Comment by sfj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sfj | Hacker News Reader

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I find the assumptions embedded in this argument very strange. It brings up a huge number of questions.

Only a conscious being would feel pain, so what is consciousness? Does it come down and embed itself into creatures that are born? If so, if they weren't born, would that be necessarily better? What if consciousness, if it didn't have a body to enter into, appeared in a different universe from ours with its own, possibly worse, sufferings? Wouldn't it be better to give the animal a full, relatively pain free life than the possibility that it would suffer greater in some other universe in some other dimension?

Or does consciousness originate on the spot, somehow born along with the creature? In that case it would be better to not be born at all? Or would it be better to have more consciousness in the universe, despite the suffering an individual might experience, rather than otherwise? Is consciousness a good in itself? Would a universe devoid of all conscious beings be the perfect good, lonely, desolate, without meaning. Or one full of them, with shared misery to go around?

All in all, it's seems quite a murky topic to be throwing around judgement on people about.

Well, it's murky, but some easy thought experiments might bring clarity: * Should we raise humans on factory farms, in order to increase the amount of conscious experience? * if so, and assuming that humans pay more attention to aversive stimuli than positive/neutral stimuli, should we deliberately torture them?

Both propositions are obviously horrible. But why? The answer is similar to why the death of worms < chickens < pet dogs < people < great people.

Consciousness is a matter of connected/integrated complexity; as a result, millions of worms do not eventually produce the depth and richness of human consciousness. Secondly, consciousness is dependent upon other conscious beings; our consciousness isn't really our own, it is part of a shared web. So, consciousness that does not participate in that shared web is less conscious, in a real sense, than consciousness that does.

For both these reasons, if we value consciousness, the only real benefits of factory farmed chickens would come from how they help contribute to the overall conscious ecosystem. Perhaps they let us build more integrated complexity, in which case, thanks.

> Well, it's murky, but some easy thought experiments might bring clarity: * Should we raise humans on factory farms, in order to increase the amount of conscious experience? * if so, and assuming that humans pay more attention to aversive stimuli than positive/neutral stimuli, should we deliberately torture them?

> Both propositions are obviously horrible. But why? The answer is similar to why the death of worms < chickens < pet dogs < people < great people.

>Consciousness is a matter of connected/integrated complexity

Can you prove this supposition, though? Would that make the internet conscious, for example? I would think not.

I think the propositions you mentioned seem horrible because of an offshoot of our instinct to form tribes to survive better. It feels bad to torture people and other beings that help us survive, because that's integral to our survival. A lone human being has a much rougher time than a group does, and a group that trusts each other would survive better than where everyone is at each other's throats.

My theory is that human beings need a religion to feel sane. If there isn't an organized one that they accept, they create one of their own. This is why these sort of "common sense" laws of morality (better to not raise animals in a factory) come into being. People need to believe in a higher set of laws than what man can provide, even if there isn't any real justification for them one way or the other.

> Would that make the internet conscious, for example? I would think not.

The internet is governed by consciousness and consciousness emerges from it, in the same way as our neurons or brain parts are not conscious per se but are structured by consciousness and provide the mechanism for it.

"a full, relatively pain free life" is not at all an accurate description of anything related to factory farming.

Also, karma is not about judgment. It's about each individual's own state of consciousness.

> "a full, relatively pain free life" is not at all an accurate description of anything related to factory farming.

You understand that I'm not saying relative to your life, right, but to some other life in some other universe?

> Also, karma is not about judgment. It's about each individual's own state of consciousness.

It seems to be about your individual biases and judgement, actually.

I don't understand how some hypothetical life in some hypothetical other universe is at all a sensible barometer to measure the quality of a life against?

It seems much more sane to benchmark against the life we have and know here.

You are talking about animals that otherwise would not have been born. Therefore the only life you can theorize about is one unknown to us.

so by extension everything is just great, right? What if a person perishes from torture and war crimes? it at least lived part of its life happily before that. Who knows what would happen if the person was born in the sucks-to-be-there (TM) "dimension" (!?). what is consciousness? is the person who is reading this now conscious? who knows. let's all eat each other while we ponder these great questions. could be totally worse, yeah. ;)

> so by extension everything is just great, right?

I never said this.

> let's all eat each other while we ponder these great questions.

Let's make sure no being is ever born again who might suffer. Seems totally good and just, therefore it must be true, right?

What arrogance...

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