You do have to ponder existence to have a "desire" to live. Desire is a conscious impulse toward something that promises enjoyment or satisfaction in its attainment. What you are describing is instinct, genetic programming, etc. Zygotes have that, it is why the cells divide to become a fetus. Check about 6 posts up, I gave you four reasons unrelated to religion.
So life is valuable because of human DNA? Ya that's called a tautology. Life is valuable because humans. Human life is valuable. If you think babies don't have a desire to live, you are a psychopath. Pondering life and wanting to live are two different things. Does a dog want to live? Do you abuse animals because they don't ponder life?
This was your restatement of my position that I rejected the last time you maintained that was my position. Then I gave your four reasons human life has value. Which you have now once again mischaracterized as a claim that human life has value because of DNA. No, a dog doesn't have a conscious desire to live. Dogs do not have the capacity for self-awareness. Why would my rejection of the attribution of conscious thought to dogs and newborns mean I support abuse though. I am the one that doesn't even support damaging a zygote which clearly doesn't have a desire to live, just like a newborn.
I think you are misunderstanding the point: "desire" is a psychologically self-aware state of consciousness. Babies do not have that capacity yet; older individual humans develop that level of consciousness over time. I take it that's the point sm is making. You might substitute the word "drive" for "desire" and make a more effective point: I think it could be said that human babies (like other forms of life) have a type of "drive" to survive--call it instinct, call it hard-wired genotypic traits, whatever. That evolutionary drive is independent of individual psychological states. anyway. I take it that's what is being suggested here:
Restate them. And yes dogs have a desire to live. Pondering the future and life is not the same as WANTING to live.
again, terms such as "desire" and "wanting" are ambiguous in terms of psychological intention. It is usually better to find and employ less psychologically-loaded terms. a serious recommendation: I use this book with my students when we address the topic of anthropomorphism and the misreading of animals' intentional/pyschological states. It is very short, very clear, and not expensive for a used copy.
No thanks. It's very troubling that you do such me tal gymnastics to just root for your side. Again, dogs are sentient. They are also also conscious. They also have an intrinsic fear of death that I would never want to trigger in a cat or dog unless it's pure self-defense. Why do abused cats hide under beds all the time? The way humans treat animals effects their behavior and trust. So ya, there is a difference between pondering life. Dogs can't make "future plans" like humans or think of the future like humans. Dogs and cats do have rem cycle dreams reliving past events though.
Genuine? Brah recommending an entire book isn't genuine. Just highlight major point you retained from reading it. You retain knowledge of books you read right?
Just skimming over the recent posts but it seems like there is a human bias to the argument about consciousness. It seems like some posters are arguing a tautology that goes: Humans have consciousness and a desire to live. Dogs aren’t humans. Dogs therefore don’t have consciousness or a desire to live. Among the many problems with that statement the problem is the a priori assumption that humans do have consciousness when it’s one of the most fundamental questions of philosophy whether humans actually are conscious. If we downplay the idea that we think animals are conscious because we anthropomorphize them then we only believe other humans are conscious because we are projecting our internal consciousness on them.
I think you will find very few who support the notion that animals on the order of dogs have the same level of self-awareness, capacity for reason, and ability to conceptualize abstract concepts like a long-term desire to live that humans do. Because dogs and cats respond to pain stimuli does not make them thinking beings. Why? They were already stated in plain and easy to understand terms.
Actually no suspect you’ll find that more people believe dogs have capacity to think and engage in self preservation. Most pet owners do feel that their pets express empathy and human emotions also dogs have been shown to have problem solving capabilities. The bigger question though is what is consciousness and how do we even know other humans are conscious? A major question in philosophy is the Other Mind Problem. That only humans are conscious itself isn’t itself certain. In fact the DNA argument weakens that as while human DNA is complex there are other organism they have more complex DNA than we do.
this conversation touches on the issues debated by the so-called cognitive ethologists (led by Marc Bekoff among others) and proponents of the more traditional animal ethology position, which adheres to Morgan's Canon. I got criticized yesterday for recommending a book; I'm going to do that again here. Daniel Dennett has written perhaps the best (lay) overview of what's at stake in the human to non-human mental comparison. He argues in Kinds of Minds that the evolutionary difference between humans and non-humans is not just a difference in degree but in kind: the human mind represents a completely different order of evolutionary development. Thus dogs etc are not just little people stuck in dog/non-human bodies, but instead dwell at an empirically and qualitatively "lower" rung on the evolutionary ladder.
Dennett is arguing for a Cartesian ideal of consciousness that actually contrasts with some of his own views on evolution. That humans have essentially become so complex as to passed a quantum state of neural ability to consciousness. In fact Dennett himself refers to this as a "Cartesian Theater" that consciousness is almost an illusion that only our brains are able to process. As noted with Morgan's Canon though others have pointed out that many animals have complex neural systems and can display behaviors that we consider conscious and that it would go against evolution that consciousness is somesort of mystical force but instead is a property that arises at varying levels. Also going all the way back to Augustine the idea of consciousness is dependent upon languange and that we assume other humans are conscious because we can talk to them. The problem with that is that would mean someone who is mute wouldn't be conscious, and following the terms as laid on in this thread wouldn't even be fully human. Yet we still recongize that someone who we can't communicate with has conscious and even when sleeping we would still consider that person to have a conscious even if they aren't visibly using it. This gets back to that while we can't talk to animals we can clearly communicate with them on some level. As we learn more we are also finding out that animal communication is much more complex than we previously thought. The problem is that we've simply defined consciousness as whether we can understand them. This still skirts the Other Mind problem as the assumption behind Dennett is that we believe humans and only humans are conscious because we are humans and we see them behaving as we are. Given that we are communicating in a non verbal media and not directly this is even more relevant as there is even less evidence that you or I are actually conscious and not just a very good simulacra of human communication.
um . . . I don't think the debate is really about animal "consciousness" per se. Very few people adhere to the almost cartoon version of Cartesianism which insists that non-human animals are little machines that do not experience psychological states of pain, fear, terror, pleasure, etc. What's controversial/arguable/debatable is the potential for what might be referred to as "higher order" thinking. This is one of the benefits of Kennedy's book cited earlier: he describe one example of an ethologist describing a robin building the nest as a set of cognitively-informed, almost "rational" choices--versus the more parsimonious, Canon's-Morgan-friendly interpretation of the robin's behavior as being nearly 100% instinctive. That to me is a completely different issue than the question of raw "consciousness" as such. But perhaps I misunderstand your meaning. this is a clue to the confusion I think we're having about the term "consciousness." Animals are conscious, but humans are self-conscious. again, I do not believe this is a view that has ever been (widely) held, at least not that I'm aware of. Language has been associated of course with conscious "thought," which is again a very different phenomenon from "consciousness" itself. there's confusion here as well: philosophers who have considered the problem of so-called "marginal humans," anencephalics and the like, who do not possess the capacity of conscious thought, usually still include such humans within the category "human"; the interesting thing about those discussions is simply the moral arguments usually proffered by those seeking to elevate non-humans to the moral status of humans: non-human animals cannot think, but neither can anencephalic marginal humans, therefore non-human animals are equal in moral status to marginal humans and by extension to humans as well. no--I believe this is a serious misreading of Dennett and of most philosophers of mind.
