How can the Economist say something so controversial yet so brave? Seriously it sounds like a Victorian era headline like 'Boffins Question Galen's Theory of Humours.' Maybe the story is that there is a religion hangup. Like, maybe the economist isn't ready for a story like 'billions of people believe in an afterlife that isn't real' and this article about consciousness is just warming up the crowd. We're taking baby steps here.
How do you connect these threads? What does animal consciousness has to do with the afterlife and belief in it? Is it mentioned anywhere that animals are not in the afterlife?
Edit: I don't care one way or the other, I am just confused by what seems to me like disconnected threads.
I think it's obvious that people would have agreed that every animal is conscious to some degree like, at least by one or two hundred years ago, if it weren't for "the implication."
Sure, but GP was talking about religion. I've never heard of a religion encouraging its followers to eat meat. The biggest ones generally discourage at least some kinds of meat.
christian evangelists propagandise meat-eating in historically vegetarian countries like india. in fact they sponsor large feasts featuring meat dishes, invest in slaughterhouses etc.
Don’t think Christianity does? And if creatures of god, with consciousness, should it not be all or nothing? Not just some? And for the wrong reasons (pigs are not ‘clean’). Still don’t see why we cannot eat humans if we can eat pigs. What’s the diff? I know many humans dumber than my dogs or pig. Outside religion and humans having more power (aka law), what’s the moral difference?
Genesis 9:2-6 NIV
[2] The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. [3] Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. [4] “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. [5] And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. [6] “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.
I'm responding to 'what is the implication' in the suggestion that people would otherwise have accepted animals as conscious centuries ago, if not for 'the implication'. My read of those parts of the conversation is that they have nothing to do with religion, and so I'm not responding to any religious element of the thread.
I have dominion over all my possessions, but I treat them with respect. In like manner when given authority over people, I treat them with dignity and respect.
I can't imagine the spirit of such words carries with it the grotesqueries and indignities we're wont to inflict on our fellow sufferers. Nor for that matter the free reign over our environment. Instead I would espouse that the spirit is the maintenance of their well-being. As might a parent, or a landowner with some interest in his lot.
The original Hebrew word is רָדָה (radah), you can see all the other times it is used in the Bible here, which should aid in understanding its meaning and potential nuance: https://biblehub.com/hebrew/strongs_7287.htm
For what it's worth, Genesis doesn't specifically mention eating meat until after the fall.
Genesis 1 says "I have given you every plant yielding seed ... and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food." Likewise to the animals, "I have given every green plant for food."
I looked on the internet and some are making that argument that it's true. For example "In the Hebrew original, "the fruit פְּרִי " of "the tree עֵץ of the knowledge דַּעַת of good טוֹב and evil רָע " can mean the offspring of a family group of living creatures who are so self-aware that they covet life (good) and fear death (evil), i.e., the progeny of a den of animals (sentient beings), like piglets or cubs or eggs."
After the flood:
Genesis 9:2-6 NIV
[2] The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. [3] Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. [4] “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. [5] And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. [6] “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind.
That we will possibly be judged by future generations as savages, in the same way we look back on people having slaves, ancestors being blatantly racist, or the holocaust.
You make it sound like things have changed. There hasn't been a single year in my entire life where the people of my country weren't at war. Killing conscious humans is every bit as popular now! It's never once gone out of fashion.
I think some animals have florbghji. What is florbghji? Well, I’m not going to define it. I’m just going to go on and on about it with no definition as though this wasn’t a total waste of time.
> I think some animals have florbghji. What is florbghji? Well, I’m not going to define it. I’m just going to go on and on about it with no definition as though this wasn’t a total waste of time.
The entire article is about the controversies and difficulties of defining consciousness, and the hypotheses of neural correlates, and at what stage of evolution those correlates appeared.
So the literal thing you seem to be snarkily complaining about, is precisely what the article is trying to directly address. With various competing scientific definitions.
I don't see why people struggle with consciousness. I've found it to be concrete. It's the experience of having inputs (vision/hearing/etc) and outputs (response to stimuli). Whether or not you're actively aware of "hey, I have inputs and outputs" doesn't really matter. It's just the process of it.
