Author: Stevan Harnad

How multitudes of people
can gather to gawk daily
at these magnificent, miserable creatures,
all brutally wrenched
from their devastated families
and forced to perform round after round
of cheap Skinnerian circus tricks,
pitilessly imprisoned
for the rest of their wretched, ruined lives
in holding containers,
tormented day and night
by the bouncing echoes
from their own hopeless sonar cries,
food-deprived and “trained”
to do whatever it takes
to draw delighted cheers
from grinning crowds of humans of all ages…

Did it really require this revealing new movie, Blackfish, to open our eyes to the ugly, shameful fact that this, and all things like this, are wrong, horribly, unforgivably, wrong?

That we provide the mindless market for such heartless abuse, in order to make our children laugh, is as much a condemnation of the sociopathic spectatorship as of the merciless, mercenary management of sadistic sea circuses — and all their land counterparts.

Perhaps the most chilling anomaly is how the “trainers” — of whom some, clearly, “turned,” eventually, after years of having been willing accomplices to the abuse of these helpless animals — were themselves “trained” (by the management along with self-deception) to overlook the obvious, in exchange for the fees and the celebrity (“just following orders”? “being professional”?). It seems to have been various blends of venality and sensation-seeking, though some got into it naively, and then got attached to their prisoners and stayed so as to use what little leverage they had to make their fates less worse, rather than abandon them altogether. — Or maybe that was just what they said for the camera? (I hope not.)

But most macabre of all was that some professed to have become Seaworld trainers to fulfill a dream that Seaworld itself had instilled in them as a child.

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Tilikum’s punishment for having been savagely kidnapped and relentlessly abused for decades:

Solitary confinement
to provide sperm
for breeding more orcas
to be wrenched from their mothers
and put into entertainment servitude
for the rest of their miserable lives
to inspire more children
about the wonders of the sea

And if you have the courage
to face the cost of your lunch:

This is how it’s done
day in and day out
24/7
worldwide,
industrially

— and for ye “faithful,”
scripturally

If this does not make you a vegan,
you need to ask yourself whether you have a heart…

Anyone who replies that this is natural or justifiable
makes an equally good case for torture, rape, slavery and murder.

All in our genes. All practiced in self-interest.

But wait for the day when it is for you and yours
that you must plead for mercy
from the monstrousness you have ignored, tolerated and drawn upon
lifelong.

And from which you avert your gaze now…

“Samuel was less than a day old when he was torn away from his mother. He was a young jersey calf whose mother was kept continually pregnant in order to keep her milk production unnaturally high so it could be sold for human consumption. Although nature intended the milk for Samuel, none was afforded him. Samuel was penned alone, chained at the neck and unable to interact with the other calves.

“The day I found Samuel, he had been loaded into a transport trailer with many other young calves and taken to a Canadian livestock auction. But Samuel was very sick and should never have been loaded and transported. He was so sick, in fact, that he could not even make it through the auction ring.The auction workers dragged Samuel to the back of the auction and discarded him there with no food, water or medical attention. There he was left to die alone, just as he had lived alone.

“I saw Samuel buried in the straw with only his small face poking out and thought he was dead until he started convulsing. My first thought was to load him into my car and get him to a vet who could peacefully end his suffering but he was too far gone. Samuel died in my arms while I stroked and comforted him. Sometimes this is all we can do for the animals we find – provide them with the dignity, care and comfort that they’ve never been shown.

“Samuel is the hidden face of the dairy industry – one that profits off the milk of a mother who will never nourish her child. Veal calves are sickly, traumatized and lonely. Their mothers are forced into a life of production and are heartbroken, forced to endure an endless cycle of birth and loss.”

Source: Twyla Francois, director of investigations at Mercy For Animals Canada.

PHOTO: is of Samuel (R.I.P.) dying and discarded at a Canadian livestock auction

How can anyone with a shred of decency believe that deliberately causing suffering to the innocent creatures that are the symbol of Christ’s suffering can be the way to atone for Christ’s suffering?

The insightful March 8 essay on Hungary’s Self-Destructive Demons, by poet/journalist Thomas Orszag-Land described the complex and sinister relationship between the stunning success of Viktor Orban’s opportunistic megalomania and his unscrupulous exploitation of the unreconstructed cultural affinity of the Hungarian populace for the ugliest and most vicious forms of denial, scapegoating and xenophobia. 

