Consciousness
I guess all Descartes knew for certain was that HE existed. In scientific sense, you can't be privy to anyone else's mind. Their own sense of self is only available to you through your senses (as is everything that isn't your self). So you have to take on faith, as in educated deduction, that other people have minds or souls or whatever.
Until recently (last couple of hundred years), at least in "Western" thought, animals were thought to be merely patterns, algorithms. The vivisection of creatures for medical research (which continues today by the way) was easily explained away by the notion that since they had no souls, they couldn't really feel anything either (Harari: Homo Deus). They were like moving plants that had automatic responses, as might a robot. The idea is alive and well, judging by my many arguments with people who think that shellfish couldn't possibly feel pain without a central nervous system like ours.
Why is there a cut-off point between has-mind, can-feel and has-none, can't? Couldn't it be more like a scale? Has mind, feels <--------> has none, can't? Could a shellfish feel in SOME sense? If so, could a plant? Could a rock?
There's a great field of study called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO, pronounced, ooOOOoo) that speculates on how the world might be experienced from the point of view of objects: how would a table or a boot see things? Jane Bennet theorises that all matter, all objects, possess a "vibrancy". That on SOME level, no matter how low, they can somehow experience other objects. If rocks and tables are the opposite end of the spectrum to humans, where do trees sit? Not right next to humans maybe, but certainly not as far as rocks.
Trees respond to light and water, but is this PURELY a robotic reaction? Peter Wolhleben would say: no. It might appear that way to us, simply because we are on a different time scale to them. Several Attenborough docos have suggested a similar thing, albeit in a very anthropomorphic way. I'll say something about time in the next post. <-------->
Until recently (last couple of hundred years), at least in "Western" thought, animals were thought to be merely patterns, algorithms. The vivisection of creatures for medical research (which continues today by the way) was easily explained away by the notion that since they had no souls, they couldn't really feel anything either (Harari: Homo Deus). They were like moving plants that had automatic responses, as might a robot. The idea is alive and well, judging by my many arguments with people who think that shellfish couldn't possibly feel pain without a central nervous system like ours.
Why is there a cut-off point between has-mind, can-feel and has-none, can't? Couldn't it be more like a scale? Has mind, feels <--------> has none, can't? Could a shellfish feel in SOME sense? If so, could a plant? Could a rock?
There's a great field of study called Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO, pronounced, ooOOOoo) that speculates on how the world might be experienced from the point of view of objects: how would a table or a boot see things? Jane Bennet theorises that all matter, all objects, possess a "vibrancy". That on SOME level, no matter how low, they can somehow experience other objects. If rocks and tables are the opposite end of the spectrum to humans, where do trees sit? Not right next to humans maybe, but certainly not as far as rocks.
Trees respond to light and water, but is this PURELY a robotic reaction? Peter Wolhleben would say: no. It might appear that way to us, simply because we are on a different time scale to them. Several Attenborough docos have suggested a similar thing, albeit in a very anthropomorphic way. I'll say something about time in the next post. <-------->
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