Insects and Other Animals Have Consciousness, Experts Declare | Quanta Magazine
www.quantamagazine.org
A group of prominent biologists and philosophers announced a new consensus: There’s “a realistic possibility” that insects, octopuses, crustaceans, fish and other overlooked animals experience consciousness.
  • Sims
    4•8 months ago

    I sense a polarization brewing. Just an anecdotal observation oc, but I think a lot of people have placed human cognition/brain/experience on a huge pedestal - as something uniquely in a league of its own. It seem to me to be the same people also arguing against true artificial intelligence, arguing for free will or arguing that the mind have non-physical abilities. They also seem to ignore collective intelligence and focus on individualist intelligence, which makes them underestimate the difference between a human raised well now, and a 100% feral human without contact to collective cultural intelligence.

    I don’t know if its roughly the same group or if the observation is even valid, but the debate might become harder and more entrenched if it is. We will keep arguing over some disagreement that is really caused by some ‘unrelated’ belief structure.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
      2•8 months ago

      I mean you’d absolutely expect that if a neural net that creates a model of the world and itself within that world, then you would end up with some form of self awareness as a result. You’d expect degrees of fidelity, but it seems strange to think of consciousness as an on/off switch. It’s much more plausible that it’s a gradient, especially in animals that have a neural feedback loop where the brain has proprioceptory feedback from the body and can correlate intent to do an action.

      I get the impression that people just like feeling that humanity is special somehow, and also use the notion that animals don’t have self awareness to justify the horrors that humans enact upon other animals.