Not being versed in matters philosophical I'm not sure of the argument in the article. The author seems to be wanting to dismiss the idea that when we perceive the world we do so via some kind of mental representation. It's not clear just what he means by this. He seems to be wanting to draw a distinction between the raw sense-data generated via the interaction between sense organs and physical properties of the world and the experience of perception itself. I'm confused by this. My naive take is that perception is not merely the responses of sense organs but is (as far a I am led to believe, at least) a far more complex arrangement in which stored information is mixed with fresh information to provide a useful model for behaviour.

For example, such ideas as perspective have evolved in human appreciation of the world and are encapsulated in the general range of information stored in a modern mind, presumably this helps tune the perceptions we experience. After all, the act of representing the world in drawings (a behaviour) is fundamentally different now than it was in say the year 1200. We also see this in the way that youngsters represent perspective (often denoting the world in a flatter geometry) - they have to learn the enactment of perspectival perception into the act of drawing.

The problem seems to be something of a Cartesian interpretation of perception - that we are actually seeing the world in some kind of direct form. Even though the writer wants to dismiss the idea we see mental images, the argument seems constructed along the lines that some kind of image or representation is nonetheless "seen". That is, as he observes, we "see" in the first sense we are actually perceiving an external object, which is why he dismisses the experience of scotoma as mere appeance.

For myself, I think the fact of the matter is that we must always experience an internal arrangement. How can it be otherwise? Sensory impressions are utilised by the brain to construct information about the world and to match that information with stored information in order to better predict both likely external events and appropriate responses. Even the first person perspective itself must be similarly constructed and integrated with the perceptual information. Put another way, the "I" that observes the external world is part of the act of perception. It isn't objective, but is entirely subjective and dependent upon a whole bunch of stored cues and contexts for validity.

If I knew what the author might actually mean by the term "direct realism" I might be able to better grasp his argument, but I confess it isn't clear to me. I am not even sure I totally agree with the idea of indirect realism and the implication there is an internal representation for me to perceive. Rather, it seems to me that the world of experience (hallucinations etc included) are states of process only. The brain does stuff and I "experience" that. It is impossible for me to have direct experience of the world because experience itself is not objective - it just is what it is for my brain to be a particular way. Any direct correspondence between the way the world looks to me and how it really is must be largely fortuitous and the result of evolutionary processes. That is, the way the world looks and works to us reflects the way our brains make use of information, not the other way round.

For one, I don't think it makes sense to compare the impact of the diets of a rural meat-eater with an urban vegan. — Artemis

Let me clarify this. I wasn't comparing rural with urban. My point is that an urban, supermarket shopping omni can choose to eat only certain kinds of meat. The urban supermarket-shopping vegan will tend to buy plant foods that are sourced from large-scale industrialised cropping activities where harms are greatest (OK, this is an assumption, but when we think about ethical foods, we tend to think only of animals raised in high welfare conditions - it is rare in my experience to find ethically grown plant products). I agree that there are so many nuances to this question, my point is simply that it isn't always the case that crop related activities are without harm or are least harm.

In regard to my use of emotive terms, my observation about the motivation of vegan evangelicism is grounded in the obvious behaviours of advocates in the public domain. In regard to the underlying value of the philosophy I don't need to be convinced, but if you don't notice that many vegan advocates tend to behave in a overly zealous manner (which frequently has the opposite effect to that desired) then I think you may not be taking an objective view of things. Their language is often emotionally charged and the claims frequently inaccurate or downright false. This opens the entire philosophy to trenchant criticism and its hard to defend a claim when the criticism so often hits the mark.

At the end of the day, this is all just my opinion. I am not a thought leader nor a social influencer, heck, even my broader family is not persuaded by my views. Nonetheless, I have an avowed interest in encouraging people to adopt vegan ethics to whatever extent they feel comfortable with. Having spent several years invested in this, I have come to the disappointing conclusion that all too often the vegan "movement" is its own worst enemy.

In regard to the original post that started this whole discussion, I don't think it is "speciesist" to use other animals. I do think human beings - as a general rule for treating the other humans in our lives - are more important than other animals. And I agree that we owe an ethical duty to the animals we do use.

Now, regarding numbers, here are couple of pieces I wrote about that problem. One is a sort of review of a book published here in Australia a year or two back, the other is a response to a farming advocate who claimed she has shown beyond doubt that vegans kill more animals. I'd be interested in your thoughts (note: my blog is not widely read and really is more of a place for me to store my ideas for future reference). I have no sound conclusion regarding crop related harms, but I hope there are a couple of interesting angles uncovered in my articles.

https://gm136.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/on-eating-meat-and-the-numbers-game/

https://gm136.wordpress.com/2019/12/05/do-vegans-really-kill-more-animals/

I don't have anything to say about the mechanics of deriving ethical attitudes within communities other than to note it's a process driven internally and may indeed result in what we might call "bad" ethical attitudes. I also tend to the view that many improvements in social justice terms only become viable when the economic argument is satisfied (eg, perhaps, slavery and equal participation in the workforce for women), but I won't pretend to have more than a cursory awareness of such things. My point is merely to note that social beliefs and attitudes in this regard spring from some kind of internal deliberation.

I suspect the biggest obstacle to any kind of genuine representation for animals in the development of rights-based frameworks is simply species. It is much easier for humans to gain greater participation when the empirical evidence supports them (they are, after all, human) AND they can have their own say. Personally, I don't really object to this. I realise people can claim speciesism or appeals to nature in my stance, but the fact that the world we have depends upon inter-species competition and exploitation (as well as co-operation) is not to be ignored. There is no real reason I can see for us to have to disregard species as a factor in working out how to treat other animals. Relations between humans and other animals is not the same as relations between humans.

As I noted, pretending that other animals perceive the world very much as we do or share similar interests or have cognitive capacities that approach ours isn't really helpful when the science tends to point in the opposite direction. That isn't to disparage other animals - they are very capable in their own ways, many do have quite rich cognitive and perceptual lives and we should do a lot better than we do in respecting them. I just am not convinced that respect has to amount to some kind of belief that we should never harm them or use them. I think we need a pragmatic definition for what "as far as is possible and practicable" means.

Don't get me wrong though. The reason I endorse vegan ethics is because the philosophy places a genuine weight on the intrinsic value of other animals. That is, we actually care about them for themeselves. Other philosophies such as say reducetarianism are more self-focused. Plus of course veganism is broader and tackles issues such as animal testing, use of animals for sport and pleasure, indeed the whole gamut of human relations with other animals.