Apart from a couple of points on which it (forgiveably) goes a bit over the top (about the potential for kingship and the triple “junk” quote), Orszag-Land’s March 8 essay is temperate, timely and telling, and has since been not so much overtaken as confirmed by events, with the self-ratification, by Orban’s supermajority, of the constitutional amendment self-indemnifyng Orban’s new constitution from oversight by the constitutional court.

Orszag-Land raises the interesting hypothesis that although Orban has successfully used his supermajority (as well as the pork-barreling of the electorate, party faithful and oligarchs) to entrench his power far beyond the possibility of reversal even under any ordinary electoral majority defeat by the (shamefully and self-destructively divided) democratic opposition, he may yet be undone by having profoundly alienated the only forces that can sustain the dictator of a small, poor country in modern times: either powerful international economic interests or the support of powerful surrounding nations.

And there is another potential contingency: Orban is not stable. He has already demonstrated himself to be a psychopath, has already been showing signs of mounting paranoia, is rumored to be under treatment for bipolar disorder, and seems to be less and less aware (or perhaps less and less in control) of the fact that Hungarian is translatable into any other language — and diffuses at lightning speed in today’s online era — so that his so far successful double-talk (in contemptuous jingo for his compatriots and sugary demagoguery for the rest of the world) may yet prove his undoing, impelling his hitherto intact cult following to jump ship out of self-interest, rather than to continue to sink with their leader, as his antics become more and more dissociated and pathological. 

Hungary is not, after all, North Korea (and not just because it lacks China to prop it up, come what may).

Vegans.

Bless them for abstaining from the horrors most people uncaringly impose on innocent animals.

But I wish they were less interested in trading tasty recipes than in righting animal wrongs.

After all, it’s because of the uncaring drive to satisfy their tastes — and not because of the needs of survival or health — that people keep imposing those horrors on innocent animals.

On 2013-02-18, at 9:09 AM, Consciousness Online [Richard Brown] wrote:

Hi Stevan, your recent comment (below) has not been approved. It is not relevant to the session. This session is not about the hard problem of consciousness (or the mind body problem). That debate has (more than) run its course in your session from two years ago. Thank you for you understanding.

Richard: Are you joking? Did you watch the video we were supposed to comment on?

This is getting a little ridiculous. I think your theoretical preferences are getting the better of your objectivity.

Of course this is about the mind/body problem. Of course it’s about the “hard” problem. What on earth else do you think it’s about?

I’ve just about had it now with this arbitrary dismissiveness.

And I don’t appreciate the remark about “more than running its course”.

Restore my commentary or kindly take me off the list and send me no more messages about “Consciousness Online.”

I don’t have the time to write focussed, substantive commentaries only to have them rebuffed because they don’t meet someone’s tastes or preconceptions.

Stevan

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COUNTING THE WRONG CONSCIOUSNESS OUT

Stevan Harnad

[Commentary on Dan Dennett on “On a Phenomenal Confusion about Access and Consciousness“]
Yes, there was a phenomenal confusion in doubling our mind-body-problems by doubling our consciousnesses.

No, organisms don’t have both an “access consciousness” and a “phenomenal consciousness.”

Organisms’ brains (like robots’ brains) have access to information (data).

Access to data can be unconscious (in organisms and robots) or conscious (in organisms, sometimes, but probably not at all in robots, so far).

And organisms feel. Feeling can only be conscious, because feeling is consciousness.

So the confusion is in overlooking the fact that there can be either felt access (conscious) or unfelt access (unconscious).

The mind-body problem is of course the problem of explaining how and why all access is not just unfelt access. After all, the Darwinian job is just to do what needs to be done, not to bask in phenomenology.

Hence it is not a solution to say that all access is unfelt access and that feeling — or the idea that organisms feel — is just some sort of a confusion, illusion, or action!

If, instead, feeling has or is some sort of function, let’s hear what it is!

(Back to the [one, single, familiar] mind/body problem — lately, fashionably, called the “hard” one.)

More prior commentaries here.

To comment further, please go to Philpapers.

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ILL-JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF
Organisms with nervous systems don’t just do what needs to be done in order to survive and reproduce. They also feel. That includes all vertebrates and probably all invertebrates too. (As a vegan, I profoundly hope that plants don’t feel!)

