Activity
#5678·Vincent Brunsch, about 21 hours agoIn the reasoning you link in support of animal insentience, you argue that sentience and the capacity for universal creativity/critical thought come as a package deal. Dreaming seems to provide evidence against that connection.
Ordinary dreams can involve vivid visual experience, fear, pleasure, pain, etc., while metacognition, reality testing and critical reflection are greatly diminished. Lucid dreaming makes the distinction especially interesting: metacognitive awareness can return during an already conscious dream. The dream does not become phenomenally conscious only when lucidity begins; rather, an additional capacity for recognizing and critically reflecting on the experience appears.
This suggests that phenomenal experience can occur independently of the active critical capacities you take animals to lack.
This suggests that phenomenal experience can occur independently of the active critical capacities you take animals to lack.
I don’t think so, since, as you write yourself, the critical attitude while dreaming is only “diminished”, not completely gone.