Stevan Harnad - Other Minds: Ethics and Animal Welfare
Dr Stevan Harnad (Cognitive Scientist and author of The Symbol Grounding Problem) discusses animal welfare, ethics and the 'other minds' problem - The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us.. In trying to make do with inferences from behavior, the behavioral sciences have been at pains to avoid “anthropomorphism,”.. our human mind-reading capacities – biologically evolved for care-giving to our own progeny as well as for social interactions with our kin and kind – are really quite acute.. But what about other species? And whose problem is the “Other-Minds Problem”? Philosophers think of it as our problem, in making inferences about the minds of our own conspecifics. But when it comes to other species, and in particular our interactions with them, surely it is their problem if we misinterpret or fail to detect what or whether they are feeling.
00:06 On the urgency of reducing suffering. Is ethics merely an aesthetic?
01:29 Classical utilitarianism. Are happiness and suffering morally symmetrical?
04:48 Negative utilitarianism
05:32 Pin prick arguments
11:37 The problem of other minds, skepticism and the Turing test (chat-bot vs robotic Turing tests)
19:18 GPT3 & Symbol Grounding - while a great text generation, it doesn't understand stuff.
27:17 Stevan Harnad's personal reasons for first becoming a vegetarian and later a vegan
31:48 Are there health issues with being a vegan?
32:21 Informing and sensitizing people about ethical food consumption
33:17 Are there nutritional benefits only found in animal products?
37:22 The ethics of animal experimentation. Conflicts of moral vital interests.
39:17 Covid19 - the cause of almost all pandemics is zoonotic - where humans force animals into each others habitats making it easier for pathogens to jump between species (inc humans)
44:48 Pets
49:45 Clean meat - duplicate the taste without the suffering.
51:36 Strategies for reducing animal suffering in industry: 1) Sensitize to horrors and non-necessity, 2) develop clean meat or alternatives to meat 3) scare tactics (i.e. regarding pandemics and environmental issues)
54:32 Disinformation campaigns in the meat industry - Ag-gag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
58:01 GPT3 a tool for generating fake news? #GPT3 can't understand stuff without symbol grounding.
#AnimalWelfare #Ethics #SymbolGrounding #FakeNews #aggag
References
"Other bodies, other minds: A machine incarnation of an old philosophical problem" Dr Stevan Harnad - https://philpapers.org/rec/HAROBO-2
'Other Minds' - Plato Stanford: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ot...
'The other-minds problem in other species' - http://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/...
'Taking Animal Sentience Seriously' (Interview with Stevan Harnad) - https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/bl...
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