You are most welcome.

Thank you very much for your excellent question. Levinas’s meontological move in Totality and Infinity is precisely what I had in mind when I spoke of the ethical and the ontological as “two inflections of the same opening.” For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy because it arises not within Being but before it - me ontos, beyond-Being. The face of the Other interrupts ontology’s self-enclosure; it calls me from a height I did not posit, demanding responsibility prior to any theoretical stance. In that sense, Levinas radicalizes Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness): I am not only thrown into Being but summoned beyond it.

Where I diverge slightly is in emphasis. Levinas’s meontology can sound like a complete rupture - an absolute outside to Being. I read it, rather, as the self-transcendence of Being itself, its capacity to exceed its own totalization through the ethical relation. In other words, the ethical call is not alien to ontology but its deepest disclosure: Being showing itself as vulnerable and relational. The “firstness” of ethics is not chronological or hierarchical but modal: the primordial tone of existence as care, exposure, and obligation.

If we hold these together - Heidegger’s ontological disclosure and Levinas’s ethical interruption - we glimpse a fuller picture: ontology opens the space for encounter; ethics keeps that space from closing into self-sufficiency. They are indeed two inflections of one openness - the event of meaning itself oscillating between comprehension and compassion.

That’s the sense in which I see Compassionism (my own evolving framework) as both ontological and ethical: Being is never a neutral substrate; it is always already an appeal to alleviate suffering. The “beyond-Being” that Levinas names as meontology is, for me, the pulse of compassion within Being - the refusal of indifference that makes the universe intelligible at all.

Thank you, Constance - your reply is characteristically rich and generous. I’ll try to clarify what I meant by “ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre,” and then engage the larger point about metaphysics, language, and sublation.

By that phrase, I didn’t mean to credit Hitchens with inventing phenomenology before Husserl, but to suggest that - without a phenomenological vocabulary - he was already doing something akin to ethical phenomenology: describing the pathic structure of moral experience as it shows itself. His critique of the “God-concept” exposes how the affective dynamics of guilt, obedience, and awe shape lived consciousness. In that sense, he was tracing the phenomenology of moral emotions, not their ontology. Of course, he stayed at the ontic level, as you rightly note - within a naturalistic frame - but even there he revealed how language and power constitute the moral field. I saw in that an unthematized phenomenological insight: the “givenness” of moral experience before metaphysics.

I completely agree that this doesn’t yet cross into Heidegger’s ontological project, where Being itself is what gives the horizon of moral and cognitive sense. But perhaps that’s where Hitchens’s critique is instructive by contrast: his limitation to the ontic makes visible the need for a deeper account of why such moral structures appear at all. In other words, his lack of ontology points us back toward ontology.

Your reflections on metaphysics as the inner life of physics resonate strongly with me. The modern impulse to banish metaphysics misunderstands that physics already presupposes a metaphysical grammar: measurement, causality, time, identity. What Hegel calls sublation - the overcoming that preserves - captures precisely the movement I see in philosophy today: a self-surpassing language that still carries its inheritance. The physicist who speaks of “fields,” “vacua,” or “information” is already enmeshed in a metaphoric web that opens onto Being, whether acknowledged or not. In that sense, I share your view that metaphysics isn’t something beyond the empirical but the intelligible depth of the empirical itself.

And yes, Derrida’s trace completes that thought: every act of meaning both posits and defers, revealing an openness that no closure can finally master. The very question, as you beautifully put it, is freedom - not the possession of answers, but the trembling of language at the edge of its own horizon. Philosophy lives in that interval where language interrogates itself.

So perhaps where we converge is here: the ethical and the ontological are not two regions but two inflections of the same opening. The cry of the suffering child and the concept of Being are both ways the real addresses itself to us. Hitchens hears the cry and answers in moral outrage; Heidegger hears the silence of Being and answers in thought. Both responses, in their different registers, attest to the same fact: existence calls, and we must respond - whether with compassion, with questioning, or with both.

Thank you, Constance - your response beautifully captures the Heideggerian intuition that any ethical relation presupposes a being who can be related. I agree that empathy or responsibility cannot arise in a vacuum; the one who responds must first be capable of self-holding - of sustaining their own openness to Being. In that sense, the haltung De Gennaro discusses is indeed prior in the analytic order, even if, as you note, not necessarily in the historical or evolutionary one.

Where I was pressing the “ought” as equiprimordial with Being, I didn’t mean that ethics could float free of ontology. Rather, I wanted to resist the tendency - especially in some readings of Heidegger - to treat the moral call as a secondary derivative of Dasein’s self-understanding. The cry of the wounded child doesn’t wait for us to complete an ontological analysis before it claims us. The affective disclosure of suffering and the ontological disclosure of being are simultaneous moments of one event - what Levinas might call the face of the Other breaking through ontology.

So perhaps the priority I meant was phenomenological, not logical: in lived experience, the ethical summons arrives first, even if conceptually we can only make sense of it against the backdrop of selfhood and worldhood. The “holding” of oneself in Being and the “being claimed” by another’s vulnerability may be two aspects of the same existential structure - the self as simultaneously sustaining and exposed.

Your point about the crucible of Dasein as the “only actuality there is” resonates deeply. Yet what strikes me is that this actuality - this singular locus of disclosure - is always already permeated by others. Even our most solitary “holding” is linguistically and affectively mediated. In that sense, the first cry of the artist or the infant is both self-affirming and world-summoning. It is a reaching outward that presupposes no prior metaphysics of self or society, only the raw openness of existence calling to itself through others.

Perhaps ethics, then, begins not after ontology but as its trembling edge - where Being feels its own finitude and vulnerability through us.

Thank you for your detailed reply. I think we’re largely aligned, though we diverge on a few interpretive nuances.

On factorization, I accept your refinement: decoherence doesn’t magically bifurcate the universal state into sealed compartments but rather entangles subsystems such that coherence between them becomes practically lost. When I said “continuously factorizes the total state,” I meant this relational entanglement structure - the effective tensor-product decomposition that yields dynamically autonomous components relative to the measurement context. So yes, the split is local and conditional, not global. I like your phrasing that “only the systems that have measured the decohered state become entangled with it.” That’s a good corrective to the loose Everettian imagery.

I share your relational preference over full-blown realism. My “ontologically generative” phrasing was intended in that same spirit: the ontology is not a collection of separate universes but a web of ever-evolving relational configurations. The structure of relations changes - new entanglement correlations come into being - even though the global amplitude distribution remains one evolving unity. So perhaps “structurally generative” would be the better expression.

Regarding “observer” versus “interaction,” I agree completely. I used “observer” phenomenologically, but “interaction” avoids the mentalistic overtones. I’m wary of language that suggests intent or consciousness as a special causal category; it risks re-smuggling the old metaphysical privilege that quantum theory works so hard to dissolve.

On free will, I think we converge on compatibilism but may use slightly different vocabularies. I take your point that “one’s own nature” could itself be construed as a second metaphysical causal chain, but I meant it more modestly: the organism’s integrated causal structure - its neural and psychological architecture - as distinct from an external intruder like the rabies virus. The point is not that one becomes “independent” of causality, but that causal efficacy remains internal to the system’s evaluative dynamics. That’s why the rabies example marks the boundary between responsibility and compulsion. Dualists, as you say, would complicate that further, perhaps imagining the pathogen interfering with both the physical and the mental “tracks,” but I see that as multiplying mysteries rather than explaining anything.

Your description of sleep paralysis is fascinating - it’s a vivid phenomenological example of partial causal decoupling: consciousness active, motor output suppressed. From a naturalistic angle, it actually illustrates how finely tuned the causal layers of agency are: when one channel is interrupted, agency becomes experiential but not performative. It’s a transient epiphenomenal pocket, not a metaphysical clue, but I can see why it feels uncanny.

As for your final point - that human choice doesn’t depend on branching - I fully agree. The experiential grammar of choice would be the same in any interpretation, whether Everettian, Bohmian, or GRW. My comparison between branching and agency was metaphorical: both involve local differentiation within a globally deterministic process. The analogy isn’t meant to make agency depend on branching, only to highlight the structural parallel between emergent autonomy in physics and in psychology.

In that sense, I see compatibilist freedom and relational quantum ontology as reflections of the same deeper pattern: causal closure at the global level, emergent quasi-autonomy at the local. In my GENE Causal Self Model, those quasi-autonomous patterns are constituted by the interaction of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - a biological analogue to decoherence’s relational structure. Both describe complex systems that remain causally determined yet exhibit self-organizing agency through internal feedback loops. Determinism and autonomy, far from being opposites, are two perspectives on the same relational process.

I totally agree.

Thank you for your thoughtful and detailed reply. I appreciate your clarifications - especially on terminology.

When I said the universal state vector differentiates, I didn’t mean that it “splits” or collapses in any literal sense. I agree that the universal wave function evolves unitarily. What I meant is that decoherence continuously factorizes the total state into dynamically autonomous subspaces. The evolution is singular, but its structure becomes increasingly partitioned as interference terms vanish. In that descriptive sense, decoherence is ontologically generative - it produces new relational structure within the universal state, even if not new “worlds” as discrete entities.

You’re right that Everett himself didn’t speak of sharply defined “branches,” and I share your caution about reifying them. Still, decoherence does create stable quasi-classical sectors whose internal histories no longer interfere. Calling them “branches” is shorthand for these dynamically independent histories. So when I said that “an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state,” I meant that every quantum fluctuation alters the total wave function’s structure, even if those alterations remain forever unamplified from our classical perspective.

I also agree that quantum mechanics is not observer-dependent in the Wigner sense - nothing special happens because a conscious agent looks. My use of “observer” was relational, not Cartesian: any subsystem that records or correlates information functions as an “observer” relative to another. Within that relational framework, phenomenological perspectives arise naturally from entanglement structure, not metaphysical privilege.

Regarding freedom and responsibility: yes, phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total evolution is deterministic, each branch still contains agents whose deliberative architectures causally mediate outcomes within that branch. That structure grounds a compatibilist sense of agency: one can be determined and yet meaningfully responsible insofar as choices flow from one’s own evaluative processes. Libertarian freedom, by contrast, would require causal independence from one’s own nature - an incoherent notion. In your rabies analogy, the external pathogen literally overrides the person’s cognitive structure, which is why we no longer ascribe responsibility. The contrast actually illustrates compatibilism rather than libertarianism.

Stepping back, the parallel between branching and agency seems telling: both involve emergent autonomy within an underlying deterministic totality. The global state’s evolution may be seamless, yet locally it yields distinct, causally closed structures - worlds in one case, deliberating agents in the other. In both, the differentiation is real enough to sustain the lived grammar of choice, even if metaphysical freedom never enters the picture.

In my own framework - the GENE Causal Self Model - I interpret such autonomy through the interplay of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences. Each agent’s decisions are determined by the evolving configuration of these factors, yet within that causal web, reflective self-organization still emerges. Much like decoherent branches of the wave function, selves are dynamically distinct yet law-governed substructures of a single evolving whole.

Thank you for such a rich and thoughtful elaboration. I deeply respect the metaphysical continuity you describe - from Husserl through Heidegger to Henry - and your insistence that all talk of “reality” already presupposes consciousness or Dasein as its horizon. I don’t reject that lineage; I simply ask a different kind of question within it.

Where you pursue the whatness of Being, I’m drawn to the ought that emerges within Being: the affective and ethical textures through which existence discloses itself. When a child is burned or a slave is whipped, what matters first is not that Being manifests itself in suffering, but that suffering calls us to respond. This “call” is not derivative of ontology; it is equiprimordial with it.

That’s why I invoked Hitchens - not as a metaphysician, but as an ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre. His critique may lack ontological precision, but it exposes the pathic structure of moral life: how conceptual fictions (like “God” or “sin”) can channel either empathy or cruelty. The moment consciousness awakens to that relation, philosophy is already in motion.

So when you ask, “What is ethics?”, I would answer: ethics is the self-manifestation of Being as concern for the Other. It is not an add-on to ontology, nor a sociological derivative, but the dimension in which Being feels its own vulnerability. Perhaps that’s where our projects intersect - your ontological monism and my existential compassionism are two ways of naming the same intimacy between consciousness and value.

Thank you for the thoughtful clarification. I think our main divergence lies in how we treat ontic status within the Everett framework.

You’re right that Everett dispenses with counterfactual definiteness: only the total wave function is “real,” while definite outcomes are branch-relative. However, if every decoherence event differentiates the universal state vector, then by definition, each “unmeasured” quantum fluctuation still contributes to the branching structure of the multiverse. The fact that we only observe a subset of classical branches doesn’t mean the rest lack existence; it only means they are decohered beyond causal contact with us.

