Philosophy Now Forum

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 5:59 pm

I disagree then that your and our position as conscious, self-aware, morally-capable entities gives us rights to abuse other forms of life.

I never said we have a right to abuse animals. Funny how that you think I did, or that a right to abuse animals is all you teased out from my posts.

I assert that consciousness and moral awareness imply, involve and necessitate more than non-abuse, they demand and require a fully responsible attitude and relationship.

And I say, in context, all we owe ourselves is to be wise stewards and cultivators of resource...it's in our best interest.

Harry Baird wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 5:45 pm

My best guess...you think that it is possible to be conscious (aka sentient), and to experience, and to feel, without having a self

As I say: Feeling is not enough. With meat, feeling is purely an electrochemical event. It's the equivalent of a ERROR message on your computer. Literally, there's no one there to experience the feeling, to contemplate it.

consciousness is subjective, implying a subject, that is, the self ("person"/"soul"/"mind" on your terms) which is conscious.

As I say: I am not merely or only conscious.

an experience entails an experiencer

A security camera in a parking lot is conscious, it perceives, and, if fitted with motion sensors, it reacts. But there's no one in there. It records and forms no opinion. It records but doesn't see. It tracks motion but is incapable of interest. It records the good samaritan as he gives a stranger a car battery jump but it feels no warmth'. It records a rape in the parking lot but experiences no outrage.

The security camera is no different than most if not all non-human life. It's a machine.

On my terms, then, given that you deny that non-human beings have a self, they by definition - given your denial - would not (could not be) conscious/sentient.

I think I have a very narrow definition for sentience/consciousness compared to you. Yours is far broader.

More to the point, how do you distinguish yourself from the promissory materialists...

The promissory materialist sez mind is a product of brain. He can't tell you how brain produces mind. Never mind he's been at it for 50 years and is no closer, today, to an explanation, than he was five decades back (as fact, he's further away from a material explanation, today, than he was 50 years ago). He promises, though, he and his will explain it all...soon.

...given that you deny agency to our fellow biological beings, and on what basis do you deny that agency?

I've made no promises. I deny Cletus the chicken is a free will with natural rights, and I'm only bein' slightly snarky here, becuz he he doesn't lead the great chicken revolution against his two-legged slavers. He creates no gray or black markets of goods or, more importantly, ideas to compete or foment dissent. He doesn't grouse to himself about his slavery. He has no concern for himself when the farmer comes up with an axe.

In short: Cletus does nuthin' a free will would or could do. And he doesn't even have to be hoodwinked, like we must be, to act against his own interests. Literally there's no one there to hoodwink. He's meat.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:09 pm I never said we have a right to abuse animals. Funny how that you think I did, or that a right to abuse animals is all you teased out from my posts.

And I say, in context, all we owe ourselves is to be wise stewards and cultivators of resource...it's in our best interest.

Becuz most if not all of that feeling life are not free wills -- not persons -- and have no moral claim to themselves. They're meat. Truly they are resources to be cultivated or squandered. We can treat them humanely but have no obligation to.

With meat, feeling is purely an electrochemical event. It's the equivalent of a ERROR message on your computer. Literally, there's no one there to experience the feeling, to contemplate it.

They're due none; we have no moral obligation to them.

And we treat them humanely. It's a matter of sympathy/empathy, not morality.

And I say only free will have natural rights. Most if not all animals are not free wills; they're bio-automata. The ecosystem is a heat exchange as is the whole of Creation. We, free wills, matter: everything else is our backdrop, our stage, our resource, our world. Ours.

I grabbed a few of things you said that -- I admit -- jangled in my ears.

Frankly, most meat production involves a good deal of *abuse*. I say that not as a PETA activist but because it is true. So *animal abuse* is the standard practice in larger scale production.

I think it is quite different on a small farm and where people live in closer association with their animals. They raise them, and from time to time they kill them, but then more are produced. It is a more respectable cycle. It also does not seem to involve the abuse (cruelty is perhaps the word) that I am pointing to.

You recognize good stewardship as opposed to bad stewardship but you also use the word squandered which could have other connotations.

