The continuities between human and animal minds are increasingly well
understood. This has led many people to make claims about
consciousness in animals, which has often been taken to be crucial for
their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues compellingly that there
is no fact of the matter to be discovered, and that the question of
animal consciousness is of no scientific or ethical significance.
Carruthers offers solutions to two related puzzles. The first is about
the place of phenomenal--or felt--consciousness in the natural order.
Consciousness is shown to comprise fine-grained nonconceptual contents
that are "globally broadcast" to a wide range of cognitive systems for
reasoning, decision-making, and verbal report. Moreover, the so-called
"hard" problem of consciousness results merely from the distinctive
first-person concepts we can use when thinking about such contents. No
special non-physical properties--no so-called "qualia"--are involved.
The second puzzle concerns the distribution of phenomenal
consciousness across the animal kingdom. Carruthers shows that there
is actually no fact of the matter, because thoughts about
consciousness in other creatures require us to project our
first-person concepts into their minds; but such projections fail to
result in determinate truth-conditions when those minds are
significantly unlike our own. This upshot, however, doesn't matter. It
doesn't matter for science, because no additional property enters the
world as one transitions from creatures that are definitely incapable
of phenomenal consciousness to those that definitely are (namely,
ourselves). And on many views it doesn't matter for ethics, either,
since concern for animals can be grounded in sympathy, which requires
only third-person understanding of the desires and emotions of the
animals in question, rather than in first-person empathy.
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The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192581815
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter