10 ms·
"Most people" is carrying a lot of weight there and really just characterizes some of the people who participate in a very specific culture that's quite new and
by swatcoder 2y ago
"Most people" is carrying a lot of weight there and really just characterizes some of the people who participate in a very specific culture that's quite new and anything but universal.
Most people around the world haven't really internalized the pointedly modern idea of "conciousness" in the first place and some people around the world and even in distintcly modern cultures don't find it a very fruitful way of making sense of their own experience, understanding it comceptually (as you might define a foreign word) but not engaging with it experientially (as you might in speaking a word). It's just a belief, a recently invented one, and one that only bears fruit alongside a constellation of other associated beliefs.
When it comes to actually navigating the world, most people don't orient themselves through such an abstract, intellectual lens let alone that specific one. They raise, eat, and sacrifice animals; they apply violence to other humans; etc etc -- or actively refrain from these things -- without thinking in terms of consciousness at all and often without thinking in terms of any comparably intellectualized rubric.
The way we treat animals and humans and fish and birds and forests and mountains and rivers is just an expression of culture. Cultures change over time and trade practices and beliefs with each other along the way, but there are nearly as many cultures as there are families in the world and to treat everyone like they do and should be part of your own, and that their failure to do so makes them morally detestable (rather than culturally alien), is extremely narrow minded and exclusionary.
In a pluralist, diverse society, like many of us live in, that kind of thinking often engenders strife, division, and eventually violence -- which I'm going to guess is something you don't want to add to the world.
- efitz 2y agoI think you are overthinking things. Of course most of the human beings on planet earth do not perform some kind of philosophical analysis. However most people actually have an intuition of what it is like to be human and apply it unconsciously to everything that they encounter. I posit that a significant part of that is “acts like a human acts in such-and-such situation” and, inferred from that, “experiences things like a human”. When I look at my fellow human beings (hell, when I look in the mirror), I have no objective knowledge that they are conscious. If I were to encounter someone badly injured it might not even be clear to me that they were human, much less conscious- so I use observations of behaviors and reactions to put $NEW_THING into the right ontological bucket. My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment. The last few years has seen a lot of research (some of it obviously animal rights activist driven) into consciousness of arthropods and mollusks. I read a couple of the papers to understand what was being measured and how, and now I’ve moved lobsters into the “should be killed humanely before cooking”, where I would put cows and chickens etc. I think most people, if they were given this kind of information, and if they were economically able to act on it, would make similar choices.
- adolph 2y ago> My bucket for “mosquitos and other pests” is absolutely inappropriate for humans; but it is interesting to me to know whether things belong in some bucket that deserves special treatment. Mosquitos are ethical creatures who only bite because they must. "Blood is essential for mosquito reproduction and survival. Female mosquitoes take blood meals to get the protein and iron needed to produce eggs that will properly hatch." [0] "Mosquitoes enjoy feeding on plant nectar like juices from flowers and fruits, plant sap, honeydew and other fluids from plants. This sugary mosquito food gives them the energy they need to fly, reproduce and sustain themselves." [0] https://www.orkin.com/pests/mosquitoes/what-do-mosquitoes-eat https://www.orkin.com/pests/mosquitoes/what-do-mosquitoes-ea...