To say *we have no obligation* to treat them fairly does not accord with an ethic of good stewardship.

I'll only say that you say contradictory things. I don;t feel blame-worthy for the confusion you create with seemingly sloppy statements.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:57 pm A security camera in a parking lot is conscious, it perceives, and, if fitted with motion sensors, it reacts. But there's no one in there. It records and forms no opinion. It records but doesn't see. It tracks motion but is incapable of interest. It records the good samaritan as he gives a stranger a car battery jump but it feels no warmth'. It records a rape in the parking lot but experiences no outrage.

The security camera is no different than most if not all non-human life. It's a machine.

A security camera is not in any sense conscious, nor sentient. Not on any level. Neither is a Roomba.

I had an odd experience one. I lived in a country region in Panama years back. When I left my house to take walks a neighbor dog made a sport of chacing me (and all who passed by) and nipping at my heels. I did not like it at all. So one day I took a rock with me and when the dog got close enough I let him have it. It hit him squarely in the read quarter and it was not a small rock. The dog ran back behind his house yelping.

There were other dogs in the pack. And a boxer saw what happened, heard the yelp of the wounded dog, and on its face appeared a look I can only describe as compassion and sympathy. It was very distinct. The boxer then ran after the other dog as if to console it.

I cannot verify what the boxer felt, but what I saw impressed me. I realized that a dog can feel things, and feel compassion, and perhaps many other things.

To compare it to a machine -- like a roomba or a security camera or a mere mechanism -- simply does not fly. It is a false assertion.

most if not all non-human life

Now that is likely true. Since most life is plant-life and insect life. But many vertebrates are of a higher order.

i believe that either humans come back as doggos when they die or doggos have souls. i have seen doggos with so much personality and quirkiness about their character that they cannot possible be just aristorlean machines. I've seen dogs smile, I've seen em laugh and tease and bullshit around like they're people who are doggos becuz they were somehow downgraded when they died but are still human just in a doggo's body with no opposable thumbs or language. like they can't just say 'hey I've got a soul and am conscious like u, i just can't do as much shit as u or explain anything'. 

Another theory is that doggos have been endowed with souls through their interacting with humans. Like over the last ten thousand years, domestic doggos have developed consciousnesses and self awareness and depth of character epidemiologically by being human's pets and subjected to the complexities of life with humans. This might mean that we were once alien's pets when we were monkeys and became human becuz of our interacting with em, just like us with doggos.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 7:57 pm

I'll only say that you say contradictory things. I don;t feel blame-worthy for the confusion you create with seemingly sloppy statements.

As I say: people hear what they wanna hear, understand what they wanna understand.

As long as you keep substituting your meanings for mine what I post will flummox you.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 8:06 pm

A security camera is not in any sense conscious, nor sentient. Not on any level. Neither is a Roomba.

Is a wasp conscious?

I had an odd experience one.

I'm a country boy. I've known a few dogs, cats, and horses that seemed like free wills -- like persons -- to me. It's entirely possible they were. It's equally possible I anthropomorphized the lot.

Most dogs, cats, horses, and all sheep, geese, chickens, fish were, however, machines, reacting meat.

To compare it to a machine -- like a roomba or a security camera or a mere mechanism -- simply does not fly. It is a false assertion.

I can't agree. They're bio-events. No one lives there. They're empty and no different than a Roomba.

Alexis Jacobi wrote:

iambiguous wrote: I revealed only what I presumed a "serious philosopher"/"pedant" of your ilk would actually be foolish enough to believe.

What are the things that a “serious philosopher/pedant of my ilk” believe (foolishly)?

Well, basically that one can discuss the moral and political and religious conflagrations of the day largely up in the didactic/pedantic intellectual clouds.

Alexis Jacobi wrote:If you provide me an outline — a list — I will then be able to comment on each point.

A list? Start here: https://www.procon.org/

Then pick one.