So when I say “an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state,” I mean that decoherence is ontologically generative - the universe’s global wave function encodes every microscopic difference, even those never amplified to our classical level. From that global perspective, nothing “fails to happen”; it merely fails to be observable within our branch.

As for responsibility, I agree that phenomenology remains intact. Even if the total state-space evolves deterministically, subjective deliberation and outcome differentiation are still structurally real within each branch - enough to preserve the experiential grammar of choice, if not libertarian freedom.

I am right. You are wrong. Because I say so.

Infallable! — I like sushi

If infallibility is self-declared, then I, too, am infallible - and I say you’re wrong. Now what?

Thank you for the thoughtful engagement - I think we’re converging on several points while framing them differently.

On Claim A, I accept that Norton’s Dome demonstrates classical indeterminism under non-Lipschitz conditions, though it’s a purely mathematical curiosity. In any physically realizable system governed by continuous differentiable dynamics, each decoherence event still alters the global quantum state. Even if that alteration remains thermodynamically undetectable within a local Lyapunov horizon, it nevertheless yields a distinct universal configuration in principle. My claim concerns this ontological divergence, not its empirical detectability.

On Claim B, you’re right that the assertion depends on whether one accepts counterfactual definiteness. I was speaking from an Everett-style, decoherence-based ontology where every event contributes to a definite branch of the universal wave function. Under that framework, an event that leaves no macroscopic trace still differentiates the overall state of the universe. The difference need not be observable to be real.

For Claim C, I’d refine “always matters” as follows: every quantum perturbation modifies the total wave function, but only some of those perturbations are amplified within our causal region into new classical structures. Others disperse or remain dynamically isolated, but they still shape the global state. “Trapped” and “amplified” are perspectival distinctions within one continuous evolution.

On determinism and responsibility, I think we share the pragmatic view. Determinism doesn’t abolish agency; it merely redefines it as a complex causal process rather than an uncaused power. Responsibility survives as a social and ethical convention that regulates behaviour within the deterministic flow. To borrow my own GENE model language, deliberation and choice are emergent computations of Genes, Environments, Nutrients, and Experiences - not exemptions from causality but expressions of it.

So when I speak of “choice” or “agency,” I mean the real-time process of deliberation that precedes action, not a metaphysical ability to have done otherwise. The phenomenology of choice remains intact, even if the universe’s total state never could have evolved differently.

Your points about the historicity of thought and the phenomenological horizon are well taken. Yes, any talk of “God,” “the world,” or “the self” emerges from within language and culture, not from an Archimedean point outside them. But I think that is precisely why Hitchens’s critique retains philosophical force. His focus on moral consequences is not “idle talk”; it is an inquiry into how concepts shape lived reality.

You call God a fiction born of thrownness into finitude. Very well, but fictions that shape moral life still have measurable effects. Whether “God” is a phenomenological boundary-concept or an anthropomorphic myth, the question remains: What does belief in this fiction do to sentient beings? Does it cultivate compassion, or sanctify domination? That is not a superficial question; it is an existential one.

You say philosophy should proceed like a scientist suspending cultural assumptions. Yet even the phenomenological reduction cannot suspend the ethical field in which human beings suffer and act. “Value-in-being,” as you put it, is not discovered in neutral contemplation but in encounter - the face of the Other, to borrow from Levinas, not the mineral horizon of a geologist.

When Hitchens challenges doctrines that justify eternal punishment or servitude, he is performing a kind of moral reduction: bracketing divine authority to see what remains of goodness once the threats are removed. That is philosophy doing its most basic work - clarifying the conditions of value and responsibility.

So yes, we can follow Husserl into the indeterminacy of consciousness, or Heidegger into the openness of Being; but we must also follow the child burned at the stake, or the slave whipped in God’s name, into the concreteness of suffering. Otherwise, “pathos” becomes an aesthetic posture rather than an ethical response.

If the “greatness” woven into existence means anything, perhaps it is precisely this - that consciousness is capable of compassion even without metaphysical guarantees. That, too, is philosophy, and it is not nihilism.

I agree that philosophy must go deeper than empirical refutations or moral outrage - but Hitchens’s value lies precisely in the moral dimension that many technical philosophers neglect. He exposes how certain conceptions of God license cruelty and submission, and that critique operates at the level of moral phenomenology, not mere empiricism. When he asks “What kind of being would demand eternal praise under threat of hell?”, he isn’t just being cynical - he’s inviting us to examine the psychological and ethical structure of the “God-concept” itself.

You ask what is “natural” versus “supernatural.” I’d say that distinction loses meaning if “God” cannot be coherently defined or empirically differentiated from nature. Once the supernatural ceases to have observable consequences, we’re left only with human moral experience - which is precisely where Hitchens situates his inquiry: in compassion, honesty, and the freedom to question.

If “God” is a moral concept, then its worth must be judged by the moral outcomes it inspires. A concept that sanctifies fear, tribalism, or subservience fails on its own moral grounds. The greatness you mention may indeed be woven into the fabric of human existence - but perhaps what we call “God” is simply our evolving attempt to articulate that greatness in moral and existential terms. When the old metaphors harden into dogma, philosophy reopens the question.

So I’d say: philosophy doesn’t replace Hitchens’s critique - it completes it.

Thank you for sharing your observations. Given how self-contradictory the Bible is, I am not surprised that Christians can't agree about what is right and what is wrong.

Thank you for your detailed reply.

1. On decoherence, chaos and “everything matters”
You’re right to insist that every physical event in principle influences the future state of the universe. But there are three separate claims mixed together here, and they need to be untangled:

Claim A: “Every decoherence event must produce a macroscopically different future.”*
This is false as a practical claim. Mathematically, you can map a micro-perturbation forward, but most microscopic differences remain confined beneath the system’s Lyapunov horizon and are washed out by dissipation and averaging. Saying “it mattered in principle” is not the same as “it produced a distinct, observable macroscopic outcome.”

Claim B: “If a quantum event didn’t cascade to macroscopic difference, then it didn’t happen.”
This is a category error. An event’s occurrence is not defined by whether it produces long-range, observable divergence in weather on Mars. Decoherence can and does happen locally without producing macroscopic differences that survive coarse-graining. To deny the event happened because it didn’t alter the weather is to adopt a peculiar, counterfactual definition of “happened” that isn’t used in physics.

