Author: Stevan Harnad

Fisher’s hypothesis (about quantum tunneling effects in biology) – probably false, but not absurd – concerns physiological functioning, as in photosynthesis.

But it has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness (sentience).

[And it certainly does not justify the pseudo-scientific lithium experiment with rats (an experiment that apparently even failed to replicate).]

Quantum physics, one of the most powerful and successful theories in the history of science, still has its problems, even paradoxes. Just as cognitive neuroscience has its problem: its paradox is sentience.

Churchill said (about Russia): “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.

Concerning quantum mechanics and consciousness, I would say that we cannot resolve a paradox (in one domain) with a paradox (from another domain).

Quantum computation (already a controversial field), if it turns out to be practical, could have a biological role – but already in photosynthesis (which does not enter consciousness…)

(One can draw one’s inspiration from anywhere, from anything, including having been relieved of depression by Prozac: the chemical effect on our consciousness may surprise us, as does any question about chemistry and consciousness; and if we struggle with the perplexities of quantum mechanics it can give us associative ideas: mysteries have affinities: that’s what, in other minds, gives birth to the soul, immortal and immaterial, to the omnipotent and omniscient creator and to the mysteries of transubstantiation and the trinity …)

There is no need for vegans to worry about protein; as you eat a wide variety of (organic) grain, beans, nuts, vegetables, greens and fruit) your own metabolism adjusts your tastes and preferences so what’s most important for your body will become the most tasty.

In all my years as a vegetarian (which is almost the same as being a carnivore because you are still consuming animal protein) my palate hardly changed from when I ate meat. My mainstay were dairy and eggs, plus some starch foods. I was not particularly interested in greens or beans or grains, etc. Now I love them, and I have even begun to cook, which I never did, all those years. And it’s not because I can’t get enough of the food I like, but because I now like so many more foods!

I think the key is animal protein: We are metabolically omnivores. We are capable of living on almost exclusively meat, if we can get it (carnivore mode). But we are also capable of living on exclusively non-meat (herbivore mode). And the biological “cue” for which mode we are in is animal protein.

I don’t think the cue is graded (i.e., I don’t think that the less animal protein you eat, the more appetite you have for vegetables): I think it’s more like an on-off switch between the two modes (which, for me, took 8 months to become perceptible): Once your body is getting no animal protein at all, the metabolic switch is set to herbivore mode, and both your appetite and your way of metabolizing what you eat changes (in my case, dramatically, because I could compare it with almost 50 years of being a vegetarian, which is just a form of carnivore).

The switch is not irreversible. We can start eating meat again and it (much more quickly) switches back. I think this has to do with our evolutionary history: availability of food varied seasonally, climatically and geographically (and we migrated a lot): we were opportunistic omnivores, and ate what we could. Sometimes many generations (or much longer) some of our ancestral populations had to make do with no meat at all, or, as in the frozen north, on almost nothing but meat. Our metabolism is adapted for both.

It’s also adapted for opportunistic theft, rape, murder, infanticide, genocide, domination, torture and enslavement.

But that’s no excuse for doing it when you no longer have to. And we no longer have to steal, rape, murder etc. today (and certainly not in the civilized, prosperous, law-based parts of the world).

And killing sentient organisms for food is one of the things we no longer have to do in order to survive and be healthy.

So if we keep doing it, it is — as with stealing, rape and domination — just because we feel like it, because we have cultivated a taste for it — and not out of biological necessity.

The young
think they seek it
but just for their own,
like the drunk and the lamp-post.
The key lies elsewhere.

If you and yours
are fed and sheltered,
safe and hale,
the meaning of life
— yes, life, yes, meaning —
is helping those who are not.I

Nor are the “those”
just kin and kind.
All living creatures who feel
can be hurt.
And most are;
and mostly by our kin and kind.

Nor is “do no harm”
enough,
for not-doing
is doing too.

There is not a monstrosity
we inflict on other kinds
that we do not inflict on our own.

But on our own,
we condemn it,
we’ve outlawed it,
and most of us
would never commit it.

Yet on the other kinds
we don’t just permit it
but most of us support it,
collaborate in it,
profit from it.

