What about religious terrorists who kill people who don't share their beliefs? — Truth Seeker

They're fighting over their stories. (God likes us and doesn't approve of them)

Aren't you upset about all the suffering, inequality, injustice, and death in the world? — Truth Seeker

I was, most of my life. Our daughter married a 'conservative' who had written a pro-worker dissertation for his Sociology course. We asked him "Don't you care about equality?" He said "I've moved on."
Well, so have I. I came to realize that this entire species is subject to some degree of the same emotional illness. We have this big brain, with its ability to reason and its ability to imagine, and we get the two mixed up all the time. We have aggressive predator genes and co-operative social genes, and we get the two mixed up all the time. We make up stories and fall in love with them so deeply that we die and kill for them. We exaggerate our fears into unspeakable monsters and then hang monster-masks on our fellow humans. We invent the notion of evil and then enact it and then make a ceremony of it.

I believe it's possible to live differently, but it would have to be in much smaller numbers, who were in accord, and it would require constant mindfulness and vigilance to maintain.

I think that if we could work out what is fact and what is opinion, it would help us get on with each other better. — Truth Seeker

It never has. Conflicting opinions arise from the very same facts (Some people speak French, while some people speak English). More importantly, conflicting interests arise from the same physical reality (Some people live on a plot of fertile land; some other people want to live there.) We don't go to war over facts; we go to war over emotions (anger, greed and fear, mostly) or because we loyally and stupidly follow leaders, or because we subscribe to different stories. (God likes us and doesn't approve of them)

Turns out, the truth rarely sets anyone free; it's far more likely to land them in jail.

I worry that we will destroy ourselves and all the other species with our conflicts. — Truth Seeker

I think it's inevitable. At least, wiping out most of us and them - odds are, something will remain and start over. But probably not a bunch a altruistic vegans, alas!
https://quillandquire.com/review/oryx-and-crake/

To break an addiction is not a matter of deciding that there is something you care about more than the addiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that's exactly what it is. You can't take appropriate action - whether it's seeking medical help, our counselling, or a support group, whether you go on a retreat or find a displacement mechanism or substitute a different vice - until after you've made that decision. The physical craving hurts, and is easy to give in to. There must be a resolute mental discipline to overcome it.

Divinity is something to be considered more numerous than infinity. — Barkon

Ho-kay

divine force. — Barkon

Eureka!

It's not a question of what I believe or what you believe. You asserted that

Things don't pop up for no reason, — Barkon

is a "given".
But you don't say the identity of the giver, not trace the provenance of the gift.
It might have been more accurate to say: "Within my ability to observe, no thing or event is uncaused.... wherefore I surmise that the existence of the universe must also have a cause."

We must assume a cause, so we must base theories on an existence that was caused rather than aiming at cause-less-ness and failing to describe it alongside many other inconsistencies concerning things happening without causes. — Barkon

We don't must any such thing - but we can and may.
Can you enumerate and define those many other inconsistencies that concern any other things that happen without causes?
Since you can't describe the cause any more than I can describe causelessness, this is an impasse.

Things don't pop up for no reason, in fact, that is an assertion that implies a cause(in this case, 'no reason'). Given this, — Barkon

Where is this given?

Because you were born with the capacity to learn both, which animals are not, the cleverness of crows notwithstanding. — Wayfarer

Every sentient being is born with the capacity to learn - and no two of those capacities is exactly the same. Some chimps, gorillas and dolphins may have a greater capacity for learning than some humans. Nevertheless, we draw a hard line between species, not IQ's. Every human ability is a quantitaive advance on some ability possessed by other species, yet we draw a hard line between species, not abilities. Every species has abilities or senses that no other has, yet we value as 'higher' only those we consider exclusive to ourselves, and never wonder how come not one of us can light up his own backside.

To even write your response, you're drawing on your innate capacities of reason and speech, which you must have to mount an argument in the first place.

That's what it means. — Wayfarer

I did not preconceive language: I learned it. I did not preconceive reasoning; I developed it over many years, with the help of other people, living and dead. I didn't start arguing 'in the first place'; I just dribbled and grizzled and responded to stimuli like every other infant. The languages I learned did not spring fully armed from the forehead of some progenitor; they evolved from grunts and snarls over three million years. Reasoned argument didn't suddenly burst forth from Athens 400BCE; people debated over everything from whether a berry was safe to eat to how many angels can dance on a pin to whether a newly discovered planet way the hell out in space could theoretically support life.

