= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
khafra comments on The scourge of perverse-mindedness - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (249)
In this last paragraph (which btw is immediately preceded, in the article, by an observation strikingly similar to mine in the grandparent), I would argue that "frantically" and "pathetic" are projections: the emotions they refer to originate in the viewer's mind, not in the lobster's.
We are demonstrably equipped with mental mechanisms whereby we can observe behaviour in others, and as a result of such observations we can experience "ascribed emotions", which can sometimes take on an intensity not far removed from the sensations that originate in ourselves. That's where our intuition that the lobster is in pain comes from.
Later in the article, the author argues that lobsters "are known to exhibit preferences". Well, plants are known to exhibit preferences; they will for instance move so as to face the sun. We do not infer that plants can experience suffering.
We could build a robot today that would sense aspects of its surrounding such as elevated temperature, and we could program that robot to give a higher priority to its "get the hell away from here" program when such conditions obtained. We would then be in a position to observe the robot doing the same thing as the lobster; we would, quite possibly, experience empathy with the robot. But we would not, I think, conclude that it is morally wrong to put the robot in boiling water. We would say that's a mistake, because we have not built into the robot the degree of personhood which would entitle it to such conclusions.
Some Jainists and Buddhists infer that plants can experience suffering. The stricter Jainist diet avoids vegetables that are harvested by killing plants, like carrots and potatoes, in favor of fruits and grains that come voluntarily or from already-dead plants.
That's a preference of theirs; fine by me, but not obviously evidence-based.
I don't mean to suggest that plants are clearly sentient, just that it's plausible, even for a human, to have a coherent value system which attempts to avoid the suffering of anything which exhibits preferences.
I'd agree with that sentence if you replaced the word "suffering", unsuitable because of its complex connotations, with "killing", which seems adequate to capture the Jainists' intuitions as represented in the link above.
Although it is relevant to note that the motive may be to avoid suffering - I wasn't there when the doctrine was formed, and haven't read the relevant texts, but it is possible that the presence of apparent preferences was interpreted as implying thus.