Sunday, November 9, 2008
Anti-Sentience
If sentience is the capacity for pain and pleasure, are those who advocate for the practice of remaining indifferent to pain and pleasure, so to transcend the effects of the mundane, physical world (i.e. Eastern mystics) anti-sentient? If sentience is then taken out of the equation of determining which living beings should be given ethical consideration, does this make all nonhumans more like humans, or does it separate humans from nonhumans even more? Would the non-sentient still give sentient creatures consideration because sentient creatures are unaware of the deluded nature of pain and plasure, or would s/he give them less consideration because s/he sees pain and pleasure as fleeting illusions, as it would not matter if they received one or the other, and whatever happens to them, happens? Because humans alone can grasp this, and become indifferent to pain and pleasure, does this create a larger gap between humans and nonnhumans? Would this ability make humans superior, because they can avoid these disturbances?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I doubt the capacity of any living human to remain entirely "indifferent to pain and pleasure"; perhaps what they accomplish instead is a displacement of traditional notions in favor of some relatively novel tangle of pleasures and pains.
Humans and animals differ in degrees when considering their similar and non similar traits. So if sentience was taken out of consideration then we would be left with the same basic degree changes from protozoa to humans. Each of these lives possess the same basic need to reproduce and carry its genes into the next generation. Whether they are conscious or unconscious of their environment they have the basic instinct to survive and reproduce. All life has selfish genes that strive to make it to the next generation.
Post a Comment