Animal Consciousness

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Dirk Meulenbelt’s avatar
Dirk MeulenbeltOP, about 1 year ago·#397·· Collapse

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.

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis Hackethal, about 1 year ago·#402·· Collapse

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.

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Dennis Hackethal’s avatar
Dennis Hackethal, about 1 year ago·#403·· Collapse

[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.)

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