Chattering of Ignorance

Another cog in the unreliable watch of Duncan's "Brain Trust" (they really do call themselves a "Brain Trust") asks:

Skɛptək Sædərəst  Stëve Sïmels, blog malignancy • an hour ago
Who's denying that animals have consciousness?

And this is a guy who I believe pretends he's a scientist.  Though I expect it's something like computer science.  A jumped up programmer.

It was a very widely asserted belief among biologists and behavioral scientists up till quite recently that animals are not conscious or where not conscious in any significant meaning of the word. I would say when I was in college it was the official, enforced and taught position of academic scientists on the issue. I'll mention the widespread atheist-materialist-scientistic assertion that human consciousness is, also, illusion, a remnant of "folk lore". 

In fact  it was so wide spread an orthodoxy that a number of scientists in 2012, knowing that even by their own claims that recent science can't support the old line felt it necessary to issue  a Declaration on the topic, a declaration against the previous orthodoxy on that point.

ARE animals conscious? This question has a long and venerable history. Charles Darwin asked it when pondering the evolution of consciousness. His ideas about evolutionary continuity – that differences between species are differences in degree rather than kind – lead to a firm conclusion that if we have something, “they” (other animals) have it too.

In July of this year, the question was discussed in detail by a group of scientists gathered at the University of Cambridge for the first annual Francis Crick Memorial Conference. Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, spent the latter part of his career studying consciousness and in 1994 published a book about it, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul. 

The upshot of the meeting was the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which was publicly proclaimed by three eminent neuroscientists, David Edelman of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, Philip Low of Stanford University and Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology.

The declaration concludes that “non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”

My first take on the declaration was incredulity. Did we really need this statement of the obvious? Many renowned researchers reached the same conclusion years ago.

The declaration also contains some omissions. All but one of the signatories are lab researchers; the declaration would have benefited from perspectives from researchers who have done long-term studies of wild animals, including nonhuman primates, social carnivores, cetaceans, rodents and birds.

I was also disappointed that the declaration did not include fish, because the evidence supporting consciousness in this group of vertebrates is also compelling.

There are still scientific sceptics about animal consciousness. In his book, Crick wrote “it is sentimental to idealize animals” and that for many animals life in captivity is better, longer and less brutal than life in the wild.

Similar views still prevail in some quarters. In her recent book Why Animals Matter: Animal consciousness, animal welfare, and human well-being, Marian Stamp Dawkins  at the University of Oxford claims we still don’t really know if other animals are conscious and that we should “remain skeptical and agnostic… Militantly agnostic if necessary.” [Yeah, she was married to Richard Dawkins before he married Lalla, sort of not surprising]

Dawkins inexplicably ignores the data that those at the meeting used to formulate their declaration, and goes so far as to claim that it is actually harmful to animals to base welfare decisions on their being conscious.

I consider this irresponsible. Those who choose to harm animals can easily use Dawkins’s position to justify their actions. Perhaps given the conclusions of the Cambridge gathering, what I call “Dawkins’s Dangerous Idea” will finally be shelved. I don’t see how anyone who keeps abreast of the literature on animal pain, sentience and consciousness – and has worked closely with any of a wide array of animals – could remain sceptical and agnostic about whether they are conscious.

You have to wonder why someone as smart as Marian Stamps Dawkins wouldn't realize that it's far easier to not care about the welfare of animals if they're unconcious automata (see Descartes and his live and no doubt agonizingly painful vivisection of his wife's pet dog*) than if they are acknowledged to be conscious. Some of the smartest people can also be the most monumentally stupid ones.

You also have to wonder at scientists who, witnessing obvious purposeful behavior in even single cell creatures, including such activity as hunting, parasitism, migration, the exchange of bodily fluids, etc. who explain those as something other than a result of consciousness, of self awareness.   I know when I was in college we were taught those were unconscious behaviors which were supposed to, somehow, arise out of "DNA."  That is still the basic dodge that materialists will go to to deny the obvious existence of such basic aspects of consciousness as choice, for no better reason that freedom cannot be shoehorned into their material deterministic ideology, or faith, really.

