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MrFun
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of Iowa
Nov 2000
time: 23:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
That's completely disingenuous, and you know it (or if you don't, you haven't been reading my posts).
I could build a robot that writhed and howled in what looked like pain when you started breaking it. I could make it so fantastically complicated that it even looked like a person. It would not, however, actually be feeling pain; it would be triggering motors and speakers whenever certain electrical sensors were triggered. It's exactly the same way with foxes. With humans, however, our thoughts are so complex that they actually give rise to self-awareness. This is obvious, since you know you are self-aware, and that your brain is practically similar to other humans' brains, so other humans ought to be self-aware too. In addition, there are other people who have spoken of the concept of self-awareness without you telling them about it first, and the most reasonable conclusion is that they have actually experienced it, to know of it.*
There is no difference between the fox's pain and a plant growing towards the light. Neither involve consciousness, all are just fantastically complicated but NOT self-aware machines responding to stimuli.
(* Turing proposed the "polite convention" that anything that claims it is self-aware, is actually self-aware, since all evidence for sentience in another being, even another person, is by nature circumstantial.) |
Plants do not have a nervous system -- thus, they are not capable of feeling any pain whatsoever.
All species of animals, on the other hand, have a nervous system with which to feel physical pain. I can't believe you can make an overdrawn argument to claim that animals cannot feel pain.
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:18
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quote:
Originally posted by General Ludd
Robots can't be trained, they are built and programmed to a specific task. They are machines. |
Robots can be trained. You lose.
Moreover, animals are machines as much as robots. They are very, very complicated machines, but they behave mechanically.
quote:
What does it take to be self-aware? Answer my question. Tell me what it is that allows a human to "hear" and a dog not to.
EDIT: Or better yet, tell me how a dog doesn't hear. |
Dogs hear in the same way that your computer microphone hears. They do not hear, in their mind (not their brain, their mind), the sound.
When you see something, you don't just register a bunch of intensities. There's a part of you, your consciousness, that actually sees the image, this thing that is aware. A religious person would call it the soul. It's impossible to describe beyond that, and if you truly don't know what I'm talking about, you must NOT be sentient. I really doubt that, though, and think you're either being obtuse or really are just stupid.
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General Ludd
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Minion of the Dominion
Aug 2001
time: 05:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
quote:
Originally posted by General Ludd
Robots can't be trained, they are built and programmed to a specific task. They are machines. |
Robots can be trained. You lose.
Moreover, animals are machines as much as robots. They are very, very complicated machines, but they behave mechanically. |
And you seperate humans from animals?
quote:
Dogs hear in the same way that your computer microphone hears. They do not hear, in their mind (not their brain, their mind), the sound.
When you see something, you don't just register a bunch of intensities. There's a part of you, your consciousness, that actually sees the image, this thing that is aware. A religious person would call it the soul. It's impossible to describe beyond that, and if you truly don't know what I'm talking about, you must NOT be sentient. I really doubt that, though, and think you're either being obtuse or really are just stupid. |
So keep that in mind and explain to me the scenario I posted before.
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Dauphin
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Caught in a tuna net
Jan 1970
time: 05:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Do you understand the meaning of sentience and self-awareness? It has NOTHING to do with intelligence (well, they may be correlated in reality, but there is no necessarry connection). Sentience is the feeling of touching something, the fact that you see the signals from the nerves in your eye. It's consciousness. It's what religious people call the soul. Animals are no more sentient than rocks or robots. |
I don't know how you would formulate a test of sentience on your hypothesis. Take dolphins for example, they are self-aware, they recognise themselves in the mirror, recognise abstract concepts and understand languages of sorts. You're claim to accept other humans as sentient is based on similarity of brain structure, dolphins have similar but slightly less developed structures. Are they sentient? Are they close to sentient? How far do they have to go to pass your sentience test? Will they ever?
If human brains themselves are your only reliable test what about prehistoric-humans from 5,000-500,000 years ago or upto 5 million years ago. At what degradation of the human brain capacity would sentience no longer exist? Did evolution cause a gradual culmination into current sentience or a sudden switch with sentient humans mixed with non-sentient ones at some point. Could we indeed still be in that era with non-sentients being the deceptive norm. Theories abound that there are only 27 real people in this world afterall.
Edit - poor grammar
Last edited by Dauphin on 20-11-2004 at 04:54
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Immortal Wombat
Darwin claimed it actually, in The Descent of Man, and a quick google search brings up the Professor of Biology at Colorado University.
