From: Rafal Smigrodzki (rafal@smigrodzki.org)
Date: Wed May 07 2003 - 12:31:19 MDT
Greg wrote:
> On Tue, 6 May 2003, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
>> ### But animals have no perspective, they are only animals. If they
>> were sentient, they'd be persons, and obviously we couldn't hunt
>> them for fun.
>
> So it is only ignorance that prevents you from opposing
> hunting. Interesting.
### Enlighten me. What do you know, that I missed, and landed in this mess
of deer-disparagement?
--------------------------------
>
> I gather you are either a creationist or some sort of secular
> rationalizer for anthropocentrism - that sentience, intelligence,
> awareness, feelings, etc., all arose magically and all-at-once,
> outside of any evolutionary pathway, in _homo sapiens_ alone.
### I seem to recall the discussion we had on wta, about fish and their
brains. You believed that the presence of a paleocortex would be enough to
postulate sentience on structural grounds. That is pretty magical, I can
tell you. It's like saying that sentience and awareness is almost
everywhere, a deism of sorts.
Humans are the only organism known to me, with well-verified sentience.
Other creatures have mostly humble beginnings of sentience. A few, like
chimpanzees, might be getting pretty close on some counts (which is why I
would oppose chimp-hunting until we know more about sentience, even if
chimps do not seem to be very honest), but sentience is a complex and
nuanced property, which took a long evolutionary time to develop in little
steps, and most creatures don't have enough of it to be persons.
It's all pretty clear and logical, once you do some neuroscience and
neurology, you know.
Rafal
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