(Balance!) Consciousness, identity, OBEs... (Identity)

by dhw, Monday, March 14, 2011, 13:17 (4792 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My dog can never have this discussion with me (I know he doesn't talk).-He just goes round telling his mates he can never have a proper discussion with you because you don't speak his language!-Thank you for the book review of "The Moral Lives of Animals" (and also for the extremely interesting Horgan article with follow-ups). Despite the reviewer's - and your own - general scepticism, he is forced to make a significant concession:-"Despite having begged the question of human exceptionalism at the start—by dismissing the sense that we are different as mere "Darwinian narcissism"—Mr. Peterson does develop a provocative case for the existence of a broadly shared evolutionary imperative that under pins human moral instincts. Among his better-chosen anecdotes are vivid illustrations of the social mechanisms by which primates and other group-dwellers mediate access to mates, food and other resources. Vampire bats, strikingly, remember which members of the group have shared a regurgitated blood meal in the past and know who to return the favor to. It is hard to argue with his proposition that the powerful emotional saliency moral issues have for us, and their connection to serious matters of social organization and conflict—sex, territory, possessions, reciprocity, kinship—point to a hard-wired evolutionary adaptation of group-dwelling animals."-We tend to forget that animal societies preceded our own and laid down the principles that govern our own. We also forget that most animal societies have a leader, generally recognized because of his/her outstanding qualities (unlike some human leaders I could mention). The matriarch of the elephant herd, for instance, often has to take difficult decisions. She is not on automatic pilot.-I certainly wouldn't argue with the reviewer's subsequent qualification concerning our human ability "to weigh abstract notions and hold ourselves accountable to moral ideals" and "to have thoughts about thoughts and to perceive that other minds exist and that they can hold ideas and beliefs different from one's own", but it bothers me that he and you take this to mean a lack of "real" consciousness in animals. It suggests that the elephant matriarch is not aware of her choices, and that animals generally are not aware that they are hungry, in pain, frightened, grieving, in danger. The next logical step is to say that since they are not aware that they are suffering, they are not suffering....(If this were true, of course, they would not seek food, try to escape, or hide). BBella suggests there must be a "dual aspect to human consciousness that, as far as we know, isn't found in other beings". I think animals have just such a dual aspect, but we have a third layer, and maybe even more: we are conscious of what we feel and do, we are conscious of that consciousness, and we can even consciously analyse our consciousness of our consciousness. I don't think there is any disagreement between us here, but I baulk at the suggestion that the consciousness of animals is not 'real'.