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
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.
The relevant systems have a shared evolutionary history…
So do laptops and their hardware, only with memetic evolutionary history. So what?
I agree that shared evolutionary history by itself would not establish that the same “software” is running. But that wasn’t my claim.
My point is that humans inherited from earlier animals many of the same organized systems involved in things like sensory processing, nociception, affect and learning. The emergence of universal creativity could have changed the overall cognitive architecture dramatically without implying that all of those older systems acquired their phenomenal properties only at that same point.
So the laptop analogy shows that common ancestry does not entail identical software, which I agree with. What I don’t think it shows is that the continuity of these particular inherited systems is evidentially irrelevant to whether phenomenal experience may already have been present before universality.