Re: Wickramasinghe may have been right.

On 20/04/2024 16:45, RonO wrote:

We can hark back to the Arkansas creation science federal court case. It wasn't necessary, but when Wichramasinghe was testifying in support of the creationist legislation he was made to look foolish by making him admit to some of his stranger beliefs.  One joke line was his belief that insects were smarter than we thought, and they were clever enough not to let us know it.
 Some researchers are trying to establish a new concept of consciousness.   It would allow a lot of animals to be sentient including insects.
 We know that bees have a language, and other insects can communicate via phermones.  Attenborough's nature series have shown fish using tools, and octopus collaborating with fish and sea snakes collaborating with fish to hunt.
 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/animal-consciousness-scientists-push-new-paradigm-rcna148213   https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration
 Looks like the way they catch crabs on Deadliest Catch will have to change.  We might be reduced to eating yeast and bacterial cakes until they wake up to the fact that single celled organisms also sense and react to their environment.
 It should be noted by animal advocates that pretty much all of these "sentient" animals kill each other for food.  Ants even take slaves.  Is it ethical to condemn the dominant species just because they are more efficient at harvesting the others?
 QUOTE:
Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal. We should consider welfare risks and use the evidence to inform our responses to these risks.
END QUOTE:
 What they should likely be working on is why using these animals has to be restricted, and why welfare risks should be considered if you are not utilizing more than you need.  Why should welfare take precedence over efficiency in human existence?  It is a double standard that they can't apply to all the other species that they claim are sentient.  We are just another lifeform on this planet.  Lynx do not have to worry about the stress they put on the rabbits.
 I personally believe that we should treat all lifeforms as humanely as possible, and that we should do everything that we can to ensure that other species have their fair chance at surviving in nature, but I know that I can't place those same values on all the other species on this planet.  They are talking about killing wolves in order to help the caribou population recover.  The first Yellowstone pack likely died out due to inbreeding.  The wolf population shouldn't be reduced any further than it already has been reduced.  They have already been decimated. They need all the genetic diversity that they have left.  They want to kill hundreds of thousands of barred owls in the North West just because they are out competing the local spotted owls.  What seems to be stupid about the owls is that both spotted and barred are likely reestablishing themselves in the area after the last cold period.  They are both coming from the south where they survived during the last ice age.  One from the east and one from the west.  The spotted owls got there first because the barred owls had to wait for the northern Canadian forests to reestablish after being covered by a mile of ice.  Now the barred owls are out competing their spotted cousins.  The barred owls are probably going to need the hundreds of thousands that they want to kill in order to preserve the genetic diversity that they will need to survive the next ice age when their current territory will be wiped out and buried under ice, they will be beaten back, and they will have to compete with their relatives that never left the south.
 Ron Okimoto
 

That's all food for thought (if nothing else lol), but tbh I think there's an objection to all these "everything is conscious/sentient" ideas that I don't see brought up a lot, which is: our brain does an insane amount of processing that *we're* not conscious of. For example: blindsight. There are different pathways by which visual stimulus is processed and it's possible for us to have no conscious awareness of vision because one specific pathway doesn't work - but to still perceive and react to visual stimulus in a limited way via the other pathway, *with no conscious awareness that this is what we're doing*. Say an animal were perceiving and reacting to visual information along the same pathway, with the exact level of conscious awareness that a person with blindsight does: we'd observe their behavior and say they see, but does that entail they're *conscious* of seeing? For the human with blindsight after all we know it doesn't.
Same with sleepwalking, and all other examples of our brains pulling off complex behavior and even reasoning by some definition or other without conscious correlates.
Even within consciousness to be honest I feel there's conscious and conscious. For example say I'm in an accident - everything happens so fast I can't even think, I just act. After it's over I remember the events, I reflect on them and on how fast it all happened I couldn't even think and such. Was I conscious in that moment? I think it would be hard to argue I wasn't; by almost any definition (wakefulness, presence of qualia, etc) I was. But if I imagine an existence that's *purely* in that state, where the later moment of reflection *never comes*... I find I'm pretty ambivalent calling that "consciousness". It's a state I'm happy to give moral valence to because obviously pain, fear, exhilaration etc are possible in it, and if it's a state that beings we care about like young human children are in then I don't want to reason myself into not giving moral valence to young human children. But still... if we go by my experience of consciousness, if that was the only conscious experience I ever had wouldn't consider myself fully conscious. (setting aside of course that it's a state I'd never even be able to ask that question in, let alone formulate an opinion on it).