Thursday, April 4, 2013
We talked in class about pets and about the passages in Fingarette that made Confucius seem more or less an animal hater. I am not a pet loving person and i found it interesting the various things that animals could do that we humans couldn't. I also found it strange and fascinating that animals do have rituals of their own. This i think shows that animals do have li and are such, are important. The question I was and still fascinated about is the idea about if animals do have consciousness?
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I know there can really never be hard evidence that animals do have consciousness, but in my opinion they do. We are having a similar discussion in my Animals in Lit class and it's a hard question to reach a conclusion on. I think they have consciousness because they are individuals and have unique personalities that I can't seem happening if they were only automatons. Of course their are arguments against this, but I know my dogs are different from each other and even my bunny has it's own personality that I don't think could be present without consciousness.
ReplyDeleteWe have just about as much evidence that many animals are conscious as that other people are. Not sure we need any harder evidence than that.
DeleteI thinkn they do have conciousness also, but they are not self concious. That is they are not, as far as we know, capable of reflection as much as we are.
ReplyDeletePerhaps not, Raj, though I suspect self-consciousness comes in degrees, and that many animals have significant degrees of it. One trivial example: unlike, say, lizards, chimps can recognize themselves in a mirror.
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