Claim C: “Because chaotic systems amplify differences, microscopic quantum noise always matters.”
Chaos gives sensitivity to initial conditions, not guaranteed macroscopic divergence from every tiny perturbation within any fixed observational timescale. Some perturbations are amplified quickly; many are damped or trapped inside subsystems and never produce a new, robust classical structure. So yes, everything is part of the state functionally, but that does not imply practical, observable macroscopic branching for every microscopic event.

2. On ensemble forecasting and pragmatic unpredictability
Ensemble weather models show that small perturbations grow and forecasts diverge over days to weeks. That demonstrates sensitivity, not an omnipresent quantum-to-macroscopic channel that we can exploit or even detect in a controlled way. Ensemble perturbations used in practice are far larger than Planck-scale corrections; their convergence tells us about statistical predictability and model error, it does not prove ontic indeterminacy at the macroscale. In short: models are evidence of chaotic growth, not of routine quantum domination of weather.

3. Interpretations of quantum mechanics - collapse, MWI, Bohmian, etc.
Two helpful distinctions:

Predictive equivalence vs metaphysics.
Most mainstream interpretations (Copenhagen-style pragmatism, Everett/MWI, Bohmian/DBB, GRW-style objective collapse) make the same experimental predictions for standard quantum experiments. Where they differ is metaphysical: whether there is a literal branching reality (MWI), hidden variables (Bohmian), or real collapses (GRW/Penrose). That difference matters philosophically but not experimentally so far.

Determinism vs practical unpredictability.
MWI is best understood as deterministic at the universal wave function level (no collapse), while Bohmian mechanics is deterministic at the level of particle trajectories guided by the wave function. Both can produce the same Born probabilities for observable results. Objective collapse theories, if true, would introduce genuine stochastic events at the fundamental level. Superdeterminism attempts to recover determinism by postulating global correlations that undermine usual independence assumptions - but it’s philosophically and scientifically unattractive because it erodes the basis for experimental inference.

So: yes, many interpretations are deterministic; some are not. But the existence of multiple empirically-equivalent interpretations means the metaphysical verdict isn’t settled by current experiments.

4. Functional robustness (brains, transistors, computation)
Absolutely: brains and silicon devices exploit enormous redundancy and averaging to achieve robust classical behaviour despite quantum microphysics. That robustness is precisely why we can treat neurons as implementing computations without invoking exotic quantum effects. Inputs and boundary conditions matter: if an input to a brain were influenced by a huge amplification of a quantum event, your choices could track that influence, but that’s a contingent physical story, not a metaphysical proof of libertarian free will.

5. About “happening”, counterfactuals and responsibility
Two related points:

Happening and counterfactual dependence.
Whether an event “happened” should not be defined by whether it caused a macroscopic divergence millions of miles away. Physics generally treats events as happening if they leave local, causal traces (entanglement, records, thermodynamic irreversibility), not by whether they produce globally visible differences across light-years.

Responsibility and determinism.
Even if one accepts a deterministic physical description (whether classical or quantum-deterministic under MWI or Bohmian), that does not automatically dissolve ordinary moral responsibility. That’s the compatibilist position: responsibility depends on capacities, reasons-responsiveness, and the appropriate psychological relations, not on metaphysical indeterminism. Saying “my decision was set at the Big Bang” is metaphysically dramatic but doesn’t change whether you deliberated, had conscious intentions, and acted for your reason(s) - which are precisely the things our ethics and law respond to.

6. About “pondering” and the illusion of choice
You’re right to resist the crude conclusion that determinism makes choice an illusion. Choice is a process that unfolds over time; it can be broken into sub-choices and revisions. Whether decisions are determined or involve ontic randomness does not by itself answer whether they were genuinely yours. If you deliberated, weighed reasons, and acted from those deliberations, we rightly treat that as agency. Randomness doesn’t create agency; reasons and responsiveness do.

We shouldn’t conflate three different claims: (A) that micro events in principle influence the universal state; (B) that such influence routinely produces distinct, observable macroscopic outcomes; and (C) that metaphysical determinism therefore undermines agency. In practice, decoherence + dissipation + coarse-graining mean most quantum perturbations don’t make detectable macroscopic differences. Interpretations of quantum mechanics disagree about metaphysics but agree on predictions. And finally, even in a deterministic physical world, agency and moral responsibility can still be meaningful because they hinge on capacities, reasons, and psychological continuity, not on metaphysical indeterminism.

Did you watch the above video? I agree with everything he said in the video. Please note that I am talking about the Biblical God.

Christopher Hitchens may not have been a professional philosopher, but I don’t think that diminishes the depth or value of his insights. What I find interesting about what he says about God is not technical philosophy but moral and existential clarity.

He challenges the assumption that belief in God automatically makes a person moral, and he exposes the moral contradictions in many religious doctrines - especially those that sanctify cruelty, fear, or submission. He asks uncomfortable but necessary questions: If God is good, why does he permit suffering? If morality depends on divine command, does that make genocide or slavery good if commanded by God?

Hitchens also reminds us that we can find meaning, awe, and compassion without invoking the supernatural. He combined reason, moral passion, and literary brilliance - showing that intellectual honesty and empathy can coexist.

So, while he wasn’t a technical philosopher, he was a moral and cultural critic who made philosophy accessible and urgent - which, to me, is just as important.

1. On Decoherence and Chaotic Amplification

I appreciate your clarification. I agree that once decoherence has occurred, each branch behaves classically. My emphasis was never that quantum events never cascade upward, but that most do not in practice. Chaotic sensitivity doesn’t guarantee amplification of all microscopic noise; it only ensures that some minute differences can diverge over time. The key is statistical significance, not logical possibility.

The fact that there are trillions of decoherence events per nanosecond doesn’t entail that every one creates a macroscopically distinct weather trajectory. Many microscopic perturbations occur below the system’s Lyapunov horizon and are absorbed by dissipative averaging. The “butterfly effect” metaphor was intended to illustrate sensitivity, not to claim that every quantum fluctuation alters the weather.

So:

Yes, chaos implies amplification of some differences.
No, it doesn’t imply that quantum noise routinely dominates macroscopic evolution.

Empirically, ensemble models of the atmosphere converge statistically even when perturbed at Planck-scale levels, suggesting the mean state is robust, though individual trajectories differ. (See Lorenz 1969; Palmer 2015.)