My point is there are those who insist that, using the tools of philosophy, one can arrive at the optimal -- most rational -- frame of mind. Whereas I suggest that down through the ages there have always been "conflicting goods" being contended. And that these individual convictions are acquired far more from points of view derived existentially from the life that one lived out in a particular world historically and culturally. And, as well, in a world teeming with contingency, chance and change. And that the Benjamín Button Syndrome is entirely applicable to the is/ought world in turn.

Then this part:

After all, what can you really know about the life I've lived and how my own personal experiences predisposed me existentially to embody particular moral and political prejudices. About the same as what I can know about your life, your personal experiences, your moral and political prejudices rooted existentially in dasein.

Which, again, is why religions and philosophies are invented: to convince ourselves that, either God or No God, there is a font "out there" that allows us to anchor "I" in an overarching sense of meaning and purpose.

Again, go ahead and pick one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

And here you are with IC, henry and others basically mocking them for not thinking exactly as you do about all of this.

You all actually do believe that of all the One True Paths to Enlightenment that there were, are and will be, your own really is the optimal frame of mind!!!

And that above all else you need to agree that there is in fact the One True Path.

Although with you [as with phyllo] I'm still unclear regarding just how religion plays a part in allowing you to embrace your own rendition of objective morality. That and the part where in regard to your interactions with blacks and women and homosexuals and Jews, you make a distinction between yourself and the Nazis.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: If you are unsure don’t you think you need to become certain?

On the contrary, that frame of mind no longer works for me. Why? Because I'm no less fractured and fragmented myself regarding them. Instead, I've managed to think myself into believing that in a No God world -- my own subjective rooted existentially in dasein assumption only -- an objectivist invents God or deontology or ideology or biological imperatives or one or another Ism, in order to comfort and console himself. How? By being able to anchor the Real Me in the Right Thing To Do.

Then back to these...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_r ... traditions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_p ... ideologies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... philosophy

...guys and gals. They accomplished that too. Only it's their own One True Path and not yours.

Does Phyllo hold tangible beliefs that you can list, and that he can verify by agreeing or disagreeing with your assessment, or do you blend various people together into a pastiche against which you then argue in your inimitable style?

Again, I'm just not sure what he believes in regard to connecting the dots existentially between religion and morality. With me however No God = moral nihilism.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: What then is my “rendition of objective morality”? You refer to it, but can you define it without immense projection of your own content?

You tell me...given a particular issue and a particular context in which you at least attempt to connect those dots between morality and immortality.

Again, that is the whole "for all practical purposes" point of religion for me.

Or, sure, some prefer the "serious philosophy" that those like henry quirk and Harry Baird exchange on this thread.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: In what ways — I refer to things I’ve written on this forum — have you concluded by interactions with Blacks, women, homosexuals and Jews? Are you referring to the “pastiche person” of Satyr, Ecmandu, Alexis (and others?) or are you actually referring to me? This clarification is important.

Look, we all know that when interacting with someone virtually, online, we never really know for sure who this person is. Or what their motivation and intention is.

I'm just asking you to explore your own views on blacks, women, homosexuals and Jews down out of the intellectual clouds. You are in a community interacting with them. You are in a position of power such that sustaining what you construe to be the "best of all possible communities" is within reach. Okay, there's how I imagine the Nazis here. Now, how would your community be different?

In other words, getting as far removed from this sort of thing...

Alexis Jacobi wrote:What do you wish to discuss — again as specifically as possible — about how my metaphysical conceptions bear upon how I may view race and race-difference; the status of women; attitude about homosexuality; and about Jews and/or Judaism?

...as possible.

Alexis Jacobi wrote:You should I think lay out what your views are since you seem to establish a polarity.

My views are drawn and quartered. I think different, ofttimes conflicting things about them at different times. I'm pulled and tugged ambivalently in opposite directions time and again given "here and now"/"there and then" assessments of genes and memes. I'll see this or read that today and think one thing. And then something else a week later. I'm just not sure anymore.

Alexis Jacobi wrote:Are you a sexist? Are you a racist?

