You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

NancyLebovitz comments on An argument that animals don't really suffer - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Solvent 07 January 2012 09:07AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (86)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 07 January 2012 03:18:09PM *  6 points [-]

Is that argument related to saying that animals are p-zombies?

It isn't saying that animals have no qualia, but I think it's saying that some types of qualia matter more than others, and that animals can behave like people in terms of reacting to and avoiding pain, but the behavior means something very different from what it would if a person were doing it.

Comment author: bogus 07 January 2012 04:20:08PM *  0 points [-]

I'd say that if qualia actually exist in some sense, and animals (at least those that are somewhat related to humans, e.g. mice and other mammals) have qualia, then awareness of pain is most likely among them. I'd also assume that all animals with qualia have some assessment of "pleasing" and "suffering", because conscious awareness would not be evolutionarily useful otherwise. Craig is probably assuming that animals do not have qualia, although he does not state this assumption clearly.

Comment author: David_Gerard 07 January 2012 06:18:28PM *  -1 points [-]

Is that argument related to saying that animals are p-zombies?

It's related in that it is intended to set the stage to show that dualism is true, if only for humans - and specifically that it is true only for humans. (In the case of p-zombies, the assertion that p-zombies are conceivable as an actually possible thing is an assertion that dualism is conceivable as an actually possible thing, so it's no surprise the argument concludes by proving dualism, i.e. something it assumed.)