By the way, I agree with you regarding the case for comparing wild animal suffering with that of farmed animals. I often have this conversation with farmers and they seem not to get it. We can't justify the harming of an animal we own on the basis that it's less of a harm than a wild animal suffers (indeed, the harms a farmed animal experiences are on the shoulders of the farmer). The two are not causally related in any way. Where I think wild animal suffering raises its head is in making a fair assessment of the harms we do and the extent to which we should cause them. I gave two examples earlier.

One is crop related harms, which to my mind extends beyond just harvesting deaths. I have had a pretty fair go at tackling this and have read about all the genuine literature that seems to be out there and in the end, I think it probably is the case that not eating any animals comes out ahead (but only when we factor in farmed and wild-caught aquatic animals as well), but it's by no means a secure case. I think someone eating only range grazed beef and lamb could be doing less harm overall than an urban vegan, especially when we consider related factors such as ecological and environmental impacts. I kind of think that in the world have, it is overall better, for now at least, to have some animal farming. But I'd much rather it was informed by vegan ethics. I do have much more I could say on that.

The other concern is that of wild animal suffering in the case that we abandon animal farming and return the land to nature. This would lead to much wild animal suffering and it's not clear to me that this is a gain. Grazing sheep and cattle in ethical and environmentally responsible ways can do much to manage the land by increasing local biodiversity, improving water cycles and so on. But more to the point, the responsible farmer can do much to alleviate animal suffering on his holdings. In particular, he can attend the needs and health of his herd far more so than most of us can do in regard to wild animals. Much farming land has been much changed by that use - in Australia, traditional animal ag methods have led to considerable degradation. To abandon that land to nature may not be a gain, while responsible farmers can do much to improve the land and ensure its sustainability into the future. Two very good books that cover that in the Australian context are Call of the Reed Warbler and The Wooleen Way. I have talked with both authors and they have a lot to say. Such people *should* be in the debate yet are so often excluded by the evangelical vegans/advocates.

In the end, while I would like to see the world move to the least possible use and harm of other animals that we can attain, I don't know that the goal has to be abolitionism or even animal rights in the manner so many appear to endorse. Perhaps veganism could have greater influence if it were encouraged and expounded in a more genuinely meaningful way than by blind adherence to an often ill-considered ideology.

If we agree to that standard then it holds true. It's that simple. There is no ultimate moral code, we answer to no-one but ourselves and natural circumstance. If we must use other animals for a good reason - and there seem to be such reasons - then it is up to us to decide whether we should to do that ethically. — Graeme M

What are "good reasons" and what does it mean to do something "ethically" if we answer to "no one but ourselves" and there is "no ultimate moral code"? You are, in the space of a single paragraph, jumping from radical moral relativism to the ideal of an objective morality--or at least are being so sloppy with your language that you seem to be doing this. — Artemis

Artemis, I am no philosopher so you may have to make do with "sloppy language". I suggest my statement is clear enough. I do not think there is an "objective" morality in the sense that morality is a singular natural property of the universe in the absence of minds to think about such things. Morality is, even that which exists within other species, context specific. In the case of we humans, I think it is also subject to general agreement. So yes, my position is essentially subjectivist. If we wish to strike a moral stance in relation to other animals, it cannot be - I contend - merely on the basis that they are animals. There has to be something more useful than this.

Many vegans/activists come from the angle that the interests of other animals should be accorded the same consideration as those of humans. That's fine, but I maintain that there are considerable differences between the interests of other animals and those of humans. Some simply do not exist. Similarly, many also believe - for example, abolitionists - that pain and suffering are the key considerations. If a being cannot experience pain and suffering then we don't have to worry about moral duties in terms of the good and the bad to the individual. We must also consider the value to humans in the use of other animals.

Some humans use and exploit and even kill other humans for their own benefit. While we do have some broadly agreed moral beliefs about this it is by no means a universal position and subject to change due to natural circumstance. If there are benefits to humans from the use of other animals - and there are - then we need to look to the possible range of animal properties we'd need to consider in determining just what ethical duty we owe them.

Put more simply, any time we act ethically, we are acting according to the ethical standards that we as a group have agreed. We answer to no-one but ourselves.

I don't know about neo-veganism, all I have in mind is that my moral scope is aimed at including other animals as seems best. I don't believe that in the world we have it is possible or even desirable that humans never use or harm other animals but by the same token I'd like to think we give the matter fair consideration before we do so. I don't like the idea of veganism, I'd rather that just as we've been refining our general societal ethical framework in terms of humans we'd extend that to include other animals more than we do now. So "vegan ethics" wouldn't be a thing, there'd just be ethics which incorporates other animals.

Do you really think that a stance that evaluates an ethical duty on the basis of relevant mental states is arbitrary? I wouldn't have thought so, it seems a sound basis for a starting point. To me, vegans eating pumpkins but not oysters seems pretty arbitrary!

well put. Artemis seems to me to have deliberately distorted my comments in order to be disparaging. For the record, if pushed I would label my ethical view as "vegan".

You'll have to be more specific, because other than animal use for food (which is only of pleasure value and not genuine value), I'm not sure what your example of the pasture-raised and painlessly-killed steer is supposed to defend. — Artemis

I have already pointed to the many uses of farmed animals - for food, clothing, pharmaceuticals, etc. I am sure you can find many more. That said, I agree that in the context of the OP we are largely only talking about as food. Food seems to be something of a benefit to us, I'd suggest.

So... now you're saying humans don't care about dying either? And if you think humans do... why in the world would you think animals do not possess the same fear? Just because you haven't heard them say it in so many words? That seems rather self-serving considering evolutionary theory alone tells us that any capability we find in one animal exists to varying degrees in others as well. — Artemis

I think you are deliberately seeking to misunderstand. I did not say humans don't care about dying, I said they do because they can entertain the abstract notion of personal existence over time. I think I am safe to claim that cows do not. So, humans are afraid of death, cows are not. But both humans and cows have evolutionarily derived fears of harm, because those fears have been selected for (for obvious reasons). There is a significant distinction between fear of harm and fear of death.

Here is how that could ensue in practice as a result of this fact about things. Take a herd of cows. Place a large screen nearby. Take one cow at a time behind the screen and shoot her to death with a single gunshot. The noise will startle the herd but they will settle. Now, remove the dead cow such that no lingering trace of her death is able to be detected. I suggest you can lead every one of those cows behind the screen and kill her and each will be quite happy to go.

Try the same with a group of humans free to talk to each other. Will each be happy to go?

The former case happens all the time. The latter never.

Your entire argument seems to boil down to "but we don't KNOW that the cow thinks x, y, or z" without any reason to suggest that she wouldn't. Again, we have all the evidence in the world which leads to the strong inference that she does, and no evidence to support the inference that she wouldn't. — Artemis

No, I think we have mountains of empirical evidence that cows do NOT know they can die.