The trouble is that even if a fox were to claim it was self-aware, you wouldn't understand it, because it doesn't speak. Incidentally, according to your definition, a child up to the age of about 15 months is a valid target for hunting/torturing/aborting. |
Ah, I missed this, but I explained earlier why babies can be called self-aware - because they have practically similar brains to our own, which we know are self-aware, therefore it is a reasonable conclusion that they ARE self-aware (by the fundamental assumption that like causes produce like effects).
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GePap
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of the Big Apple
Nov 2001
time: 23:18
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quote:
Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Robots can be trained. You lose. |
People can be trained. So what?
quote:
Moreover, animals are machines as much as robots. They are very, very complicated machines, but they behave mechanically. |
HUman beings are machines if this is your line of arguement as well. Jesus....
quote:
Dogs hear in the same way that your computer microphone hears. They do not hear, in their mind (not their brain, their mind), the sound. |
Are you a neuroscientist? Have you done MRI's on dogs brains while they are undergoing auditory stimulation? Or have you seen studies thusly? Cause if you haven't, yet another BAM.
quote:
When you see something, you don't just register a bunch of intensities. There's a part of you, your consciousness, that actually sees the image, this thing that is aware. A religious person would call it the soul. It's impossible to describe beyond that, and if you truly don't know what I'm talking about, you must NOT be sentient. I really doubt that, though, and think you're either being obtuse or really are just stupid. |
Do you have any neurological evidence to back these statements whatsoever, evidence that wouldat least counter the observable every day evidence anyone with an animal, or who has ever seen an animal react has? Cause again, if you don't.....
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Kuciwalker
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of Schmooism
Feb 2001
time: 00:18
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OK, my definition of self-awareness/sentience (yes, I AM using those interchangeably). If you don't understand this, you are truly hopeless and you might as well shoot yourself for the betterment of the human race:
quote:
I'm using them both to mean the quality of actually feeling sensations. It's impossible to describe more clearly, really; it's that you actually see the image projected onto your retina, that you actually hear the vibrations in your eardrum. |
Basically, there is this thing that is aware of your sensations, not in the sense of a computer having it in memory, but actually perceiving it. A robot is not aware in this way of its sensory inputs.
About my personal thoughts on the origin of consciousness (not evolutionary origin, but causal):
quote:
We are machines. We, however, for reasons completely unknown, happen to be sentient machines. IMO sentience is an emergent property of matter - actually, an emergent property of simple calculation - but we can't really know right now. I think that if we simulated the motions of every particle in the human body in a computer, it would act exactly the same as an actual human body (i.e. there is no dualism or "external" soul that attaches itself to the body) and that the simulation would necessarily be sentient itself. |
Why I conceive of babies and fetuses in the third trimester as sentient:
quote:
Brain activity, and the fact that they are human brains. I am sentient, and my brain is practically similar to other humans' brains, therefore they ought to be sentient as well. In addition, sentience does not seem to depend on pure computational power, but actual constitution, so it makes sense that the brains of fetuses, once active, would also be sentient, because they have the same pattern as my brain. |
Why the nervous system is a ****ing IDIOTIC argument:
quote:
Foxes aren't aware of pain. Their brains sense it as an input, but is your basis or morality now defined based solely on the chemical mechanism by which the organism processes information? If I created a brain with five neurons, would it be equally protected? And by the way, fetuses have a brain. Are you absolutely against abortion as soon as any nervous tissue develops? |
Basically, using possession of nervous tissue as a metric is even more absurd that defining it based on the sequence of nucleotides in an organism's genome. What if we met some alien race that didn't have a biology like ours, and whose thoughts were in a biological system completely unlike ours? Why is your basis of morality chemical of all things?
Why simply avoiding pain or responding to it or whatever does not mean they are aware of pain in the sense of self-aware:
quote:
Because they are a fantastically complex machine designed to react in a certain way to certain stimuli. It is not aware of the pain, in the sense of self-awareness. A robot that backs up and turns around when it hits something does not feel pain when it hits an object. It is not aware of pain. It simply senses an input. |
And yes, people are also fantastically complex machines designed to react in certain ways to stimuli, but they are (obviously) self-aware, as I explained in the first and second quotes of this post.
And finally, I will not respond to ANYONE who doesn't tell me why abortion is OK but killing foxes isn't, and who doesn't tell me how we should punish animals that harm other animals. I'm sick of my conclusive points being ignored.
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20-11-2004 02:20
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