>the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist behaviorism (e.g. John Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well over 50 years.
Maturana and Valera’s classic book Autopoieses and Cognition came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition, and even as a form of consciousness.
Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the way we mean it as recursive inner monolog—is coupled strongly to language.
Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger gets very close to this position. But at some point a quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem to me to be “unusual” to say the least compared to other species. (I watched the great movie “Arrival” again last night.)
My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the greatest of joys.
Thanks for the reading recommendations, that stuff sounds fascinating, and I'll admit that my reference to RCTs was perhaps an overly mean dig at overcorrection for methodological rigor, a tic I likely developed from my exposure to the pharmacological research world, which is in practice greatly stymied by hidebound institutional policies about what hypotheses can be considered and what experimental framings are considered evidence at all. Probably not an appropriate thing to apply to ethology, which I know a lot less about
>the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist behaviorism (e.g. John Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well over 50 years.
Maturana and Valera’s classic book Autopoieses and Cognition came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition, and even as a form of consciousness.
Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the way we mean it as recursive inner monolog—is coupled strongly to language.
Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger gets very close to this position. But at some point a quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem to me to be “unusual” to say the least compared to other species. (I watched the great movie “Arrival” again last night.)
My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the greatest of joys.