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, we could 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
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.
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. You can post multiple sibling ideas (not nested ideas) by using the form where it says “Add another top-level idea to the discussion” for each one.
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.
The idea is: given that we know little about animal consciousness, it's better to err on the safe side given the asymmetry of inconvenience versus mass animal suffering.
I think you can attack this by either pointing out how that is a faulty way of thinking about a 'lack of evidence', or that there is indeed enough information on animal consciousness.
I'm mostly interested in finding evidence or thinking of cases that would be evidence, and less about the implications on morality.
I think you’ve replaced my question with a different one.
I asked whether you’d like to break your post up into several ideas to protect against bulk criticism.
You replaced the question with: ‘what is the core of your idea?’ And then you answered the replacement question instead of mine.
So your original post still stands (#364), and is still vulnerable to bulk criticism. I conclude that you are not concerned with bulk criticism and I will comment on the original post accordingly.
I have to admit I was unsure how many claims I actually made, and excused myself from the burden of having to figure it out with the following excuse: I expect that many potential users of your platform would make this error and therefore we should try to run with it. I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
I agree many people would make the same error and that it’s a good idea to see how things play out when it does happen. There’s going to be a learning curve for new users. I will probably just point it out every time. I may even implement a feature where ‘AI’ analyzes text and helpfully points out to users that they’re about to submit multiple claims at once.
I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
Even if the person submitting an idea doesn’t mind bulk criticism, others still have a harder time discerning which parts of the idea are true/salvageable and which should be discarded. Meaning error correction is harder.
It helps when critics quote which part they’re criticizing, like I’m doing above, but the responsibility still lies with the original poster.
I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
Even if the person submitting a post doesn’t mind bulk criticism, others still have a harder time discerning which ideas in the post are true/salvageable and which should be discarded. Meaning error correction is harder.
It helps when critics quote which part they’re criticizing, like I’m doing above, but the responsibility still lies with the original poster.
I also don't mind the bulk criticism.
Even if the person submitting a post doesn’t mind bulk criticism, others still have a harder time discerning which ideas in the post are true/salvageable and which should be discarded. Meaning error correction is harder.
It helps when critics quote the part they’re criticizing, like I’m doing above, but the responsibility still lies with the original poster.
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
What are the criteria by which this is evidence?
As I write in the first link, the videos “mostly show bugs and nonsensical behavior, things that wouldn’t happen if animals were sentient.”
As I write in the first link, the videos “mostly show bugs and nonsensical behavior, things that wouldn’t happen if animals were sentient.”
P.S. Dirk was here
As I write in the first link, the videos “mostly show bugs and nonsensical behavior, things that wouldn’t happen if animals were sentient.”
[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).