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- Xref: sparky comp.ai.philosophy:7375 sci.philosophy.tech:4940
- Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
- Path: sparky!uunet!utcsri!psych.toronto.edu!christo
- From: christo@psych.toronto.edu (Christopher Green)
- Subject: Re: Searle on animal consciousness
- Message-ID: <1993Jan25.004959.10988@psych.toronto.edu>
- Organization: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
- References: <1993Jan24.024230.5977@sophia.smith.edu> <1juactINN4ph@cannelloni.cis.ohio-state.edu> <1993Jan24.213358.10067@sophia.smith.edu>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jan 1993 00:49:59 GMT
- Lines: 23
-
- In article <1993Jan24.213358.10067@sophia.smith.edu> orourke@sophia.smith.edu (Joseph O'Rourke) writes:
- >In article <1juactINN4ph@cannelloni.cis.ohio-state.edu> chandra@cis.ohio-state.edu (B Chandrasekaran) 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.]
- >>
- >>Well, do you think dogs feel pain when you, say, cut them with a razor
- >>blade without anesthetics? It seems that they generally give lots of
- >>incontrovertible evidence of being in pain when something like this
- >>happens.
- >
- > I agree: dogs, perhaps even spiders, feel pain. But the situation
- >is not so clear to me with other aspects of mental life. Do they have
- >desires? Do they have beliefs? Do they recall the distant past?
- >Do they have streams of consciousness?
-
- Do they need to in order to answer your question. Doesn't pain alone
- count as an existence proof?
- --
- Christopher D. Green christo@psych.toronto.edu
- Psychology Department cgreen@lake.scar.utoronto.ca
- University of Toronto
- Toronto, Ontario M5S 1A1
-