It seems an obvious, common-sense answer, but the point is that a dumb animal, for instance, might be likewise 'exposed' to a series of events but never form any idea of a causal relationship, unless in terms of stimulus and response. — Wayfarer

it's a precondition for how we perceive and interact with the world. — Wayfarer

Recognition is not precognition. Most of the people who claim to have that are charlatans.
There is an innate potential, which varies greatly among humans, as it does in other animals, and if the environment is favourable, some of us, and them, attain the most mental agility of which we are capable.

It is that abstractive and intellectual ability, easily taken-for-granted, that differentiates h. sapiens from other species. — Wayfarer

Okay, you've found another invisible threshold. I think the difference is of degree; you insist (along with many other humans loath to give up their god-given exceptionality) that it is of kind. I accept that.

According to Kant, these categories are not derived from experience but rather are the preconditions that make experience intelligible in the first place. — Wayfarer

Where is that "first place" supposed to reside? In the embryo? On the ovum? Surely not in the genes of apes that oh so recently could not philosophize at all? What is the origin of this mind that preconceives?

For example, when we perceive one event following another, our understanding interprets this as causation, — Wayfarer

We fist interpret it as a story. It is not until the same kind of event is followed by the same kind of event repeatedly that we begin to understand cause and effect. (For some people, it can happen with monotonous predictability and they still go on television to say "Nobody could have foreseen this!") Moreover, the intelligent among us observe, experiment and discover whether we ourselves can cause the same thing to happen. That's how we learned to control fire and ride logs down a river and build airplanes.

Generally speaking, your posts seem to exhibit a straightforwardly empiricist approach, hence are susceptible to this kind of critique. — Wayfarer

They're both dead enough not to trouble me overmuch, and they were both smart guys, yet disagreed, so it's possible that they were both wrong about some things that have since become easier to study, like neuroscience.

He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism

And he has intuited all this about a mind of which he has not clue#1. Clever man!

Once this exemplar is visualized (or heard, smelled, touched, etc.) either via the imagination or otherwise, it will exclude all other possible exemplars of animal which the concept of “animal” by its very definition encompasses. — javra

No it doesn't! The concept encompasses the general as well as the particular; domains, classes, orders, families, genera, species, every member thereof as well as the specimen under observation. Concepts begin with the particular and expand up and out. Only the particular is real; the rest of whatever classifications apply are symbolic or imaginary.

The human awareness of other animals did not begin with an idea; it began with individual real entities. The human realized that every example of a certain kind of prey was like every other in some ways in which it was unlike another kind of prey. He then generalized that quarry as 'deer' - because whichever particular deer they killed, there would be enough meat for the clan. If, however, that stone age man went after a mammoth, his strategy would have to be different from the deer-hunting strategy, and this would hold true for all the very large creatures that had long curved tusks and a trunk. But the deer and mammoth had this in common with each other and with rabbits and wild pigs: unlike roots and berries, they resisted being killed, screamed and bled when they were. Kind of like other people....

Concepts are crucial to cognition and to understanding of that perceived, but are in themselves extra-empirical. — javra

And still contain no information which is beyond observable reality.

One for example does not perceive the concepts of "animal" or of "world" or of "number" but simply understands them - this when perceiving signs, for example - and any perception we might have of an animal or a world or a number (be it of the imagination or not) — javra

Not sure what this means. One [person?] simply understands the concept of animal, world or number - okay. But before that one can understand the concept of something, at least one example of the original had to exist in either reality or imagination. One wouldn't have much use for a concept that corresponds to nothing in the universe. The ideal triangle would be quite meaningless without we can draw imperfect real ones.

will necessarily exclude many if not most elements which the concept itself encompasses.

This, I understand not at all.

And that the difference is significant. — Wayfarer

Of course it is. But the ways in which that difference is interpreted by humans is also significant.

What I will acknowledge is that I believe that elements of the religious account of mankind signify real differences. — Wayfarer

No; they exploit real differences.