There’s no way to know for sure (or to “prove”) that anyone else but me feels. But let’s agree that for vertebrates it’s highly likely and for computers and today’s robots (and for teapots and cumquats) it’s highly unlikely.

Do we all know what we mean when we say organisms feel? I think we do. I have no way to argue against someone who says he has no idea what it means to feel — meaning feel anything at all — and the usual solution (a pinch) is no solution if one is bent on denying.*

You can say`’I can sorta feel that the temperature may be rising” or “I can sorta feel that this surface may be slightly curved.” But it makes no sense to say that organisms just “sorta feel” simpliciter (or no more sense than saying that someone is sorta pregnant):

The feeling may feel like anything; it may be veridical (if the temperature is indeed rising or the surface is indeed curved) or it may be illusory. It may feel strong or weak, continuous or intermittent, it may feel like this or it may feel like that. But either something is being felt or not. I think we all know exactly what we are talking about here. And it’s not about proving whether (or when or where or what) another organism feels: it’s about our 1st-hand sense of what it feels like to feel — anything at all. No sorta’s about it.

The hard problem is not about proving whether or not an organism or artifact is feeling. We know (well enough) that organisms feel. The hard problem is explaining how and why organisms feel, rather than just do, unfeelingly. (Because, no, introspection certainly does not tell us that feeling is whatever we are doing when we feel! I do fully believe that my brain somehow causes feeling: I just want to know how and why: How and why is causing unfelt doing not enough? No “rathering” in that!)

After all, on the face of it, doing is all the Blind Watchmaker really needs, in order to get the adaptive job done (and He’s no more able to prove that organisms feel than any of the rest of us is).

The only mystery is hence how and why organisms feel, rather than just do. Because doing-power seems like the only thing organisms need in order to get by in this Darwinian world. And although I no more believe in the possibility of Zombies than I do in the possibility of their passing the Turing Test, I certainly admit frankly that I haven’t the faintest idea how or why there cannot be Zombies. (Do you really think, Dan, that that’s on a par with the claim that one hasn’t the faintest idea what “feelings” are?)

*My suspicion is that the strategy of feigning ignorance about what is meant by the word “feeling” is like feigning ignorance about any and every predicate: Whenever someone asks what “X” means, I can claim I don’t know. And then when they try to define “X” for me in terms of other predicates, I can claim I don’t know what those mean either; all the way down. That’s the “symbol grounding problem,” and the solution is direct sensorimotor grounding of at least some of the bottom predicates, so the rest can be reached by recombining the grounded ones into propositions to define and ground the ungrounded ones. That way, my doings would contradict my verbal denial of knowing the meanings of the predicates. But of course sensing need not be felt sensing: it could just be detecting and responding, which is again just doing. So just as a toy robot today could go through the motions of detecting and responding to “red” and even say “I know what it feels like to see red” without feeling a thing, just doing, so, in principle, might a Turing-Test-Passing Cog just be going through the motions. This either shows (as I think it does) that sensorimotor grounding is not the same as meaning, or, if it doesn’t show that, then someone still owes me an explanation of how and why not. And this, despite the fact that I too happen to believe that nothing could pass the Turing Test without feeling or meaning. It’s just that I insist on being quite candid that I have no idea of how or why this is true, if, as I unreservedly believe, it is indeed true. It’s an ill-justified true belief. Justifying it is the hard problem.

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FEELING BY FIAT

@Richard Brown: “felt representing (i.e. consciousness) occurs when one represents oneself as being in some other representation in a way that seems subjectively unmediated… There is no equivocation here; the claim is that feeling (i.e. consciousness) consists in a certain kind of cognitive access. What’s the argument against this view? That there can be these kinds of representations without feeling? That is called begging the question.”

The argument against this claim is that it is an ad hoc posit: an attempt to solve a substantive problem by definition.

My critique is on-topic (access vs. feeling), the matter is far from settled, and neither your comments nor mine prevent Dan or anyone else from responding.

Much of what passes today for verse
is more for cruciverbalists
— stay: that just means lovers of crossword puzzles —
than seekers of sounds and sentiments
repaying the time to reflect and rehearse

Losing the ones
you love the most
loosens your desperate
bear-hug on life