Re: Feelings And Other Living Organisms
I guess we can never really no for sure, but we could make very good educated guesses.
Put simply, we can discount certain creatures on the basis that they simply do not meet the necessary requirements for having feelings.
Does this rock on the ground have feelings? Of course not. It lacks the basic requirements for feelings (a central nervous system, a brain). But can we
know that it has no feelings? Of course there is no way to determine that it does not, but any sort of panpsychism of this sort is pure nonsense. (in the same way that we cannot
KNOW that god does not exist, or that we cannot
KNOW that the purple penguins don't exist)
Can we apply the same sort of logic to other simple creatures? I suggest that we can...to an extent.
Does a bacteria have feelings? Again, we can answer that with a confident no, as it is lacking the necessary causal mechanisms.
What about a spider? What about a fish? What about a mouse? Now we are on shakier ground. Why can we not apply the same logic to these creatures? Because our understanding of the causal mechanism of our own feeling is incomplete. We have stated a
necessary condition for feelings: A central nervous system and a brain. But we have not defined a
sufficient condition. Those creatures which fail to meet the necessary condition can be dismissed as being without feeling.
As for those other creatures? Well for the moment we have to leave the question open to a degree. They may or may not have feelings.
To get around this problem we will need to tighten up our necessary condition. Damasio suggests a way of doing this, by claiming that the construction of neural maps of the various systems of the body is also a necessary condition.
So, now armed with our tighter definition, we return to our "maybe" set of potential "feelers". Eliminating creatures apparently becomes an empirical biological task.
This is all well and good, but we are bound to come across a grey area...and this is by no means a problem. I strongly believe that feeling, and consciousness in general is not a matter of yes and no, have s and have-nots, Rather there are levels of "awareness".
We are conscious. Is a cat conscious?
If by that you mean is a cat conscious in the same way that we are, then the answer is a definite no. But a cat is surely conscious in its own way. It would be a "simpler" type of consciousness than we enjoy, but it would most definitely be consciousness.
Some people find the idea of different "strengths" of consciousness very difficult to accept. I am conscious. I have feelings. I have thoughts. In short I am aware that I exist, in a way a rock is not...it seems a simple on/off situation. But this I believe is far from the truth, and in fact humans can actually experience "lower" levels of consciousness. Think of being in a drunken stupor. Think of being so incredibly tired that you literally cannot keep your eyes open. I am not suggesting that this is what it is like to be a cat...rather I am attempting to show that feeling and awareness are not all or nothing things, and as such we cannot divide the animal kingdom into neat categorizations of "aware" and "unaware".
So in short, in order to answer the question we need a clearer understanding of how the physical brain causes feelings in humans. In dealing with humans we have a major advantage...they can talk to us and tell us about what they are feeling. (We will have to take their word for it, and assume that they are not liars, or mere unfeeling zombies).
Our ultimate goal would be to come up with some sort of model which describes the sufficient conditions for the various aspects of feeling. Armed with this knowledge, we can go out, and examine other creatures, and decide if they are feeling, and if so, to what extent.
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