Animal Consciousness
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.I don’t think animals are sentient.
I realize this view sounds outlandish to most but it’s a considered, researched conclusion.
There’s lots of evidence of insentience in the way animals behave. If they were sentient, they would not behave the way they do: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/evidence-of-animal-insentience
Dozens of videos compiling and explaining evidence of animal insentience: https://libertythroughreason.com/insentience-in-animals-and-sleepwalkers/
Additional reasoning:
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-faq
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/konrad-lorenz-hacked-animals
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/animal-sentience-discussion-tree
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-animal-rights-community-is-based-on-fear-a
You propose in your writings that universal creativity can emerge from lower-level, mindless computation, and that consciousness is among the emergent properties associated with creativity. But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
The fact that simple execution-only systems are not conscious does not show that no noncreative computation can have phenomenal properties. For example, pain could in principle have emerged from a different kind of lower-level computation long before that system acquired universal creativity.
So unless there is an explanation for why phenomenal experience cannot emerge from noncreative computation, the inference from “animals are noncreative” to “animals are insentient” does not seem to follow.
The inference would seem more natural in the opposite direction: evidence that animals lacked phenomenal experience might support doubts about more general mental capacities, but the absence of universal creativity does not by itself explain why even pain or color experience should be absent.
Hi Vincent, welcome to V. Nice meeting you at Conjecture Con.
But why must phenomenal experience emerge only together with universal creativity?
Idk why you switched from “consciousness” to “phenomenal experience” here. But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
I have seen no evidence of any animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. If you know of any, please show me.
But the argument is that behavior that may just as well be preprogrammed and then executed mindlessly is not evidence of consciousness (because it is, again, mindless).
This seems to be circular reasoning:
Your reply seems to move from “the behavior could have been preprogrammed” to “the behavior is therefore mindless.” But those are different claims.
“Preprogrammed” describes how the behavior is generated. “Mindless” additionally says that no phenomenal experience accompanies that process. That does not follow unless we already assume that non-universal or preprogrammed computation cannot support phenomenal experience. Which is precisely the connection my criticism questioned.
So showing that animal behavior could be preprogrammed may show that the behavior does not prove sentience, but it does not by itself provide evidence of insentience.
I have seen no evidence of any animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. If you know of any, please show me. <
You ask for animal behavior that could not have been preprogrammed. But I’m not sure any finite observed behavior could meet that standard.
For any finite sequence of behavior, it seems possible in principle to posit a sufficiently elaborate fixed program that produces it. The same would apply to human behavior.
So if the criterion for sentience is behavior that could not possibly have been preprogrammed, it is unclear how sentience could ever be established behaviorally, including in humans.
In 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.
If vivid phenomenal experience persists while the relevant critical capacities are greatly diminished (and some forms of meta-awareness appear to be absent altogether in ordinary dreams) that seems at least evidence that phenomenal experience does not closely depend on the degree to which those capacities are active. Lucid dreaming strengthens this: reflective/metacognitive capacities can return within an experience that was already phenomenal.
In the reasoning you link in support of animal insentience, you argue that similarities between human and animal nervous systems do not tell us whether the same conscious “software” is running. But humans and other mammals are not analogous to two identical computers on which entirely unrelated programs happen to have been installed. The relevant systems have a shared evolutionary history, with substantial continuity in sensory, affective, nociceptive and learning mechanisms.
A change in that inherited system may indeed have produced the qualitative leap to universal creativity. Since universality is necessarily all-or-nothing in the relevant sense, that leap is unsurprising. But it does not follow that every other aspect of mental life (including pain or other phenomenal experience) must have appeared in the same leap, or even require a comparable leap at all.
Neural continuity therefore seems evidentially relevant even if it cannot by itself prove sentience. The observation that universal creativity is uniquely human still leaves open whether older, shared systems already supported phenomenal experience.