As a professional wildlife photographer and someone who observes animals on an almost daily basis, I think if humans have anything called a soul, so does an animal, that we aren't anything special, and that animals deserve the same regard as humans.
It moreover seems hard to reconcile the idea that there needs to be some minimal level of intelligence to gain a level of awareness. In fact, several philosophers have thought this way also and have coined the term panpsychism to denote the idea that all entities of the universe have some level of sensing and awareness and that it is most concentrated in life forms.
Donald Hoffman takes the panpsychist view a step further. Most theories argue consciousness is something that happens in physical reality, whereas his conscious agent theory assumes consciousness (not space and time) is fundamental and creates physical reality. In other words, brains don’t create consciousness, consciousness creates brains. It implies we’re all little portals allowing consciousness to experience itself vs the panpsychists who say we’re all physical things with a little consciousness in us.
That is a very interesting viewpoint and seems like a logical conclusion, and much more plausible than brains creating consciousnss in a way. The potentially scary conclusion is that AI may also be such a possible outlet for consciousness and who can guess as to its malevolance?
I love listening to Donald Hoffman. Very unique guy. I do sort of subscribe to his theories - and not to take anything away from Donald Hoffman - but this concept comes from eastern philosophy and isn't necessarily his own.
"We are one"
"We are the universe experiencing itself"
These are tenants of buddhism and other eastern religions.
Dr Hoffman makes things a bit more interesting in his observations by relating these older concepts to modern understandings of simulation theory and physics (my own opinion).
Just some context. Ive listened to everything the guy has on YouTube.
I'm always happy to see views of human exceptionalism getting torn down.
Animals show behaviors that are very close to human, often identical modulo anatomical differences. Animals lack a language that we can understand, and therefore can't defend themselves against claims that their behavior doesn't hold up to arbitrary standards of emotion, intelligence, etc.
All sentient beings deserve to be treated with respect and dignity. The vast majority of humanity is not on logical or ethical solid ground here, and remains in denial.
> All sentient beings deserve to be treated with respect and dignity
There is merit in arguing that sapience, i.e. functional self awareness and a general capacity to learn, merits a higher standard of respect and dignity than mere sentience. (As do non-sentient objects, like mountains, though at a lower standard than sentients.)
I've only read partway, but some of these stories of elephant behavior are very touching. It's clear that elephants have very rich social and emotional lives. Given how similar elephants are to humans (long-lived, highly cooperative mammals capable of fine-motor manipulation), it makes you wonder how close elephants were to the kind of evolutionary breakthrough humans had (I'd offer the crude speculation that apes' vocalization-related anatomy was the edge that caused human cultural evolution to outpace that of elephants).
The author seems to be setting up a lot of human-animal binaries (humans choose, animals act on instinct) in order to ultimately cast doubt on them. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding these binaries quite implausible to begin with, and therefore finding those parts of the piece a bit tedious. But I am moved by these vignettes illustrating just how relatable elephants and humans are to each other.
Do humans have souls? I certainly do, not so sure about you though..
All that aside, I think this opens up too much interpretation. Why would it matter if an elephant has a soul, poachers will still poach, and the pope won’t do a damned thing! Didn’t finish the article, it is about an hour’s reading..
We can observe that we have behaviors caused by thoughts and awareness and unless we have an reasonable alternative explanation to why others have similar behaviors it seems like a reasonable conclusion that others have similar thoughts and awareness.
I’d argue that mourning is the mark of a soul. When a creature mourns, it’s perpetuating the dead soul’s individual existence through the act of remembrance. (Would note that even solitary creatures, as parents, have been found to mourn, while several social creatures, e.g. ants, seem to not.)
an inner realm of awareness, selfhood, and possibility
The dictionary has some similar phrasing:
the immaterial essence, animating principle, or actuating cause of an individual life
the spiritual principle embodied in human beings, all rational and spiritual beings, or the universe
a person's total self
So depending on your definition, you could (or could not) apply it outside of humans. Or it's something you believe in or don't believe in. If it's self awareness, or just a definition we wrap around what causes a living being to do things, then yes, it's something you can say an elephant has. Obviously if you say it's "a person's total self", then you only apply it to people.
Other people may or may not have souls, I have no real way to confirm this. Elephants may or may not have souls as well.
I can say with some confidence that P(other humans have souls) > P(elephants have souls). That's about all I can conclude from this limited vantage point.
The piece defines its use of "soul" quite clearly:
> But there is a fourth sense in which when we talk about [a soul], we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved. Even if, religiously, we know by revelation that other people possess them for eternity, we only engage with or know anything about them at a quotidian level by way of the same cues and interactions that a more this-worldly view would take as their sum total: bright eyes, a dejected slump, a sudden manic inspiration or a confession of regret.
