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https://livestream.com/nyu-tv/AnimalConsciousness/videos/166146145

Prominent cognitive scientist (name deleted):
“Infuriating panel! I have a question for Marian Dawkins (and maybe for you, Stevan….). What does she do when a mosquito lands on her arm? A wasp? When a rat chews through the basket in her garage and eats her expensive, heritage seeds for next year’s garden? When a deer eats all her greens? When a coyote kills her pet cat?”

Your question is not for Marian Dawkins, who is a steady, nonconfrontational welfarist, focussed on reducing some of the suffering of the victims of animal production by trying to appeal to its possible benefits for the producers and consumers (rather than for the victims). That’s why Marian says she is not trying to claim animals are (or are not) conscious: because that approach is unconvincing to skeptics and it has not led (by Marian’s lights) to much progress in improving animals’ lot, either in production or in the wild.

(Marian attributes this to the problem of trying and failing to solve — to the satisfaction of consciousness-skeptics — what has been dubbed the “hard problem” of consciousness. But what Marian really meant was solving the other-minds problem to the satisfaction of other-minds-skeptics.)

(Although Dave Chalmers did baptize the “hard problem,” giving it a name, he did not, of course, invent the problem and his own comment — that Marian was right to cite the “hard problem” because the other-minds problem in fact follows from the hard-problem — was just Dave’s opinion. And in my opinion, this is easily shown to be wrong: Because even if we had a highly reliable “cerebroscope” for diagnosing which organisms are sentient, and when, the “hard problem” (of explaining, causally, how and why biological tissue generates feeling, rather than just generating function), would still remain unsolved, and would still remain just as hard.)

The “hard problem” is neither an ethical problem nor an animal-welfare problem. It is a problem of causal explanation. The problem for ethics and welfare is the other-minds problem. And solving it, by determining which organisms are sentient, and when, would not solve the ethical/welfare problem, because you still have to convince people that causing animal suffering matters, and needs to be acted upon.

My own answer to the question you raise about mosquitos and wasps — (it came up here during the conference as the question about cockroaches and bedbugs) – was that while there is an elephant in the room (the monstrous suffering inflicted on animals needlessly — for food, fur, and fun — there is no point fretting about cockroaches and bedbugs (or about being attacked by a predator): In a vital conflict of interest between sentient organisms, where life and death or health is at stake, every member of every species can and should protect its own vital life/death/health interests. The cockroach/bedbug/predator “objection” is hence just deflectionary (rather like Trump’s responses to criticism). It’s just an attempt to deflect from the implication that we should stop hurting animals needlessly for food/fur/fun today, and that we should start that stopping in our own comfortable western consumer societies where every living, healthy vegan — like myself — is irrefutable evidence of the fact that the horrors are not necessary; they are not based on life/death/health needs for humans.

So forget about the cockroach/bedbug/predator worry. (Save it for a happier day.) Philosophers would call it sophistry – if it comes from a non-vegan. Coming from a vegan it is premature, like puzzling about Zeno’s Paradox instead of just crossing the room. When the whole world is vegan, only vital conflicts of life/death/health interests with no alternatives will justify hurting or killing another sentient being. But today, while the elephant is in the room, the cockroach question is otiose.

“Worse, the whole discussion is focused entirely on WEIRD* people — a lot of the world is not weird.“

By wierd you mean the lady who was distributing the pamphlets? She is just good-hearted, and shell-shocked by the unending horrors, rather than a philosopher or a scientist. My own hope is that the majority of human beings are potentially decent, like her, rather than self-interested sociopaths, bent only on holding onto their food/fur/fun perks, with otiose objections, oblivious to the real ongoing cost in needless blood and suffering to their animal victims, come what may.

I might add that nonhuman animals’ only hope is that most human beings, thanks to their mammalian (“K-selected”) heritage, with its evolved darwinian empathy and compassion for their own young, their kin and their kind, supplemented by the cognitive, social and cultural capacity to learn to do the right thing, by inhibiting and outlawing portions of their likewise darwinian legacy, such as infanticide, homicide, rape, slavery, subjugation torture — the hope that most of our kind have evolved the eyes and hearts that can be opened to the unspeakable agony we are inflicting on other species, on a mounting, monstrous scale.

If we are not potentially merciful in the face of the overwhelming evidence (which only ag-gag laws are currently concealing from our eyes and hearts) — if we are, instead, die-hard deplorables, clinging to our own orgasms oblivious to their cost in others’ agony, then of course the animals are lost, and the animal cause is hopeless. And that would perhaps have been the case if human beings, together with all their cognitive and linguistic capacities, rather than having been descendants along the mammalian (K-selected) line, had descended instead along the cold-blooded reptilian (“r-selected”) line from their last common ancestor with Donald Trump (who restored the right to import the trophies from elephant-hunts a few days ago, but has just been forced by the protests from decent mammalians to freeze his order for the time being).

