Animal Consciousness
Discussion started by Dirk Meulenbelt
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.Figuring out whether animals have consciousness has implications for how we think about animal welfare, and also how we think about creativity
Unless we are solipsists, we conclude that all human beings are conscious.
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
I am not aware of any strong theories on animals being unconscious, other than intuitions of some AGI researchers who conjecture that sentience hangs together with unique learning capabilities of humans.
And suppose that we have a reasonable (best available) current explanation for why animals are not conscious, I don't think that puts us in a Pascal's wager situation, because considering our own (recognised) fallibility, and the asymmetry of being right and wrong with respect to moral outcomes: enormous suffering versus inconvenience, we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
This implies that we should treat animals carefully, as their sentience allows them to feel pain, until we have a lot more information. Interestingly, this also implies that wild nature is evil and that we should seek to get rid of it (if we continue to believe in animal consciousness).
TL;DR: We only have vague conjectures on animal consciousness
Thanks for your contribution, Dirk.
Your post contains several ideas. In the future, you would benefit from submitting them separately so they have to be criticized separately. As it stands, a single criticism of your post will mark all of the ideas contained therein as problematic. I call this a ‘bulk criticism’, see #362.
To protect against bulk criticism, try to submit one idea per post.
Would you like to break your post up into several ideas before I offer criticism? They can still reference each other the same way I do above with idea #362 – if you type # followed by a number, it will turn into a link to the corresponding idea, much like GitHub does with issues.
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
Sounds inductive.
A simple extrapolation to animals would be to say that those with similar characteristics to humans, could also have consciousness.
In addition to #371, this also sounds vague. Which “similar characteristics” and why?
[S]uppose that we have a reasonable (best available) current explanation for why animals are not conscious, I don't think that puts us in a Pascal's wager situation, because considering our own (recognised) fallibility, and the asymmetry of being right and wrong with respect to moral outcomes: enormous suffering versus inconvenience, we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
You say this wouldn’t put us in a Pascal’s wager situation, but then you employ more or less the same logic as Pascal: comparing a huge, potential downside with a certain, minor downside, and then choosing the minor downside.
I think it's different from Pascal's wager, as with Pascal's wager you have infinite, or many (all known religions) wagers. (Which god?) Whereas with animal consciousness we have only one wager, that we're currently not sure of, on which we're wagering a lot of potential animal suffering. Furthermore, we are not on our deathbed, and hence have the luxury of time to consider our trade.
I see that, according to Wikipedia, Pascal’s detractors criticized the wager for not addressing “the problem of which religion and which God should be worshipped”, but I don’t see how that is relevant here. Maybe there are some differences between how you apply the wager and how Pascal applied it, but the core logic is the same and equally invalid.
[W]e are not on our deathbed, and hence have the luxury of time to consider our trade.
But meat eaters contribute to the death of animals every day, so if animals were sentient there would be more urgency to apply the wager, not less. (I’ll preemptively add that, although meat eaters die every day, too, each one of them is complicit in what would be the murder of several innocent animals, so there’d still be more urgency.)
[C]onsidering our own (recognised) fallibility […] we should consider to tread on the safe side until we have more evidence.
There’s lots of evidence: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
And reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a
[W]ild nature is evil and […] we should seek to get rid of it (if we continue to believe in animal consciousness).
The suffering of some is not an obligation on others (Rand).