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Human and Animal Minds - The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (Hardcover)
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Human and Animal Minds - The Consciousness Questions Laid to Rest (Hardcover)
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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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