Are there actually neuroscientists who dont believe that most invertebrates, fish, etc. have lowercase-c consciousness, an internal subjective experience of the world? Is the alternative that they are just reflex machines? Why wouldnt we make the opposite assumption - that animals that have a complex enough nervous system to run a whole body thats responsive to their ecosystem are "conscious" until proven otherwise. But what would the point be of proving otherwise? I guess im just deeply uninterested in semantic games that exclude most of the animal kingdom from the assumption of mere subjectivity.

Re: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01144-y

I dont feel like you need sophisticated arguments or evidence to suggest that the ant foraging through your kitchen has some internal sense of what its doing, whats its experiencing, even if you dont believe they have a fully reflexive self-reflective memory and humanlike conception of self. Its a much more interesting question to me to ask what they do experience than what they don't experience, and I dont know what the negative assumption gets you except for perpetual surprise that all animals are more sophisticated than that assumption.

@jonny the whole question is are we as a society interested in a paradigm that would make killing, eating or harming animals in any way non-ethical

although we're pretty sure people are conscious and still treat them as shit, so I don't know what's at risk even

@albi
Yeah, right. Consciousness seems like a really bad and unsubtle way to draw those lines

@albi @jonny I don't really see a way around the reality of having to consume other organisms for survival, unless we find a way to become autotrophic. (In which case we should hope matter/energy itself is not conscious, or else we'd be back at the same quandary.)

@albi
@jonny

i think this is the thing. it's just a sloppy encoding of "humans are special (made in god's image, conscious, smart, have free will, etc), so we get dominion over the earth and its inhabitants" logics into a cogsci framing.

re: humans being seen as conscious but still treated like shit... denying the attribution of cognitive abilities/experiences to people is a pretty typical maneuver for oppressors to make when justifying their actions. there's so many parallels to draw between these sorts of animal consciousness inquiries and historical justifications of racial/gendered oppression.