Re Tomasik (example) and wild animal suffering, here we will just have to disagree. There are those who claim that the life of the wild animal is mostly stress free, and for some kinds of animals that may be true (it may have been for free roaming kangaroos 1000 years ago, for example), but it probably is not the case for many other species (eg birds, mice, zebra, etc). On balance, I think pain, suffering and stress predominate in nature. You could choose to read the many references Tomasik includes in his article, many of which are empirical studies.

What are "good reasons" and what does it mean to do something "ethically" if we answer to "no one but ourselves" and there is "no ultimate moral code"? You are, in the space of a single paragraph, jumping from radical moral relativism to the ideal of an objective morality--or at least are being so sloppy with your language that you seem to be doing this. — Artemis

It worries me that such a simple and clear statement confuses you. That probably explains much of your commentary.

My feeling on this is that a brain devoid of input would have very little experience as we know it. Perhaps some essential instinctual modes of "thought" might be found but it wouldn't comprise anything useful. Brains aim to extract information from the environment to guide behaviour, so if there isn't any information I can't see how the brain would do anything useful. Worse, I think that without language the kinds of inner experience of "us" that we take for granted would simply fail to show up.

In this respect, perhaps an insight might be to recall Helen Keller’s words in her essay “Before the Soul Dawn”:

“Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.

I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heart-beat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life, then, was a blank without past, present, or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith.”

And her awakening upon beginning to know language, when she first appreciated the relationship between a finger-movement against her palm and the idea of ‘water’:

“That word startled my soul, and it awoke, full of the spirit of the morning, full of joyous, exultant song. Until that day my mind had been like a darkened chamber, waiting for words to enter and light the lamp, which is thought”.

(As an aside, notice here the striking contrast between the non-world of conscious unconsciousness first described and the bounding, fulsome world of metaphor that springs forth in that final paragraph, metaphor enabled by language).

And this from someone lacking but sound and sight and not the other inputs of sensation such as touch and feel and taste and internal body states.

I'd say some kind of psychiatric episode. Consider that it is very likely there are many people at any given time experiencing such feelings. At least some of the time, subsequent events provide a potential causal relationship. Of course, there is no such relationship.

What we do know, based on the studies of animal behaviorists, psychologists, neurologists, etc etc. is that animals show the same or at least very similar reactions in the face of danger as humans do. Plants do not. Since plants don’t have brains, the suggestion that animal reactions to danger were similar to plant reactions is just kinda ludicrous on the face of it. But that aside, we have a preponderance of evidence that animals do feel as we do in the face of danger, and a total lack of evidence that they are missing something. — Artemis

I think you misunderstood what I said. I suggested that all organisms, including plants, have damage avoidance behaviours. Sessile organisms like plants evolve rather different tactics to motile organisms like animals, but the underlying selector if you like is the risk of damage. So cows and humans avoid being harmed because they do not want to be damaged. That is different from not wanting to die.

We’re not killing animals to sustain our own lives. We’re doing so to enhance the pleasure of our own lives. Big difference. — Artemis

I agree there isn't a good defence for using animals for pleasure. That includes say horse racing, fox hunting, cosmetic testing, fast food, perhaps even fine dining. But we do use animals for positive human benefits such as clothing, pharmaceuticals, food and so on. Some argue in favour of animal testing for medicine but I'm not convinced of that! So consider my arguments framed in the context of those animal uses that are able to be defended on valid grounds (ie there is some actual genuine value for us).

“How Animals Grieve” by Barbara King is an excellent resource on the matter. There are numerous other books and accounts that describe the grief herd animals go through when one of their own, especially their offspring, are taken or killed. — Artemis

I do have several books on this topic yet to read, but from the research I have read, I am willing to bet they aren't grieving for a loss understood in the abstract as humans do. The loss of an offspring might cause a grief response in all animals including humans, for good reason. Similarly herd animals may grieve the loss of members. But I suggest that is a response to loss alone (and primarily reflects a personal state - the loss means that the animal will no longer gain something from the presence of the other) and doesn't represent an understanding that they might suffer a similar fate.

I covered this in my response earlier. A cow might grieve the loss of a calf or a fellow cow. But it doesn't follow that she knows that she can die. So when we kill a cow quickly and painlessly, I am suggesting it is not a harm to that individual. It may cause grief to others but I don't know how much that affects a typical domestic bovine. Many dairy farmers claim that dairy cows show only limited reaction to loss of a calf. I'm not able to say anything about that.

You can disagree as completely or incompletely as you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that our current meat-consumption habits are dependent on the mass-production only a factory farm can afford. 99% of our meat comes from the factories. We don’t have the farm land or labor force necessary to sustain both the pastoral ideal and our overconsumption. — Artemis

Agreed, and I thought I made that clear above. I am not defending intensive animal farming sytems or over-consumption.

In regard to wild animal suffering, from my reading and thinking on this I think it more likely that suffering predominates in nature. Brian Tomasik has several essays that tackle this issue and that is broadly his conclusion.

https://longtermrisk.org/the-importance-of-wild-animal-suffering/

“I did you a good, now I’m allowed to do you a bad” — Artemis

If we agree to that standard then it holds true. It's that simple. There is no ultimate moral code, we answer to no-one but ourselves and natural circumstance. If we must use other animals for a good reason - and there seem to be such reasons - then it is up to us to decide whether we should to do that ethically.

I think we should.

I don't know very much about IIT, though what little I do know of it didn't lead me to think it promoted panpsychism. As you say, I believe the theory claims to model information integration mathematically in order to predict what systems might be conscious (I guess on the basis that consciousness is enabled by complex bi-directional and integrated information flows). But that still depends on some kind of computational system (the idea being that complex feed-forward/feedback circuits enables complex computations) so I am not sure how panpsychism could be implied by IIT? I guess I am still not clear on just what panpsychism really says. I had a quick skim of a couple of definitions but they seem to be sketchy, talking only of mentality and thought and "minds", whatever those things are.

This raises a problematic issue though. Because while the lion kills without thought, it certainly does so with the implied consent of humans. The issue is more pronounced if you look at projects reintroducing predators like wolves into a habitat. Being killed by some wild animal is often accompanied with a lot of stress and pain. Do we therefore have a moral imperative to stop wild animals from killing other animals where possible? — Echarmion

An interesting perspective on this is to consider if we return to the wild land currently under crops (to feed animals) or used to farm cattle and sheep. Presumably, the presence of wild populations will result in considerable harms to the wild animals now living on those lands. For example, injury, disease, exposure to weather extremes, predation and so on. While much of this probably happens to smaller animals, it could be the case that there is much more general harm and suffering to rewilded lands than were the land to remain under human agriculture. While we could argue that we don't have any moral duty to wild animals that exist naturally, is that still the case if we rewild lands? The resulting suffering stems from our actions.

