Thank you very much for this information. I think that the attempt of these scientists is remarkable, especially because they compromise their seriousness by involving themselves in a field that is extremely important, but also very confused and exposed to criticism. I think it is an important sign of a cultural sensitivity that we are getting more and more in last decades.
I believe it would be useful to clarify the points that can cause confusion.
The core basis of the declaration is in the few lines paragraph that starts with “What is consciousness?”:
What is consciousness? The term has a variety of meanings. The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness focuses on one important meaning, sometimes called “phenomenal consciousness” or “sentience.” The question here is which animals can have subjective experiences. This can include sensory experiences (say, the experience of a particular touch, taste, sight, or smell) as well as experiences that feel good or bad (say, the experience of pleasure, pain, hope, or fear). This sense of the term “consciousness” is what Thomas Nagel had in mind when he famously asked “What is it like to be a bat?”.
Essentially they say that what consciousness is is completely unclear. Their ultimate reference point is Nagel’s famous article, which doesn’t clarify anything, remains ambiguous, so that, at the end, these scientists have no idea of what they are talking about in their declaration. I am saying this not to ridiculise these scientists, but, on the contrary, to point out their courage, as I said.
I think that the essential reference point in talking about consciousness is the dialectic relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. This is what is never clarified by Nagel, nor by these scientists, nor by anybody else, as far as I know in my quite limited bunch of information on the topic.
The paragraph I mentioned “What is consciousness?” is confused exactly because it mixes and messes up references to objectivity and subjectivity in trying to explain what consciousness is.
If consciousness is an objective phenomenon, it coincides with Chalmer’s “easy problem of consciousness”. As a consequence of this, suffering does not exist, since it is just a series of physical and chemical reactions happening in our body, that has been programmed by nature to favour our survival. This means, for example, that, when a human is tortured, nobody is suffering, what we have is just a series of objective, mechanical, material, measurable phenomenons, the same way when you hit a computer that has been programmed to show signs of suffering, actually nobody is really suffering, despite whatever that computer has been made able to show: it is just a “show”, there is not any actual “somebody” suffering inside that computer. This means that, even when I feel bad, I feel pain, I must interpret it the same way: I am just a theatre where a show happens. Any feelings, pain, suffering, desperation of mine, has to be considered by myself just as mechanical phenomenons. When I am suffering, actually nobody is suffering. This coincides with certain metaphysical constructions that we can find in spiritualities and religions, where everything is explained in terms of a system that works as a whole, despite its complex, diversified or even conflicting and opposing components.
For some unexplained and inexplicable reason, we humans talk also about subjectivity, which coincides with Chalmer’s “hard problem of consciousness”. To the extent that it is exactly “subjectivity”, it cannot be explained and it has to be impossible to explain it. When we explain something, even when I explain something to myself, we can’t escape using shared concepts and reference points. To the extent that they are shared, they are not entirely subjective anymore. This means that, whenever we talk about subjectivity, we cannot escape turning it automatically into an objective concept made and expressed by objective and shared reference points, so that what we are talking about is not anymore the subjectivity we wanted to explain. This meets Wittgestein’s statement “What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. According to Wittgestein and to what I said, we must give up any attempt to talk about subjectivity. I disagree with this, because language is not exclusively objective and shared, otherwise art wouldn’t exist, it wouldn’t make sense. Actually there are people who think that art can be entirely reduced to objective phenomenons. This coincides with people who answered Chalmers that a “hard problem of consciousness” does not exist. The same way it is not possible to give evidence of the existence of consciousness meant as subjectivity: if such evidence exists, as those scientists agree in the declaration, then it is not subjectivity anymore, it is objectivity.
I don’t think we can build any morality, as the declaration tries to do, basing on an objectivistic interpretation of consciousness. They wrote
“Third, when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal”.
Why is it irresponsible? In a mentality that relies on objectivity, a stone that has been broken into small pieces is not something worse than when it was intact, just in one whole piece. The same way an animal, or a human, or a plant, that has been torn in pieces, it doesn’t matter how much “suffering” has been caused, is not something worse than a living being happily enjoying their life. At the end, this is what our cruel universe shows us, not caring at all if our minuscule planet Earth exists or not.
At the end, we can see that the declaration, by talking about “irresponsibility”, tries to create a scientific basis upon which to build some kind of morality, which is destined to failure, because morality, by definition, cannot be scientific.
Fortunately the declaration is confused, because it contains references to subjectivity as well. They just don’t realize that subjectivity cannot and mustn’t be proved. As I said, if we prove it, then it is not subjectivity.
I think that, if we want to include references to subjectivity in our minds, talks, discussions, mentalities, we need to stop with Wittgestein’s mentality and accept that language and philosophy have to accept and welcome their ability to refer to unprovable things and concepts. We need to welcome the methods and styles that are typical of art, poetry, music, and accept the fact that frequently, when somebody asks us to give evidence and clarity of what we are talking about, we cannot give it, they cannot claim evidence and clarity as something always essential, always required and necessary.
In other words, we need to integrate analytical philosophy, which wants clarity and objectivity, with continental philosophy, that accepts to venture into unprovable concepts.