2. On Determinism, Ontic vs. Epistemic Randomness

You’re right that we can’t know that randomness is purely epistemic. My point is pragmatic: there’s no experimental evidence that ontic indeterminacy penetrates to the macroscopic domain in any controllable way.
MWI, Bohmian mechanics, and objective-collapse theories all make the same statistical predictions. So whether randomness is ontic or epistemic is metaphysical until we have a test that distinguishes them.

Even if indeterminacy is ontic, our weather forecasts, computer simulations, and neural computations behave classically because decoherence has rendered the underlying quantum superpositions unobservable.

So I’d phrase it this way:

The world might be ontically indeterministic, but macroscopic unpredictability is functionally classical.

3. On Functional Robustness

Completely agree: both transistors and neurons rely on quantum effects yet yield stable classical outputs. The entire architecture of computation, biological or digital, exists precisely because thermal noise, tunnelling, and decoherence are averaged out or counterbalanced.

That’s why we can meaningfully say “the brain implements a computation” without appealing to hidden quantum randomness. Penrose-style arguments for quantum consciousness have not found empirical support.

4. On Choice, Process, and Responsibility

I share your intuition that a “choice” unfolds over time, not as a single instant.
Libet-type studies show neural precursors before conscious awareness, yet subsequent vetoes demonstrate ongoing integration rather than fatalistic pre-commitment.

Determinism doesn’t nullify responsibility. The self is part of the causal web. “Physics made me do it” is no more an excuse than “my character made me do it.” In either case, the agent and the cause coincide.

Thus, even in a deterministic universe, moral responsibility is preserved as long as actions flow from the agent’s own motivations and reasoning processes rather than external coercion.

5. Summary

Decoherence → classicality; not all micro noise scales up.
Chaos → sensitivity; not universality of amplification.
Randomness → possibly ontic, but operationally epistemic.
Functional systems → quantum-grounded but classically robust.
Agency → compatible with determinism when causation runs through the agent.

Quantum indeterminacy might underlie reality, but classical chaos and cognitive computation sit comfortably atop it.
Responsibility remains a structural property of agency, not an escape hatch from physics.

Thank you for your thoughtful and technically well-informed reply. Let me address your key points one by one.

1. On Decoherence vs. Propagation of Quantum Effects

I agree that quantum coherence is not required for a quantum event to have macroscopic consequences. My point, however, is that once decoherence has occurred, the resulting branch (or outcome) behaves classically, and further amplification of that quantum difference depends on the sensitivity to initial conditions within the system in question.

So while a chaotic system like the atmosphere can indeed amplify microscopic differences, the relevant question is how often quantum noise actually changes initial conditions at scales that matter for macroscopic divergence. The overwhelming majority of microscopic variations wash out statistically - only in rare, non-averaging circumstances do they cascade upward. Hence, quantum randomness provides the ultimate floor of uncertainty, but not a practically observable driver of weather dynamics.

2. On the “Timescale of Divergence”

I appreciate your breakdown - minutes for human choice, months for weather, millennia for asteroid trajectories, etc. That seems broadly reasonable as an order-of-magnitude intuition under MWI or any interpretation that preserves causal continuity. What’s worth emphasizing, though, is that those divergence times describe when outcomes become empirically distinguishable, not when quantum indeterminacy begins influencing them. The influence starts at the quantum event; it’s just that the macroscopic consequences take time to manifest and become measurable.

3. On Determinism and Randomness in Complex Systems

I also agree that classical thermodynamics is chaotic, and that even an infinitesimal perturbation can, in principle, lead to vastly different outcomes. However, that doesn’t mean the macroscopic weather is “quantum random” in any meaningful sense - only that its deterministic equations are sensitive to initial data we can never measure with infinite precision. The randomness, therefore, is epistemic, not ontic — arising from limited knowledge rather than fundamental indeterminacy.

Quantum randomness sets the ultimate limit of predictability, but chaos is what magnifies that limit into practical unpredictability.

4. On Decision-Making Systems and Quantum Filtering

I completely agree that biological and technological systems are designed to suppress or filter quantum noise. The fact that transistors, neurons, and ion channels function reliably at all is testament to that design. Quantum tunneling, superposition, or entanglement may underlie the microphysics, but the emergent computation (neural or digital) operates in the classical regime. So while randomness exists, most functional systems are robustly deterministic within the energy and temperature ranges they inhabit.

* Decoherence kills coherence extremely fast in macroscopic environments.
* Chaotic systems can amplify any difference, including quantum ones, but not all microscopic noise scales up meaningfully.
* Macroscopic unpredictability is largely classical chaos, not ongoing quantum indeterminacy.
* Living and engineered systems filter quantum randomness to maintain stability and reproducibility.

So while I agree with you that quantum events can, in principle, propagate to the macro-scale through chaotic amplification, I maintain that in natural systems like the atmosphere, such amplification is statistically negligible in practice - the weather is unpredictable, but not “quantumly” so.

So no, you could not have made a different choice because that would have meant that you had different information than you did when you made the decision. — Harry Hindu

I agree.

Thank you for asking for a source. You’re right that quantum effects can, in principle, influence macroscopic systems, but the consensus in physics is that quantum coherence decays extremely rapidly in warm, complex environments like the atmosphere, which prevents quantum indeterminacy from meaningfully propagating to the classical scale except through special, engineered amplifiers (like photomultipliers or Geiger counters).

Here are some references that support this:

1. Wojciech Zurek (2003). Decoherence, einselection, and the quantum origins of the classical. Reviews of Modern Physics, 75, 715–775.
Zurek explains that decoherence times for macroscopic systems at room temperature are extraordinarily short (on the order of (10^-20) seconds), meaning superpositions collapse into classical mixtures almost instantly.
DOI: 10.1103/RevModPhys.75.715

2. Joos & Zeh (1985). The emergence of classical properties through interaction with the environment. Zeitschrift für Physik B Condensed Matter, 59, 223–243.
They calculate that even a dust grain in air decoheres in about (10^-31) seconds due to collisions with air molecules and photons - long before any macroscopic process could amplify quantum noise.

3. Max Tegmark (2000). Importance of quantum decoherence in brain processes. Physical Review E, 61, 4194–4206.
Tegmark estimated decoherence times in the brain at (10^-13) to (10^-20) seconds, concluding that biological systems are effectively classical. The same reasoning applies (even more strongly) to meteorological systems, where temperature and particle interactions are vastly higher.

