Vegetal intelligence/sentience. I keep saying it's happening, that scientists will eventually confirm plant consciousness, and the confirmation seems, slowly, to be happening.
ADDENDUM: terms like intelligence, sentience, and consciousness have a lot of overlap, but they are not necessarily the same thing. A very (overly?) simple, pragmatic definition of intelligence might be problem-solving ability.* This is a definition that I can imagine a lot of engineers, themselves hardcore pragmatists, might like. (There will be persnickety exceptions, of course.) By this reckoning, something like a 1980s-era Texas Instruments calculator could be said to possess a limited amount of intelligence. The same could be said of the chess app on your phone. The larger implication of this admittedly simplistic definition is that intelligence might not imply consciousness. It could, in fact, be a faculty divorced from consciousness. So if we do end up developing true AI that possesses something like the human g (general intelligence), there's no "zombie problem": we know the AI won't be conscious.
And since I've mentioned the words conscious and consciousness several times, let's deal with that term next. First, we note that there's no universally agreed-upon definition of consciousness (as is true with intelligence). Most people, however, will likely agree that the terms consciousness and mind overlap almost entirely. Whether consciousness/mind appears epiphenomenally from matter or is its own special substance is a centuries-long debate with no resolution currently in sight, but this is the issue that separates the materialists from the substance dualists (or just dualists). Consciousness is multidimensional in that it includes both logical faculties like deduction, reasoned anticipation and emotive faculties like fear, happiness, and anger. Consciousness is polymorphic and multilayered—a sophisticated phenomenon poetically encapsulated in old ideas like a divine spark or, for the dualists, a "ghost in the machine." What is consciousness? It's the whole field of emotion plus cognition: it's reasoning, understanding, learning, anticipating, remembering, deducing, associating, analyzing, synthesizing, applying, awareness, and all the rest, including feelings like anger, sadness, joy, happiness, boredom, etc. Bernard Lonergan is a good source for people wanting a more philosophical and non-scientific look at consciousness.
Lastly, there's sentience. I see at least three ways to look at sentience; there are undoubtedly more. (1) Going back to the word's Latin roots sensus/sentire, we can say that sentience has to do with feeling. A being that can feel or emote is sentient. (2) But others will say that sentience is more than emotion: it's a kind of intelligent awareness of one's surroundings, as well as the ability to do conscious things like reason, etc. We can thus see how this second definition of sentience is related to consciousness. (3) A third way of looking at sentience is as self-awareness (that implies consciousness): the feeling of "I" or ego. When a person is injured, there's an immediate, instinctual feeling of "I am in pain." And while we can't confirm this, the ego-feeling might also obtain for cats, dogs, and other members of the animal kingdom. For centuries, Buddhists have certainly been willing to ascribe sentience to living creatures, using the collective label sentient beings (중생/joongsaeng in Korean).
For this reason, ethical vegetarians eat plants because, up to now, they've reasoned that plants aren't conscious, aren't sentient, or aren't intelligent. But more and more, scientists are building a case for plant consciousness or sentience. And what will vegetarians and vegans do then? When I first posted about this subject on the blog, I did it in a whimsical, joking way, but these days, the question has taken on greater seriousness, and I genuinely wonder what sort of pretzel-logic ethical vegetarians will have to use to justify their diet.
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*See a broader definition of intelligence here.
1 comment:
Now I feel guilty about all those trees I've peed on over the years. They must think I'm awful!
Anyway, interesting lay down on a subject I haven't thought much about. My dogs have all these characteristics, and I've often wondered what they think about during the empty hours of their life. I can't imagine eating dog meat (never even tempted despite living in Korea all those years), but I absolutely love to eat cows. Which reminds me, we had a pet pig once, and I'll be damned if it didn't act just like a dog. Doesn't stop me from craving bacon though.
Does that make me a bad person?
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