Consciousness

[Wildtree]

Are we confusing Consciousness with Empathy?

[Ghostpanther]

Only human consciousness can ask "What is God?".

Best response so far.

[Simulacrum]

What looks right now to possibly be the only thing that distinguishes humans from other animals in a way that only we do it is our capacity for abstraction. It's a pretty big deal, since without abstraction you can't have pretty much anything that humans do. We also have other features that make us stand out, such as our amazing ability to cooperate with each other, but other species do that too, if not as well as we do. I don't think any other animal has been observed to be capable of abstracting, though.

What would you call building nests if not planning ahead? How well do people really analyze why they feel a certain way? I feel like 60% of the population wouldn't be popping all kinds of anti depressants and investing heavily in self help bullshit this were the case. Animals might not know the word tomorrow but they hunt and gather and nest illustrating some concept of linearity.

There is a very easy answer brought to you by Sam Harris. I'm paraphrasing but picture a world where every living thing is in the worst possible agony imaginable. That would be considered bad by any standard. So any lessening of that agony has to be seen as a positive. There. The less pain every living thing feels the better the world is, question answered.

Building a nest doesn't necessitate planning ahead. There's no conscious effort put into building nests by animals, any more than there's conscious effort put into learning languages by human babies; it happens automatically because it has been programmed into us by the process of evolution.

And Sam Harris' hypothetical doesn't address pain. It addresses suffering, which is a different concept; e.g., I could make you suffer enormously without inflicting any pain upon you. It isn't a hypothetical designed to say anything about pain management, but about objective morality.

It's also a pretty dumb hypothetical. All he does is create a situation where, by definition, everything that exists suffers as much as possible, asserts that any reduction in that suffering would (because everyone would agree to it) objectively be an improvement, and concludes from that that there's some objective way to measure suffering, thus objective morality (which is based on reducing suffering) exists.

The problem with that is that the only context in which this is true is his hypothetical; a world where everyone suffers the greatest amount possible. In any other world - for example, reality - this isn't the case, and so you will never be able to establish complete agreement upon how to reduce suffering, and so you can not conclude that there exists such a thing as objective morality.

Though all of this is entirely besides the point of reducing or increasing pain, which is different from suffering. And as far as pain goes, you can't even get people to agree that less pain is always good. For example, I enjoy pain in moderate amounts; working out without feeling pain makes the workout feel pointless. Competing without feeling pain makes the competition feel hollow. Even in huge amounts, pain can be a good thing, e.g: Putting my hand on a very hot oven without feeling pain would obviously be much worse for me than feeling the extreme pain that normally produces. There are many other similar situations. So less pain is not always better, ergo your conclusion is also wrong.

[Deleted]

I don't think human consciousness is any different from any other conscious animal. It's an ON or OFF switch. You're either aware of your own existence or you're not. There are no levels of self-awareness that separates us. The difference is that you better understand the things you experience because your intelligence allows you to draw more advanced correlations. When it comes to emotional range you can also assume that animals are capable of feeling the same emotions that you are. Again, what separates us is that you better understand why you feel a certain way.

So on that basis you should always treat animals with respect because they are fully aware of what is happening to them. What they are not necessarily aware of is that YOU are the cause for that feeling or emotion or that X or Y event lead up to what they are currently feeling. But to think that an animal does not feel or experience feelings and sensations in the same way that we do just because it doesn't understand it as good as we do is a ridiculous notion. Pain is pain, happiness is happiness and confusion is confusion no matter if you understand why you feel that way or not.

But this doesn't mean that killing and eating animals is wrong, it's not. They are meat and you are a predator or they are interfering with your property(territory) and you need to kill them. Their death is sometimes necessary for your survival and that's okay. The only thing you shouldn't do is to cause pain and suffering when it is not necessary. You do not kill or harm an animal just for the sake of causing it pain, that's when it becomes evil and wrong. This applies to people too. Killing or causing suffering is not morally wrong(No matter what the law or biblical morals say) because the thing you kill or cause suffering to is conscious. It is only morally wrong when it is unnecessary and/or lack proper reason.