> From: Brandon Payne
> Sapience is something that is beyond the reckoning of science.
Now you know that's only partially true. What sapience really is, is a
mystery. But then again, what inertia actually really is, is also a mystery.
That doesn't mean we can't build a lot of science around it.
In particular, we can easily apply comparative measurement to the problem of
sapience. We can take a creature that is widely believed to be sapient (a
one year old human for example) and then expose it to a battery of harmless
mental tests. We can then expose any number of animals to similar tests
which test for similar mental processes. What we find is that there is a
significant degree of overlap between the bottom end of human mental
capacity (young children and some mentally disabled) and animal capacity
(apes, dolphins, etc). Scientifically we can then observe that even though
these groups are (in every possible way we can measure) mentally equivalent,
we treat them very differently. When you treat two similar groups
differently and there is no real reason to, that's called bigotry.
This is why the 'problem' of sapience *is* seen as a problem. No one can
find a way to draw a clear distinction between all humans and all animals,
without excluding some humans, or including some animals in the 'people'
category. If you are willing to drop that quaint idea that we were created
on a different day to every other life form on earth, and ground yourself in
reality instead, that requirement ceases to exist and the problem stops
being a problem.
People want to believe they hold their ethics close to heart (we judge merit
instead of appearance) but at the same time want the benefits of ignoring
them (meat and animal testing). Anyone who follows the Freefall web comic
might find a similar example in Florence's current history lecture.
>(a) No other creatures that have a complex
> language and culture like humans do.
Neither do *severely* retarded children or the average one day old. Are you
saying they are not people?
> (b) It is not something that can be
> biologically explained.
Hmm... This depends on your definition of biology. It's definitely not a
matter of individual cellular biology, but it definitely comes under the
category of 'things neural cells do'.
> dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years
So have humans. Being able to meaningfully interact with wolves and
proto-dogs increased the ability of humans to survive. Hence humans were
'domesticated' for the ability totollerate and pick up social cues from
dogs. When scientists talk about 'evolution', they mean it, and it applies
to us too.
> And if you're going to get into the destructive capacity of humanity
> just keep one thing in mind. The Earth . . . no, the universe, can
> throw out far more destructive actions that us humans ever
> could. That
> being in the form of asteroids, gamma bursts, super novas, and black
> holes. Whether it is intentional or accidental is total irrelevent.
I don't understand your logic here. Unless you're getting at the 'ants with
nuclear weapons thing'? That we aren't significantly more immoral than the
rest of the animal kingdom? If that's what you meant, I agree, but it
undermines your argument that humans are special in some way.
> Not everything can be explained in terms of biology. Some things are
> simply beyond the realm of science.
No being can scientifically prove to be god for example. (Any being even
1/10th as powerful could warp our instruments to show what it wanted, and
hence no reliable science would be possible in its presence.) But knowing
whether the emperor is actually wearing any clothes or not is not one of
those things. We can compare the emperor to other people after all,
especially the ones who actually are wearing clothes.
> And I am willing to bet that this sort of argument is going on upon
> another planet somewhere out there among its own sapience race of
> beings simply because a lot of them might be self-loathing (like I
> once was, but got away from because it is so unhelpful).
Interesting problem though. If the aliens came here, how would you grant
them civil rights? Change 'human' to 'sentient' in all the law books? Oh,
but how would you legally define sentience then? You might have to twist
into some very interesting shapes to keep human adults, babies and the
mentally incomplete, and one species of animal (the aliens) on one side of
the line, and everything else on the other.
> People like myself are frequently accused of being arrogant.
> But it is just AS arrogant to assume that were no different than animals.
At
> least we are capable of understanding right from wrong when an animal
> is not.
This is debatable. There's a simple test where a dog and child is told not
to eat some food. The adult goes away. When the dog and child do eat the
food, and the adult comes back, they end up behaving in exactly the same
way; either lying or displaying guilt. Or at least that's what most people
automatically assume for the child. We like to think that any given young
child is smarter than any given dog, but we don't know that. We can't tell
what's going on in either head, and must leave all assumption at the door.
Besides, not all humans can tell right from wrong; for any given version of
right from wrong. How low would the percentage of those who could tell have
to drop before it became significant? If some animals could be shown to
understand the difference; what percentage would they have to reach before
you extended the same assumption to the rest of their species? Out of
interest, what would you estimate the 'moral percentage' was in 1940s
Germany?
> If we didn't then we would be carrying on the same way we did
> hundreds and even thousands of years ago when warfare and casual
> brutality was the norm.
We're not? Have you read a newspaper recently? Or watched children playing?
See also the latter variations of selfish gene theory. Just because it's
sometimes in our interests to cooperate with each other, doesn't mean we
behave any different when it's not.
> All anthropomophism has done for me is to vigorously reinforce what I
> have always believed since I was a child: Humans are NOTHING like
> animals.
And you are welcome to that article of faith. But like you have done for
science, please recognise that while there are no limits to faith itself,
there can be some very stark limits to how it should be applied in the real
world.
ANTIcarrot.
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Received on Sat Feb 17 2007 - 11:10:34 CST