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If you want to be Vedic about it, but I don't equate worms and humans. I don't view a chicken and a fox as equals. I think one is more aware than the other, has more feeling, is more thoughtful. The chicken is dull and has been bred to be dull. The fox is clever and quick and is bred by hardship to be clever and quick. If worms are sentient, then sentience is nothing and there is no such thing as.
I don't think having a less detailed sense of vision counts as being any less aware
I don't think that ordering animals in such a way is in any way helpful
How do you propose to show that that is the case?
The same goes for bacteria which are individual cells. Bacteria react to stimuli, too. They are very complex cells. Should I care as much about a bacterium as I do a human, or should I draw the line at worms?
Now, as far as plants go, I'm not so sure at all. In my view, sentience has one important requirement, and that is a central nervous system, where feedback within the system can allow for higher-level processing than mere response to stimuli. Plants have neither synapses nor central nervous systems. Their response to their environment is entirely chemical and electrical but without anything that resembles a synapse, which is the basic requirement for complex data processing in living organisms.
It has a central nervous system and a brain so of course it feels pain
No, however people should be aware they can suffer and try to minimise suffering
If the only thing you are seeing is grey shadows, you are certainly NOT as aware of your environment.
We should be able to understand together that humans are profoundly different than the other animals and that feeling pain has little to do w/ the difference. People think and speak. OK so the other animals can think and speak too, but there's a huge difference how people can think about thinking and talk about talking. The other animals don't do that in any observable way.
The difficulty here is, that despite that many people intuit animals are conscious, this intuition is not universal.
And no less conscious or sentient
if consciousness is the same thing as awareness, then yes, they would be less conscious. But like I said, humans are so profoundly sentient that this hardly makes a dent in it. It's like, if you have an IQ of 150 and drop a point, its insignificant.
Rival, believe it or not, a LOT of people don't think animals have thoughts and feelings. I remember when I was a kid and was asking my mom why God allowed animals to be eaten alive, her response was that they didn't feel any pain. Descarte used to say that animals were automata.
To me knowing they have thoughts and feelings was intuitive.
Duh...."Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient
....All three of these discoveries came in the last five years — indications that the more scientists test animals, the more they find that many species may have inner lives and be sentient. A surprising range of creatures have shown evidence of conscious thought or experience, including insects, fish and some crustaceans. "
Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient
Far more animals than previously thought likely have consciousness, top scientists say in a new declaration — including fish, lobsters and octopus.www.nbcnews.com
Hi @Brickjectivity - This is an interesting line of thought.
