fear running out of food in a months' time if you can't think ahead that far, and you can't have an existential crisis without metacognition.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 07:39 |
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Torka posted:To clarify, I'm not saying that other animals can't anticipate the future, I'm saying that our ability to do so is a lot more powerful than theirs and therefore we are vulnerable to certain types of suffering that they aren't. Ditto self-awareness. You can't fear running out of food in a months' time if you can't think ahead that far, and you can't have an existential crisis without metacognition. Yeah, this is onto the crux of the matter. Douglas Hofstatder has an interesting discussion along these lines in his book I Am a Strange Loop, which is definitely worth reading if you're interested in this topic. Animals, including us, are conscious of things we have representations for, or in other words the cognitive machinery to respond to (before the derails happen, I'm not even interested in entertaining non-representational theories right now, sorry SurgicalOntologist or whoever else). Humans have the capacity to represent a whole lot of things, and if we look at other species we can see they have certain symbols and signals for specific things in their environment. How "conscious" we consider a being is a consideration of the plethora and variety of the symbols a creature has. People are very hesitant to attribute any of the sorts of symbols we have to other animals, but we can find lots of evidence for them even if they don't share all of ours. Holding up any single one of them (like the mirror test) as a criteria for the basis of consciousness is kind of silly though.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 08:07 |
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Amarkov posted:The same criteria shouldn't be applied to other animals because other animals are not humans. You associate visiting someone's grave every day with mourning because that is how humans behave; on what grounds do you assume that dogs have the same mourning behavior? One of a pair of male cockatiels my family had had forever died one day. The other barely ate, moved or sang for weeks. Eventually he perked back up to almost usual, and when my parents got a female to keep him company, he perked up even more. Suddenly for the first time in his life, the beta male bird started acting all happy, tough and protective. I don't know if you could correctly call what he went through 'grieving' in the same way that humans grieve. It's completely obvious that he went through the same sort of emotional reaction as a human would, however. The hows and whys are irrelevant. You could say, 'oh that was all hormones' but the same could be said of a human, if you were to experience them grieving but could not communicate with them about their feelings. Social animals have ways of communicating their internal states to others, so if you learn how they communicate these things, it is very obvious to anyone who has been around a number of them for a while that they have a similar spectrum of emotional and cognitive responses as people do. Horses are dumb as loving rocks and panicky as hell, but you can't stick around a herd very long without noticing that they are all very individual. Each horse will have its own likes and dislikes, varying relationships to other horses, and level of cleverness. My horse, Beavis (or Something To Talk About, outta Jet Texas, if you want official names) was quite a character. He had a massive fixation on food, as is common in gieldings, but also a number of personal eccentricities. He HATED hollow sounding bridges and grates and would not go over them at any cost, whereas his full blooded sister who was even more high strung had no issue with them. He was also a trickster. Aside from eating and GOTTA GO FAST, the third pillar of his life was Harrassing Mares. He'd just constantly gently caress with them like a grade school boy does to the girls that catch his interest, except with a lot more nipping and physical harrassment and less of everything else. As his rider, I had a deeper level of communication with him. I always thought it sounded like bullshit when people claimed a psychic seeming connection to an animal they ride a lot, but it's amazingly true. It's not truly psychic of course, just nonverbal. My favorite example of this link of communication and trust happened when I rode at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. It's a huge event, one of the biggest in the world, but for some drat reason they had a closed loving gate 40 feet behind the timer line. So you had to be going full speed at the timer and stopped by the gate. As I was reining in as hard as I could, I felt Beavis' panic level rising rapidly. I immediately understood that we weren't going to make the stop in time. I tried guiding him to one side so as to approach the fence at a more oblique angle and thus buy us more time. It didn't work. When a horse really panics, they stop accepting input. To be fair to him, the gate was of the steel pipe variety. Not something you want to smash into at 15+ mph. Anyway at that moment, he turned his head and shot an eye back at me as he sometimes did, usually his way of calling me a dumbass. I noticed his pupil wasn't dilated as much as could be expected. My horse had just shot me a resolute stare. He then did something I've never seen another horse do. He jumped sideways and skidded to a halt sideways against the gate, putting his legs at great risk but shielding me from contact. This is not the natural reaction of a horse in these circumstance. An untrained horse would probably try to throw you. They can stop a lot easier without the extra weight. A trained one might blindly fly into the gate or turn, depending on how freaked out they are. Instead, Beavis made an assessment, determined to put himself at some risk for his rider's sake, and as dull and freaked out as he was, he followed through with the plan brilliantly. I could talk more about how Beavis in particular was a fully formed if dumb individual by human standards. However at the end of the day my personal experiences don't amount to evidence, just flavoring to my intuitive understanding of the issue. I think you'll find that most people who work around higher mammals a lot feel the same way. After all, when looked at with a distant enough eye, PEOPLE aren't even really people, but a dumb, mostly predictable group of mobs. Easily dissociated with, just as we dissociate ourselves from 'lower' life forms. Keep in mind, this latter group of organisms recently included 'black people' and often in human history 'all people not like me'. Yet as human beings, we have vastly more similarities than differences. Our differences do not make abuse morally acceptable. I think the same can be said of all higher mammals, and all life forms to some degree. But if you want to talk about animals that have something similar to human thought processes, the only ones we can hope to answer that question about are the ones that are capable of communication. Keep in mind though, any animal that has relatively few young is going to have to be individually adaptable in ways that make it look smart. This individual uniqueness is more what I see questions of consciousness getting after, rather than specific thought processes.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 08:23 |
