No; please explain it again.

At this point, Bolga, you're just feeding the troll.

Don't give him an out lol; let him waste his time until he makes a meaningful contribution.

No point in trying to explain something to someone who won't even try to confirm or disconfirm whether they understand what you've already explained to them. Until he understands the problem of a stolen concept, any argument that depends on it will go right over his head. Either he just doesn't get it (I don't know how many ways we can explain the same thing before the light bulb comes on) or he was being disingenuous when he asked Gae Bolga to explain it again. The latter would be trolling, as has been pointed out.

There's only one way to find out: show me how it applies to the topic of consciousness. It does benefit me to keep you circling around definitions than to apply it; my argument stays safe as long as it's beyond the reach of these comments. So please, explain it to me again, what's a stolen concept?

If you were looking for a real discussion, you wouldn't care if your argument 'stayed safe'. You'd want to find out if it's wrong, and if so, how. I've learned to love finding out that I'm wrong about something, I'd rather actually be right about something than be wrong thinking I'm right.

What you've managed to do is convince some of us that you're trolling, and therefore not worth putting in effort to refute. That is, no matter what we say, we won't 'find out' anything.

I'm not as humble as you; or perhaps not as passive. You also have to understand I'm very confident in the things I've studied and learned. So when members say they know animals have consciousness and that there's all this evidence, I'm not exactly looking to get taught anything by them.

I'm more interested in understanding people's thought processes in that conclusion, and see where I can help them understand the problem better.

If you were prudent, you might realize that it's the conclusion that you wish to remain safe - not the argument. Stolen concepts threaten the safety of their conclusions by requiring the truth of the thing they're attempting to disprove.

So, for example, the scientific consensus that non human consciousness exists cannot be disproven by reference to facts of that same scientific consensus. Those, John, are facts of B. If your position A is that B is not true - that we do not know and perhaps cannot know whether an animal is conscious, then the non facts of a false B will not help you to establish as much.

If you drink from the cog sci well, you're stuck with the contents of the water. This is the genetic relationship between your objections and the thing to which you object.

Saying they 'know' is reaching, saying that the available evidence points supports that conclusion and there is no available evidence that points away from it justifies a tentative conclusion that at least certain animals have some degree of consciousness and are capable of experiencing things like attachment, pleasure, and suffering. The level of evidence you seem to be demanding for the consciousness of animals is also unavailable for humans; you have experience that you are conscious, but all you've got for the rest of us is our behavior and brain states.

The most obvious justification is that you have no particular reason to think you are so unique that you are the only human who possesses consciousness. However, there is no particular reason to think consciousness is absolutely unique to humans, either; so why accept evidence that other humans are conscious but reject evidence that other species are conscious?

A chimp or gorilla and some other animals can learn that their reflection is a reflection of them. That behavior was once thought to be unique to humans, as once was altruism and self-sacrifice, and tool use (and tool-making). The more we learn about animal behavior, the more we learn that our behavior isn't so unique, but more complex. That these things are not indicative of the same processes that we experience in our minds to some degree requires an assumption of the uniqueness of specifically human consciousness that isn't justified.

(February 17, 2020 at 1:57 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Saying they 'know' is reaching, saying that the available evidence points supports that conclusion and there is no available evidence that points away from it justifies a tentative conclusion that at least certain animals have some degree of consciousness and are capable of experiencing things like attachment, pleasure, and suffering. The level of evidence you seem to be demanding for the consciousness of animals is also unavailable for humans; you have experience that you are conscious, but all you've got for the rest of us is our behavior and brain states.

The most obvious justification is that you have no particular reason to think you are so unique that you are the only human who possesses consciousness. However, there is no particular reason to think consciousness is absolutely unique to humans, either; so why accept evidence that other humans are conscious but reject evidence that other species are conscious?

You're the only one (and perhaps Peebo) that has taken a more neutral stance. The others have spoken in absolute terms that animals have consciousness and that there's evidence. I've tried my best to keep your stance separate from the others. That said, it would be more appropriate to say the evidence is consistent with, or doesn't contradict, consciousness; not that it points to or away, supports or opposes, consciousness.

I also agree that the evidence is not available for humans; which is why those who study consciousness refer to the behavioral "correlates" of consciousness (BCC) or the neural "correlates" of consciousness (NCC), not the behavioral or neural "determinants" of consciousness, etc. Such correlations are possible for humans because he have language, and we can communicate (presumably) our consciousness to others, and correlate it with behavior or neural activity.