Tuesday, May 09, 2006

Sentience


Where I agree with the animal rights activists is that we must confront our species chauvinism

Fellow Progressive blogger Nunc Scio reports that another one of our deeply held chauvinistic beliefs has bit the dust.
Dolphins have names?

What is ironic is that there are those who insist that while animals have no sentience, artifical intelligence; man made computers/robots, can.


One of the oldest ideas in philosophy is that animals act in a machine-like fashion with no conscious thought processes of any kind. The more we find out about animals, the more this idea is disappearing. Evidence is growing that animals have far more cognitive abilities than has traditionally been believed - they are sentient creatures. Animal Sentience Conference - London 2005



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2 comments:

Graeme Stewart said...

This definitely has the potential to problematize some stalwarts of human existence...like, could you eat something that has a name? Now, I'm no veggie, but this stuff makes me vaguely nervous.

Good post, Eugene. Another conundrum for the collective mind to ponder

EUGENE PLAWIUK said...

My niece and nephews found that out the hard way they named the family ducks and chickens and then couldn't eat them. When you name it you anthropomorphize it and it becomes a little more 'human'. As shamans have known for centuries. Which is why during the rise of fuedalism in Christian Europe folks avoided naming animals, hence the term you dumb animal,dumb brutes, dumb beasts, which allowed them to brutalized the 'beasts'.