If the Golden Rule
that

It is as if OJ Simpson’s Dream Team were now ruling an entire nation. Quis custodiet? Not the populace. Not the EU. Hungary is not a rudderless ship: It is the unchallenged fiefdom of a sociopathic gangster. The democratic world needs to figure out — and put into practise — all means of constraining and combatting this potentially fatal exploitation of the vulnerabilities of democracy itself by rogue regimes. For the Orban phenotype is anything but rare among would-be power brokers. (There’s a homologue in the White House.) Once they discover that the democratic world lacks — or lacks the will to use — the means to protect itself, the Orbans and Trumps will sprout like toadstools all over the planet; the defeat of the CEU, and of the heroic efforts of its founder to make and keep society open, democratic, and free will be the historic harbinger of the triumph of the toadstools — if anyone is still doing history in the new Dark Ages…

About my interruptive/interactive quote/comment compulsion: Yes, it is treating a written text as a real-time conversation (in which you don’t normally hear the end till you reach the end).

Some (many) mea-culpas: Even in real oral conversations, I tend to interrupt before the person gets to finish, sometimes because I have already anticipated the finish or think I have (I’m of course sometimes/often wrong) and sometimes because I’m just impatient to reply (often because I’m afraid I’ll forget otherwise).

In my defence, on my own end, I don’t much speechify; I say my bit with minimal words, so as not to subject the other party to the kind of frustration I feel when someone is being long-winded. (I stop reading novels as well as monographs, too, when it’s obvious (or so I think) where they’re going, and it’s just words).

I think my interruptingness is also related in some way to my indiscretion, my saying things I shouldn’t say, divulging secrets, partly even a Trumpian hyperbole, stating things that I conjecture or wish were so as if they were fact. There is a definite impulsive/compulsive component to these ejaculations.

And of course the failure of open access and skywriting, which was specifically motivated by my belief that everyone was inclined and inspired to real-time interactivity, as I was — but instead turned out to be an olympic event at which I perhaps excelled but for which no one but me had any interest or appetite!

I tell it (or perhaps rationalize it) all here:

Harnad, S. (2003/2004) Back to the Oral Tradition Through Skywriting at the Speed of Thought. Interdisciplines.

(It’s against my nature, having said all this, to refer anyone to chapter-and-verse instead of just restating it simply and compactly on the spot, so I’ll say it: I thought the human brain (and thinking itself) evolved language for real-time, “online” exchanges at the speed of thought, not for the long, offline monologues that later supplemented it across time, space, and generations, in the form of writing and print.)

But it was just a fantasy, based on a compulsive quirk of mine.

‘Nuff said. Since then I have learned what I knew (as we all know) already, but had ducked for 50 years: It’s not about me (unlike this bit of self-indulgent self-flagellation).

Amia Srinavasan‘s critique of “Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and a Radical New Way to Make a Difference” by William MacAskill
is excellent, pointing out how much Effective Altruism (EA) simply takes for granted (e.g., capitalism itself, and the status quo).

But the worst is that EA is psychopathic — as psychopathic as Darwinian evolution itself: Evolution’s sole criterion is maximizing (“satisficing,” really) net survival and reproduction, and EA utilitarianism’s sole criterion is maximizing net utility. Both turn a blind, “rational” eye on collateral damage, including proximal collateral damage.

That’s not morality, it’s mathematics. And treating emotion as if it were just a vice or a distraction is not a virtue. In fact, it was (ironically) Darwinian evolution itself (the origin of sentience, hence suffering, hence all moral problems) that implanted empathy and compassion in mammals and birds (at least), probably in the adaptive service of reproductive success (in altricial K-selected species, at least, of which we are one). Without those traits we’d all be psychopaths (as r-selected, precocial species may be).

In the trolley problem, any mother who would not flip the switch to save her own child rather than another’s would be a psychopath. If it was for the sake of saving two children of another instead of her own child that she failed to flip the switch then she’d be an EA utilitarian — and a psychopath.

Altruism needs to be compassionate, not just “effective.” And charity begins at home (or it never begins at all). Nor would an uncharitable world be a hospitable one to live in: It would be rather like a zombie world. Surely an (emotionally!) weighted combination of EA and proximal compassion would be better than EA alone.

The other-minds problem

is the other mind’s problem

if you decide it doesn’t have a mind

and it does.

And it’s YOUR problem

if you are the other mind…

Other species

Like our feces

Montréalais et Montréalaises:
voulez-vous un RODÉO à MONTRÉAL
ANNÉE après ANNÉE?

Montrealers
Do you want a RODEO in MONTREAL
YEAR after YEAR?