You're joking, right? I haven't seen a single piece of compelling AI art, and I've seen a lot of it. It all has the soul and creativity of stock photography.
The only generated images I've seen that had some sort of meaning were AI images so carefully chosen or manipulated that the meaning was as attributable to the AI as the meaning behind Starry Night is attributable to Van Gogh's paintbrush
> Do you expect people the entire world over to have a Rolodex of fairytales that used to be told in your country?
Well no, I don't expect that of most people. I do however expect those who claim to refute an idea to show slightly less than complete and utter ignorance of the idea they claim to refute.
I wouldn't trust a fool who tried to tell me water wasn't wet because sand in the desert is made of silicon. Likewise I won't trust someone who can't turn on a computer to tell me why my code is broken.
> So?
Well, it's basically the same as above - I can tell you are quite sure of yourself. However I can't reach the same level of surety about anything you say about souls, since you clearly don't even have a basic understanding of the concept. You may even be right, but I prefer to form my opinions from a place of knowledge rather than ignorance (no matter how aggressively confident that ignorance is).
I was just trying to help you make your point somewhat intelligible to other people who dislike arguments from ignorance.
I think you are confusing what I was saying with something else. It's general knowledge that the concept of a soul is a common the world over. There have been quite a few philosphers that have delved deeply into the topic, many of them foundational to philosphy and deeply impactful on science.
> You'd have an actual point if you were talking about real philosophy, but you aren't.
You mean like Kant or maybe Descartes?
I think you suspect I'm trying to argue for some religion or another or even just a general pro-religion stance. I'm not - I'm merely pointing out your statement showed ignorant dismissal of a concept that's pretty big and has an impact on most cultures. Asking the question "does an elephant have a soul?" does not imply a religious treatise - souls are conceptually what sets humans apart from animals (in many, many traditions) and asking the question "does $x have a soul?" is often asking (as in this case) "Are humans really that special?". Presumably the authors in this articl are expting their audience be any one of several billion people from places where that metaphor is a cultural trope that everyone knows.
> Words like "soul" and "creativity" are pointless anyhow -- human AI has stomped every one of those bounds, why not nature's AI?
Sounds like you might have some thoughts on "Are humans really that special?". If you want to be taken seriously, knowing about the multiple viewpoints, and being able to refute those actual points is helpful. If you want to come across as a buffoon and jerk, then just make sweeping statements against a strawman, and show ignorance of the concept you're discussing.
> Foreign religions deserve equally as much derision as domestic religions
I don't know what foreign or domestic religion is. An awful lot of religions are practiced in many countries, so I don't follow what you're saying there.
As for derision of religion... nah. Seems like a lot of futile effort. Why put everyone (on all sides) in a bad mood all the time by picking fights over it when no one's beliefs (or lack thereof) will change because some insults were hurled around?
> Now, this might seem a trivial thing to mention, considering the gravity of the subject, but I truly don’t feel it is. We were very pious children from pious households in a fairly pious town, and this affected our behavior considerably. Once, we baptized a litter of cats.
> It occurred to one of the girls to swaddle them up in a doll’s dress — there was only one dress, which was just as well since the cats could hardly tolerate a moment in it and would have to have been unsaddled as soon as they were christened in any case. I myself moistened their brows, repeating the full Trinitarian formula.
> Their grim old crooked-tailed mother found us baptizing away by the creek and began carrying her babies off by the napes of their necks… We lost track of which was which, but we were fairly sure that some of the creatures had been borne away still in the darkness of paganism, and that worried us a great deal.
> I still remember how those warm little brows felt under the palm of my hand. Everyone has petted a cat, but to touch one like that, with the pure intention of blessing it, is a very different thing. It stays the mind. For years we would wonder what, from a cosmic viewpoint, we had done to them. It still seems to me to be a real question. There is a reality in blessing… It doesn’t enhance sacredness, but it acknowledges it, and there is a power in that. I have felt it pass through me, so to speak. The sensation is one of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time.
If you consider consciousness as the soul, then yes. Most countries in the world, have one or another form of anti-animal-cruelty laws, which are universally applied to all mammalian species, and to considerably lesser extent, birds and esp. reptiles. These laws are admission of the belief in consciousness of animals, esp. mammals.
Genesis 1:26 "Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”"
It is a great article describing Anthropomorphism though.
It moreover seems hard to reconcile the idea that there needs to be some minimal level of intelligence to gain a level of awareness. In fact, several philosophers have thought this way also and have coined the term panpsychism to denote the idea that all entities of the universe have some level of sensing and awareness and that it is most concentrated in life forms.