We don't know what consciousness is, and every time we make a test or category for it, we end up having to include many kinds of minds and lives that make a LOT of people Very uncomfortable. We also end up Excluding kinds of humans, a fact which SHOULD make More of us more uncomfortable than it does
#consciousness #neuroscience "The more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient."
Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus.
So all those "Far Side" cartoons with animals talking to therapists were really trying to tell us this?
People also need to understand that "sentience" and "sapience" are two different words.
The discomfort is probably based on how vehemently people right for the ability to eat out sentient friends.
insects are conscious I smoke out a spider in my room every day and he loves it
Why would accepting a human state lacking consciousness scare people. We already do that, this is why we often comfort ourselves by referring to death while asleep as preferable. And also refer to those knocked out as unconscious.
When I learned about animism as a teen, I thought, “THAT’S IT!” Personhood & agency does not simply exist in the ways we comprehend it does. Some humans like to decide against agency to keep themselves superior to others, be they other humans, animals, plants, insects, etc.
Consciousness? We can't even define "sex" reliably, and probably for similar reasons
every study on animal consciousness feels like a desperate attempt to prove it *doesn't* exist - to find some spark that is truly and uniquely human, to finally locate the animal we can exploit without guilt
It would be pretty hard to study neural mechanisms in psychology and not think that if we call ourselves conscious, we should probably also call most other animals conscious.
Me a spinozist who sees mind and matter as two sides of the same substance : ☕️umm damn good coffee