The sheer amounts of meat produced and consumed seem to preclude any significant consideration for animal welfare. Without factory farms, the prices would skyrocket well beyond what most people can afford. — Echarmion

Well, maybe. But in the West especially we eat far more meat than we need to. In a world without factory farms, there'd be a lot less meat available and it might be more expensive, but there'd still be considerable demand. Equally, we might reduce the quantity of meat eaten - it might become more of an accepted part of a balanced diet. I agree that we should accept we have a moral duty to eradicate low welfare high intensity animal farming, I am not as confident the same applies to high welfare free range type farming. I also don't think that such a state would lead to most people eating vegan meals - I would foresee something more like the Meditteranean diet. Mostly plants, some meat. Then there's no need to worry about Omega 3, B12, etc supplements.

This does not make those acts moral, as we have refined our thought and evolved beyond accepting those behaviours as "part of nature" and "the way of the world" as we should with eating/exploiting animals — HannahPledger

Historical facts about the world explain why the world is how it is but don't tell us what acts are moral or immoral. That decision requires thought, as you note, and agreement. Facts about the world inform that decision making process. Some facts advanced in favour of extending moral prohibitions against animal use are are not true facts, for example claiming that other animals desire not to be exploited or have an express wish not to die. I agree that the capacity for other animals to have bad experiences demands an ethical consideration. It seems a leap though to say that using another animal in circumstances where they do not have a bad experience (or at most have limited bad experiences) should be prohibited, regardless of the benefits to us.

Consciousness is an essential prerequisite for an experience. If I'm conscious, it means I'm capable of experience. Exactly what I experience is not yet determined merely by the fact of my being conscious. What I experience are the qualia, and these change. We can't identify consciousness and qualia because qualia change and consciousness doesn't. — bert1

I think I can see what you are getting at, though it seems a bit circular. Consciousness is the state of being aware, you seem to be saying, but do you also require that being "aware" means that your consciousness has a content in the qualia sense? If so then one isn't conscious until one experiences qualia (in the sense I defined qualia earlier, that is what you call "content"). I feel that there is evidence one can be aware without experience of that awareness, for example the case of colour discrimination in the absense of colour experience I described earlier. There are also other cases that show that people can attend to and even respond to stimuli at greater than chance without a shred of awareness of the stimuli.

Nonetheless, even granting that consciousness is an enabling state, how would we determine that other material objects have this enabling state? Isn't the hallmark of the consciousness we are seeking the existence of the content of consciousness for which so far we seem not to have a strong explanation? Help me here, I'm not quite grasping the application of the concept.

Panpsychism appears to be a sort of response to the hard problem - that is, that qualia exist without physical explanation. So long as an organism is functional and responding to stimuli, we would consider that creature to be conscious. We'd say it is in a conscious state, but we aren't bound to believe that it also has qualia. In the case of other material objects, we not only don't have evidence for qualia, we don't even have evidence for them being conscious.

I think language again obscures my meaning (perhaps I am not able to explain myself well enough). Yes, I agree that perceiving red is a natural process, so I am not denying the process of perception. What I am saying is that there is nothing "red" about red. As a description of a state of our perceptual system it exists but redness as a quality/property doesn't exist. If we could isolate some particular brain state that reliably conforms to claims of red experiences, I am saying that is all there is to be explained. THAT is red.

I am not really following your argument for bifurcation of nature. It isn't a bifurcation to say that brainstate A corresponds to claims of redness, is it? If I were to say that I assign the value A to claims of redness and B to claims of greenness for the sake of succinctness, do A and B now emerge as genuine properties of the world? They are in the sense that A and B are placeholders (rather like a variable in a program), but they might as well be C and D. A and B don't hold any strong claim to being genuine properties of the world, they are descriptions (placeholders for the states they describe). Consider that IF we were really able to inform each other what red looks like to us, we might even find that none of us have the exact same experience. This is, I propose, because the qualitative aspect of red isn't fixed - red is not the thing itself. The experience of red stands in for a physical state of the brain.

It doesn't matter at all what red looks like to you, as long as you reliably respond to an object's reflected wavelengths the same as I do. I'd stand on an even stronger formulation and say that red doesn't look like anything at all, but that's a bit harder to explain. A Martian who reliably reports some distinctive quality for the wavelengths I refer to as red is having a red experience, even if he calls it "Mnng", because all there can be is the appropriate discrimination. If he fails to discriminate red from a shade of grey, we could infer perhaps that he cannot have colour vision (physically, his perceptual system isn't able to make that discrimination).

Returning to panpsychism, I am still not able to discern what the claim is. I mean, I know panpsychists are saying that mentality is a fundamental property of the universe, but if we aren't talking qualia then what are we talking about?

The basic notion is that some form of mind, experience, mentality, psyche or “conscious quality” is ubiquitous in nature (to the core) and that physical monisms, and dualisms are mistaken ontologies that give rise to the “hard problem of consciousness”. — prothero

As you noted, much of our mental processing goes on outside of conscious awareness. Something the same could be said for a computer. There is a pretty strong similarity between the operations of a digital computer and a human brain. If there is no consciousness of such events, then there is nothing especially noteworthy there. Computers manipulate data and produce consclusions. We know what physical properties are necessary for that, even single cells do this. These are clearly physical operations of a particular kind - anywhere we find systems doing this, we can say computations are occurring.

So that can't be what panpsychists are getting at. Is it? In a sense, if it IS that then I might kind of agree, because as I said earlier, information is ubiquitous. So if the capacity for agents to make use of information is panpsychism, then I'd be on board with that. In other words, information is a property of the universe that the right sorts of agents can utilise. But that is hardly a startling conclusion, so again, it doesn't seem to be what panpsychists are thinking. And it certainly isn't tackling the problem of dualism as far as I can see because it says nothing about qualia, only that the universe is such that computing systems can compute...

The point I am making is that it isn't justified to you but it is to a great many other people. The only way to change the other people is to prosecute a strong case for why it's immoral to use animals for our benefits in all possible cases. I don't think it is easy to do that. Many of the standard arguments fall short, as far as I can see. Put it this way, there is nothing wrong with an animal eating another animal. That is how nature and evolution works. The only way it can be wrong for us to do so is if we come to believe it to be wrong. In order to believe that, we need good defensible reasons to adopt that belief. Just saying so isn't a good reason.

