Ultimately human thought is intimately linked to the wetware of the entire nervous system. Whether anything that could rightly be described as consciousness comparable to human consciousness could occur without this wetware is an open question.

I disagree, and with all confidence.

It is logically impossible for the material (wetware) to matter. So it cannot be an open question. It remains open only to those who haven’t actually thought it through.

For example, due to relativity theory, a ship passing a conscious person at near the speed of light would see single electron movement after single electron movement, and thus see nothing more than single logic-gate operation after single logic-gate operation, identical to any computer in any other material.

Yet that person would be fully conscious. And they cannot simultaneously be conscious and not be conscious. So consciousness logically necessarily reduces to single electron movements in a register (or waves of electrons to effect a potential, but that’s the same thing, just differing by how many electrons have to move to flip a register or trigger a gate).

Since the only difference between one conscious thought and another is which electrons move where, all other underlying structures make no difference and thus can be substituted with any other material or structure that would perform the same function (which means, serve as the same register or logic gate, determining when electrons go where).

And since electrons can’t matter (there is nothing special about fundamental particles that can carry so complex an emergent property as consciousness), any logic-gate-and-register system arranged the same way must also produce consciousness (so, e.g., a giant brain made only of gears serving as registers and gates; a national population running around in perfect synonymy with the same order of registers and gates; and so on).

I read Seth’s Being You.

I like his concept that the brain is basically a Bayesian computer. The brain sits in the skull with no real input except for strings of impulses on its nerves. From these it builds a model that best explains why these nerves are delivering these signals. It continuously updates its model with an emphasis on the immediate situation. That model becomes its “prior” for its Bayesian analysis. It then compares the incoming signals with the prior it expects. Where the incoming signals differ with expectations, the brain quickly rebuilds its model to reflect the new inputs.

If, for instance, I turn my head to the left, my brain already has a model of what it expects there. It compares this prior with the incoming signals, adjusting its model where it needs to. And so, if I turn my head and my optic nerves report the image of an uncaged gorilla in front of me, that is very different from what the prior expected to see, such as perhaps another person. And so, my brain will quickly look at its model of the world for an explanation of what is there, narrowing it down perhaps to a beast, a gorilla, and an angry gorilla. Immediately the self-model knows that I am the kind of person that runs from angry uncaged gorillas, and it immediately alerts my body that I have decided to run. And my emotions module reports that I find this frightening, and that tells my entire brain to drop everything non-essential and concentrate on getting away.

When Seth gets to his chapter on computer consciousness, he agrees that it might be possible for a computer to someday have something that would be rightly described as consciousness. Or it might be true that it could never get beyond duplicating that which was described above without ever experiencing anything that could properly be called consciousness. Seth leaves it open as to how we would even know if and when a computer should rightly be described as being conscious.

Ultimately human thought is intimately linked to the wetware of the entire nervous system. Whether anything that could rightly be described as consciousness comparable to human consciousness could occur without this wetware is an open question.

Sure, I realise that I missed out an adjective “wounded”, that would have clarified the point. A “wounded boar that is going to die anyway”.

I totally agree r.e wasteful hunting.

I don’t exactly follow the reasoning there. All animals are “going to die anyway.” There is no such thing as an immortal animal.

But yes, ethical husbandry aims at painless deaths and that is an advantage of it over leaving things to nature which is far more vicious and horrific.

Although respect for conservancy can entail respect for a kill. Wasteful hunting entails a disordered and disrespectful mind, which will likely have self-defeating or toxic consequences downstream. By contrast, an indigenous ethic of respect for an animal entailing wasting nothing of what you kill habituates an ordered and respectful mind, which will likely have beneficial personal and social consequences downstream. I discuss this more in Meat Not Bad.

We’ve been through that con before.

It would not be consciously aware that it is running this self-awareness program. It would all just be a mass of computer bits.

That is logically impossible. If it is running a self-model, it will experience being a self-model. It can’t be computing a thing and at the same time have no knowledge of what it is computing. This is explained in my “Touch” article for example, and through most of the latest cognitive science literature extending the Dennett mode. It was the basic point in Cottrell’s seminal paper “Sniffing the Camembert.”

A computer either has the knowledge in question, or it does not. It cannot be computing x and not computing x at the same time.

This is especially the case for emotions, which are not even an intelligible entity without awareness of them. The awareness of pain is pain. Everything else is the absence of pain. Likewise desire, joy, ennui, etc. To compute these things means to experience them; if you weren’t experiencing them, they’d have no effect on your decisions and thus no function.

I include this point in “Touch.”

I can still visualize that we could make a complex computer system that would have software models and an emotions module that would duplicate the functions you mention in your post, but still not have the lights on, so to speak. It would just be a complex set of bits changing states with no true consciousness. It would not be consciously aware that it is running this self-awareness program. It would all just be a mass of computer bits.

Of course one could say that, once that computer truly had modules for self-awareness, emotions, etc. the “lights would be on”. Perhaps.

I have recently retired and plan to do a lot of reading (and writing). I have read Sense and Goodness and Consciousness Explained. Next on my list is Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. We will see where this all ends up.

“So people need to decouple death from misery and rethink why death is bad. It’s not because it’s a misery. Misery is bad for a completely different reason. So ethically, we should treat the animals we eat well (at least as well as nature, red in tooth and claw, would, or else we are doing a net harm). That does not translate into not killing and eating them. The foundation for the one conclusion does not exist for the other.”

I think one problem in this debate, which you have put your finger on here, is I think often when we value the life of any creature, we´re valuing a combination of things and I find often the animal rights movement just value one thing, i.e consciousness, or the ability to feel pain (i.e Pete Singer).

I think we have to assess a multitude of factors, for me, I think the level of self-awareness is a big factor and having a developed narrative memory is likely strongly linked to that, as is in turn an animal caring about whether it lives another year or not.

It’s certain most animals live in the moment. Most animal cognition studies seem to back that up. I guess there’s a question of whether you weigh a future desire to keep on living a few more years over a desire not to die at the moment, I think both me and you would think it’s wrong to end dementia patients’ lives earlier if the person still wishes to carry on, even though they’ve lost all notion of time.

I think it’s definitely not a black and white issue as Vegans portray it, i.e that eating all animals are bad, I also think the level of protection a creature deserves is something that exists on a spectrum as you suggest and there are definitely grey zones.

I particularly don’t like the term “specieism” as it’s only relevant if the other species actually have similar cognitive capacities to humans. The whole reason racism is wrong is that black people, Chinese people, Arabs and White people are the same species and have the same basic neurology.

It is (not yet) a rigorous study but it is hard to see how WLC arguments have any validity in the face of Bunny and co. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8k2upr9vCE
“Ouch” indeed?