Comment on Fish have heart too.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 11 months agoAre you saying everything we can talk about is arbitrary because everything we can talk about is with words and concepts?
Are you talking about meriological nihilism? (thanks alex oconnor for teaching me that term lol)
I know sentience is real based on the fact that I’m experiencing things right this moment. Based on my understanding of the brain and nervous system, and the strong evidence that those things give rise to my sentience, I think that it’s reasonable to extrapolate that other, similar nervous systems/brains are also sentient and their experience is worth consideration in a similar way to how I consider my own experience (among the many other reasons to have a basic level of empathy)
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
why sentience and not DNA? or literally any other characteristic? your standard is absolutely arbitrary.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 11 months ago
commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
the same can be said of DNA. this is a completely arbitrary standard, and you would be better served to embrace that than pretending it’s somehow objective.
oshitwaddup@lemmy.antemeridiem.xyz 11 months ago
I’m not saying it is objective, I’m saying it’s not arbitrary.
If my dna was isolated in a test tube and it could experience things then I would also care about what it experiences. There isn’t any evidence I’m aware of that that’s the case. Dna is the instructions and tool to build the sentient being, not the sentient being itself. So no, the same couldn’t be said of dna. Extrapolating from how much I care about what I experience, I think it’s reasonable to care about what ** experience