As far as ‘what more is there than information’ there’s the whole question of interpretation, of what information means. — Wayfarer

‘what more is there than information’ Why is that in single quotes? It looks suspiciously like a disinterpretation of my asking what information is there in the extra-empirical?
Yes, interpretation is the sticking-point.

then rational inference goes well beyond what is available to sensory perception. Through it, we have discovered endless things that you could never learn only by observation. — Wayfarer

That's the 'point'. Conjecture, intuition, imagination, projection, gut feeling are all valuable starting points for the investigation of some phenomenon or the search for an answer to some question. They often point to where one should look for information; they do no themselves supply information.

And also an existential one, more to the point. — Wayfarer

What is an existential threshold? Apes exist; humans exist; humans are apes but apes are not human. Every speciation is a threshold of sorts, and so is every conception. What makes this branching off more special than all of the others?

I think its' very clear that other animals "understand". We had a dog which clearly understood that it ought not get on the table, and so it did not ... as long as someone was around. But as soon as we went to bed it would be on the table. — Metaphysician Undercover

A complete side-track. We had one of those. We had a fairly big table in the kitchen, off limit to animals. We hardly ever saw her on it, but when I put my key in the lock, there was a scramble and clicking of nails on tile, a big white dog coming to greet me, and a Pyrennees-shaped puddle of sand on the table. It was a perfectly rational thing for her to do: lying on the table enabled her to see out the windows in comfort.

Reasoned inference enables discoveries of facts impossible to obtain by observation alone. Science relies on it, not to mention everyday rational thought. — Wayfarer

Science confirms or disproves it through experimentation.

Those very means you call into question in your initial response. And here, you're verging on positivism. — Wayfarer

I call all means into question. Here, I was merely pointing out the self-contradiction of a particular hard-line position.

I think humans need to take responsibility for the fact of their difference to other species. — Wayfarer

What's that to do with the topic? The power of humans was never in question; the sentience of other species was.

we've crossed an evolutionary threshold which sets us apart from other animals. — Wayfarer

We did cross a threshold, but it wasn't an evolutionary one; it was a cultural one. Once humans turned into settled farmers, their attitude changed: land and water became commodities; herbivores became cattle or vermin; carnivores became rivals and enemies; insects became pests. Humans alienated themselves from other species.

What can be inferred, what it means that something is the way it is. — Wayfarer

That's not information; that's conjecture. AFAICS, there is no reliable source of information on what it means to be what it is. Who assumes there has to be a meaning?

They don't consider the consequences or weigh up their decisions — Wayfarer

Of course they do! They have strategy and method and rules and consequences. Less convoluted ones than in human societies, but that's degree again, not kind.

Sin and taboo are more than just 'inventions' - they arise from the fact that we can sense right and wrong. — Wayfarer

Then why do these concepts change from culture to culture, age to age?

Here is the contradiction:
Humans attribute rationality to mankind (ignoring evidence of gross irrationality on the part of individual specimens as well as mobs and nations). Humans claim exclusive possession of this rationality (ignoring the rational behaviour of other species). Humans assume that a sophisticated intelligence and communication system makes us superior to all other life on earth (ignoring exclusive capabilities that other species have and we lack). Humans declare that no other species is sentient, because we can't conclusively prove that they are (ignoring the evidence of our own interaction with them). Humans deny that other animals have a subjective experience, because it's not measurable by scientific means nor directly experiencable by human beings.
At the same time this complex intelligence and communication skill, tool making and skyscraper building ability and complex hierarchical thinking is presumed to exist in every single member of the human species (I don't always see it in my fellow humans). All humans are credited with subjective experience and sentience, even though it's not measurable by scientific means nor experienced from outside the individual experiencer.

And the cherry on top of the whipped cream of our tippy-toppery is a 'moral sense' that can't be located, measured or verified by scientific means, but is presumed to exist (without evolutionary antecedents) and humans to have a monopoly on it. This unproven assertion proves our categorical distinction from other animals.

It's a question in philosophy of mind, and one I'm interested in. — Wayfarer

I get that there is a question, or maybe more than one. What I'm asking is, what do you have to consider? What information do you have to work with beyond the empirical?

