of course they loose their shit if you challenge it to any depth like this.
That’s a shame, I think it’s an interesting argument that opens some questions, so let’s challenge it a bit (somewhat ironic given the post, I know, but its just too intriguing).
Your position is basically that humans are the only species that has consciousness, correct? That means if you take a dog or chimpanzee or whatever and burn it alive, they wouldn’t feel a thing in your view because they’re not conscious? Just to make sure we are on the same page.
they speak about consiousness and it’s location like it has all been proven. They provide no papers. no proof. just how they feel about consciousness when talking about it.
How do you actually know that humans are definitely the only species that has consciousness and that other species are fundamentally incapable of it? I’d be very interested in the papers and proof or even just arguments for that.
As I see it, we even have the same fundamental issue with human consciousness. Where are the papers, what is the proof that all humans are conscious, or even just one human? I’m not aware of any hard proof.
You just know you’re conscious, and you assume from that that all other humans are too. But you can’t actually prove anyone else is conscious.
By your argumentation and standard of evidence, putting humans on factory farms would actually be fine too, as long as we don’t have hard proof that they are actually conscious.
But I don’t think it works for the following reason:
The argument “other animals are not conscious, therefore their treatment isn’t an ethical issue” relies on that definitely being the case. If there’s still a chance that they are conscious, it remains an ethical issue. You actually need hard proof.
The counter position “other animals might be conscious, so we must not (potentially) torture them by the millions/billions in case they are” doesn’t have that requirement.
The burden of proof lies where do don’t give the benefit of the doubt, not where you do.
if they can say consiousness exists with animals: i can say consiousness exists in plants too.
You could say that they might be conscious, sure. But raising animals takes a lot more animal feed than just eating plants directly, so industrially farmed meat would still be the most unethical choice either way.
We have to eat something, eating plants directly minimizes both animal deaths and plant deaths.
Even if only plants had consciousness and animals didn’t, factory farming would be still be the most unethical source of food.
I certainly had this feeling too when I had an ego death experience. Though I attribute that more to my mind being formed by evolution around an ego/actor, and when this ego is missing, the subconscious might have to come up with a plausible alternative to keep the brain circuits working/comprehend reality. I even thought in terms of “he” instead of “I” about “myself” (the person), but my consciousness felt like a separate universal “they” in this moment. Neat experience for sure.
But to me it still seems most likely that as life is entirely formed by evolution, and things like instincts, pain, memories, agency, emotions, reasoning, model of the world, personalities etc. have advantages for survival, they are selected for in their most basic forms, get more sophisticated over time and eventually coalesce into what we experience as consciousness.
So to me it seems very very likely that most animals have consciousness, with varying degrees of sophistication regarding those abilities. Some animals might even surpass the sophistication of humans on some of these abilities, if the evolutionary pressure for that was stronger for them than for us.
On plants I’m more sceptical because their behavior doesn’t need to be nearly as complex as that of moving animals for survival I believe, it can probably rely much more on “hardcoded” behavior. Although reality loves it’s exceptions and complications so who knows.
Yeah that is another view on that I guess.
To me theres still a big difference between harvesting a carrot and cutting the throat of a pig. But all aspects of living have an impact on the environment and animals and humans, to different degrees, of course. So I agree that we’re all guilty and that nobody is perfect, and that vegans aren’t automatically good people and meat eaters aren’t automatically bad people. Some vegans kinda forget that they also ate meat for many years without considering the harms and that they might still do other problematic things too so they really don’t have an excuse to look down on people.