Do you have a pet dog or cat? It's obviously conscious. I guess my construct breaks down if we consider things like plants, they obviously respond to their environment.
Bacteria using their flagella to move away from danger seems like a conscious decision to me. It's analogous to the "Are viruses life?" question, where on the fringe it does get a bit more interesting. Any poorly defined term is going to raise interesting questions on its edge cases.
Can a temperature sensor have experiences? It's stateless. Maybe that's an element to it. To revise, inputs and outputs with some concept of statefulness.
Autonomy seems important as well. Plants are at the mercy of their environment to a much larger degree than conscious animals that can strategically assess their environment.
*> Whether or not you're actively aware of "hey, I have inputs and outputs" doesn't really matter. It's just the process of it.
No, thats exactly wrong inverse-style.
Simply producing outputs from inputs is not consciousness. Being actively aware you exist is the whole and being of consciousness: Absence of inputs and outputs we can understand invites us to say "not conscious, no evidence of consciousness" but thats subject to validation.
I don't personally believe plants are conscious, but I'm open to somebody demonstrating a sense of awareness. It probably won't be a mirror-test.
It's all the different levels and degree to think about, from the tiny cell to the plants that can mimic what they see (even if it's just plastic, they still try to copy it), you are you but what is it that is you? Anti-addiction drugs are starting to be studied that make people not feel like over-shopping or over-eating and the results of new diabetic drugs that study this effect are very interesting.
I guess I probably see plants like fish not exactly conscious though they certainly respond to their environment. Plants are quite noisy if you pet them, the audio is just outside our hearing range but we have devices that can track that sort of thing now. And some fish actually like to be pet, my great grandmother apparently had some fish she would pet, never met her just know of the stories. Probably everything that can grow has some level of it.
Also fun fact worm memories are stored outside the brain, their are some trained worm studies you can Google that are interesting too.
If you believe having no agreed-upon definition of “consciousness” means we should not bother talking about it at all, try to define the “I” in “I don’t know what consciousness is and therefore refuse to talk about it”, you might get a tad closer to the crux of the issue and perhaps see why it is considered “the hard problem”.
The thing is - just because we can't find an answer to a hard problem we can't simply use a whatever placeholder "answer" in the meantime. There is no mandate from the above to have some/any answer, as a must have thing. If we don't have a real (maybe incomplete) answer then we just don't. Full stop. We can't substitute it with random words just because it is convenient.
So your counterpoint should be actually split into two parts:
1. Should we work on the unsolved problem even when it is very hard and ambiguous and there is no even clear hypothesis for the solution? Of course we should.
2. Should we make new conclusions derived from the the unsolved problem #1? No, we must not.
So listing the different parties:
a) Scientists should work on the researching consciousness problem.
b) Animal activists should continue protecting animals, but not because they are supposedly conscious, but because they MAY be. We just don't know yet.
c) Journalists MUST stop writing that such and such animal has consciousness.
There is a position about what consciousness is which implies many animals may have it. This article is about that position. Journalists have a moral obligation to keep writing about such positions, if we are to assume that imparting harm and pain on conscious beings is evil.
There are also positions that animals, even including humans, don’t have consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t exist. They are more comfortable to most humans, especially meat eaters. This article is not about those positions.
The incompleteness theorem has an important implication that we would not be able to construct a full and verifiably formally correct model of the system from within which we ourselves operate. All we have is hypotheses. Saying that people are not free to make hypotheses that are uncomfortable to you, or that journalists are not free to write about them, is a self-serving position.
Defining anything is a hard problem, but the English word "consciousness" clearly refers to multiple distinct phenomena. There is literally no point in talking about if animals have consciousness if you don't pinpoint whether you mean:
- Whether animals are asleep or awake (conscious or unconscious)
- Whether animals have subjective experience / qualia
- Whether animals are self-aware
Etc. etc.
Once you narrow down then you can try to precisely define the topic or not, but without narrowing down, it's pointless.
One of my cats has the IQ to play Tetris, for sure. I know what will happen if I connect a brain/computer interface to him and let him at it. The other cat is fucking retarded though.