Let me add that the other-minds problem, in this context, is not an abstract problem for philosophers pondering epistemic uncertainties (as we are doing in much of this conference). The other-minds problem is not even our problem. It is the problem of the other minds, the ones that are feeling the agony — while Descartes, wizard-of-oz-like, urges everyone to pay no attention to their screaming and struggles, they are just reflex robots, behaving as if they were feeling pain, but in reality just “nocicepting” without feeling a thing.

*My interlocutor pointed out afterward that by WEIRD he had meant Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic and that most of the world is not WEIRD. My reply: It is the well-off weirdos in the west who can and should take the first step when it comes to the elephant in the room. After all, they are also its biggest producers and consumers.

“Singer is bored to death and ignores questions from the floor because he’s on his laptop….”

Since he wrote his book, Animal Liberation, in 1975, Peter Singer has done the most that any human being to date has ever done — especially as quantified by utilitarian calculations — to awaken the potential for human decency and to spur action in generations of human beings.

Although I cannot agree with Peter on everything — utilitarianism is an appeal to just the head, or a computer, rather than to the heart — I think that what is misperceived as “boredom” on Peter’s part is just the difference between the cerebral and the visceral — dare one call it the sentient? — approach to safeguarding the sentience of others.

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The Other Minds Problem: Animal Sentience and Cognition

Institute for Cognitive Sciences Summer School, June 26 – July 6, 2018
Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada

Since Descartes, philosophers know that there is no way to know for sure what — or whether — others feel (not even if they tell you). Science, however, is not about certainty but about probability and evidence. The 7.5 billion members of the human species can tell us what they are feeling. But there are 9 million other species on the planet, from microbes to mammals, with which humans share biological and cognitive ancestry, but not one other species can speak: Which of them can feel — and what do they feel? Their human spokespersons — the comparative psychologists, ethologists, evolutionists, and cognitive neurobiologists who are the world’s leading experts in “mind-reading” other species — will provide a sweeping panorama of what it feels like to be an elephant, ape, whale, cow, pig, dog, chicken, mouse, fish, lizard, lobster, snail: This growing body of facts about nonhuman sentience has profound implications not only for our understanding of human cognition, but for our treatment of other sentient species.

Partial list of speakers who have accepted and confirmed to date:

https://othermindsproblem.blogspot.com

Adamatzky, Andrew (UEW) slime mold cognition
Allen. Colin (Indiana) evolution of mind
Andrews, Kristin (York) animal mind
Balcombe, Jonathan (HSUS) fish intelligence
Baluska, Frantisek (Bonn) intelligence (and possibly sentience) in plants
Berns, Gregory (Emory) what it’s like to be a dog
Birch, Jonathan (LSE) the precautionary principle
Brosnan, Sarah (Georgia State) primate sociality
Burghardt, Gordon (Tennesee) reptile cognition
Chang, Steve (Yale) primate preferences
Chapman, Colin (McGill) primate social cognition
Chitka, Lars (Vienna) bee perception
Dukas, Reuven (Mcmaster) insect cognition
Giraldeau, Luc-Alain (UQÀM) dans l’oeil du pigeon
Hendricks, Michael (McGill) perception in c. elegans roundworms
Kelly, Debbie (Manitoba) corvid cognition
Marino, Lori (Whale Sanctuary Project) cetacean cognition
Mather, Jennifer (Lethbridge) cephalopod cognition
Mendl, Michael (Bristol) pig cognition
Ophir, Alexander (Cornell) vole social behavior
Oyama, Tomoko (McGill) sensation and cognition in drosophila
Phelps, Steve (Texas) social cognition across species
Plotnik, Joshua (Hunter) elephant mind
Pravosudov, Vladimir (Nevada) chickadee spatial cognition
Ratcliffe, John (Toronto) bat cognition
Reader, Simon (McGill.Ca) evolution of social learning
Reiss, Diana (Hunter) dolphin mind
Ryan, Mike (Texas.Edu) evolution of communication
Sakata, Jon (McGill) social learning in birdsong
Simmons, Jim (Brown) what is it like to be a bat?
TenCate, Carel (Leiden) avian cognition
Wise, Steven (NhRP) primate and proboscid personhood
Woolley, Sarah (McGill) perception and learning in songbirds
Young, Larry (Emory) prosocial behavior and oxytocin

All videos are here,  starting with Berns:

JE:

What in the world

What
In the world
Are we doing here?
In the world, where
Everything is at home,
In the world where it all works
except around us, where
It’s all screwed up and things are dying too fast.
We don’t belong in this beautiful working place;
What
In the world are we doing here?