It is more to the point that the moral value of a cow is worth more than the temporary pleasure you get from eating its body. — HannahPledger

In respect to an individual's moral beliefs and choices, yes, that's pretty much true. But at a broader level I think it's much more complex than that. Humans do gain considerably from the use of other animals in a variety of ways, not the least of which being food. It's not simply a case of pleasure. For example, eating at MacDonald's is, I'd suggest, tantamount to killing other animals for fun. However, eating a healthy Meditteranean style diet whilst ensuring as far as practicable to source plants and meats from ethical sources is not. In the former case I think your statement is true, but not in the latter case. Then we have a few more matters to consider before we can make confident ethical statements that might be regarded as globally applicable.

To be an ethical vegan only requires the recognition that the interests of a cow to live and be unharmed outweigh our interests to eat their carcasses for pleasure. — Artemis

Well, that's more or less my point. I am saying the cow does not have an express interest in living. When I speak about a "biological" disposition, I am speaking about an inherited behaviour to avoid damage. Animals, indeed all organisms (including plants) have evolved defences against damage. There is no actual intent here, it is a blind evolutionary outcome. A cow's desire to live on is not really such, it is the evolutionary imperative of reproducing successfully. Just like a potato plant. Humans on the other hand have the abstract idea that they can die, so our interest in living on is an express one (as well as the underlying biological disposition).

Cow's also have a desire to avoid harm, as do we. Again, it's largely an evolved defence but it IS accompanied by painful feelings so for both us and the cow there is an actual desire or interest. If a cow could speak, it couldn't say that it doesn't want to die, but it could say it doesn't want to be hurt. I would suggest that we can farm cows in such a way as not to cause them harm, day to day (ie, pain and suffering).

In regards to the difference between the interests of a non-imapired human and an impaired or immature human, the reason for that moral duty is nothing to do with the biological interests of the person, but rather some broader species-specific interest. Put another way, in our society we are of the view that babies and impaired persons attract the right to life merely because they are human. In other times and places, that moral duty may not apply (for example, utilitarians may believe there is a strong case for euthanising persons with severe disability).

In this context, we have come to see other humans as deserving of rights that trump any interest we might have in depriving them of life (eg it is murder to kill your severely impaired daughter). But this may merely be a matter of convention, subject to change in the future. It would only remain so if we believe that the course of ethics is to improve our beliefs and behaviours. I'm not sure that an evolutionary/historical account would bear that out.

On the other hand, our interests in using other animals for life sustaining purposes of ours may still trump their interests in avoiding harm (again, I am of the view that if we don't harm them day to day, then there is no interest we have quashed by using them to our ends). The real question is how much harm we agree is acceptable to cause them. Vegans would ask that we harm them not at all.

Unless of course you actually meant to say "he is unaware of any pain associated with his death." Because otherwise you're admitting that it is harmful to take the life away from a creature who even "only" possesses a natural biological interest in continuing said life. — Artemis

I'm not quite sure of your argument here. Yes, of course, feeling pain when being killed is a harm. If the steer, you or me can be killed without pain, then we have not been harmed in that sense. However, there is a broader sense in which death is not a harm. Harms accrue to living beings. Once dead, you do not exist and cannot be harmed. So, if in killing you I cause you no pain, you are not harmed. And once dead, no harm can accrue. So there is no harm in killing someone painlessly, at least not to them.

The best we can say is that death thwarts our future potential but I consider that an uncertain claim for the reason that we cannot say what that potential is. It may be that if I don't kill you today, you will die from a heart attack tomorrow. Of course, your death will cause harm (suffering) to those that love you or have some close personal relationship with you, so we do consider that of relevance in the human case. I am not convinced that is such an issue with other animals. It seems to be with elephants, for example, but I'm not sure it is with cattle. It's probably an open question whether a typical herd suffers from the loss of any of their number. I believe The Last Pig does, if the movie of the same name is any guide.

If we eradicated factory farms and the evils that go with it, the vast majority of people would still have to go vegan because there simply would not be enough meat to go around. — Artemis

I completely disagree. How could you possibly come to that conclusion?

Also, people like to suggest that "nature is red in tooth and claw," but if you look at the average day-in-the-life of a wild animal--especially a large, herding herbivore like a cow-- it is (or would be) pretty pleasant. — Artemis

I think that claim is subject to scrutiny. I suspect that on average, a wild animal's life is quite stressful and filled with suffering. In fact, I suspect that the vast majority of those born do not make it to sexual maturity which must bias the odds in favour of suffering outweighing happiness. It's worth considering the fact that in everyday terms, we cannot do much to alleviate the suffering of wild animals. The farmer on the other hand, can do a great deal to alleviate the suffering of farmed animals. On balance, it should be the case that a farmed animal subjected to ethical methods should experience more happiness and far less suffering than a wild animal.

As I think about it, the concept of qualia stands for the phenomenal character of experience, whether we are talking mental objects or their properties. I mean, if a mental object did not have phenomenal character I don't believe we'd consider it conscious (eg thoughts). So I intend by qualia any mental object and its properties that we apprehend.

Should qualia on that definition be regarded as consciousness? I'd have thought so (again, so long as we aren't just talking about the physical state of being responsive to stimuli). After all, isn't it the phenomenal character of consciousness with which we are concerned in panpsychism? Or have I misunderstood the claim?

Ethical vegans claim that the interests of other animals should be afforded the same weight of consideration as those of humans, which is fine. But there is no strong case for other animals actually having interests that might trump ours or even hold equal worth. For example, many vegans would say that humans have an interest in living on, as do other animals. I would suggest however that is not true - I propose that other animals have no interest in so doing, IF we are talking about an interest over and above a natural biological disposition.

In regard to the harming of farmed animals, I suppose it depends on what you mean by harm. I tend to view harm in welfare terms - if I am harmed it reduces the extent of my happiness and well-being. On that view, a pig kept in an intensive farm where she suffers psychological trauma and/or physical disability is being harmed. However a beef steer on a free range farm may enjoy a life considerably better than his wild counterparts and on the whole may attain considerable happiness and well-being. His harm is minimal for being a farmed animal. Some would suggest that killing the steer is a harm, but I'd disagree if we do so in such a way as he is unaware of his death.

I hope not to derail the more serious discussion in this thread, but I did want to respond to a couple of earlier comments.

I think I am not clear on some kind of definitional matter. The argument for panpsychism is that mentality is a fundamental part of the universe and as such accompanies any material object. So in that respect, even a rock is "conscious".

This is a strange claim, to me at least. Mind you, I am assuming that when people talk of consciousness, they are primarily concerned with what we'd loosely call "experience" - that is, that everyday behaviour is accompanied by what seems to be an internal movie. It seems like "we" are immersed in this experience - we see red, feel warmth, hear middle C. But I am not convinced we have movies in our heads, at least not of the sort that a rock might also experience.