Yeah, in some ways I think I'm both. As a young man I was virulent racist and sexist and homophobe. Jews never really came up in my own white working class community. Now, I was once a staunch Marxist and an even stauncher feminist. But not anymore. Not even close. The arguments I fiercely rejected as an ideologue I'm more ambivalent about now. Like in noting to VT that I share many of her own complaints about transgenders. I'm considerably more conservative about things "here and now"...guns and capital punishment and animal rights. But mostly I'm still fractured and fragmented. Convinced that, as I suggest of everyone else, I came to acquire particular moral and political prejudices about the particular world around me. And that there is no deontological assessment available to "serious philosophers".

Alexis Jacobi wrote: These appear to be issues of concern for you. Why? Why do you continually refer to Nazis? Is your view that anyone, in any culture, who has what I infer are unacceptable ideas about women, homosexuality, race-difference or about Judaism (or Judeo-Christianity) more or less sympathetic to Nazism?

The Nazis encompass moral and political objectivism taken to its very extreme. The color of your skin, your gender, your sexual orientation, being a Jew etc, could literally become a matter of life-or-death for someone.

That's my point about the dangers of objectivism. Indeed, for some like IC, the consequences can include Hell itself. On the other hand, I'm also rather blunt about the consequences of moral nihilism. They include the amoral global capitalists...those for whom everything revolves entirely around a "me, myself and I"/"show me the money"/"dog eat dog"/"survival of the fat cats" mentality.

And then the reality of the sociopaths among us.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 5:06 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 2:41 pm

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 2:35 pm Participation in my “topic” will involve responding, openly and fairly, to this:

Right after you "participate" in my question, which I asked first.

Then we'll talk about other things, if you can be reasonable. Otherwise, pound sand.

I talk about what I desire to talk about.

So you won't even answer one basic question? Then you're not "participating," no matter what nonsense you spout about that.

Pound sand.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 8:53 pm Is a wasp conscious?

Insects are way down there on the consciousness scale. They are sentient but extremely primitive. But at a structural level (cell complexity, etc.) they function similarly to us and all animals. They are extraordinarily complex and incomparable with any human machine, however complex.

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 8:53 pm As long as you keep substituting your meanings for mine what I post will flummox you.

I respond to what I read. Substituting meanings? Certainly not. Reading unclear and contradictory statements, yes. Open to your corrections, certainly. There is no advantage in deliberate misreading and that is not my intention.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:06 pm
So you won't even answer one basic question?

You will respond to what I tell you you must respond to. You do not make any demands. You had those rights, you forfeited them.

Do better, earn rights.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:29 pm

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:06 pm
So you won't even answer one basic question?

You will respond to what I tell you you must respond to.

Hilarious. Dude thinks he's God.

No, Chuckles, I will not. Ain't happenin'. Ain't no reason it should, seein' as you don't answer mine.

But if you ever answer my question, I'll consider entertaining yours.

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:35 pm Hilarious. Dude thinks he's God.

No, but think about it: I do not argue *for God*. Therefore I cannot act like God. What I argue for is that man, a man, take responsibility for himself. I make that demand on you. If you don't wish to, it's no skin off my nose.

I say that you are entirely irrational in what you believe. You arrive at it through irreason. And I tell you that what I gather and what I glean about *higher consciousness* cannot be proven to you or to anyone. It is either evident to you, intuitionally, or it is not.

I define what the issue is here. It is that you are not a reasoning man. You are an irrational man playing a farce.

Getting more clear?

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Wed Jul 19, 2023 12:31 am

Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:35 pm Hilarious. Dude thinks he's God.

No...

Yes. You imagine you can speak things into existence, when they are not so.

Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 11:20 pm

henry quirk wrote: ↑Tue Jul 18, 2023 8:53 pm Is a wasp conscious?

Insects are way down there on the consciousness scale. They are sentient but extremely primitive. But at a structural level (cell complexity, etc.) they function similarly to us and all animals. They are extraordinarily complex and incomparable with any human machine, however complex.

Describe wasp consciousness/sentience. What is it a wasp does that sets it apart from a Roomba: tell me.

Is consciousness/sentience confined to biological systems?

Mebbe the best place to begin: define consciousness/sentience.