ME:

A darwinian mistake
that will eventually auto-correct
in the usual darwinian
i.e. sociopathic
way

An EUS
evolutionary unstable
hence unsustainable
strategy

A blip

A bloody blip

yeah, true. There have been so far worse catastrophes before… so comforting.

Not worse.

The slow agony
we’ve made
of our prey species’
(i.e. all other species’)
lives
has no parallel
or precedent

or pardon

Our sole modicum
of mercy

sometimes

has been for our own

and we don’t deserve it

a blip:
meaning it won’t matter in a hundred thousand years,
right? (Thank you Thomas)
But goddammit, it matters now.

it matters
to our victims
now
and forever

and it’s all that matters
or ever did

Irreparable

and unpardonable

Redemption
is for souls
for whom
only they matter
or matter most

For their victims:

perdition

in this life

Deplored
by the Decent

Deified
by the Deplorables

Stroked
by the Sycophants

Sustained
by the Sociopaths

—

Déploré
par les décents

Déifié
par les déplorables

Flatté
par les flagorneurs

Soutenu
par les sociopathes

Fisher’s hypothesis (about quantum tunneling effects in biology) – probably false, but not absurd – concerns physiological functioning, as in photosynthesis.

But it has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness (sentience).

[And it certainly does not justify the pseudo-scientific lithium experiment with rats (an experiment that apparently even failed to replicate).]

Quantum physics, one of the most powerful and successful theories in the history of science, still has its problems, even paradoxes. Just as cognitive neuroscience has its problem: its paradox is sentience.

Churchill said (about Russia): “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

Concerning quantum mechanics and consciousness, I would say that we cannot resolve a paradox (in one domain) with a paradox (from another domain).

Quantum computation (already a controversial field), if it turns out to be practical, could have a biological role – but already in photosynthesis (which does not enter consciousness…)

(One can draw one’s inspiration from anywhere, from anything, including having been relieved of depression by Prozac: the chemical effect on our consciousness may surprise us, as does any question about chemistry and consciousness; and if we struggle with the perplexities of quantum mechanics it can give us associative ideas: mysteries have affinities: that’s what, in other minds, gives birth to the soul, immortal and immaterial, to the omnipotent and omniscient creator and to the mysteries of transubstantiation and the trinity …)

There is no need for vegans to worry about protein; as you eat a wide variety of (organic) grain, beans, nuts, vegetables, greens and fruit) your own metabolism adjusts your tastes and preferences so what’s most important for your body will become the most tasty.

In all my years as a vegetarian (which is almost the same as being a carnivore because you are still consuming animal protein) my palate hardly changed from when I ate meat. My mainstay were dairy and eggs, plus some starch foods. I was not particularly interested in greens or beans or grains, etc. Now I love them, and I have even begun to cook, which I never did, all those years. And it’s not because I can’t get enough of the food I like, but because I now like so many more foods!

I think the key is animal protein: We are metabolically omnivores. We are capable of living on almost exclusively meat, if we can get it (carnivore mode). But we are also capable of living on exclusively non-meat (herbivore mode). And the biological “cue” for which mode we are in is animal protein.

I don’t think the cue is graded (i.e., I don’t think that the less animal protein you eat, the more appetite you have for vegetables): I think it’s more like an on-off switch between the two modes (which, for me, took 8 months to become perceptible): Once your body is getting no animal protein at all, the metabolic switch is set to herbivore mode, and both your appetite and your way of metabolizing what you eat changes (in my case, dramatically, because I could compare it with almost 50 years of being a vegetarian, which is just a form of carnivore).

The switch is not irreversible. We can start eating meat again and it (much more quickly) switches back. I think this has to do with our evolutionary history: availability of food varied seasonally, climatically and geographically (and we migrated a lot): we were opportunistic omnivores, and ate what we could. Sometimes many generations (or much longer) some of our ancestral populations had to make do with no meat at all, or, as in the frozen north, on almost nothing but meat. Our metabolism is adapted for both.

It’s also adapted for opportunistic theft, rape, murder, infanticide, genocide, domination, torture and enslavement.

But that’s no excuse for doing it when you no longer have to. And we no longer have to steal, rape, murder etc. today (and certainly not in the civilized, prosperous, law-based parts of the world).

And killing sentient organisms for food is one of the things we no longer have to do in order to survive and be healthy.

So if we keep doing it, it is — as with stealing, rape and domination — just because we feel like it, because we have cultivated a taste for it — and not out of biological necessity.

The young
think they seek it
but just for their own,
like the drunk and the lamp-post.
The key lies elsewhere.