What does the word 'aware' in this sentence mean? It can't mean 'conscious' because you're implying that awareness exists but saying that consciousness does not exist. — bert1

I am suggesting that people think of consciousness as an inner movie and that "they" experience this movie - they are aware of the movie. And this leads them to believe that there actually IS a movie running in their heads. My claim here, along with others, is that people are mistaken to think this. In the matter of panpsychism, if there isn't a movie playing that we can experience, then what would a rock be experiencing? I guess we'd need to better distinguish what our experience is (if it isn't a movie) before we could say whether a rock might have it.

When you say “red isn’t a property of the real world” you engage in what Whitehead would call an “artificial bifurcation of nature”. We are part of nature, our perceptions are part of nature. The division of the world into primary and secondary qualities per Locke is an artificial one that leads us into many of our philosophical difficulties — prothero

I don't think I am positing some kind of division, I am saying that red doesn't exist. It is not a property of the world. At least, not in the everyday sense we think of red, which is to say that we think of it as a property of objects that we perceive. I think that people believe that red is a genuine "thing" that can be described. I am saying it isn't, rather it is information. Perhaps more like a description.

I realise I don't understand the philosophical implications of say computationalism and embodied cognition, for example, but it seems to me that consciousness (for brevity, let's call consciousness qualia so we aren't being confused about physical states of awareness etc) describes physical brain states. I think we can be reasonably confident this is the case because a great many learnings about the brain come from observing how people describe experiences in the presence of various brain dysfunctions.

Consider that when we say something is red, aren't we really describing a physical function of the brain, that being to distinguish between objects on the basis of the wavelengths of light reflected from them? We know that light stimulates the retina, the retina signals the visual processing system, this system makes discriminations on the basis of wavelength and eventually assigns the perceptual experience of what we call colour to consciousness. Damage to parts of this system can render patients still able to discriminate on the basis of wavelength but unable to experience colours, for example.

The critical thing here, as is typically the case with other sensory modes, is that the discrimination is described consciously by reference to a quale, in this case "colour". Behaviourally, patients can in many cases respond to sensory input without a conscious experience of that perception. That suggests, to me at least, that qualia describe computational outcomes within the processing system.

We do not have red experiences when we flutter our eyelids, wave our arms or comb our hair, rather, we have red experiences when the visual processing system computes the wavelengths of light from objects in our field of view.

If qualia are descriptions of brain processes that we use to undertake certain functions/behaviours, they would not seem to me to be actual objects or real entities. The brain makes discriminations about the world based on how it processes the information encoded in spike trains and in turn the outputs from those computations are used to produce useful, functional descriptions about those discriminations. My take on this is that qualia, as we call them, aren't real things, they are descriptions of the internal brain states.

If we do not have the required computational processes happening, it seems hard to imagine a description might be produced. Descriptions are not ubiquitous in the universe and are almost certainly agent specific, but the critical point would be that without the agent and its computations, a description does not occur. Descriptions are information, information is ubiquitous, describing agents are not. Rocks do not undertake those kinds of computations, at least not so far as I know.

So my objection to panpsychism is that I think people are mistaking the descriptive capacity of appropriate systems for actual physical entities. If red were a genuine physical property of the universe, then it seems possible other material objects could also experience red. If on the other hand red is a description that is a consequence of a particular physical state in an agent, then it is agent specific and has no broader availability. Or existence. It might be true that red objects reflect light at particular wavelengths, but it is hard to state that for certain. The only thing we can state for certain would seem to be the resulting brain state in an agent. Providing that our agent reliably discriminates between red and green, for example, we can be confident that the agent's description is functionally identical to our own. We could, I suppose, agree to call that red. But red itself isn't in there.

Do rocks compute information about internal states and reliably respond to those computations? I didn't think so, but maybe they do? If all material objects undertake such computations and reliably act upon those, then perhaps consciousness is ubiquitous. My guess is that it isn't.

I haven't heard of Sean Carroll, but that sounds like an interesting video, so thanks for the share, QuixoticAgnostic. I have only the most basic grasp of the question of space, time, and the origin of the universe so I don't think I can offer much to the original question.

My largest uncertainty is not understanding what space-time is. If I think about it, it rather sounds like we are describing trajectories. Space... doesn't seem to exist. Does it? What is space? It's simply a dimension as far as I can tell (ie distance, relationship etc). Time is a measure of change. Time depends on matter, in a sense so does space. So wouldn't space-time just be a measure of change in the trajectories of objects?

If we had an infinite space with no matter at all, we couldn't describe that as a "space" (ie there are no dimensions). With no spatial or temporal dimensions, it isn't anything at all, yet it would be infinite. Which suggests that the energy available is infinite, yet unmeasurable until matter exists (after which the dimensions of time and space also exist and can be measured).

So the void or the energy potential is sort of effectively infinite in both dimensions but a universe only exists while there is matter. So the answer to the question is that there is a beginning and an end to the universe, but the energy potential remains infinite.

Does that make any sense?

Well I wouldnt qualify the capacity for pain and suffering alone. I think it needs to be an experience of suffering/pain of a certain kind, a kind that fits the same criteria for why pain and suffering is wrong to inflict on humans. Aside from that consideration, yes I think ethics (with preventing suffering as the moral metric) would demand we be more careful about what animals we eat. — DingoJones

I like this, it's more my own stance on vegan ethics. I find it hard to adopt the view that all animals are accorded the same ethical duty, largely due to the problematic claims that all animals have interests of the kind we believe carry a moral weight and that all animals experience pain and suffering.

Vegan ethics also rejects the commodity status of other animals but I am troubled by that claim as well. Why do we reject the commodity status of cows but not wheat? Presumably, because cows are "conscious" and can have both interests and suffering. But the interests of cows are not the same as our interests. Equally, we can farm cows without causing them harm (though I suspect that is not at all the norm) so on theoretical grounds at least I don't really see the need to accept this claim. In the end, I think that claim also really boils down to pain and suffering, because as I noted earlier if an organism can't suffer why would it matter if I own it?

So I think pain and suffering are strong grounds for arguing for a moral duty to other animals, though it might not always require not using (or eating) another animal.

I think it's more than simple ambiguity. I think it's a sort of fundamental misinterpretation. I should emphasise again that I am not saying that what we call inner experience doesn't exist, but rather that we are mistaken in how we think it exists.

So I am not implying that the "mental" as it were is not real - there must be some actual thing happening - but that the qualities of the mental are not genuine physical qualities. Instead, they are descriptions of process. Red for example isn't a real property of the world. It's a description of how a physical quality of the world affects my body. Perhaps it might make more sense to say that the objects of mind are logical/informational objects - they represent relationships between cellular responses.

