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September 23, 2005
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Neat huh. Effectively blows apart the old modernist divide between animals and humans doesn't it. Since we are so closely related to dogs, and since we have successful social interactions with them and act like them in so many respects, - the notion that we share consciousness with them has surely more initial plausibility than the idea that it is a human monopoly, a unique achievement.
The great divide between animals and humans was delineated by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the so-called "father of modern philosophy". He famously argued that humans are distinctly different from other animals and the rest of the natural world. In his view, language and reason are the features that set humans apart from all other species. Descartes argues that the observed behaviors of all nonhuman creatures can be explained without ascribing minds and consciousness to them. He concludes that nonhuman animals can be viewed as no more than machines with parts assembled in intricate ways. Based on Descartes' rationale, humans have little responsibility to other animals or the natural world unless the treatment of them affects other humans.
Today we find people writing books arguing that animals are conscious? Those who still doubt this are those wh had been put through the kind of behaviourist-inspired training that students of biology and psychology received during much of the 20th century. Then academic prestige in many professions depended on abjuring all thought and all talk of consciousness. Only exceptionally determined academics put up any resistance to the behaviourism that ruled that human thought had no effect on action, and that therefore only human behaviour could be studied. Consciousness, in both humans and animals, was treated as a suspect supernatural entity, equivalent tot he existence of angels.
Though psychologists officially abandoned behaviourist doctrines some 20 years back, the attitudes that went with those doctrines do not automatically change. Modernist philosophers with a bias for mechanism are more resistant to change. They take the whole position seriously. They have dumped Descarte's dualism and embraced a physicalist materialism that takes its starting point Descartes key argument.
Descartes had argued that, although an animal or machine may be capable of performing any one activity as well as (or even better than) we can, each human being is capable of a greater variety of different activities than could be performed by anything lacking a soul. In a special instance of this general point, Descartes held that although an animal or machine might be made to utter sounds resembling human speech in response to specific stimuli, only an immaterial thinking substance could engage in the creative use of language required for responding appropriately to any unexpected circumstances. My dog may be a loyal companion, and my computer is a powerful instrument, but neither of them can engage in a decent conversation.
Modernist philosophers challenge that argument in terms of machines but not animals. Machines are seen as self- regulating.
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Gary,
This theme is addressed comprehensively at
Fear No More Zoo
It also relates to your previous posting on Masaru Emoto and Water. His fundamental theme being that water is affected both postively and negatively by human consciousness,actions and technologies. Water also retains memory and transmits consciousness and information.
This has much wider implications for all living biological forms which are essentially water shapes. And indeed the entire planet which is mostly a water world
It implies/means that everything is interconnected at the primary matrix of consciousness/energy. John