Can I just say, and I'm just being honest...

[Edwardo Piet]

I do think animals have a lesser sense of self awareness and sentience as humans, but they definitely still do have it. As I said, sentience is on a sliding scale.

I agree but we both reach a point where an organism has no sentience, you've got to admit. You don't think grass or algae or cactuses have sentience do you?

And Rob talks of how animals are not so different from us. I agree if we're talking about mammals. But I don't think there's anything intrisically special about animals that makes them all sentient. If you go further and further back through the evolutionary line, there's no clear line you can draw for when the first animal existed. And if there was, what, so the first animal ever, even though it was almost entirely identical to its predecessor, had sentience on some level but the organism that was almost the first animal didn't? I find it hard to believe and rather arbitrary.

No, I think Rob also thinks that some animals are more sentient than others. I'm sure he thinks that a fish or a grasshopper is sentient and can feel pain on some level, but not to the same level as, say, a dog. And I'm sure he doesn't think rocks are sentient even though ultimately life came out of non-life. I doubt he thinks plants are sentient. Sure, plants don't have the ability to feel pain even if they were sentient.... but when I talk about going further and further back down one of the branches on the evolutionary chain to a point where it's an animal so primitive that its ancestor is almost an animal, and it's not an organism anywhere near complex enough to actually have the biologically required to feel pain yet.... what, so you give it the biology required to sense pain and it can suddenly feel the pain? So that would assume it was already sentient beforehand. So how far back down does the sentience go? Further back than the biological ability to sense pain? I think it's the other way around. The ability of an organism to be able to detect pain precedes the consciousness required to feel it. I don't think the feeling it is even necessary, it's just a side effect in complex organisms that, like consciousness in general, has no real function.

But then I'm an epiphenomenalist so it's no surprise that the conclusions that leads me to may seem bizarre to many people. But science is very supportive of epiphenomenalism, as no real function for consciousness itself has been in fact found by science, ever. And I reckon it never could. Because science doesn't test first person experience itself. Science is always a matter of people using first person experience to test external reality, including even another person's brain, or even their own brain. But science can't locate consciousness precisely in the brain, even though everyone knows it must be there. Because consciousness is an experience, something that is first-person and science tests third-person. There are no consciousness tests or way to scan a human or other animal's brain to test if it's conscious. We can test whether people are awake or asleep, or whether their brain is working or not working. But that's about as close as we can get on this matter of consciousness. We can't test whether a brain of a creature is conscious when it is awake, we just have to go from our own first person perspective and make an argument from analogy. We have to intuit that because we ourselves are obviously conscious as we are here experiencing our own consciousness, then surely other people who are so similar to us must be conscious for the same reasons, and then surely other primates must be because they're similar, and then other mammals, and so on. And we notice that neurons and neurophysiology are definitely highly relevant to consciousness... so then the argument is that the further back you go through evolution from our human standpoint, and the less neurophysiologically complex lifeforms become, the closer you get to the point where sentience developed from that neurophysiology. And I am simply suggesting that I think it developed in mammals at some point, as mammals are much more neurophysiologically advanced than reptiles, birds or fish. But I also believe octopuses (and some other cephalopods) are conscious, because they have 500 million neurons. But again, I could be wrong about birds, and birds may have the neurophysiology required to have developed the sentience to feel pain, but then that would just push my position further back. If birds are conscious, what about fish and grasshoppers?

I don't think serious questions such as these are questions that can be dismissed so easily by irrelevant scientific facts about biology that suggest the ability to sense pain but don't give evidence of any actual consciousness within the animal that allows them to feel pain. I think this is a seriously deep and interesting philosophical question, and not something that can just be dismissed as me simply being insensitive or whatnot.

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I wouldn't even call fish alive. They're just like little biological robots that taste nice.

"It's okay to eat fish, cuz' they don't have any feelings..."

Rats. It says the video is not available in my country.