I would have thought an obvious difference between humans and animals, is that we're capable of moral choice — Wayfarer

Once again, classifying degrees as distinct and different categories. Wolves and groundhogs have rules of behaviour - they just don't make a big verbose fuss about it: if somebody misbehaves, they snarl or snap at him; they don't put him on the rack or cut out his tongue.
However, I agree that we are unique in inventing the notion of sin and taboo. So that's two exclusive characteristics of the human animal.

Oh? I work in the VR space, I'm interested in this. Do you have a link? — hypericin

Sorry. I saw it on "The Nature of Things" a couple of years ago, but don't recall which episode. There have been quite a few, since about 2018 dealing with animal intelligence, perception and behaviour.

But this doesn't truly give us the slightest idea of what it is actually, subjectively like to be another animal. — hypericin

It does give us the slightest idea. Nobody can ever truly know another's subjective experience - that's a constant. But it's not important to be a rat or a marlin; what's important is to put yourself in their place, as any compassionate human being would put himself in the place of another human being who has different capabilities, experiences and world-view from ones' own, to recognize the feelings, impulses and motivations as being similar to our own.

But you’re aware of David Chalmers distinction between the ‘easy’ and ‘hard’ problems? — Wayfarer

Not really. I'm not terribly interested in solving the "problem" of consciousness, because I don't consider it any more of a problem than sunlight. It just is. And ain't we lucky to have it?

But when it comes to the question of the nature of being, there might be more to consider than the empirical. — Wayfarer

Like what?

Interesting.
This bit

but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject

is slightly out of date. There have recently been some quite convincing virtual reality attempts to help humans what cats see, hear what bats hear, etc. It's not the full experience - we will never really know what it's like to be a dolphin or hummingbird - but we can get an approximation.
The important point here is the effort. Still using scientific equipment, we're trying to see the world from another species' perspective, the better to understand. I think the key is to distance ourselves from rigid 'objectivity' - which is often another term for objectification - and let our other faculties participate in a quest for knowledge; accept the information we get from our senses.

If you can identify the yellow paint spot on your own nose in the mirror, you can also identify the distress of a robin defending her nest or the rage of an abused elephant or the sorrow of a donkey who has lost his friend.

I'm more inclined to the Buddhist view, that all sentient beings suffer and deserve compassion. — Wayfarer

Of course, that's much better. But the Christians have an out for that: things without souls are not sentient. And that brings us full circle to the behaviorists. Categorize, dismiss, ignore the evidence of your senses and reason, stick to the dogma, and you can do anything you want to rats, cats, monkeys and pigs.

Buddhists also believe that humans may be reborn into the animal realm — Wayfarer

Not for behaving like animals; for behaving like bad humans. And that - being reborn as a sparrow - may be what it would take to convince some anthrosupremacists that we all experience pretty much alike.

Nevertheless Buddhists still recognise that only in human form can one progress in dharma, — Wayfarer

What other animals needs it? They're already okay. They don't require enlightenment, salvation, transcendence or any other supernatural nonsense. They're content to live in the real world. Each and every one of the blessed creatures is a staunch atheist.

the fundamental drives that characterise all other existence, summarised as 'the four F's' (Feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproduction.) As I mentioned in another thread, that attitude effectively negates the possibility of philosophy — Wayfarer

I don't see why. Just add another F - fantasizing. That includes telling stories, creating art and inventing religions. That story-making drive is very strong in humans. If you're looking for a single unique feature of the species, that's the one I'd recommend. Cats may act like prima donnas, but I don't believe they imagine themselves the star of a movie the way each of us does.

As is tool-making — Wayfarer

Nope. I've mentioned this twice before. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/g39714258/animals-using-tools/

As is the capacity to reflect on the nature of being and question the meaning of existence. — Wayfarer

That one is a distinctly unique liability.

Gods are easily bored; they tinker.

What would concepts such as "paradox", "contradiction", "logic", "irrationality", "belief" and "fact" mean in such a universe? — Benj96

They could not mean anything. Language, where and as it arose (it would have to, being one of the possibilities) in such a random universe, would develop quite differently from the way we use it, for the beings who invent it would have a very different experience.
Or perhaps the meanings would apply to the very same things for a short period of time. If the universe elaborated its need to make everything that could happen, happen serially rather than geographically or in a cascade, then each possible kind of reality might last anywhere from minutes to centuries.

