RE: Can I just say, and I'm just being honest...
March 27, 2018 at 2:33 pm
(This post was last modified: March 27, 2018 at 2:34 pm by Edwardo Piet.)
(March 27, 2018 at 2:09 pm)Losty Wrote: I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?
I don't think science addresses consciousness much. Unless I'm missing something. Science talks about neurophysiology and brains but no one knows for sure where to draw the line between how much a brain needs to be developed before something is conscious. The question "How advanced does an animal's brain need to be neurophysiologically before we can consider it to actually have a consciousness rather than merely behave like it does from the perspective of people who anthropomorphize it?" I think such questions are more philosophical than scientific. Science can study brains and find real data about how advanced a brain is and what the brain is capable of, but whether that brain is actually advanced enough to have its own first person perspective seems more of a question for philosophy than science because despite the fact that scientists know that consciousness must reside somewhere in the brain, no scientist has ever been able to locate it. We only know consciousness from our own perspective, and we understandably rationally infer that others similar to us must have their own perspectives, but how far back down the evolutionary line you have to go back before you get to a creature that isn't conscious... no one really knows that. Anyway, that's my take on it.