In short, quantum coherence does not persist long enough in atmospheric systems to influence large-scale weather patterns. While every individual molecular collision is, in a sense, quantum, the statistical ensemble of billions of interactions behaves deterministically according to classical thermodynamics. That’s why classical models like Navier–Stokes work so well for weather prediction (up to chaotic limits of measurement precision), without needing to invoke quantum probability.

That said, I fully agree with you that quantum randomness is crucial to mutation-level processes in biology - those occur in small, shielded molecular systems, where quantum tunnelling or base-pairing transitions can indeed introduce randomness before decoherence sets in. The key distinction is scale and isolation: quantum effects matter in micro-environments, but decoherence washes them out in large, warm, chaotic systems like the atmosphere.

Here are two images I created to help explain my worldview:

I agree with Christopher Hitchens. Thank you very much for posting the video.

Thank you very much for the fascinating links you posted. I really appreciate your thoughtful follow-up. I agree that we’re largely converging on the same view.

Regarding Norton’s dome, I think it’s an interesting mathematical curiosity rather than a physically realistic case of indeterminism. It depends on idealized assumptions (e.g., perfectly frictionless surface, infinite precision in initial conditions) that don’t occur in nature. Still, it’s a useful illustration that even Newtonian mechanics can be formulated to allow indeterminate solutions under certain boundary conditions.

As for the quantum–chaos connection, yes - Schrödinger’s cat is indeed the archetypal quantum amplifier, though it’s an artificial setup. In natural systems like weather, decoherence tends to suppress quantum-level randomness before it can scale up meaningfully. Lorenz’s “butterfly effect” remains classical chaos: deterministic, yet unpredictable in practice because initial conditions can never be measured with infinite precision. Whether a microscopic quantum fluctuation could actually alter a macroscopic weather pattern remains an open question - interesting but speculative.

I agree with you that determinism is a great tool for agency. Even if all our choices are determined, they are still our choices - the outputs of our own brains, reasoning, and values. Indeterminacy doesn’t enhance freedom; it merely adds noise.

On superdeterminism: I share your concern. It’s unfalsifiable if taken literally (since it could “explain away” any experimental result), but it remains conceptually valuable in exploring whether quantum correlations might arise from deeper causal connections. I don’t endorse it, but I don’t dismiss it either until we have decisive evidence.

You put it well: the bottom line is that we mostly agree - especially that neither pure determinism nor indeterminism rescues libertarian free will. What matters is understanding the causal web as fully as possible.

Thanks again for such a stimulating exchange. Discussions like this remind me how philosophy and physics intersect in fascinating ways.

Quantum indeterminacy is irrelevant because at macroscopic levels all the quantum weirdness (e.g. quantum indeterminacy and superposition) averages out.
— Truth Seeker
Only sometimes, but not the important times. There are chaotic systems like the weather. One tiny quantum event can (will) cascade into completely different weather in a couple months, (popularly known as the butterfly effect) so the history of the world and human decisions is significantly due to these quantum fluctuations. In other words, given a non-derministic interpretation of quantum mechanics, a person's decision is anything but inevitable from a given prior state. There's a significant list of non-deterministic interpretations. Are you so sure (without evidence) that they're all wrong?

Anyway, it's still pretty irrelevant since that sort of indeterminism doesn't yield free will. Making truly random decisions is not a way to make better decisions, which is why mental processes do not leverage that tool. — noAxioms

Thank you for the thoughtful response. You raise a key point — that in chaotic systems, even minute quantum fluctuations could, in theory, scale up to macroscopic differences (the “quantum butterfly effect”). However, I think this doesn’t meaningfully undermine determinism for the following reasons:

1. Determinism vs. Predictability:
Determinism doesn’t require predictability. A system can be deterministic and yet practically unpredictable due to sensitivity to initial conditions. Chaos theory actually presupposes determinism - small differences in starting conditions lead to vastly different outcomes because the system follows deterministic laws. If the system were non-deterministic, the equations of chaos wouldn’t even apply.

2. Quantum Amplification Is Not Evidence of Freedom:
As you already noted, even if quantum indeterminacy occasionally affects macroscopic events, randomness is not freedom. A decision influenced by quantum noise is not a “free” decision — it’s just probabilistic. It replaces deterministic necessity with stochastic chance. That doesn’t rescue libertarian free will; it only introduces randomness into causation.

3. Quantum Interpretations and Evidence:
You’re right that there are non-deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics - such as Copenhagen, GRW, or QBism - but there are also deterministic ones: de Broglie-Bohm (pilot-wave), Many-Worlds, and superdeterministic models. None of them are empirically distinguishable so far. Until we have direct evidence for objective indeterminacy, determinism remains a coherent and arguably simpler hypothesis (per Occam’s razor).

4. Macroscopic Decoherence:
Decoherence ensures that quantum superpositions in the brain or weather systems effectively collapse into stable classical states extremely quickly. Whatever quantum noise exists gets averaged out before it can influence neural computation in any meaningful way - except in speculative scenarios, which remain unproven.

So, while I agree that quantum indeterminacy might introduce genuine randomness into physical systems, I don’t see how that transforms causality into freedom or invalidates the deterministic model of the universe as a whole. At best, it replaces determinism with a mix of determinism + randomness - neither of which grants us metaphysical “free will.”

Randomness entails a factor not under our control. — Relativist

It's not just randomness that is a factor not under our control. We don't control the genes we inherit, our early environments, our early nutrients and our early experiences. As we grow older, we acquire some control over our environments, nutrients and experiences, but even then, we don't have 100% control.

Yes, indeed.

I think both, but I'm not a compatibilist. — bert1

That's interesting.

Even though it seems like you could have chosen differently, it is impossible to know you could have. — Relativist

I agree that it is impossible to know with 100% certainty.

I agree. Faith is not reliable. Religions are self-contradictory, mutually contradictory, and they contradict what we know using the scientific method.

I agree.

If hard determinism is true, then all choices are inevitable, which means that no one could have chosen differently. It's impossible to know with 100% certainty whether it is true or false.

Ok, thank you. There is no rush.

Thank you, Constance. I can see how much care you’re taking to work these ideas through, and I appreciate the way you keep tying them back to phenomenological method rather than treating them as free-floating theses.