I suggest that if we move from thinking that our experience is a representation of the world and view it as the state of internal information manipulation, we no longer need to explain "consciousness". If this were so, then qualia for example aren't really actual entities that somehow emerge from neuronal interactions, rather they are distinctions, differences, equalities that are grounded in genuine physical states (you will see from this that red doesn't have to be an experiential quality that can be defined on those terms - so long as any population is reliably agreed about when something is red, then "red" as a descriptor is reliably observed). In the end, the world we inhabit (as opposed to the world without) is an abstracted model, perhaps something like Graziano's attension schema. WE are a model, if you like.

So, while information is ubiquitous in the universe, I think computing agents (information processors) are not. That's why I think panpsychism fails. It's trying to describe a process as a thing.

I see what you are driving at. So if we are to use pain and suffering as our moral benchmark, some organisms may be excluded from consideration. For example, if we are confident that wheat doesn't feel pain, we have no need to concern ourselves with any moral duty to any particular wheat plant (we might however, on a different basis, have some concerns about a wider ethical concern relating to the growing of wheat as a commodity). Similarly, the same should apply to any animal that does not experience pain (if we are sufficiently confident that an oyster for example isn't likely to suffer any more than a stalk of wheat).

This seems to point in the right direction. Broadly then we could see an endorsement for vegan ethics in regard to animal farming - that is, those animals which can feel pain and suffer would be those we'd owe the greater duty to. Wouldn't the typical farmed animal fall within that scope? And as I mentioned earlier, we have some reasonably sound empirical grounds for excluding insects from that duty which would free us from particular concerns about insects as individuals. That would mean we can happily eat insects and kill them in crop farming (with the same caveat as earlier - for example, a broader ethical duty to insects as species and members of the ecosystem).

Just as an aside, is there a particular objection to folk seeking the higher moral ground? I'm not sure I'd advocate for chasing the lower moral ground!!

I don't think I am denying subjectivity, if by that we mean a privileged point of view. I am also not denying that we take in information from the world and use it to model functional responses - the results of which we observe in behaviours. Or that we can report on how we do that (to a limited extent, anyway). The problem seems to be when we take that a step further and imbue the modelling as a discrete reality. But it isn't, how could it be?

I think the trouble with consciousness is probably language - by creating terms to describe our internal experience we have given concrete existence to something that isn't really there. We report that we "see" things, that "we" feel emotions, that the subjective perspective of our corporeal selves is somehow a separate entity.

Now, I am no scientist nor philosopher, so I guess I don't know the detail enough. But I disagree with your suggestion that it is unlikely that an AI can have a "subjective or interior" experience. As I read that, I get the feeling you are saying that inside us, there is some thing. An entity, perhaps, or some qualitative essence. And taken as such we are in trouble because how could we ever measure such an unphysical phenomenon? And how could a mere machine of all things also have this inner essence?

The answer is, I suggest, that it cannot. Nor can we.

Taken in that wise, panpsychism cannot be a real description of anything. Information on the other hand is a real description of a real, physical quality of the universe. And it is always available to the right kinds of agents to exploit. Whether it is you, me, a crocodile or an AI. But not rocks, I am willing to wager.

However, I dont think that all the animals vegans/animal rights folk believe shouldnt be eaten are going to be shown by science to have anything like the human ethics or suffering. I think some will, and based on suffering as a metric we shouldn't (ethically speaking) eat those animals. That would be consistent with the premiss of suffering as the metric. — DingoJones

Dingo, I am not sure of your stance as described there - are you agreeing that when we are reasonably confident that another animal can experience pain and suffering, we shouldn't eat them?

Tononi's theory seems to make a lot of sense, though I think it probably better describes a particular kind of consciousness. I haven't read it in depth though so may be mischaracterising it. The problem that always remains is how is it we or some other creature can be "conscious" - how is it that there is something it feels like to be me.

What I am suggesting is that we are mistaken when we claim that consciousness exists because we are aware of it. You say that consciousness is what allows us to think and question, but it would seem theoretically possible for us to design a machine that can do relatively the same things. After all, it really is our brain thinking and questioning. Any system that can compute information from its own data store and produce responses that indicate it has just done so would seem to be conscious on that view. I would agree. So too does Graziano. But that doesn't mean that consciousness is some quality of the world.

If consciousness is the feeling of the world, what exactly does that mean? It seems to me that when we think we are experiencing things (or seeing an object or hearing a sound), I suggest we have have just fallen into the Cartesian Theatre. We can never explain that so long as we believe "we" are participating in an experience.

I joined this forum the other day when I found it by accident while looking for some info about a topic other than consciousness. But panpsychism intrigues me. Or at least, what I think people mean by that term. I run into it a lot with certain people who want to claim that the fundamental fabric of the universe, as it were, is consciousness. I never quite know what that means.

I haven't read this thread in detail - to be honest, most of it goes over my head - but I found it a pretty unsatisfying thread on the whole. Not because those contributing have done so poorly, quite to the contrary, but because I haven't been able to get a clear picture of what anyone is really talking about. This could be my problem of course, but still...

The difficulty I have is that a persistent theme seems to be that consciousness is referred to as some actual "thing", even by those who may be questioning its presence. What is consciousness, the writer asks, and the answer is "experience", or "awareness", or "feeling". When I think about consciousness, which I do on occasion because it is pretty interesting, I can't actually see it anywhere.

When I try to pull it apart, I can't find anything really. I don't mean that I am not aware of things because we all agree that we are aware of things, I just mean I can't actually put my finger on some thing called awareness or experience. I agree that there is something that it is like to be me, so clearly something is going on. But I have to confess it really seems like no more than a particular informational state - that is, consciousness is a concept that stands in for how we use information to model states of affairs. If we start thinking that we are viewing actual objects or having experiences of things, I kinda think we've fallen into the trap of the Cartesian Theatre.

That is why panpsychism seems so untenable - it's explaining some claimed quality of the world that doesn't seem to be there. I can't for the life of me see why anyone would want to say that a rock has some kind of awareness, at least not in the sense we typically mean. Sure, it's aware if we observe there are real physical relationships between a rock and the rest of the world and the rock can be seen to be causally related to the rest of the world, but I am pretty sure that we aren't talking about that. We are really talking about a system abstracting information from the world to model functional processes peculiar to itself. I suppose that is some form of computationalism, though I confess I haven't the background to make that claim.

Perhaps in some sense panpsychism IS true, in that any computational system that models informational entities and relationships will be "conscious", but I feel that is also a bit misleading because we immediately start to think Cartesian actors by saying so...

