This center cuts off awakeness, not (just) consciousness. Inactivating the claustrum seems to put the subject into an immobile trance that is not sleep (which is an active dynamical state) but a kind of âsuspended animation.”
But consciousness means feeling â feeling anything at all. It is not (just) awakeness.
If something could “cut off” feeling while leaving âdoingâ intact (moving, talking, etc.), then it would make us into the Zombies that we would have been if we were not conscious. (Now that would be a real âon-offâ switch!)
But there is no such center, or switch. Because consciousness is much more fundamental and pervasive than mere awakeness.
And for some reason that no one can understand or explain, there (probably) cannot be Zombies â at least not with human-scale (or probably even any biological-scale) doing-capacity. To be able to explain how and why that is the case would require solving the mind/body problem (the âhardâ problem).
By the way, like claustrum inhibition, general anaesthesia too cuts of awakeness but it also induces a lot of other accompanying changes in state along with it. (Maybe, if it is not harmful, claustrum inhibition could be used for surgery instead of pharmacologically inducing sleep or coma?)
And local anaesthesia merely cuts off sensation (which also happens to be felt): It makes the stimulation of the anesthesized location unfelt (but of course it leaves all other feeling intact).
As was brilliantly done recently to free a dog locked in a car in the heat by mobilizing a large number of people in the area via a cellular and Facebook, a global network of animal-lovers should be set up to alert people in any area immediately of any abuse witnessed: mistreatment, abandonment, dog-fights, etc.
The Internet, instead of helping to democratize and integrate has furnished extremist sects with an unprecedentedly powerful weapon for recruitment, segregation and destruction.
âanimals that provide us with healthy, life-giving food deserve not to be subject to torment and agony and immeasurable miseryâ
— Daniel Payne, “Why You Should Eat âHumaneâ Meat,” The Federalist, June 24 2014
Agreed.
So too do animals who do not provide us with healthy, life-giving food deserve not to be subject to torment and agony and immeasurable misery.
No living, feeling creature deserves to be subject to torment and agony and immeasurable misery — perhaps not even those who have subjected others to torment and agony and immeasurable misery.
But neither does any animal deserve to have its life taken to feed humans if it is not necessary for the survival and health of humans.
Nor is it possible to deprive a living, feeling creature of its life humanely, any more than it is possible to rape someone humanely.
Euthanasia is a way to end a life of torment and agony and immeasurable misery humanely.
But the needless slaughter of healthy, helpless animals is not euthanasia â nor should it be called humane.
At best some slaughter can be called “less-inhumane” than slaughter that causes torment and agony and immeasurable misery â just as rape without strangulation can be called “less-inhumane” than rape with strangulation.
But unnecessary life-taking is not and cannot be humane.
[Note: The following comments are based solely on the two 3-minute video segments linked below. Professor Chomsky has since replied that he has written a lot more on the subject of animal rights; that he does consider that animals have rights (though not the same ones as humans), and that he has supported animal rights movements for years. He considers species-destruction to be the most severe attack on animal rights by far, and one in which we are all complicit in our daily habits and decisions (travel, heating, etc.); it is accordingly one of his highest priorities. Professor Chomsky also points out that some animals are afforded some legal protection (e.g. in animal experimentation). But the animal slaughter that concerns Professor Chomsky most appears to be natural environment destruction rather than the suffering and slaughter of animals bred for that purpose. Though not a vegan, Professor Chomsky is opposed to factory farming.]
Noam Chomsky is a scholar and an ethical thinker for whom I (and countless others) have boundless admiration and respect. He is in many respects the moral conscience of our planet and our age.
Although Professor Chomsky has sympathy for the cause of animal suffering, it is not his highest priority (and he stresses that we are constantly having to make decisions about moral priorities throughout our lives).