If you and yours
are fed and sheltered,
safe and hale,
the meaning of life
— yes, life, yes, meaning —
is helping those who are not.I

Nor are the “those”
just kin and kind.
All living creatures who feel
can be hurt.
And most are;
and mostly by our kin and kind.

Nor is “do no harm”
enough,
for not-doing
is doing too.

There is not a monstrosity
we inflict on other kinds
that we do not inflict on our own.

But on our own,
we condemn it,
we’ve outlawed it,
and most of us
would never commit it.

Yet on the other kinds
we don’t just permit it
but most of us support it,
collaborate in it,
profit from it.

If the Golden Rule
that

It is as if OJ Simpson’s Dream Team were now ruling an entire nation. Quis custodiet? Not the populace. Not the EU. Hungary is not a rudderless ship: It is the unchallenged fiefdom of a sociopathic gangster. The democratic world needs to figure out — and put into practise — all means of constraining and combatting this potentially fatal exploitation of the vulnerabilities of democracy itself by rogue regimes. For the Orban phenotype is anything but rare among would-be power brokers. (There’s a homologue in the White House.) Once they discover that the democratic world lacks — or lacks the will to use — the means to protect itself, the Orbans and Trumps will sprout like toadstools all over the planet; the defeat of the CEU, and of the heroic efforts of its founder to make and keep society open, democratic, and free will be the historic harbinger of the triumph of the toadstools — if anyone is still doing history in the new Dark Ages…

About my interruptive/interactive quote/comment compulsion: Yes, it is treating a written text as a real-time conversation (in which you don’t normally hear the end till you reach the end).

Some (many) mea-culpas: Even in real oral conversations, I tend to interrupt before the person gets to finish, sometimes because I have already anticipated the finish or think I have (I’m of course sometimes/often wrong) and sometimes because I’m just impatient to reply (often because I’m afraid I’ll forget otherwise).

In my defence, on my own end, I don’t much speechify; I say my bit with minimal words, so as not to subject the other party to the kind of frustration I feel when someone is being long-winded. (I stop reading novels as well as monographs, too, when it’s obvious (or so I think) where they’re going, and it’s just words).

I think my interruptingness is also related in some way to my indiscretion, my saying things I shouldn’t say, divulging secrets, partly even a Trumpian hyperbole, stating things that I conjecture or wish were so as if they were fact. There is a definite impulsive/compulsive component to these ejaculations.

And of course the failure of open access and skywriting, which was specifically motivated by my belief that everyone was inclined and inspired to real-time interactivity, as I was — but instead turned out to be an olympic event at which I perhaps excelled but for which no one but me had any interest or appetite!

I tell it (or perhaps rationalize it) all here:

Harnad, S. (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines.

(It’s against my nature, having said all this, to refer anyone to chapter-and-verse instead of just restating it simply and compactly on the spot, so I’ll say it: I thought the human brain (and thinking itself) evolved language for real-time, “online” exchanges at the speed of thought, not for the long, offline monologues that later supplemented it across time, space, and generations, in the form of writing and print.)

But it was just a fantasy, based on a compulsive quirk of mine.

‘Nuff said. Since then I have learned what I knew (as we all know) already, but had ducked for 50 years: It’s not about me (unlike this bit of self-indulgent self-flagellation).

Amia Srinavasan‘s critique of “Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference” by William MacAskill
is excellent, pointing out how much Effective Altruism (EA) simply takes for granted (e.g., capitalism itself, and the status quo).

But the worst is that EA is psychopathic — as psychopathic as Darwinian evolution itself: Evolution’s sole criterion is maximizing (“satisficing,” really) net survival and reproduction, and EA utilitarianism’s sole criterion is maximizing net utility. Both turn a blind, “rational” eye on collateral damage, including proximal collateral damage.

That’s not morality, it’s mathematics. And treating emotion as if it were just a vice or a distraction is not a virtue. In fact, it was (ironically) Darwinian evolution itself (the origin of sentience, hence suffering, hence all moral problems) that implanted empathy and compassion in mammals and birds (at least), probably in the adaptive service of reproductive success (in altricial K-selected species, at least, of which we are one). Without those traits we’d all be psychopaths (as r-selected, precocial species may be).

In the trolley problem, any mother who would not flip the switch to save her own child rather than another’s would be a psychopath. If it was for the sake of saving two children of another instead of her own child that she failed to flip the switch then she’d be an EA utilitarian — and a psychopath.

Altruism needs to be compassionate, not just “effective.” And charity begins at home (or it never begins at all). Nor would an uncharitable world be a hospitable one to live in: It would be rather like a zombie world. Surely an (emotionally!) weighted combination of EA and proximal compassion would be better than EA alone.

The other-minds problem

is the other mind’s problem

if you decide it doesn’t have a mind

and it does.

And it’s YOUR problem

if you are the other mind…