I had an extremely smart and communicative cat. she monitored things and let me know when they were out of place, was able to clearly communicate complicated ideas, put her toys away in her toy box, and told on the other cats when they were doing something she knew wasn't approved of.
my current cat is what I would consider above average, understands over 100 words, is very emotionally intelligent, and can communicate fairly well. she seems to have about 20-30 different vocalizations that we have agreed on, and is able to communicate that way; though not in the way of the other cat that could communicate ideas.
of course, I've also had cats that were either on the dumb side, or didn't care enough about dealing with the humans to make themselves appear as smart.
unfortunately, until we can define "consciousness" and measure it well, it will still be our own ideas on what is intelligent or conscious that we either observe with bias or make an emotional "guess" about.
I find it enormously entertaining that mine actually has a "whining" vocalization when she is moved against her will, letting me know her displeasure in an impotent but palpable way. She knows I'll soothe her and lessen the blow; really makes me think cats aren't so different than children.
Alright, maybe...
But it's still OK to farm them industrially, with no repercussions for unnecessary suffering, since they don't have a soul.
Or something
of course animals are conscious. it would be more accurate to say that consciousness appears in animals, since consciousness is a priori to the body. but consciousness is not an observable; only its symptoms are observed, except by the conscious being itself. consciousness is “unseen by any sense organ, not related to anything, incomprehensible by the mind, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable” (Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 7) because it is completely subjective and Absolute.
We dont even know what consciousness is, or how to define it, but somehow we know thousands of species has it.
Personally, I like EW Schumacher's definition (a guide to the perplexed): animals are conscious because they can be knocked unconscious. Very practical.
"I wasn't conscious when that or this happened" implies that consciousness is just perception. Neutrinos fly straight thru our bodies, but we don't perceive that, so we aren't conscious of that reality. We can be conscious of our thoughts or not, the latter means our attention was elsewhere. Following this logic, all animals are conscious. They can't reason, but that's an addon to consciousness.
Btw, imagine your mind as a standalone reasoning machine: you tell it a situation and it models the outcome. This machine can reason on its own, passively wiretapping sensory inputs and modeling outputs in your memory, all without your involvement, and whayever it models will be simply ignored, as your attention would be elsewhere. In other words, the thinking process would carry on unconsciously, just like your heart's activity. However, the moment you pay attention to those thoughts and start steering the thinking machine, this process becomes conscious. A creature equipped with such thinking machine, but without anyone steering it, would be a zombie.
Consciousness is often associated with self-awareness, subjective experiences, and the ability to perceive and respond to one's environment. It is challenging to study and measure consciousness directly because it is inherently subjective and cannot be directly observed in others. https://www.yourtexasbenefits.bid/
I highly recommend the book "Other Minds" by Godfrey-Smith, it has changed my view on this topic. I understood that consciousness is a scale. Humans have "a lot" of it, chimpanzees a bit less, dogs even fewer, but we all have a first person perspective of what it is to be us. I don't know where the scale begins or ends, but I am sure we are not that unique. I assume the capacity for consciousness has plenty to do with hardware and it's capacity for complex operations, so I don't know if all living things (like bacteria, or ants) "have it". Other point: at some moments I feel like I am less conscious, just going through my motions like an automaton, or daydreaming. And then sometimes, while meditating or under very intense stress, I feel hyper conscious. Fascinating topic for sure
My own leaning is towards a panpsychist view, in which case the idea of animal consciousness as a binary, or even a scalar, makes no sense. It's multifaceted and complex and built from overlapping (resonant?) pieces. For example, human tongues can act like they have a mind of their own just like the arms of an octopus.
Yeah, you're right that it's "the amygdala". I got confused by the plural. It's complicated. As Wikipedia says, "amygdala" is the singular for "amygdalae", but both of these words are said to be Latin. Wikipedia correctly traces them to the original Greek "αμυγδαλή", which is a female noun, hence its transliteration as "amygdala" in Latin, rather than "amygdale" as it should be if it came directly from Greek; I think that's because it's ungrammatical to have a female noun ending in "-e" in Latin (I am unsure, since I'm not a Latin-speaker). To confuse matters further, "amygdalae" is correct as the plural of both the Latin "amygdala" and the Greek "amygdale" ("αμυγδαλή - αμυγδαλαί"). Of course, "αμυγδαλή" itself is derived from "αμύγδαλον".
