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Yet this is the same type of work people are using to argue that that crabs/fish can feel/experience pain. Proving or disproving consciousness is basically imp
by nezzle 9y ago
Yet this is the same type of work people are using to argue that that crabs/fish can feel/experience pain. Proving or disproving consciousness is basically impossible.
E.g. I feel like a lot of people aren't conscious :) Prove me right or wrong?
- knodi123 9y agoI know where I came from — but where did all you zombies come from?
- hux_ 9y agoSo would you allow me to chop up someone you have decided is unconscious? If the answer is no, why?
- nezzle 9y agoI shared the impossibility of making such a decision with any degree of certainty. But we have to eat. I'm no longer sure what's more ethical: eating something dead meat or vegetables that are still alive.
- akvadrako 9y agoThe best explanation demystifying consciousness I've found comes from a claim it's a social phenomena that only arose around 3000 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) These days most people are conscious because you need it to function in society; there is a good deal of evidence in the book.
- fsloth 9y ago"It is one of those books that is either complete rubbish or a work of consummate genius, nothing in between! Probably the former, but I'm hedging my bets." - Richard Dawkins
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI wonder how you'd spot a Bicameral person in modern society.
- klmr 9y ago> Yet this is the same type of work people are using to argue that that crabs/fish can feel/experience pain. Not really: a fundamental requirement in the assessment of pain reception in animals is the presence and stimulation of nociceptors (pain receptors). Plants don’t have any nerves, so they fundamentally lack pain reception. It’s entirely possible that they have developed an alternative system to experience pain (e.g. via analogous action potential signalling) but at this point our conventional model of pain reception completely breaks down.
- nezzle 9y agoWe could connect a nociceptor to a computer. Does the computer now experience pain? Just because the mechanism exists for sedation or pain does not imply the experience of consciousness or pain.
- klmr 9y agoI’m not arguing that. I’m arguing that a nociceptor is necessary but not sufficient to argue for pain experience. And plants don’t even fulfil this basic, necessary criterion. So the “type of work” shown in the article isn’t the same kind of evidence conventionally used to argue for pain experience.