Philosophy of Mind
Christian Andrews, How to study animal minds.
Octopolis, little village with octopuses. Australian guy talks about octopus intelligence.
Of Maybugs and Men. Animal homosexuality.
Are animals machines?
According to Descartes yes. They’ve got lots of physical stuff but do they really have a lot of psychical stuff? They can’t really tell us.
Johan Bloch talks about how many things have intelligence.
Many animals deliberate on stuff. Wow.
There can be an input in an animal and then there is a bit on deliberation on how to solve that problem, at least in dogs.
What do we do with these concepts that have multiple meanings like innatenes?
Don’t create language with recursion, no animals will have language then. Recursion is a key concept of human language.
”We argue that the available data suggst a much stronger continuity between animals and humans with respect to speech wthan previously believed. We argue that the continuity hypothesis thus deserves the status of a null hypothesis.” Chomsky.
Some group of elephants deliberate on where they go. When they make a decision, they first stop and then they move in a direction based on where they’re going and it seems that they are making a kind of sounds with each other, which seems to be a kind of communication which is how they deliberate about going somewhere.
Can animals have experiences of qualitatively positive or negative evalutation. That is required for sentience. Most people accept that animals do.
What a plant knows: a field-guide to the senses. Teleology, anthropomorphism, philosophising and wild speculations.
There is zoopsychism, only animals and humans have mental states.
Biopsychism argues that everything biological has mental states.
Then there is panpsychism which attributes mental states also to inanimate nature.
Why should we bother asking whether animals have minds?
One answer is about morals. One answer about philosophical anthropology, or the nature of humanity.
If they can’t have pain, we can treat them like a computer or whatever other physical object.
Utilitarianism would argue that hurting animals is bad because you inflict pain to the animals, that is decreasing the general good.
Abolitionism. Dk what that is.
”to be a subject-of-a-life is to have eliefs and desires; perception, memory and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feelings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical identity over time.” Tom Reegan
Well you know, if you wanna have moral rights, you need to be a subject that is cared for as living.
Evolutionary psychology: human nature exists. They argue heavily that human nature is qualitatively different state from that of other animals. Descartes also argued that there are traits that are essentially human. However, it seems animals do have language and so on. So we’re unsure. Like everything in this stupid course.
Human nature: universal, adaptive and uniquely human.
Which psychological universals are uniquely human? Are there modes of consciousness that are different in humans and animals?
A spectre of anthropological philosophy is the anthropomorphism of it.
We project human features onto animals by saying that they do have mental states just like we do. Are there good reasons to do this? Sometimes probably. Who knows.
One less neutral definition of anthropomorphism is to say that it means to project uniquely human features onto non-human subjects. If they are uniquely human there isn’t really any sense in ascribing them to other creatures.
Situational anthropomorphism: An animal is capable of having a mental state x, but doesn’t have it at the moment.
I love crazy gay lions.
The lion behaviour that Goldstein calls gay is not sexual according to some professional, but is social behaviour. Sex is not sexual. Classic.
Basically we are mistaken in seeing it as sexual, we are projecting our version of sexuality is the argument.
There is a tendency to desexualise non-human animal behaviour. Historically scientists will see homosexual acts at work and then rationalise away them as some other kind of behaviour with a different purpose than the kind of purpose we see in humans.
Anthropomophism can also just be a common cateogorical fallacy. It argues that the anthropomorphism is a category mistake much like Gilbert Ryle’s crtique of Descartes.
Animal trials are a historical phenomena where animals are brought to justice. One interpretation of these trials, is that somehow our ancestors thought about animals as having the required mental and moral capacities to be sentenced like humans. They are morally accountable in the same way as humans. If we indeed ascribe the capacity to be held morally acountable to non-human animals we are probably comitting the categorical anthropomorphism fallacy. Talking about gay animals cannot be dismissed by calling it categorical anthropomorphism. It seems perfectly reasonable to attribute some kind of homosexual mental states to non-human animals.