I think I understand your point that the “wholly other” is not something that stands beyond phenomenality, but is disclosed in the radical indeterminacy of language and in the givenness of value itself. Your example of pain was helpful: the badness of the burn isn’t an “idea” but an elusive alterity that resists reduction, and only shows itself when we perform the reduction. That gives me a sense of how phenomenology preserves otherness without positing a Kantian noumenon.

At the same time, I’m still left wondering: if all alterity is revealed within phenomenality, isn’t there a risk that “the wholly other” becomes just another way of talking about indeterminacy and openness, rather than something irreducibly beyond? Levinas wanted the face of the other to resist assimilation; does phenomenology, as you frame it, secure that resistance, or does it reinterpret it as another disclosure of givenness?

On responsibility, your clarification helps. Animals and children participate in the value-dimension, but responsibility as such belongs to us, since it requires reflection and concepts. That makes sense, but I’m curious whether this creates a two-tier picture: all sentient beings are moral participants, but only humans are moral agents in the full sense. Is that the distinction you’d want to defend?

And lastly, I can see why you describe phenomenology’s refusal of closure as a strength rather than a weakness - it keeps philosophy alive, a “feast for thought.” But when you gesture toward meta-consummatory and meta-redemptive grounds, you seem to be moving back toward something like metaphysics or even theology. How do you see phenomenology avoiding the pitfalls of “bad metaphysics” at that point? Does this “metaground” remain descriptive, or does it inevitably take us into prescriptive, religious territory?

Thank you, Constance, that was a fascinating tour through Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, and beyond. I think I see more clearly now what you mean when you describe the “wholly other” not as something that exceeds language but as something disclosed within the indeterminacy of language and the openness of being. That does help explain why you resist the charge of collapse: otherness isn’t abolished, but appears in the play of disclosure and re-description.

Still, I’m struck by the cost of this move. If alterity is always mediated by hermeneutical openness, then the “wholly other” seems inseparable from the historical contingency of our vocabularies. Is that really sufficient to preserve what Levinas meant by alterity in the ethical sense - the face of the other as a demand that resists assimilation? Or is phenomenology reinterpreting that demand as simply another manifestation of openness?

On agency, I appreciate your willingness to extend moral significance beyond the human - that if cats and canaries participate in value-as-such, then they are owed moral regard as agents of a kind. That resonates with contemporary debates about animal ethics, though your grounding in phenomenality is very different from utilitarian or rights-based accounts. I suppose my question here is: if all sentient beings are moral agents in this descriptive sense, what still distinguishes human responsibility? Is reflection just a matter of deepening what is already basic, or does it introduce something normatively unique that goes beyond affectivity?

Finally, I notice you say phenomenology doesn’t “solve” problems but reframes them. Do you see that as a strength - a way of keeping thought open to the world as event - or as a limitation compared to traditions that do aim for closure in metaphysical answers?

Thank you again, Constance - I can see how much thought you’ve put into this, and it helps me clarify where my own sticking points are.

On the “wholly other”: I appreciate how you bring Derrida into the discussion, especially the way language can turn back on itself and fall “under erasure.” I think I see what you mean: that when language asks “what am I?” it exposes both its indispensability and its limits, and that this tension is where the notion of the wholly other arises. Still, I find myself asking: does this really preserve alterity, or does it risk reducing “otherness” to the play of language itself? If all otherness is mediated through our historical vocabularies, can the “wholly other” ever really exceed them?

On co-constitution: your insistence that “pain is not an idea” struck me. I take you to mean that normativity doesn’t float free as some principle, but that it arises directly out of the manifestness of suffering itself. That’s a powerful point, but it does blur the line between ontology and normativity. If pain is already “its own importance,” then ethical obligation seems built into the structure of being. Do you think that means ethics is not derivative at all, but intrinsic - part of the very fabric of reality?

And regarding agency: I see now that you’re trying to resist both Kant’s formal reduction and a purely human-centered notion of agency. If even my cat evidences agency in its participation in the value-dimension, then ethics extends beyond reflection into affectivity itself. That’s an intriguing move, but I wonder: if all sentient creatures are agents in this sense, does “ethics” lose its distinctively human task of reflection and responsibility, or does reflection simply become one way of deepening what is already basic to existence?

I like how you put it that phenomenology resists deflationary “language game” talk and instead sees all knowledge as hermeneutical, including science itself. That helps explain why you stress that suffering and value aren’t abstractions but intrinsic to the manifestness of being.

But I’m still wrestling with the issue of co-constitution. If, as you say, “pain is its OWN importance,” then ethics is not something layered on top of ontology but already woven into it. Yet doesn’t that blur the line between description and normativity? Saying “pain is its own importance” feels stronger than “pain shows up as something important to us.” Do you mean to suggest that importance is ontologically basic, that value is part of the very fabric of reality?

And on your point about agency: I find it intriguing that you see even your cat as a moral agent because it participates in the value-dimension of existence, even without conceptual reflection. That seems to broaden “agency” far beyond the Kantian framework. But does that mean every sentient creature participates in ethics simply by virtue of suffering and caring? If so, wouldn’t ethics then lose its distinctively human dimension of reflection and responsibility?

Finally, on scientific realism: if physics is just another hermeneutical abstraction from phenomenality, does it still tell us something true about the world, or is it simply a historically contingent interpretation that works until paradigms shift? I’m wondering whether, in your view, science still “latches onto” structures of reality or whether its authority is entirely instrumental.

So my view would be: we should avoid unnecessary harm wherever it occurs, but we must prioritize preventing the most intense and obvious suffering. And right now, that means reducing and eliminating the killing of sentient organisms when we can live well on plant-based foods.
— Truth Seeker

It sounds like you are projecting your own personal value or psychological state onto the nature and the eco system unduly and with some emotional twist. The nature works as it has done for billions of years. It operates under the system called "survival for fittest". Lions always used to go and hunt for deers, striped horses and wild boars. If you say, hey Lion why are you eating the innocent animals killing them causing them pain? And if you say to them, hey you are cruel, bad and morally evil to do that. Why not go and eat some vegetables? Then it would be your emotional twist and personal moral value projected to the nature for your own personal feel good points.

Lions must eat what they are designed to eat by nature. No one can dictate what they should eat.
Same goes for human. Human race is not designed to eat rocks and soils, just because someone tells them it is morally wrong to eat meat, fruits or vegetables because they may suffer pain, and they might have minds and consciousness.