Perhaps because he assigns them a lower priority or urgency, however, some of the details of Professor Chomsky’s views on the animal question do not seem to have undergone as deep and rigorous an analysis as his views on the ethical questions to which he assigns a higher priority:
“Rights” & Responsibilities. Professor Chomsky states (as have others), that in order to have certain “rights,” an individual must also have responsibilities — and animals do not have responsibilities.
It is certainly true that animals do not (and cannot) have responsibilities. Not even a trained seeing-eye dog can be literally said to have responsibilities.
It is not clear, however, whether what we mean by having “rights” — either in law or in ordinary language — necessarily entails anything about having (or being capable of having) responsibilities (although in practice the two are often linked).
Professor Chomsky himself gives an example: human infants. (Professor Chomsky admits — without further comment — that according rights to human infants even though they have no responsibilities is “speciesist.” The same point could be made about the rights of the severely handicapped.)
Harming Animals. But this semiological concern need not deter us. It is not substantive. We can refrain from using the word “rights” at all here, and speak only of the responsibilities (obligations) of humans:
We can agree to make it illegal for a human to harm another sentient (feeling) being intentionally except if it is necessary for the survival or health of a human.
(This would be much the same as making it illegal to kill someone, exculpable only if it was necessary for defence.) For animals, this would not yet be ideal, but it would be a night-to-day improvement over their lot today.
This also covers the (trivial) case of insects (which many others, too, have invoked as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the notion of animal rights): It’s alright to kill mosquitos or flies to protect people from bites or health hazards. Yet harming even insects wantonly or for pleasure can and should be unlawful too, and there is nothing absurd or ridiculous about that.
“Personhood”. Professor Chomsky does not discuss this topic in these 2 videos, but similar semiological points have been raised about attempts to accord animals the status of “persons” under the law. Yes, describing animals as persons is at odds with what we mean by “person” in ordinary language. But the law often uses words differently; for example, a corporation is a “person” (with rights and responsibilities) under the law.
Again, however, nothing substantive is at issue. Animals would gain the same legal protection if we agreed to make it illegal for a human to harm another sentient (feeling) being intentionally except if it is necessary for the survival or health of a human. Both “rights” and “personhood” can be left unmentioned if it causes confusion or opposition.
Decisions. As to personal choices: A lion has no choice about being a carnivore. It cannot survive or be healthy without eating other sentient (feeling) beings. Human beings (being omnivores) can. And they can choose not to eat animals, just as they have chosen not to murder, rape, have slaves, or subjugate women — and have accordingly outlawed it.
In most of the US and Europe today, it is feasible and easy to be a vegan, and not consume animal products. (The “opportunity costs” are small, and vanish once one has been doing it for a while.) Choosing not to eat meat at all is not like choosing to renounce all automated transport in order not to add to one’s carbon footprint.
Priorities. Last point: Although individuals can indeed decide their own moral priorities, it is nevertheless a fact that humans are now protected by law from being harmed by humans, but animals are not; only some special kinds of harm to animals under special conditions (such as laboratory experimentation) have some restrictions on them (minimal ones, minimally monitored or enforced).
âIt is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.â Craig & Mangels (2009)
Rollin, B. E. (2009). Ethics and euthanasia. The Canadian Veterinary Journal, 50(10), 1081.
Rowan, A. N. (1999). Cruelty and abuse to animals: A typology. Child abuse, domestic violence, and animal abuse: Linking the circles of compassion for prevention and intervention, ed. FR Ascione & P. Arkow, 328-34.
When I teach cognitive science and we discuss the Turing Test, I point out that the Turing Test is not a trick or a game. It is a scientific research programme (reverse-engineering) for explaining how the mind works, by designing a system that can do everything that a real person with a mind can do â so much so that it is indistinguishable (for a lifetime) from a real person with a mind to a real person with a mind.
But to bring it home to the students what it really means to pass the Turing Test, I pick out someone in the class, midway through the course, when we all know one another, and ask everyone to imagine that I now reveal to them that this person is in fact a robot who was created in MIT 4 years ago. My question is: would they now feel that it was all right to kick that person? Almost everyone always says no, it would not. And then I ask them why not? And they say that they have no way of knowing that it would not hurt that person, even if they were a robot. I then point out to them that they have no way of knowing with one another either, and that thatâs the whole point of Turing indistinguishability.
