[blamestross]

The cultural fixation on "Consciousness" has become deeply frustrating to me.

We are naturally "animistic" and personifying. The twist in structure allowing mirror neurons being able to re-use the hardware for thinking to model the behavior of external things is useful and has been critical to our success. Unlearning the behavior of of that animism is HARD. Maintaining awareness that the forces of nature, animals, or even objects don't have feelings, motivations, and narratives of their own is hard work but also becomes a more accurate and useful model of reality.

I think that dissonance between hardware that wants to interpret the world as a reflection of self, and the forced acknowledgement that it is not is uncomfortable. And we keep filling that discomfort with whatever rhetoric we can force to fit, and once that schema is in place, it takes a great act of discomfort and bravery to remove or replace it. The arguments and debates about it don't change minds, they just exacerbate the dissonance, making people even more motivated to shout loudly their model of the situation is right.

I desperately want the answers too. I don't know any of the answers. I don't think our culture (or even our neuroanatomy) is ready for the answers. In the meantime people yell at each other a lot without wanting to listen.

[pavlov]

How do you know that animals “don’t have feelings, motivations, and narratives of their own”?

Seems like this can only be true if you define feelings, emotions and narratives as precisely human ones… But then the question becomes whether humans are truly all so similar either.

[blamestross]

You are right, i should have added "like I do" to that statement.

Its about the fact i shouldn't be using my internal model as the basis for my expectations of their behavior. I need to suppress that instinct and learn a more correct model of what an animal perceives and how it reacts that isn't built on anthropomorphic projection.

Based on the response, I need to try communicating this entire sentiment differently.

[danielbln]

Are you saying animals have no feelings?