Here, I amend
Blake:
Roomba Roomba, sanitizing might,
In the hallways of God's trite;
What immortal algorithm,
Did frame thy clever cleaning decision?
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Harry Baird wrote: ↑Tue Aug 15, 2023 12:16 amHere, I'll make it as easy for you as possible: let's take just a single example, the video I shared earlier which shows a herd of cows being released into a field after six months' of winter confinement in a shed. Turn off the sound, ignore the title, and just watch how the cows behave.
I described this behaviour as follows: "The cows run and leap vigorously". That description makes no reference to joy, suffering, or any emotion or mind, and nor does it imply any such things (nor their lack, either). If you object to the adverb "vigorously" in this respect, then we can leave it out.
"The cows run and leap" is a purely objective description of their behaviour.
Now, what is your (causal) explanation of that behaviour?
It seems to me that you might, just might, have to accept that Henry is not going to be influenced and swung over to the camp of understanding -- about animal life -- that animals are sentient creatures with wide ranges of, well,
feelings.
Sentience, when applied to human beings, always implies a distinguishing awareness:
1. Having sense perception; conscious: "The living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God's stage" (T.E. Lawrence).
But sentient when applied to other life forms, especially higher animals, implies more the capacity of exalted
feeling:
2. Experiencing sensation or feeling.
[Latin sentiēns, sentient-, present participle of sentīre, to feel; see sent- in Indo-European roots.]
Curiously, the root of the word sentient is found in an Indo-European word that refers to movement or going:
sent-
To head for, go.
sont-eyo-. send1 from Old English sendan, to send, from Germanic *sandjan, to cause to go.
Examples of words with the root sent-: assent, consent, dissent, godsend, presentiment, resent, scent, send, sense, sentence, sentient, sentiment, sentinel, widdershins.
To feel, to go, to have awareness on some level or another, perhaps on a scale, it is these traits that all living creatures share in common with each other. Did I just say something unequivocally true or, as Henry would say, an anthropomorphic anti-truth?
What
determines whether one holds to the former or to the latter view? There are, it seems to me, two unalike but parallel schools of thought, as one might call them: One of course is the science of today (where it seems Dubious is located), but the other is harder to locate but I think it is actually an evolution within religious thought itself. It is an awareness (we have not determined if it is an awareness of truth or a projection so let's put that aside for a moment) of the *commonality of all that lives*. That whatever is alive has arisen from a similar root. That all that lives arises out of the same *substance*. And even that Man's awareness -- his sentience -- is an amplified expression of a life-force that, by logical extension, does manifest and will always manifest in this unfathomable Universe.
However it is also true that this awareness has also a *poetic* or a *romantic* dimension -- and of course a sappy New Age expression.
But here is the thing: all creatures, and any creature that lives, will meet its end. A chicken, a pig, a cow -- these creatures live for a time but that life ends either unnaturally or naturally. To propose, for example, that a nation or the whole world cease to kill and consume creatures will mean that no domesticated creatures will ever come to exist! Therefore there will be no *frolicking cows* who kick up their heels when the feel the openness of the pasture and what seems to be a physical delight at being released from confinement.
It is not impossible, yet it is certainly unlikely, that humankind will cease to raise and consume creatures. Therefore, it is a question of the treatment of those animals while they are being cultivated. It seems
unquestionable to me that all living creatures feel misery when they find themselves in miserable conditions.
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