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Lumifer comments on Why Eat Less Meat? - Less Wrong
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That's not evidence, that's a declaration of opinion.
In particular, reading things like "Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots" (emphasis mine) makes me highly sceptical of that opinion.
It's not scientific evidence, but it is rational evidence. In Bayesian terms, a consensus statement of experts in the field is probably much stronger evidence than, say, a single peer-reviewed study. Expert consensus statements are less likely to be wrong than almost any other form of evidence where I don't have the necessary expertise to independently evaluate claims.
Not if I believe that this particular panel of experts is highly biased and is using this declaration instrumentally to further their undeclared goal.
That may or may not be true, but doesn't seem to be particularly relevant here. The question is what constitutes "near human-like levels consciousness". If you point to an African grey as your example, I'll laugh and walk away. Maybe, if I were particularly polite, I'd ask in which meaning you're using the word "near" here.
If I were in your place, I'd be skeptical of my own intuitions regarding the level of consciousness of African grey parrots. Reality sometimes is unintuitive, and I'd be more inclined to trust the expert consensus than my own intuition. Five hundred years ago, I probably would have laughed at someone who said we would travel to the moon one day.
I trust reality a great deal more than I trust the expert consensus. As has been pointed out, science advances one funeral at a time.
If you want to convince me, show me evidence from reality, not hearsay from a bunch of people I have no reason to trust.
This is evidence from reality. In reality, a bunch of neuroscientists organized by a highly respectable university all agree that many non-human animals are approximately as conscious as humans. This is very strong Bayesian evidence in favor of this proposition being true.
What form of evidence would you find more convincing than this?
No, I don't think so.
That's not a statement of fact. That's just their preferred definition for the expression "approximately as conscious as humans". I can define slugs to be "approximately as conscious as humans" and point out that compared with rocks, they are.
I have no way to respond to this.
That interpretation of the quoted expression strikes me as implausible, especially in the context of the other statements made in the declaration; for example: "Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought." This indicates that humans' and birds' consciousnesses are more similar than most people intuitively believe.
Again, I ask: What form of evidence would you find more convincing than the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness?
Evidence of what?
It seems that you want to ask a question "Are human and non-human minds similar?" That question is essentially about the meaning of the word "similar" in this context -- a definition of "similar" would be the answer.
There are no facts involved, it's all a question of terminology, of what "approximately as conscious as humans" means.
Sure, you plausibly define some metric (or several of them) of similarity-to-human-mind and arrange various living creatures on the that scale. But that scale is continuous and unless you have a specific purpose in mind, thresholds are arbitrary. I don't know why defining only a few mammals and birds as having a mind similar-to-human is more valid than defining everything up to a slug as having a mind similar-to-human.
I originally posted the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness because Peter asked you, "What do you think of the body of evidence provided in this post [that nonhuman animals suffer]?" You said he hadn't provided any, and I offered the Cambridge Declaration as evidence. The question is, in response to your original reply to Peter, what would you consider to be meaningful evidence that non-human animals suffer in a morally relevant way?
Generally untrue.
African grays are pretty smart. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call them near-human, but from what I've read there's a case for putting them on par with cetaceans or nonhuman primates.
The real trouble is that the research into this sort of thing is fiendishly subjective and surprisingly sparse. Even a detailed ordering of relative animal intelligence involves a lot of decisions about which researchers to trust, and comparison with humans is worse.