The Humanist Cafe
Wednesday, June 20, 2018 – 7:00-8:30 pm
James Bay New Horizons 234 Menzies Street, VictoriaDiscussion Topic:
James Bay New Horizons 234 Menzies Street, VictoriaDiscussion Topic:
Intelligence or Sentience – to which do we owe more care and respect?Presenter: Glynne Evans
Moderator: John Pope
Is a gradation of moral obligation justified?
If intelligence, how do we define it? Is a honey bee’s dance any less a form
of intelligence than our own, or a bird’s migration skills or song any different
in kind from our mastery of language? Why should one be intelligence and
another described as instinct?
If sentience, how do we know how much pain and variety of emotion is felt
by species with which we have little ability to communicate or interpret their
behaviour or mere presentation? And if plant matter reacts to stimulation,
may that be evidence of sentience?
We are facing the possibility of mass extinction or near extinction. If this
appears to be inexorably the case, does this change our priorities? Should
we attempt to preferentially save some species or individuals with particular
characteristics of their species, whether for hardiness and possibly less of a
certain kind of sentience, or for intelligence as another form of adaptability?
How about for sociability, empathy, for vegetarian diet, or ecological non
disruption?
Is life worth saving anyway? Are the disruptions of physical atoms in a
“lifeless” multiverse any less or more matters of pain and pleasure than
those in central nervous systems. Is intelligence of worth beyond a survival
mechanism or a curiosity for other intelligences?
Can these questions be addressed by “the man in the street” or the woman
in labour as well as it can by philosophers? (I think they can, regardless of
the immense difficulty.)