In any case, it may be easy to see what is meant by "amygdalas" but it is not right. "Amygdalae" is the right form of the word, whether you want to take it from Latin, Greek, or, indeed, English.
Btw, there is a lot of confusion about what is Latin and what is Greek. Both languages are used for scientific terminology (for reasons unknown, this habbit has persisted in modern times) but Latin words often borrow from Greek, but keep their Latin endings... which are often similar to the Greek ones. So it's hard to know which is which. I used to resolve this kind of confusion by perusing a good etymological lexicon of Ancient Greek, but unfortunately this was taken from me in a flood and I can only now rely on the internet, and my native knowledge of Greek.
> In any case, it may be easy to see what is meant by "amygdalas" but it is not right. "Amygdalae" is the right form of the word, whether you want to take it from Latin, Greek, or, indeed, English.
If you take a foreign word from (say) Latin and use it in English, you also do not use Latin declension forms of it, so why use Latin plural form of it? I think it makes more sense to form plural using English grammar rules.
I think the point is that those are not loans into English, rather they are international scientific terms in terminology that is used by many people whose first language is neither English, nor Latin (or Greek). So there is no reason to have a convention that is specific to English, or any other language, besides the Greek or Latin of the original.
In essence, when you use a word like "amygdala", you are not using English. Rather, you are code-switching between Latin and English.
How do people still not know this. I am azed that every year another article comes out claiming that it's somehow a novel idea.....
I understood this when I was 4-5 years old.....it's obvious if you have pets, go to a farm, anything with animals....squirrels....birds.... seriously....pet fish....haha
Because our western agriculture demands depends on us believing they don’t.
But in the end I suspect everyone believes it internally but that Big Mac tastes so good that we’d rather be blind to it. These studies bring it to the forefront again.
82 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadEdit: I don't care one way or the other, I am just confused by what seems to me like disconnected threads.
At least that's my reading of 1 Timothy 4:3
Can’t get much more primal than Genesis 1.
I can't imagine the spirit of such words carries with it the grotesqueries and indignities we're wont to inflict on our fellow sufferers. Nor for that matter the free reign over our environment. Instead I would espouse that the spirit is the maintenance of their well-being. As might a parent, or a landowner with some interest in his lot.
Genesis 1 says "I have given you every plant yielding seed ... and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food." Likewise to the animals, "I have given every green plant for food."
The word "animal" comes from the Latin animalis, meaning 'having breath', 'having soul' or 'living being'.
Why do you think this would have been different?
It's literally about scientific models of consciousness in specific body parts that specific animals have.
The entire article is about the controversies and difficulties of defining consciousness, and the hypotheses of neural correlates, and at what stage of evolution those correlates appeared.
So the literal thing you seem to be snarkily complaining about, is precisely what the article is trying to directly address. With various competing scientific definitions.
I honestly don't know what more you want.
Do you have a pet dog or cat? It's obviously conscious. I guess my construct breaks down if we consider things like plants, they obviously respond to their environment.
No, thats exactly wrong inverse-style.
Simply producing outputs from inputs is not consciousness. Being actively aware you exist is the whole and being of consciousness: Absence of inputs and outputs we can understand invites us to say "not conscious, no evidence of consciousness" but thats subject to validation.
I don't personally believe plants are conscious, but I'm open to somebody demonstrating a sense of awareness. It probably won't be a mirror-test.
I guess I probably see plants like fish not exactly conscious though they certainly respond to their environment. Plants are quite noisy if you pet them, the audio is just outside our hearing range but we have devices that can track that sort of thing now. And some fish actually like to be pet, my great grandmother apparently had some fish she would pet, never met her just know of the stories. Probably everything that can grow has some level of it.
Also fun fact worm memories are stored outside the brain, their are some trained worm studies you can Google that are interesting too.
So your counterpoint should be actually split into two parts:
1. Should we work on the unsolved problem even when it is very hard and ambiguous and there is no even clear hypothesis for the solution? Of course we should.
2. Should we make new conclusions derived from the the unsolved problem #1? No, we must not.
So listing the different parties:
a) Scientists should work on the researching consciousness problem.
b) Animal activists should continue protecting animals, but not because they are supposedly conscious, but because they MAY be. We just don't know yet.
c) Journalists MUST stop writing that such and such animal has consciousness.
