Consciousness/Souls/Animals

[EliteNinja]

Do we simply say we are conscious and animals are not because we are more intelligent than animals and/or "God created us in His image"?

Aren't animals conscious of themselves and their environment? Dogs seem pretty conscious to me.

How do I know other people are conscious and not just robots programmed to react to different stimuli to simulate consciousness?


"Your soul is MINE!"

[EliteNinja]

Holy crap, I'm a Pooh-bah!

[EliteNinja]

For those who voted that animals do not have souls:

Why don't animals have souls?

[David Sklansky]

I think the important point is that only humans,(at least for now and at least on this planet) are aware of the fact they will die.

[Piers]

Humans-Animals-consciousness-brain.

While other mammals have the same basic brain engine as humans there are I think some hardware and software differences. I think the software differences are the most significant.

Size as a proportion of body mass appears to be a very important feature of the hardware configuration. Humans do very well here, but there are some other animals that come close to the human ratio.

The most important software upgrade has to be human language. You are to a large extent what you think, and thanks to language humans can construct much more sophisticated thoughts. Also the layer of logic added to language through words like ‘and, not, if…” support a level of reasoning that would otherwise be imposable to match. A further mathematics upgrade gives access to technology, and makes human society orders of magnitude more sophisticated than that of other animals.

I think it is clear that other mammals can think and communicate with each other, however due to inferior software can not do so at the same level of humans. Other animals thoughts are likely to be mainly in the form of remembered experiences, however in the higher animals I would expect some level of abstraction derived form rudimentary communication.

One question that you can ask, is ‘is there any further hardware upgrades to the human brain that say chimpanzees and dolphins don’t have or is the difference just power and software.’ I am refereeing to these three possibilities.

One might for instance hypothesise that human level languages needs a brain above a certain power for support, so it’s a threshold effect, and while some animals have nearly the same ‘brain power’ its just below the threshold needed to support human language and its logic and maths upgrades.

Conversely, it might be possible for higher order mammals to think in a humanlike way, it just needs their brains to have the correct programming.

Alternately is there some extra hardware feature in the human bran that humans have uniquely developed to support language. This would prevent other animals ever being able to match human thought processes without a similar modification, and would give justification to the position a human being is a higher order forma of animal.(as compared to their society being of a higher order.) I don’t know maybe some anthropology researcher can enlighten me?

While considering differences between animals and humans, I think it is important to clearly realise that all the higher order animals share the same basic framework, but humans have made significant modifications in some area, mainly language and associated improvement in reasoning. However it follows that any feature humans have that are not directly connected to these changes is going to be shared by at least the higher order mammals.

One poster mentioned that other animals do are unaware of the fact that they will die. I wonder if he has worded in an abattoir.

Imagine some higher order mammal that sees her mate die in great pain over a couple of days. Do you think she will not be able to remember the experience and make the logical leap of imagining herself having the same fate?

[BZ_Zorro]

[ QUOTE ]
I think the important point is that only humans,(at least for now and at least on this planet) are aware of the fact they will die.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is a big statement.

Many mammals form social and emotional bonds with others, feel sorrow, happiness, jealously and other emotions, and mourn the loss of their young. Surely they must have some awareness of existence and non existence, even if that awareness is not specific.

BTW, how many humans can truly grasp the concept of death?

[Jeff W]

[ QUOTE ]
Why don't animals have souls?

[/ QUOTE ]

Your results will be skewed by voters who don't believe humans have souls.

Do you believe that animals have souls? != Do you believe that people have souls and animals do not?

[scarr]

Julian Jaynes wrote an excellent book on this subject: "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"

In it he points to Wernicke's Area of the brain as beeing necessary for speech. And this goes right along with what you said about lanquage.

I don't think Humans have souls, so the survey questions were a little too wishy-washy. Consciousness is an interesting subject, and there is more to it than something which separates us from non-humans.

Consciousness is partly composed of your own image of yourself. Jaynes calls it the Analog I, and the Metaphor Me. A map is the analog of the actual place. A metaphor is a tool we use to understand. We say a new something is like something else we are familiar with. We use our metaphor capabilities to do this. Our ability to communicate via language is another example of this capability.

Also, I would take issue with the "Do animals have consciousness?" question. I don't believe infants are conscious, assuming here that humans are not "animals" in the context of the question.

Consciousness is learned, and even though animals without consciousness can learn, humans have the ability to learn about what I and Me are through the language processing abilities we were born with.

[EliteNinja]

[ QUOTE ]
I think the important point is that only humans,(at least for now and at least on this planet) are aware of the fact they will die.

[/ QUOTE ]

Wow, I didn't even think of that. That's an excellent point I did not consider.

I don't think that that is entirely proven, though.
As there are cows which cry and behave as if they are facing impending doom or certain death when they are lining up to be slaughtered.

[Piz0wn0reD!!!!!!]

[ QUOTE ]
I think the important point is that only humans,(at least for now and at least on this planet) are aware of the fact they will die.

[/ QUOTE ]

im not sure this is true.

somewhere i read that dogs try to die facing north. Not sure if thats true, but when my dog died she was facing north. Also all the dogs on the block were howling like crazy the morning she died.