![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
complexity to the world
Apr. 6th, 2012 11:17 amThis video of a bonobo crafting stone tools reminded me about stuff I think.
I don't think sentience is a binary thing where you flip the switch from the world of animal into human. I think it's this complex thing. Human emotional and intellectual richness is not evolutionarily isolated, it's just how one species plays out a batch of useful genotype. A spider or nudibranch is not going to have any big emotional/intellectual whatever because what good would that do it? I assume the neurophysical underpinnings of sentience start out that early however. I'd argue that as brains get physically more complex, the more complex emotional and intellectual processing is going to become. This isn't something you can generalize. Crows and ravens are intensely social birds and recently I was reading about tool use in Egyptian vultures - I assume these are 'way more recognizably smarter and emotional birds than the average hawk or duck or whatever. The physical need to pick something apart when that's not necessarily easy leads to a lot of processing, which is why I think a lot of scavenger species tend to be brighter than hypercarnivorous ones. Humans just happen to be at one extreme of a large spectrum.
I think lots of species have emotions, but I also think it'd be really wrong for us to impose human judgments onto non-human emotions. I don't think a human can emotionally understand what territory means to a cat or herd means to a horse. Using ravens as the example, ravens recognize human faces 'way better than humans recognize individual ravens. What must be the emotional tie in of having a brain that does that? The thing sitting in my skull isn't a raven brain, so I can't tell you.
And as long as I'm here, a political tie in. See, I figure that the ability to process emotions and sensation obviously develops in utero - it'd be counterproductive for a fairly derived organism not to have some basic idea of what it's going to be facing out there in the bigger world. So yes, I think an embryo is sentient, but when that happens depends on when there's enough neurophysiology on line to actually process this stuff. Thus I'd argue that life doesn't begin at conception nor at birth but at some nebulous point partway through. But since I'm pretty sure the entire abortion issue is cooked up as a distraction, placebo and smokescreen for a batch of really ruinous autocratic self-enrichment, I guess the actual details of "when does a fetus become sentient" really doesn't matter much.
I don't think sentience is a binary thing where you flip the switch from the world of animal into human. I think it's this complex thing. Human emotional and intellectual richness is not evolutionarily isolated, it's just how one species plays out a batch of useful genotype. A spider or nudibranch is not going to have any big emotional/intellectual whatever because what good would that do it? I assume the neurophysical underpinnings of sentience start out that early however. I'd argue that as brains get physically more complex, the more complex emotional and intellectual processing is going to become. This isn't something you can generalize. Crows and ravens are intensely social birds and recently I was reading about tool use in Egyptian vultures - I assume these are 'way more recognizably smarter and emotional birds than the average hawk or duck or whatever. The physical need to pick something apart when that's not necessarily easy leads to a lot of processing, which is why I think a lot of scavenger species tend to be brighter than hypercarnivorous ones. Humans just happen to be at one extreme of a large spectrum.
I think lots of species have emotions, but I also think it'd be really wrong for us to impose human judgments onto non-human emotions. I don't think a human can emotionally understand what territory means to a cat or herd means to a horse. Using ravens as the example, ravens recognize human faces 'way better than humans recognize individual ravens. What must be the emotional tie in of having a brain that does that? The thing sitting in my skull isn't a raven brain, so I can't tell you.
And as long as I'm here, a political tie in. See, I figure that the ability to process emotions and sensation obviously develops in utero - it'd be counterproductive for a fairly derived organism not to have some basic idea of what it's going to be facing out there in the bigger world. So yes, I think an embryo is sentient, but when that happens depends on when there's enough neurophysiology on line to actually process this stuff. Thus I'd argue that life doesn't begin at conception nor at birth but at some nebulous point partway through. But since I'm pretty sure the entire abortion issue is cooked up as a distraction, placebo and smokescreen for a batch of really ruinous autocratic self-enrichment, I guess the actual details of "when does a fetus become sentient" really doesn't matter much.