Animal Consciousness

By -
This big beautiful fellow flapped confusedly around my porch light for a while tonight as I read Bosanquet:



I have seen some people (Dawkins?) ask, "How could you think these creatures are conscious, given how easily they are confused by something as simple as a porch light?"

I ask, "How can you think something that is not conscious can be confused at all?"

Has anyone ever noted a confused rock? A confused cloud? A drop of water that has made a mistake? Mistakes and confusion are marks of consciousness, not signs of its absence!

Comments

  1. Ken B11:47 AM

    Doesn't sound very Dawkinsy to me to be honest.

    Siri makes mistakes. Mistakes are characteristic of calculation and inference, not consciousness.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah4:19 PM

      Siri's programmers make mistakes. Siri has no purpose of its own, and so is incapable of its own mistakes.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more