Is it the case that we, as human beings, have subjectively decided to say that we are different (perhaps referring to human intellect), and that our minds have produced some sort of mental, or psychological threshold, or barrier, — Metaphysician Undercover

That's a very interesting anthropological question. It wasn't easy to divide early hominids into classes, and even for a very long period into the species definitely identified as human, we have very few clues as to their thinking. We see rock art and cave art, but can't really know what it meant to the people who made them, or how they regarded themselves or their place in the animal kingdom. Remnants of early mythology (that is, well within the last 50,000 years or so) suggest a respectful attitude toward other species as well as overlap between the human, the animal and the divine spheres.

The hard demarcation line doesn't show up until the after the Neolithic Revolution, with the advent of sophisticated urban societies. If a deliberate psychological threshold was set, I would date it to about 6,000 BC. One of the remarkable features of the ensuing several thousand years is the appearance of human/animal totems as objects of worship and the celebration of hunting as an elite sport. It suggests to me an attempt not merely to dominate, but to subsume the species humans prized, admired or feared.

or is it the case that there is real physical principles (opposing thumb?) which supports your claim of a threshold?

That wouldn't wash; there are a dozen or more similar hands, and not merely among primates: it includes rats, raccoons and lizards.

Agree that humans and other species are on a biological continuum, but I also believe that humans crossed a threshold with the advent of language, tool use, and so on, and that it is a highly signficant difference, that though we're related to other animals, we're more than 'just animals'. — Wayfarer

Can you show me the threshold? Tool use is not unique; language is not unique; the 'so on' is built-up levels of complexity. The problem of "more than" is that it is far too easily read by the beneficiaries as "superior to" (rather than "more accountable") and the odious phrase "just animals" is far too easily read as "things". ...

And I think this is something mostly lost sight of in many naturalist accounts of humanity. — Wayfarer

If it were, the priests are still there to set us straight: "just animals" have no souls.

Here's a collection of human artifacts, the likes of which could have been constructed by no other animal: — Wayfarer

A bigger, busier, less organized and far less peaceful termite mound.

Bigger, richer, more more voracious, more complex doesn't equate to better. It just means a unique capability for destruction. That should have meant we are also aware and refrain from doing more damage, and some of us have always been that way inclined. But the double-thinking human mind with its complexity and linguistic agility guarantees that this species is unique in its internal conflict and the variety of ways it can go mad.

So, the distinction is of structure and complexity. Did the first two humans communicate in a language with hierarchical syntax - or were they freak chimps talking linear and their children, and great-great-great-great grandchildren evolve less hair and more complexity of speech?

one of ours had quite a large 'vocabulary' — Wayfarer

In a second language. (I've known a dog who learned German and later English) Most of ours also spoke fluent feline. Dogs are - of course! - expected to and do learn our words, but we don't all make any effort to learn theirs.
And you know, a Great Dane is hardly ever required to figure how many cars your friend's mechanic is supposed to fix. Just as well you are hardly ever required to read all the messages on a fire hydrant, because most humans couldn't pick out the smell of their own urine from a lineup, never mind a pileup.
All I mean is, every species develops the language in which it needs to communicate, to whom and what it needs to communicate. I do not dispute the extreme complexity of human life and therefore the need for complexity in human communication. But we're still talking flavours and degrees of the same medium, not isolated tanks of different media.

Only that rationality and language allow you to reflect on experience, to make it the subject of conscious deliberation and analysis, as well as simply feeling it. — Wayfarer

How sure are we about this baseline of 'rationality'? If evolution is a continuous, fluid process, it admits of no hard boundaries between existing and emergent species. Does it not follow that the traits of progenitors continue in a fluid way through the progeny and undergo gradual change, rather than stopping and starting at arbitrary borders?
So with intelligence, memory, pattern-recognition and cognition. Maybe Descartes was right in that dogs "do not philosophize", but they do dream; they remember persons, places, rules, and experiences. Is "reflection" very far from memory?