Reducing suffering is not my own basis of morality, nor a metric I would use to defend/attack animal rights. — DingoJones

I'm curious, what metric would you propose? Mind you, the original discussion was in relation to vegetarianism, extended to veganism. Neither is essentially about animal rights as far as I know.

Oops sorry zookeeper I thought your comment was Dingo's! Dingo, no its not an arbitrary line. I suggested it is empirically motivated. Personally I doubt insects feel pain, certainly not the kind of pain that counts.

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DingoJones, if our concern is to reduce suffering, then it isnt clear that insects suffer in morally relevant ways. Probably most insects do not experience pain, but I understand the science is as yet somewhat equivocal. Still, few people afford an insect such as a grasshopper as much moral weight as a calf. We cant fix everything so insect suffering may have to wait on the fringes along with wild animal suffering. We can however fix farmed/caught animal suffering to a degree.

I was referring to the amount of lives lost/suffering. Insects and rodents are more enumerate than farm animals. Insects and rodents can co-exist with animal farm fields. Thats not the case with crops, the insects and rodents are wiped out or displaced (and most die). So many many times more individual lives and suffering result from a crop field. Ergo, if we are measuring the suffering of individuals we see there are more individuals suffering from the footprint of the crops than the animal farming. By a landslide really.
Just because you don’t understand something doesnt mean it doesnt make sense. I dont mind clarifying, I simply thought you understood the huge numbers difference in individual lives. My mistake, hopefully its clear what I meant now. — DingoJones

You will need to offer some actual numbers to back up your claim that the loss of animals from the proportion of crops to replace meat is astronomical when compared to the number of animals we kill/catch each year. I agree that generally speaking, cattle grazing on open range is relatively harm free and can be ecologically preferable, but we aren't talking about the impact of ALL crops grown for food versus just range grazed cattle. See my comment above.

DingoJones, the point of veganism is that we have a choice. The suffering in nature is part of the natural order; we could perhaps take a stance about that, but the ethical issue is the suffering we cause. So as Zookeeper says, the goal is to not produce animals in the first place if their lot is to suffer. There's an extension to that which is that even if suffering is not their lot, it isn't right to create them in order to take their life before their natural life span. Something similar exists in relation to use/exploitation/enslavement, however you want to frame it, but I feel that is really just the same concern about suffering. So no, no-one seriously suggests turning all the farmed animals loose. The concern about what to do with those that exist is misplaced - if you eat meat, then you clearly don't worry about that to begin with. For animal advocates, they know that even though say the animals on one farm will be killed if no-one is buying the meat any longer, it means that this will not continue into the future, so the aim is to eliminate future suffering.

The concern about crop-related deaths is a good point, but ultimately fails I think for several reasons. The first is that a lot of crops are grown to feed animals, so eliminating animal farming would also reduce the number of animals suffering, both directly and indirectly. Second, we don't really know how many animals ARE being killed in crops. It probably is far fewer than you think (as long as we ignore insects, that is). And lastly, consider that pretty much all of us eat plants. In fact, for a healthy diet, something like about 60-80% of our calories should come from plants. That is a shared cost - in other words, vegans and non-vegans are eating those, so it follows that the vast majority of all animals killed in cropping are killed by non-vegan consumption.

Now, we could look to fix that, and if the world had a vegan agricultural system then we would aim to do that. In the meantime, there is no avoiding the shared cost. What's left then is the cost we CAN avoid - the animals farmed/caught for food. On average, a non-vegan will cause the death of somewhere between 50 and 100 animals per year. As meat is mostly consumed for protein, we could replace that meat with protein crops such as peas/beans/lentils etc. To replace the proportion of protein from animals in the diet would require about one tenth of a hectare per year. If wild animal deaths are say 50 per hectare per year (almost certainly an exaggeration), the the vegan will cause the death of an additional 5 animals (over and above the shared cost baseline). Compared to the 50-100 of the non-vegan.

Of course, the non-vegan can get around this by only eating range grazed beef, and thereby causing the death of perhaps one or two animal each year directly. But that is a bit of an uncertain claim because we don't know the true quantum of crop-related deaths (what if it is just five per hectare per year) and we are ignoring the deaths related to beef production (eg predator control).

I watched this doco and it supplemented some other commentary I have seen. While it does have inaccuracies, I think it broadly supports a couple of essential points. First that renewables (if by this we mean wind and solar primarily) are extremely unlikely to power the world any time soon AND it is extremely environmentally damaging to attempt to do so, and second that we have too many people trying to live too well. The only way to keep on producing more people is to substantially scale back on material wealth. Again, this is very unlikely any time soon.

The concern around population isn't merely that there are too many of us, but rather how that many live. Very few people really believe that we should substantially scale back our modern society. Worse, I think too many people believe that all we need do is wheel in some solar panels and wind turbines and we can continue as we are. I don't see how we can do that, not if we also expect the rest of the world to share in first world lifestyles. We shouldn't believe that wind and solar are saviours of first world extravagance, we shouldn't believe that they are not harmful to the environment, and we shouldn't believe that the pursuit of renewable energy is somehow linked to both some kind of new socialism and environmental responsibility.

In the end, we simply have to step back a long way from the present lifestyle of the first world, because I don't see how we can find the resources to maintain that strategy (which includes the strategy of hoisting the rest of the world up to that level). Equally though, I can't see how we'd constrain global society from pursuing that strategy. Who sets the limits? Why would everyone agree to those constraints?

All that renewables are doing, really, is maintaining and building upon the broader strategy of exhausting our niche, which after all, is the entire planet.

Returning to the OP's questions, I think that firstly, it doesn't really matter whether we want to know or not - collectively we will always act as though we don't. And secondly, no. But what would be an effective replacement for capitalism? Some kind of socialism? In the latter case, unless we enforce constraints we are effectively saying that we should increase global prosperity which will lead to resource overshoot sooner. Wouldn't capitalism postpone this longer due to the essential inequality - fewer people have much? We'll still overshoot, it will just take longer.

I think that veganism (which is the more ethically based "flavour" of non-meat eating) is concerned primarily with pain and suffering. The argument isn't that pain and suffering only exist within farming but rather turns more on our involvement. It is the natural order for some animals to be eaten and some to do the eating. And of course, for many to suffer. Humans could, depending on circumstance, be the eaten and the eater. But we, more than any other animal, can determine our own circumstances. In that light, we have the choice, and this is where the ethical domain emerges - in the space where choice and natural order intersect. THAT is why we can choose not to eat other animals when possible.

To my mind, this means that there isn't some moral duty on us never to use or eat other animals, but there IS a moral duty to consider the circumstances. For someone such as myself, it is not particularly difficult to choose not to eat meat and hopefully that choice results in less pain and suffering. So that is my choice.