And since I also mentioned the philosophical denial of animal consciousness,  something which came into mainstream scientific thought by one of the founders of modern, mechanistic science, Descartes,  I'll include this from the article on its extreme consequence, Eliminative Materialism from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosphy.

Nevertheless, contemporary eliminative materialism—the sort of eliminativism that denies the existence of specific types of mental states—is a relatively new theory with a very short history. The term was first introduced by James Cornman in a 1968 article entitled “On the Elimination of ‘Sensations’ and Sensations” (Cornman, 1968). However, the basic idea goes back at least as far as C.D. Broad's classic, The Mind and its Place in Nature (Broad, 1925). Here Broad discusses, and quickly rejects, a type of “pure materialism” that treats mental states as attributes that apply to nothing in the world (pp. 607–611). Like many future writers (see section 4.1 below), Broad argued that such a view is self-contradictory since it (presumably) presupposes the reality of misjudgments which are themselves a type of mental state.

Apart from Broad's discussion, the main roots of eliminative materialism can be found in the writings of a number of mid-20th century philosophers, most notably Wilfred Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, Paul Feyerabend, and Richard Rorty. In his important 1956 article, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Sellars introduced the idea that our conception of mentality may be derived not from direct access to the inner workings of our own minds, but instead from a primitive theoretical framework that we inherit from our culture. While Sellars himself regarded this theoretical framework as empirically correct, his claim that our conception of the mind is theory-based, and at least in principle falsifiable, would be influential to later supporters of eliminativism.

In articles such as “Mental Events and the Brain” (1963), Paul Feyerabend explicitly endorsed the idea that common-sense psychology might prove to be radically false. Indeed, Feyerabend held that practically any version of materialism would severely undermine common-sense psychology. Like many of his contemporaries, Feyerabend argued that common-sense mental notions are essentially non-physical in character. Thus, for him, any form of physicalism would entail that there are no mental processes or states as understood by common-sense (1963, p. 295).

Like Feyerabend, Quine also endorsed the idea that mental notions like belief or sensation could simply be abandoned in favor of a more accurate physiological account. In a brief passage in Word and Object (1960), Quine suggests that terms denoting the physical correlates of mental states will be more useful and, as he puts it, “[t]he bodily states exist anyway; why add the others?” (p. 264). However, Quine goes on to question just how radical an eliminativist form of materialism would actually be, implying no significant difference between explicating mental states as physiological states, and eliminating mental state terms in favor of physical state terms. He asks, “Is physicalism a repudiation of mental objects after all, or a theory of them? Does it repudiate the mental state of pain or anger in favor of its physical concomitant, or does it identify the mental state with a state of the physical organism (and so a state of the physical organism with the mental state)” (p. 265)? Quine answers this question by rejecting it, suggesting there is no interesting difference between the two cases: “Some may therefore find comfort in reflecting that the distinction between an eliminative and an explicative physicalism is unreal” (p. 265).

One thing is certain, if these giants of atheist-materialist-scientism wanted to discredit consciousness in human beings, they certainly did in animals.  I will advise you to go look up Paul and Patricia Churchland (cited in the article) to see the circular rat hole that junk will get you into.

Geesh, Ducan, considering your "Brain Trust" consists of pretty much all college grads, it combines extreme conceit with extreme ignorance in a really impressive way.  Only it doesn't impress the way you'd want it to.  It's more of a symptom of what happened to education in the late 20th century than anything to be proud of.    But it's not my fault if they don't bother reading about stuff before they bloviate on it.  You should know that, their refusal to read your old 300-400 word posts was the reason you gave up writing, isn't it?

*  You have to wonder if it wasn't an act of cruel hatred against the poor dog's keeper.  The more I find out about Descartes the more of a sociopathic monster he seems, though he was hardly alone in that. Regarding life in mechanistic terms is probably a guarantee to produce various forms of recreational and vocational cruelty of the most vicious kind.   I don't think his attitude towards animals was unrelated to his worship of mathematics as the key to absolute knowledge about the physical universe but that's a longer piece.   I don't think it's unrelated to the psychotic thinking of people like the Churchlands.