I’ve noticed that there seems to be an emphasis on being extremely serious at all times, as if every single comment is a PhD dissertation being evaluated or something. There’s like this weird, subtle one upmanship about every little thing and a lot of people are very nitpicky and judgmental. It kind of takes the fun out of being on here, TBH. Or am I the only one experiencing this?
Also my position is not that humans are the only beings with consciousness.
My personal position(belief) is that we are in consciousness… ‘submerged’ as it were. Or even a radio wave for it to connect to. along with everything forming this reality. Like interconnected.
So I’m of the opinion everything has consciousness.
I actually take offense that anyone would believe one being would be preferred over another. Human vs animal vs plant.
Vehicle wise we might offer a different experience for a consciousness to know itself.
But I’m against minimizing any life form or any form as referring to it as incapable of consciousness without evidence. This is why I find vegans problematic with pushing their opinions with the intention of shame and guilt.
To live is to consume. And anything we consume has consciousness. We’re all ‘guilty’ of consuming in order to live as a flesh body regardless of what it is we consume.
I certainly had this feeling too when I had an ego death experience. Though I attribute that more to my mind being formed by evolution around an ego/actor, and when this ego is missing, the subconscious might have to come up with a plausible alternative to keep the brain circuits working/comprehend reality. I even thought in terms of “he” instead of “I” about “myself” (the person), but my consciousness felt like a separate universal “they” in this moment. Neat experience for sure.
But to me it still seems most likely that as life is entirely formed by evolution, and things like instincts, pain, memories, agency, emotions, reasoning, model of the world, personalities etc. have advantages for survival, they are selected for in their most basic forms, get more sophisticated over time and eventually coalesce into what we experience as consciousness.
So to me it seems very very likely that most animals have consciousness, with varying degrees of sophistication regarding those abilities. Some animals might even surpass the sophistication of humans on some of these abilities, if the evolutionary pressure for that was stronger for them than for us.
On plants I’m more sceptical because their behavior doesn’t need to be nearly as complex as that of moving animals for survival I believe, it can probably rely much more on “hardcoded” behavior. Although reality loves it’s exceptions and complications so who knows.
Yeah that is another view on that I guess.
To me theres still a big difference between harvesting a carrot and cutting the throat of a pig. But all aspects of living have an impact on the environment and animals and humans, to different degrees, of course. So I agree that we’re all guilty and that nobody is perfect, and that vegans aren’t automatically good people and meat eaters aren’t automatically bad people. Some vegans kinda forget that they also ate meat for many years without considering the harms and that they might still do other problematic things too so they really don’t have an excuse to look down on people.