Oh please.
There is a position about what consciousness is which implies many animals may have it. This article is about that position. Journalists have a moral obligation to keep writing about such positions, if we are to assume that imparting harm and pain on conscious beings is evil.
There are also positions that animals, even including humans, don’t have consciousness, and consciousness doesn’t exist. They are more comfortable to most humans, especially meat eaters. This article is not about those positions.
The incompleteness theorem has an important implication that we would not be able to construct a full and verifiably formally correct model of the system from within which we ourselves operate. All we have is hypotheses. Saying that people are not free to make hypotheses that are uncomfortable to you, or that journalists are not free to write about them, is a self-serving position.
- Whether animals are asleep or awake (conscious or unconscious)
- Whether animals have subjective experience / qualia
- Whether animals are self-aware
Etc. etc.
Once you narrow down then you can try to precisely define the topic or not, but without narrowing down, it's pointless.
my current cat is what I would consider above average, understands over 100 words, is very emotionally intelligent, and can communicate fairly well. she seems to have about 20-30 different vocalizations that we have agreed on, and is able to communicate that way; though not in the way of the other cat that could communicate ideas.
of course, I've also had cats that were either on the dumb side, or didn't care enough about dealing with the humans to make themselves appear as smart.
unfortunately, until we can define "consciousness" and measure it well, it will still be our own ideas on what is intelligent or conscious that we either observe with bias or make an emotional "guess" about.
It's almost exclusively carnivores/omnivores who fit this description, not herbivores....
Do you even comprehend how carnivores eat?
Personally, I like EW Schumacher's definition (a guide to the perplexed): animals are conscious because they can be knocked unconscious. Very practical.
Btw, imagine your mind as a standalone reasoning machine: you tell it a situation and it models the outcome. This machine can reason on its own, passively wiretapping sensory inputs and modeling outputs in your memory, all without your involvement, and whayever it models will be simply ignored, as your attention would be elsewhere. In other words, the thinking process would carry on unconsciously, just like your heart's activity. However, the moment you pay attention to those thoughts and start steering the thinking machine, this process becomes conscious. A creature equipped with such thinking machine, but without anyone steering it, would be a zombie.
https://mattasher.com/2021/04/22/ep-33-peter-godfrey-smith-o...
My own leaning is towards a panpsychist view, in which case the idea of animal consciousness as a binary, or even a scalar, makes no sense. It's multifaceted and complex and built from overlapping (resonant?) pieces. For example, human tongues can act like they have a mind of their own just like the arms of an octopus.
Not all humans though. (see Kissinger)
No, the _amygdala_. "Amygdala" is the plural of "amygdalon", Greek for "almond".
Also: one phenomenon, many phenomena; one criterion, many criteria; etc.
See also:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/plurals-of-for...
According to Merrimack-Webster, the plural is amygdalae, but we also knew what the author meant with amygdalas.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amygdala
In any case, it may be easy to see what is meant by "amygdalas" but it is not right. "Amygdalae" is the right form of the word, whether you want to take it from Latin, Greek, or, indeed, English.
Btw, there is a lot of confusion about what is Latin and what is Greek. Both languages are used for scientific terminology (for reasons unknown, this habbit has persisted in modern times) but Latin words often borrow from Greek, but keep their Latin endings... which are often similar to the Greek ones. So it's hard to know which is which. I used to resolve this kind of confusion by perusing a good etymological lexicon of Ancient Greek, but unfortunately this was taken from me in a flood and I can only now rely on the internet, and my native knowledge of Greek.
If you take a foreign word from (say) Latin and use it in English, you also do not use Latin declension forms of it, so why use Latin plural form of it? I think it makes more sense to form plural using English grammar rules.
In essence, when you use a word like "amygdala", you are not using English. Rather, you are code-switching between Latin and English.
I understood this when I was 4-5 years old.....it's obvious if you have pets, go to a farm, anything with animals....squirrels....birds.... seriously....pet fish....haha
But in the end I suspect everyone believes it internally but that Big Mac tastes so good that we’d rather be blind to it. These studies bring it to the forefront again.