And then I ask them: would they kick their dogs? And if not, why is it all right to do incomparably worse to countless calves, cows, pigs, chickens â and, yes, dogs and cats â every minute of every day in order to keep enjoying our carnivore pleasures rather than just satisfying our herbivore needs?
Scholars and scientists are becoming increasingly involved in this question for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. Since the epochal book of Peter Singer in 1975, not only philosophers but social scientists, biologists, environmental scientists and food scientists have generated a sizeable empirical and theoretical literature on all aspects of human/animal relations, culminating in the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness by a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at The University of Cambridge in 2012:
We declare the following: The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective [feeling] states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds , and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
In other words, animals feel. To give an idea of what is at issue, I would like to try to reduce the problem of the human treatment of non-human animals to a few basics that most of us can agree about. The first and most important one is that humans are animals too. The second is that all animals with nervous systems feel. They are not insensate lumps of matter. The third is that ethics and law â what is right and wrong to do â are predicated on the existence of feeling: In an insensate world there would still be natural laws (laws of motion, gravity, electromagnetism) but no such thing as morality, or laws of conduct, or right or wrong, because if nothing feels, nothing matters.
Now, although there is no suffering that we inflict on non-human animals that we do not inflict on humans, the vast difference is that the suffering we inflict on humans is seen as wrong by most decent people worldwide â and it is also against the law. Not so for animals. They are not protected by the law and most of us are not only unaware of their agony in slaughterhouses but we are actively sustaining it as consumers. Most of us believe (1) that meat is obtained humanely, and (2) that it is necessary for our survival and health. Both of these beliefs are profoundly, tragically and demonstrably wrong. Reducing and eventually abolishing the gratuitous suffering that humans are inflicting on animals is hence one of the most urgent moral imperatives of our age.
But even normal human beings have needs â indeed so do non-human animals. For example, they have to eat. And in nature, eating always entails a conflict of interest between predator and prey. Carnivores eat other animals, even though their prey feel and suffer, because otherwise the carnivores suffer. They cannot survive otherwise. So there is the familiar Darwinian struggle for survival between predators and prey.
Herbivores have to eat too, and they too are predators, but their prey â plants â though they are likewise living organisms, are not feeling organisms. They do not have nervous systems. They are living matter, but insensate matter. So the survival needs of carnivores necessarily entail that they cause suffering to other feeling creatures, whereas the survival needs of herbivores do not.
What about our own species? We are omnivores, capable of thriving healthily on either a carnivorous or a purely herbivorous diet. Our ancestors no doubt ate meat, because they had to: there was not enough herbivorous fare for survival. But then we invented agriculture, and it became possible, in principle, to thrive, healthily, on purely herbivorous fare. However, we have not yet taken that route, and the question is why?
The worldwide March Against Slaughterhouses on June 14 2014 is intended to open the eyes and hearts of decent people worldwide, to the enormity of the agony of innocent, helpless creatures in slaughterhouses, to the fact that their suffering is unnecessary, and, to the great urgency of adopting laws to protect them.
We are planning a study on Israeli attitudes to animal suffering and Israeli attitudes to Palestinian suffering. Please do not assume that the two are dissociated till the findings are known.
It is a great puzzle why some Nazis were (allegedly) concerned about animal suffering, since most Nazis were sociopaths, who are unmoved by any sort of suffering. And sociopaths are known to be cruel to animals (as well as people).
My guess is that some of the motivation for the Nazi public campaigns in support of animals was ideological and decorative — something woven into the fabric of Nazi extremism, along with an idealization of motherhood and children.
That does not impugn support for motherhood or children either.
