11b. Harnad, S (2016) Animal sentience: The other-minds problem
Reading: Harnad, S (2016) Animal sentience: The other-minds problem. Animal Sentience 1(1)
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***EVERYBODY PLEASE NOTE: I REDUCED THE MINIMUM NUMBER OF SKYWRITINGS. BUT THE READINGS ARE **ALL** RELEVANT TO AN OVERALL UNDERSTANDING OF THE COURSE. SO, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT DO A SKYWRITING ON ALL OF THEM, AT LEAST FEED EACH READING YOU DO NOT READ TO CHATGPT AND ASK IT FOR A SUMMARY, SO YOU KNOW WHAT THE READING SAID — OTHERWISE YOU WILL NOT HAVE A COMPLETE GRASP OF THE COURSE TO INTEGRATE AND INTERCONNECT FOR THE FINAL EXAM.***
ReplyDelete*Mental states are felt states, and to have a mind means to have the capacity to feel. In a word: sentience.*
ReplyDeleteFeelings, unlike behavior are not observable. We can only be certain of our own feelings/mind, how do we know that other organisms are sentient too? We can only infer the mind by the observable and that is the other-minds problem. However, this is not a problem for our species because we know other members of our species have a mind. We can use language as a vehicle of our thoughts and feelings. We can also observe and even predict how one will behave based on their saying. Our mind-reading skills are good, “mirror neurons” probably play a role when we observe and feel. Nevertheless, the other-minds problem applies to other species because it is not as clear to us what feeling or thinking is for them especially when they are not mammals. Our scepticism of other organisms’ sentience can change how we treat them. If they are in fact sentient, it would have detrimental effects on them like fear and suffering.
When reading the paper, what struck me the most was Descartes' claim that animals don't feel anything. I kept wondering what brought him to making that claim, and the answer is nothing much? Descartes' biggest contradiction is the work he did to get to "the cogito" vs the work he did to claim that animals don't feel. In méditations métaphysiques Descartes goes through an entire experiment about blocking prior knowledge and any subjective experience (any sensorimotor input) to conclude "je pense donc je suis". It is the ONLY thing outside of mathematical proof by pain of contradiction that is certain. And yet, he needed nothing to claim that animals are not sentient and thus we can do whatever we want with them...
ReplyDelete“With humans we can rely on language and neural similarity; with nonhuman animals we must rely on behavioural and anatomical evidence alone.”
ReplyDeleteThis passage raises an interesting point about human attitudes toward animals. Some individuals, like Descartes and Key, make strong claims about animals based on their perceived power or intellectual authority, asserting what is “true” about animal experience. Others, who recognize their own limitations and approach with empathy—trying to imagine what it is like for a fish or a dog on an operating table—rely on behavioural and anatomical evidence to make careful inferences. This distinction begs the question: are we morally commanded to care for animals and encourage others to do the same, integrating true concern with the ethical precautionary principle? Or are we justified in acting based solely on what we think is best? Humans are limited to our own subjective understanding; apart from that, we are constrained in truly knowing what it is like to be another being. This limitation may also point to a higher moral law, suggesting a Creator or good God who models moral uprightness for us to emulate. Recognizing our limits is crucial, not only for respecting animal sentience, but also for how we relate to other humans in our world.
Hopefully this makes sense:
ReplyDeleteIf we 1. know ourselves that individually we can feel and 2. can infer well how others are feeling based off of our own perception of how our feelings manifest into our own behaviors, then what does that mean in terms of both the easy and hard problems in the sense that yes, we don't know WHY we feel, but we are able to infer how others are feeling because we apply what we know about how we feel?
Attempting to answer my own question after yesterday's class: We know directly that we feel, and we use the way our own feelings manifest in behavior (grounding?) as the template for interpreting others’ behavior. This helps with the easy problem of explaining how we predict and understand others’ states. But it doesn’t touch the hard problem: even though these self-based inferences work (obviously to an extent), they give us no explanation for why feeling exists at all. Specifically talking about humans in this case to avoid the OMP