The bottom line is that it is not matter of morality - right and wrong. It is more matter of the system works, and what is best and ideal for the nature. If it is healthy - keep them fit and keep them survive for best longevity, and tasty for the folks, then that is what they will eat. — Corvus

I think it’s important to distinguish between what happens in nature and what humans choose to do. Lions must eat other animals because they have no alternative. Humans, by contrast, have alternatives. We can thrive on plant-based diets, which are now supported by mainstream nutrition science, and in doing so, we can drastically reduce the suffering and death we cause.

Appealing to “nature” as a moral guide is tricky. Nature also contains parasites that eat their hosts alive, viruses that wipe out populations, and countless brutal struggles. If “survival of the fittest” were our moral compass, then any act of domination or exploitation (e.g. murder, torture, rape, robbery, slavery, colonization, child abuse, assault, theft, etc.) could be excused as “just natural.” But human ethics has always involved questioning our impulses and asking whether we can do better than nature’s cruelties. You used the word 'designed' for humans and lions. Humans and lions are not designed. They evolved. Evolution is a blind process, it has no foresight, plan or conscience.

So I’d say the real issue isn’t whether killing happens in the wild - it obviously does - but whether we, with our capacity for reflection and choice, should perpetuate unnecessary killing when alternatives exist. Lions can’t choose beans over gazelles. We can. That’s where morality comes in. Lions murder other lions, and they have no police or legal system to punish the murderers, but we do. Humans are not lions, and lions are not humans. We have the capacity for moral reasoning - lions don't.

Veganism is far more than a diet. It's an ethical stance that avoids preventable harm to sentient organisms. Fruits and vegetables don't suffer pain because they are not sentient. Humans, lions, zebras, deer, chickens, cows, lambs, goats, pigs, octopuses, squids, dogs, cats, rabbits, ducks, lobsters, crabs, fish, etc., suffer because they are sentient. Please see:
https://www.carnismdebunked.com
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan
https://veganuary.com

I think I see what you’re saying, that what looks like a “collapse” isn’t a collapse at all, but an opening. If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then the “other” is always already available through the recontextualizing power of language. A pen is what it is until language situates it otherwise, and in that sense the “wholly other” is not shut out but emerges as a possibility.

That helps me understand why you resist the charge of collapsing appearance and reality. You’re not erasing the difference but relocating it: the difference shows up within manifestness itself, in the shifting horizons of description and re-description. The danger, you’re suggesting, only comes if we try to freeze being into a final, closed definition.

Still, I wonder whether this move really preserves the “otherness” that Kant had in mind. If all otherness is mediated by our historically contingent vocabularies, does the idea of the wholly other end up being just another name for the openness of language? In that case, are we still talking about reality-in-itself, or have we turned it into a way of describing indeterminacy within phenomenality?

And on your last point about good and bad: I find it intriguing that you see them as “closed only in their manifestness.” Do you mean that values, unlike objects, resist infinite re-contextualization, that they present themselves with an authority that can’t be deferred in the same way? If so, is that where phenomenology keeps the ethical from collapsing into pure relativism?

Thank you for taking the time to unpack all of that - it’s a lot to absorb, but I think I follow the thread. If I understand you, you’re saying that Kant’s noumena don’t need to be treated as some unreachable “beyond,” but rather are already immanent within phenomenality itself - the givenness of the world. The cup, the keys, the pain in my ankle: these are not mere appearances pointing to something hidden, but the very ground of what Kant misplaced on the noumenal side.

That makes sense of why you think phenomenology “drops representation” and allows the world simply to be what it is. But then I wonder: doesn’t this risk dissolving the distinction between appearance and reality entirely? If noumenality is internal to phenomena, then haven’t we just collapsed reality-in-itself into the structures of givenness, making it conceptually impossible to say what, if anything, could be “other” than appearance?

I also found your point about language important - that ontology requires articulation, and that language both makes the world manifest and at the same time gestures apophatically beyond itself. Still, I’m left with a tension: if language constitutes beings, do we have any grounds left for scientific realism? In other words, can we still say physics describes how the world is, or is it only another language-game, a historically contingent way of structuring manifestness?

And finally, on the ethical dimension: I appreciate your insistence that value is not vacuous, that pain and joy are not abstractions but intrinsic to the manifestness of being. But if value is as foundational as you suggest, does that mean ethics is not derivative of ontology, but co-constitutive with it? That strikes me as both powerful and problematic - powerful because it restores seriousness to ethics, problematic because it blurs the line between descriptive ontology and normative claims.

Would you say phenomenology ultimately abolishes the metaphysical question, or only reframes it as a question of how manifestness discloses itself in experience, language, and value?

Why wouldn't the murder of 80 billion sentient land organisms and 1 to 3 trillion sentient aquatic organisms per year by non-vegans and for non-vegans be morally wrong when it is possible to make vegan choices which prevent so much pain and death?
— Truth Seeker

Some plant and fruit lovers might say to you that how could you kill the plants pulling them out from the field, cut and boil or fry them, and eat them? You are killing the innocent living plants. Same with the corns and fruits. They were alive and had souls. But you took them from the fields, cut them and boiled them, and ate them killing them in most cruel manner. The panpsychic folks believe the whole universe itself has consciousness and souls. Even rocks and trees have mind. What would you say to them? — Corvus

That’s a fair question, and it touches on deep debates about consciousness and moral status. If plants or even rocks had experiences - if they could feel pleasure, pain, or suffering - then harming them would indeed raise moral concerns. But that’s precisely the point: sentience, not mere aliveness, is what makes the moral difference.

Plants grow, respond to stimuli, and even have complex signaling systems, but there is no credible evidence that they have subjective experiences. There is no “what it’s like” to be a carrot or a corn stalk. By contrast, cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, octopuses, and lobsters clearly display behaviors indicating pain, fear, and pleasure. That’s why I draw the moral line at sentience: it’s the capacity for suffering and well-being that generates ethical duties.

If panpsychism is true and everything has some primitive form of consciousness, then we’re faced with a spectrum: perhaps electrons or rocks “experience” in some attenuated sense. But even then, there is a morally relevant distinction between a rock that (hypothetically) has a flicker of proto-consciousness and a pig screaming in agony while being slaughtered. Degrees of sentience would matter.

So my view would be: we should avoid unnecessary harm wherever it occurs, but we must prioritize preventing the most intense and obvious suffering. And right now, that means reducing and eliminating the killing of sentient organisms when we can live well on plant-based foods.

So this may be a collective dream. We don't know. — frank

I agree.