I agree. They are a stepping stone to the mammalian consciousness we relate to. When I try to catch an invading ant, the second it sees The Finger of Doom it runs like the clappers, along with some neat sidestepping. It is very easy to relate to. We don't know what they feel but we can certainly see lots of analogous behaviours, and behaviour is the only the clue we have as to others' consciousness.Dukedroklar wrote:How do you know they don't have "feelings"? They obviously feel and experience pain as that is easy to prove. Imo, If they feel pain then there must be some form of mind to receive and react to it. Our brains didn't evolve in a vacuum so I do not believe our sense of consciousness evolved in a vacuum either. I believe they do have a sense of consciousness although it's very unlikely it is anywhere near as complex as ours.
Agree. Emotions emerged from chemical reactions - chemicals reflexively respond to stimulus (chemical, mechanical or electromagnetic) as according to their atomic configuration. Stable bonds persist and the unstable ones don't. With complexity of reactions comes life, and from complexity of life comes consciousness.Dukedroklar wrote:One could say "you have no way to know this" but it really is simple logic based on evolution. Nature doesn't change much in the way it functions. Pain is a good tool to keep a creature away from something harmful. Pleasure is a good tool to reinforce desired or advantageous results. Emotions are a good tool to assist a pack or social creature. As long as something has a nervous system and a brain it is a pretty sure bet they experience a lot of the same things to various degrees.
Emotions are a more flexible and evolutionarily advantageous means of response than chemical reactions; the latter could lead a creature into the jaws of a predator because confusing chemical cues were present. However, if you fear a predator then almost no amount of alluring chemicals will lead you into danger. Fear and contentment (opposites) would appear to be fundamental emotional characteristics of any life that flees from danger.
However, things are obviously not the same. Take the example of "exploding toads", where hundreds of toads were found dead, apparently exploded. Eventually they worked out that while the toads were copulating crows would fly down and remove the toads' livers while the toads were (rather admirably) committed to the act. The toad would finish the copulation and then its lungs would expand because of the extra spaces left by the missing livers until the poor animal blew apart.
It would be easy to say that the animals were so insensitive that they doesn't even care if their livers were removed. However, toads normally care plenty about having their liver removed, but the sexual experience is clearly so encompassing, or the chemicals involved are so compelling, that it trumps personal (toadal?) survival.
It's easy to see the evolutionary advantage - the fertilisation is completed whereas if a toad interrupted the act to protect itself it may well have still been killed - but without passing on their genetic material. Natural selection will favour the stoics who finish the job, come hell or high weather.
So that's the dynamics, but what does it tell you about what a toad would feel? It would be easy to say that the toads are insensitive and just wander off oblivious to their injuries like robots until kaboom time. It's just as easy to assume that the toad walked away feeling like absolute ****, although there's no report of them writhing around once the afterglow wore off ... but natural selection will also reward a stoical response to injuries. Writhing creatures are vulnerable and birds and ever-present threat. You'd have to imagine they suffered before the end.
Still, you also have to assume that the toads' pain is much less profound than ours. Danger or not, even Chuck Norris is going to writhe around if he's just had his liver pecked out.
Interesting line of thought. Being mostly passive, plants have little need for sensory input so they do seem foreign to us in a way. But there are commonalities.Dukedroklar wrote:So for me, insects are an easy thing to empathize with. What I would consider too great a leap would be to empathize with plant life as it doesn't posses a brain and therefore I have nothing to relate to them on any level.
Plants' limited active behaviour is based on growth and absorption, which are our areas of common ground since we also grow and absorb (eat, drink). In growth you see the push and shove that plants engage in to occupy space. If something is in the way of the growth then the roots or trunk either go through it or wind around it. This is the basis (I almost said root ) of problem solving.
When the sun is down a plant closes its flowers, which is analogous to sleep. Like animals, plants can be symbiotic or antagonistic. They can be parasitic and predatory. We start as an egg, which is analogous to a seed.
Simpler organisms make more clear the roots of our behaviour. We just do it with more panache