Confessions

[Arkilogue]

I hear ya...  When I worked commercial landscaping I had to blow parking lots clean before sunrise.  And I mean clean of ALL gravelly debris. So you end up with a line of grit, traveling across the lot like a slow but deadly rock and glass storm to the poor earth worms that were just out for their morning stretch. I felt bad for them, picked up each one I found and put them in the grass.

Sometimes I wonder about all the tiny little soil creatures for whom my random piss outside is the world ending Great Yellow Deluge.

That's sweet... I'm glad I repped you

I'm aware in this situation that there's a possibility that they don't have consciousness and the empathy that comes for them comes from attributing human emotions and agency to them. Are they complex enough to have consciousness or are they philosophical zombies? That is the (rhetorical) question. But perhaps since you could never know, the default position should be to assume that all animals, no matter what size, have consciousness. Maybe as long as it has to represent state, and self-as-centre-of-multiple-sensations that's all that's needed? Who knows.

I imagine it works very much the same way with less complex life forms with no "self" consciousness needed. The physiological "environmental" consciousness of the body itself squirts out reactive hormones due to external stimuli. Like if you just see a tiger stick it's head out of the bushes 20 ft and it locks eyes with you...your body is going to flood with adrenaline and cortisol.

I'd imagine what ever kind of electric feedback mechanism that serves as their rudimentary consciousness gets swept up in similar, fight or flight hormone storms just as surely as we do.