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- Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
- Path: sparky!uunet!haven.umd.edu!darwin.sura.net!news.Vanderbilt.Edu!ctrvx1.vanderbilt.edu!diwadkva
- From: diwadkva@ctrvx1.vanderbilt.edu (Vaibhav A. Diwadkar)
- Subject: Re: Searle on animal consciousness
- Message-ID: <24JAN199317172344@ctrvx1.vanderbilt.edu>
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- Sender: diwadkva@ctrvx1.vanderbilt.edu (DIWADKVA)
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- Organization: Vanderbilt University
- References: <1993Jan24.024230.5977@sophia.smith.edu> <dpn2.232.727891709@po.CWRU.Edu>
- Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1993 23:17:00 GMT
- Lines: 31
-
- In article <dpn2.232.727891709@po.CWRU.Edu>, dpn2@po.CWRU.Edu (Damien P. Neil) writes...
- >In article <1993Jan24.024230.5977@sophia.smith.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
- >>Searle says that "it seems to me a well-attested empirical fact
- >>that dogs are conscious." [The Rediscovery of the Mind, p.74.]
- >>I haven't read much about animal consciousness, and I would
- >>be interested to hear the opinions of various philosophers on
- >>the topic. Is it as uncontroversial as Searle implies?
- >
- >I very much doubt it. My freshman philosophy teacher maintained that humans
- >are the only self-aware creatures on the planet, and that we perceive
- >conciousness in animals because we tend to judge all things by ourselves.
- >
- - Your freshman phil. teacher is the worse off for his/her ignorance
- of emperical research on animal behavior, and also for his/her
- anthropocentric hubris. Certain classes of
- primate species do exhibit behavior indicating that they do
- possess some form of awareness of themselves. A typical
- experiment would involve the animal's reaction to seeing itself
- in a mirror. Different primates have been shown to demonstrate
- different behavior in such instances. I have seen films on this
- and they make for enthralling viewing.
-
- - On an added note, if evolution is indeed a continuous process,
- I wonder why it would give rise to discontinuous phenomenon like
- consciousness etc. By discontinuous I mean a case where only
- one species has it and noone else on the evolutionary continuum
- does.
-
- Just curious,
-
- - Vaibhav.
-