That much-vaunted human language ain't so unique either. Practically every vertebrate communicates in a way that is intelligible to other members of its species. Just because you don't know what a frog or starling or hyena is talking about, why assume they have no language? We may not understand what Javanese people say to one another, yet we assume that since they are human, they are speaking a language, because language is a uniquely human attribute... Like the use of clothing and tools. Ask a crow or octopus about that.

As for conscious deliberation, I have seen some pretty elaborate escape plans put into action - not by just one dog but two, working together. They abandoned the strategy we humans had discovered, and devised a new one. Several times. And when the serial escapee returned home hours later, she hung her head and walked in slow motion - you could practically see the little thought-bubble over her head "Oh, I'm in trouble... I'm gonna get it now..." And that's the semi-bright Pyrenees, not her henchman, the clever border collie X. (I also recommend video compilations on You Tube.) Animals have ideas, carry out plans, try to hide or deny their misdeeds. Where is the big black line of demarcation?

oh. As a sidenote, in elementary school I was given the impression that the earth rolled around in a big basketball net.

Rational/irrational is one of those weasel concepts, innit? What's the dubious definition of rationality to do with experience? Don't mentally ill people feel hunger, pain and fear and desire pretty much the same way that sages do?

Of course; I have all the proof I require.

Of course ethical standards are relative to the principles they are conceived to serve.
There is nothing irrational about that, since ethics are about how one individual relates to others in his or her sphere of influence.
Every society has a central core of values and beliefs to which every member is expected to subscribe and contribute. Ethical behaviour consists of actions that uphold the society's values and support the society's belief system.

You could say scientists were allowed to be behaviorists and talk perhaps about drives, but not to assume animals were experiencers. — Bylaw


Until evidence is provided, I will stay unconvinced. — Lionino

What form would that evidence take?

Can you hear the bigotry in the phrase "the scientific attitude"? Do you not recognize scientists as individuals? — wonderer1

You can try, but very few buck the prevailing attitude of their times.
As individual people, scientists start out as little babies. They grow up in an environment of other people, in a culture, in a religious faith, in an economic stratum, in an education system. All those influences precede their identity as 'scientist', and all those influences don't just fall off when they're handed a little scroll on graduation.

In the sciences, as in architecture, music, law or theology, there are periods and prevailing trends. A few giants of the field set the tone for a new period: their radical, original theories are internalized by less creative thinkers; become doctrine in the colleges and taught to the next generation, where they become dogma... Until a new young giant grows up to challenge the status quo and the less creative thinkers of his generation take up a new theory as doctrine....

That would appear to be entailed by his philosophy, however despite arguing for it all throughout his career, he never actually behaved as if it were true. — Wayfarer

Why has anybody got any use for him? Seems like just another blowhard talking through his....hat.

According to him and his ilk, if something can’t be described or understood in scientific terms, then it ought not to be considered worthy of analysis. — Wayfarer

Therefore, in his school of thought, all humans are also eligible for protein, slave labour, spare parts and experimentation without their consent?

Notice that the background statement acknowledges that definitions of consciousness are ‘hotly contested’. — Wayfarer

I get the contest between conscience and self-interest. I don't get the separate categorization of equally inexplicable consciousnesses.

I guess I didn't understand it. I didn't discern confusion. I thought they simply resolved to put aside the controversy - that is, the conflict between acknowledging what our senses perceive and the convenient pretense of vested interests that treat other species as inanimate objects. We've been through all this with the characterization of non-Europeans, non-Christians, non-males, non-heterosexuals as "other" and therefore subject to abuse.

Quite agree, and also agree that it is something that cannot be explained. — Wayfarer

Do we need to explain or prove the value of life or freedom or happiness before we grant people the right to it? We don't all have one another's subjective experience and we have not required that to understand that we have these experiences in common. How do we know? Because we see ourselves in one another. We see ourselves in the actions and reactions of other species, too.

Even Trump/Putin/the boogieman will tell the truth when it's convenient. — unenlightened

I'll wait, but i won't hold my breath.

But all my ancestors come from the Europes, so you may ask an indian instead. — Lionino

I'm not asking; just musing on the different/similar belief systems of empires: Inca, Roman, British, Mughal, Songhai...