I love these little bastards, sometimes its like they live to mock our beliefs of how they should behave.
Of course lobsters are conscious. And of course it's a sickening, despicable, sadistic act to boil them alive. It's one of those things that makes me hope that karma's real.
(2017-09-21, 05:37 AM)Laird Wrote: [ -> ]Of course lobsters are conscious. And of course it's a sickening, despicable, sadistic act to boil them alive. It's one of those things that makes me hope that karma's real.
I saw a UK tv programme which described a rather eccentric man of great wealth, who would invite 'friends' to come and dine with him, After the spending an evening eating and drinking the finest fare, then would retire to sleep as guests in his house.
At some point during the night, a mechanism would tilt the bed of a chosen guest, dumping them into a huge tank of boiling water, where they met their end.
It was presented as a true story, though it sounds bizarre.
(2017-09-20, 05:11 PM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: [ -> ]It recalls Dennet's blather about robots being machines and the moving up to comment on humanity, but AFAIK never updating his beliefs in light of the fact lobsters were observed to play.
Of course this isn't the only time Dennet made a fool of himself, claiming to represent the voice of Science while lacking in actual understanding...
Quote:....in fact, scientific observation has revealed that even lobsters engage in some forms of play—manipulating objects, for instance, possibly just for the pleasure of doing so. If that is the case, to call such creatures “robots” would be to shear the word “robot” of its meaning. Machines don’t just fool around. But if living creatures are not robots after all, many of these apparently thorny questions instantly dissolve away.
Another quote from Graeber's essay (at
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-...t-have-fun) on animal play and its origins, in which he justly savages neo-Darwinistic evolutionary psychology's attempts to explain it as ultimately the activity of "selfish genes":
Quote:Let us imagine a principle. Call it a principle of freedom—or, since Latinate constructions tend to carry more weight in such matters, call it a principle of ludic freedom. Let us imagine it to hold that the free exercise of an entity’s most complex powers or capacities will, under certain circumstances at least, tend to become an end in itself. It would obviously not be the only principle active in nature. Others pull other ways. But if nothing else, it would help explain what we actually observe, such as why, despite the second law of thermodynamics, the universe seems to be getting more, rather than less, complex. Evolutionary psychologists claim they can explain—as the title of one recent book has it—“why sex is fun.” What they can’t explain is why fun is fun. This could.
I don’t deny that what I’ve presented so far is a savage simplification of very complicated issues. I’m not even saying that the position I’m suggesting here—that there is a play principle at the basis of all physical reality—is necessarily true. I would just insist that such a perspective is at least as plausible as the weirdly inconsistent speculations that currently pass for orthodoxy, in which a mindless, robotic universe suddenly produces poets and philosophers out of nowhere. Nor, I think, does seeing play as a principle of nature necessarily mean adopting any sort of milky utopian view. The play principle can help explain why sex is fun, but it can also explain why cruelty is fun. (As anyone who has watched a cat play with a mouse can attest, a lot of animal play is not particularly nice.) But it gives us ground to unthink the world around us.
Graeber is proposing a form of panpsychism, where it is a principle of play that is universal among things in the natural world, even down to fundamental particles like electrons, to say nothing of octopuses and lobsters. He doesn't even speculate on why reality should be constituted this way. It's too bad he summarily excludes from consideration any form of dualism including substance and interactionist, as obviously reversion to superstition. In this he really ends up somewhat in the reductionist materialist camp.