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Torka posted:To clarify, I'm not saying that other animals can't anticipate the future, I'm saying that our ability to do so is a lot more powerful than theirs and therefore we are vulnerable to certain types of suffering that they aren't. Ditto self-awareness. You can't fear running out of food in a months' time if you can't think ahead that far, and you can't have an existential crisis without metacognition. Can you describe a means of testing for or demonstrating that a creature (humans inclusive) experiences dread, in a way that doesn't rely on direct communication or making a priori assumptions about the subject's experiences relative to your own? Complex vertebrates absolutely do express strong stress reactions when exposed to stimuli previously associated with suffering, even lab mice don't wait around until they're actually hurting to start freaking out at the sight of something that's been an indicator of incoming pain previously. Whether they're panicking or self-mutilating or whatnot because they're visualizing the tortures they're about to go through or just exhibiting a cleverly designed simulation that mimics all the gross physical results humans associate with that experience in every way we can measure but not anything we can't seems like sort of a wierd distinction to fixate on, or make positive declarations about. I mean, it's probably true that the mouse experience of anticipation is very different from a human's and a lot more primitive, but the same basic mechanism and mental hardware is very clearly there and that's all we can really speak of definitively with anything that can't independently describe its awareness in clear English. The insistence people seem to have on tying "true" consciousness or the stuff that makes people special to everything that can't actually be proven to exist or not exist seems very god-of-the-gaps to me. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 09:42 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 09:33 |
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Tubgirl Cosplay posted:Whether they're panicking or self-mutilating or whatnot because they're visualizing the tortures they're about to go through or just exhibiting a cleverly designed simulation that mimics all the gross physical results humans associate with that experience in every way we can measure but not anything we can't seems like sort of a wierd distinction to fixate on, or make positive declarations about. Third option: they've been conditioned to know THIS THING BAD, and thus give the BAD response whenever they perceive the thing.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 09:35 |
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Amarkov posted:Third option: they've been conditioned to know THIS THING BAD, and thus give the BAD response whenever they perceive the thing. This isn't a different option this is the basic uncontroversial fact; the point of contention is in whether the BAD response also manifests at a level of consciousness beyond those reactions which can be directly perceived or not, or whether it even matters given that nobody has any means to determine this and everyone's just guessing. We do know critters react to things in different ways and generally have much more rudimentary problem-solving skills, so they clearly do think differently albeit we don't really have any way to determine what that means at the consciousness level; from what we can tell there's really nothing special about humans vs. other mammals as far as emotional range goes, though, so that's sort of a wierd thing to focus on the vaguest intangibles of. I have tangible, actual reason to believe a mouse cannot visualize the workings of a simple machine or perform basic geometry, on the basis that having been given materials and shown how to assemble them to make a crude pulley and use it to escape it opts to keep digging at the walls. I don't have any reason to believe that when it runs away or starts gnawing its tail off at the sight of an electrode that secretly inside its experience of terror is qualitatively different from, or for that matter the same as, mine would be. This cuts both ways; I doubt anyone would be talking about grieving or loyalty if Hachiko was a squid or a swarm of bees instead of a cute widdle fuzzy puppy, and yet everything with a CNS is capable of learned behavior and forming habits. Tubgirl Cosplay fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 11:31 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 09:41 |
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Shbobdb posted:How are humans different from other animals? The assumption of a clear divide between humans and animals is pretty much magical thinking at this point. And I have better reasons for thinking the widow is sad than I do for thinking the dog is sad: a widow can say "I am sad." edit: I am not saying that I think dogs do not get sad. I think they do. But I do not think their emotions are anywhere near as varied or nuanced as a human's, and I also do not have reasons of the same quality for thinking that they get sad as I do for thinking that humans get sad. Smudgie Buggler fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 09:53 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 09:47 |
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Laminator posted:I find it interesting that people always bring up dogs and cats for these topics because they are not capable of self recognition. Most recognition tests are done using a mirror. Which is pretty dumb(nothing new in the world of behavioral research), since many animals have very poorly developed senses of sight. If a dog was testing you for self-recognition he'd probably have you sniff your own urine and conclude you must be an automaton. See http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2...