Nothing of the sort. Really passing the Turing Test would require designing a system that has real, lifelong verbal capacity, indistinguishable from a real pen-pal, not just fooling an arbitrary percentage of interrogators in a series of 5-minute exchanges!
At the beginning of his 1950 paper Turing had written:
Turing: â[A] statistical survey such as a Gallup poll [would be] absurd [as a way to define or determine whether a machine can think]â (Turing 1950)
Taking a statistical survey like a Gallup Poll â to find out people’s opinions of what thinking is â would indeed be a waste of time, as Turing points out. Later in the paper, however, in a throwaway remark that is merely his personal prediction about progress in attempts to pass his Test, he mentions the equivalent of a statistical survey in which 30% of interrogators will be successfully fooled for five minutes:
Turing: “I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers… [to] play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.â (Turing 1950)
No doubt this party-game/Gallup-Poll criterion can be met by today’s computer programs — but that remains as meaningless a demographic fact today as it was when predicted 64 years ago: Like any other science, cognitive science is not the art of fooling some or most of the people for some or most of the time! The candidate must really have the generic performance capacity of a real human being — capacity that is totally indistinguishable from that of a real human being to any real human being (for a lifetime, if need be!). No tricks: real performance capacity (Harnad 2008).
Turing was not only the co-inventor of the computer and the code-breaker of the Nazisâ Enigma Machine, thereby helping the Allies win World War II, but with what came to be called the âTuring Testâ he also set the agenda for what would eventually come to be called âcognitive scienceâ: the science of explaining how the mind works.
Turingâs idea was simple: Stop worrying about what the mind âisâ and explain instead what the mind does. If you can design a system that can do everything that a person with a mind can do â and can do it so that people cannot tell it apart from a real person â then that system will have passed the Turing Test, and the explanation of how that system works will be the explanation of how the mind works.
But the lionâs share of the enormous research agenda proposed by Turing for cognitive science is getting the system to be able to do everything a person with a mind can do. Testing whether people can tell the candidate apart from a real person only becomes relevant at the endgame, once the system already has our generic performance capacities. And we are nowhere near having designed a system that can do everything a person with a mind can do. Not even if we restrict the test to everything a mind can do verbally. (The real Turing Test will of course have to be robotic, not just verbal, because what we can do is not just what we can do with our mouths! But lets set aside for another discussion the âsymbol grounding problemâ of whether computation alone can indeed do everything the mind can do.)
It should be obvious from all this that the Turing Test is not â and never was â about fooling anyone, let alone fooling some people, some of the time. It is about designing â indeed âreverse-engineeringâ — a system that is really able to do anything an ordinary person can do, any time, as long as you like, indistinguishably from the way a real person does it. Nothing about 5-minute tests and percentages of judges that think the candidate is or isnât a real person (although obviously eventual success can only be achieved by degrees).
The Turing Test has captured the imagination of the general public partly because of our interactions with computers that are able to do more and more things that only people with minds had been able to do. Another reason has been the growth in the number of science fiction books and movies about computers and robots that have â or seem to have â minds. But the biggest reason for the fascination is the âother minds problemâ itself â the very problem that the Turing Test is meant to resolve:
We are not mind-readers. The only one I can know has a mind is myself; weâve known that since at least Descartesâ famous âI think therefore I am.â For all bodies other than my own, the only way I can infer whether they indeed have a mind is if they can do what minds can do. I canât observe other minds, but I can observe what they can do. So Turingâs real insight was that Turing-testing is — and always has been — our only means of mind-reading. Hence once we have designed a system that can do anything a person with a mind can do, indistinguishably from a person with a mind, not only will we be in no better or worse a position to know whether that system really has a mind than with any other person, but we will come as close as it is possible to come to having explained how the mind works.
But thatâs certainly not where we are when we have a system that can fool 30% of people for 5 minutes. And Turing certainly never said, implied or intended any such thing.
The Internet, instead of helping to democratize and integrate has furnished extremist sects with an unprecedentedly powerful weapon for recruitment, segregation and destruction.
On: “