This guy wants really badly to believe that animals aren’t people, so he’s likely biased.
His arguments are:
Recognizing one’s reflection and self-awareness are poorly correlated; chimps can be trained to pass theory-of-mind tests but there’s no evidence they’re using theory of mind to do so. Plus there are humans who definitely are people who still have trouble with self-awareness and theory of mind. So those tests prove nothing.
Animals pay attention to different things from humans, so they don’t have humanlike consciousness.
The latter is obviously a confusion between senses of “conscious” as “a valuable mind” and “aware of something”. The former is true, but doesn’t cover Cambridge’s main argument about emotions (states that lead to similar brain activity and behaviors in humans and animals and are described as emotions by humans, and are disrupted in similar ways by hallucinogens).
This guy wants really badly to believe that animals aren’t people, so he’s likely biased.
His arguments are:
Recognizing one’s reflection and self-awareness are poorly correlated; chimps can be trained to pass theory-of-mind tests but there’s no evidence they’re using theory of mind to do so. Plus there are humans who definitely are people who still have trouble with self-awareness and theory of mind. So those tests prove nothing.
Animals pay attention to different things from humans, so they don’t have humanlike consciousness.
The latter is obviously a confusion between senses of “conscious” as “a valuable mind” and “aware of something”. The former is true, but doesn’t cover Cambridge’s main argument about emotions (states that lead to similar brain activity and behaviors in humans and animals and are described as emotions by humans, and are disrupted in similar ways by hallucinogens).