Alors que plusieurs villes et États dans le monde bannissent le rodéo en raison de la souffrance animale qui en résulte, se tiendra à Montréal, dans deux semaines, la « première édition » du nouveau rodéo urbain destinée à souligner le 375ème anniversaire de la ville…

§§§ While several cities and states worldwide are outlawing rodeos because of the suffering they cause, in Montreal, in two weeks, there will be the “first edition” of a new “urban rodeo” to celebrate the city’s 375th anniversary…

La réputation globale de Montréal en matière de bien-être animal s’en trouvera assurément entachée.

Montreal’s global reputation in matters of animal well-being will certainly find itself stained…

Visiblement, le maire de Montréal ne s’en formalise pas :

Obviously the mayor of Montreal has no problem with this (video is in French):

Et qu’un cheval meurt lors d’une épreuve de monte extrême du même fournisseur de rodéos (St-Tite) trois mois avant son « rodéo urbain » ne le perturbe aucunement…

And the fact that a horse dies in a bronco-riding trial from the same rodeo producer (St-Tite) three months before his “urbain rodeo” does not trouble him either…

Grady, 6 ans, s’est fracturé la colonne vertébrale en raison d’une « zone de faiblesse » qui n’a pas été détectée au préalable, malgré les précautions que disent prendre les vétérinaires mandatés par le Rodéo de St-Tite. Si Grady n’avait pas été soumis au rodéo, il serait encore en vie aujourd’hui.

Grady, age six, broke his back because of a “weak area of his spine” which was not detected in advance, despite all the precautions that the St-Tite Rodeo’s veterinarians boast of taking: If he had not been forced to perform in rodeos, Grady would still be alive today.

NOUS AVONS BESOIN DE VOUS pour ramener le maire Coderre à la raison — en démontrant que le rodéo est insoutenable et illégal !
Merci de soutenir notre campagne de financement (voir ci-dessous)

WE NEED YOU to bring mayor Coderre back to reason — by proving the rodeo is untenable and illegal !
Thank you for supporting our funding campaign (see below)

Dear Sue & Will,

It was good to see you again at Fauna yesterday.

I just wanted to summarize the observations I made during the question session.

(1) I think you’re absolutely right that although consciousness seems to be increasing, the absolute number of animals beings needlessly hurt and killed is growing even faster (as is the human population).

(2) You are also right that the average half-life of vegan diets is about 3 months. Nevertheless, across the years, and even if we count only those who have been vegans for over a year, or even over 5 years, both their relative and their absolute numbers are growing. This does not negate (1), above, but I think it is some (slim) evidence that the animal rights movement is not a complete failure.

(3) But it is (1) that matters, and you are right that more strategies are needed so the problem stops growing and instead begins actually shrinking.

(4) On the citizenship strategy, which I certainly hope works, I have four thoughts:

(4a) I cannot see how the “sovereign nations” metaphor for wildlife living on their (shrinking) ancestral territory is likely to be more effective than the (unsuccessful) appeals against encroachment and on behalf of the protection of wildlife, either natural or endangered.

(4b) I also cannot see how the “denizen” metaphor for urban wildlife is likely to be more effective than the (unsuccessful) appeals for citizens to be kind to urban wildlife.

(4c) That leaves the “co-citizen” model for animals selectively bred and used by humans for meat, dairy, eggs, fish, fur, wool, service, pets and entertainment. Your proposal is to integrate them into human society as citizens with complementary rights and responsibilities. But the only species for which that model seems to have some potential is dogs, who have been selectively bred for a social dependency on humans. For all other domesticated species, the humane solution is surely to stop breeding them. And in view of the enormous risk of “collateral damage” to subsequent generations, I think that’s the humane solution for dogs too. Local humane solutions don’t scale, any more than humane dairy or oviulture scales. And I think the natural breeding “rights” of human-bred species pale beside the risks and suffering that indulging them would entail.

You suggested that the minimal success of the animal-rights strategy was because of its focus on diminishing and abolishing animal suffering, rather than a more positive incentive. But diminishing and abolishing animal suffering is not just a strategy: it is the goal. I son’t think we have gone anywhere near as far as it would be possible to go to sensitize the human population to animal suffering That appeal to human empathy is still, I think, by far the most promising path toward putting an end to the unspeakable horrors, about most of which most people are still not even faintly aware.

If Peter Singer did not succeed in solving the problem, he certainly helped increase awareness of it. I think you, Sue and Will, are also doing so; history will remember you for it, and the escape of future victims from the monstrous annual fate of today’s trillions of sentient creatures, once it comes, will also be due in part to your influential efforts.

Best wishes,

Stevan