-self-conscious for a somewhat more rigorous test idea. How about another example: it is conclusively known("known") that dogs cannot feel guilt, defined as exhibiting submissive behavior when scolded for doing something they were trained not to do. How was this excellent bit of science produced? Dogs that peed in a room(or something along those lines, broke a rule basically) and dogs that hadn't done that were both scolded by their owners. All dogs exhibited the same submissive behavior. Therefore the guilty look your dog has when you scold them has nothing to do with any crime they may have committed. Similarly the exact same experiment applies to children and parents. It's almost as if the experiment tests whether small animals react in a submissive fashion to larger, potentially violent animals screaming at them. It's almost as if the experiment had nothing to do with whether the dog ANTICIPATED punishment and acted in a submissive fashion BEFORE the owner scolded them at all. My point being testing cognition in humans is hard enough. Testing it in animals is extremely difficult. For all we know whale songs are a massively advanced acoustic-internet that connects the cetacean world. Who the gently caress knows, there's no money in studying this rigorously since we'd rather just eat exotic steak. When aliens come to visit they'll farm our asses for bacon, guaranteed. e. "The full range of human emotion" is not a scientifically defined Thing. What's the biological difference between ennui, sadness, depression, nervousness, joy, homesickness, mild satisfaction, hunger whatever? Some of those things can be separated in terms of released hormones and brain activity, others can't. My emotional range seems to involve a one-dimensional sad-happy line colored with whatever I am thinking about at the time. I must be a dog. It's not that human beings DON'T feel a wider range of emotions, but until you have clear measured parameters for what those emotions are in the brain, how can you look for them in other animals? Sil fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 10:03 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 09:57 |
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I would say that an oyster possesses approximately zero consciousness.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 10:17 |
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WHY DID I HAVE TO GROW UP IN THE SOUTH
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John Bradshaw's In Defence of Dogs covers dogs' conciousness and emotions and is a very interesting read.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 11:22 |
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Laminator posted:I find it interesting that people always bring up dogs and cats for these topics because they are not capable of self recognition. We tried the mirror test on my old dog, put her in front of a mirror (which she was always fascinated with) and put a tiny dollop of red paint on her head prior. She ignored the paint till she was put in front of the mirror , then straight away went for it. Ok, sure its just an annecdote, but I have trouble believing that all dogs except for my old bull terrirer can't self recognize. The thing is, I have no idea how that test is supposed to tell us anything other than the most surface interaction. Does a spot of paint on an animals head really tell us a dog isn't conscious, when for the most part the dog has most of the same the same brain parts as us, and largely behaves as a sentient being, so really who are we fooling? And why is self recognition the keystone to this anyway? I dont spend my day self-recognizing. I'm usually thinking "gently caress better get some more coffee", "Hey my client hasnt paid his loving bill still" or "Time to shitpost on somethingawful again". Has philosophy and psychology rigiourously decided that consciousness is definately being able to look in a mirror and go "Woah thats me". And hell when I'm drunk *I'd* probably fail the mirror test, but chances are I'm still conscious to some degree of drunk. duck monster fucked around with this message at Jan 6, 2013 around 11:40 |
| # ? Jan 6, 2013 11:35 |
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duck monster posted:The thing is, I have no idea how that test is supposed to tell us anything other than the most surface interaction. Does a spot of paint on an animals head really tell us a dog isn't conscious, when for the most part the dog has most of the same the same brain parts as us, and largely behaves as a sentient being, so really who are we fooling? It tells us something, because dolphins and (IIRC) other large primates behave like humans when given the test. So our squishy notion of species intelligence seems to have some correlation to some actual feature of thought. quote:And why is self recognition the keystone to this anyway? I dont spend my day self-recognizing. I'm usually thinking "gently caress better get some more coffee", "Hey my client hasnt paid his loving bill still" or "Time to shitpost on somethingawful again". Has philosophy and psychology rigiourously decided that consciousness is definately being able to look in a mirror and go "Woah thats me". You self-recognize a lot more than you give yourself credit for. If you start thinking about how regular your coffee schedule is while you're walking over to the pot, that's self-recognition. If you feel that little twinge of smugness that you would pay your bill on time, that's self-recognition. If you judge your posts to be super awesome as you post on somethingawful, that's self-recognition. If we could prove that certain animals did not have the capacity to do this, it would imply pretty severe limits on the kind of abstract thought they can engage in. (I don't think that self-recognition is really what's important here; from what I understand, it's just the only thing that people can even bullshit about measuring without some sort of shared language.)
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 11:46 |
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Torka posted:My understanding of creatures like insects and spiders was that they're essentially simple machines, with nerve clusters firing automatically based on certain inputs, and no brain or mind to speak of. But that's based on things I read almost 20 years ago, has our understanding changed? I think at least some invertebrates are more intelligent (whatever that word means) than people normally acknowledge them to be. I mean mainly cephalopods but, hell, even arthropods like jumping spiders are not as simple machines as people normally think.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 12:02 |
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Torka posted:My understanding of creatures like insects and spiders was that they're essentially simple machines, with nerve clusters firing automatically based on certain inputs, and no brain or mind to speak of. But that's based on things I read almost 20 years ago, has our understanding changed? I think it's safe to say that any such creature that lacks a central nervous system just does not possess consciousness, at least not in any way that we can understand from our own experiences. I really do think that bugs and stuff are little more than "reflex machines", but of course there will never be a way of making this scientifically rigorous.
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 17:09 |
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| # ? May 19, 2013 12:24 |
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Why are people with mental handicaps who are not aware of the sentience more "people" than, say, great apes who are?
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| # ? Jan 6, 2013 17:28 |
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