If you’re an animal lover, you might want to pick up a copy
of the current Time magazine Special
called The Animal Mind. The photographs are worth the price,
and the written account by Jeffrey Kluger is excellent. The title of the edition suggests a new
idea for science: the idea that your cats and your dogs, as well as the birds
and squirrels in your backyard, have
minds.
Modern science has evolved under the spell of mechanistic
materialism, and has taken centuries since René Descartes to finally begin to
admit that other living creatures besides humans feel, think, mourn, play, have
friendships, and so on—in short, exhibit mental
experience.
In 2012, a group of scientists, the physicist Stephen
Hawking along with notable neuroscientists, solemnly signed The Cambridge
Declaration of Consciousness. So,
what anybody who has a dog or a cat knows is now officially true: if you kick
Rover in the face, he will feel
it.
It took four hundred years of “science” to figure that out!
It is of course expedient to not believe that animals feel or think. It’s so much easier to exploit, torture, slaughter, and
(yummy) eat them. Still, there are
die-hard materialists who don’t believe that animals feel anything. One philosophical
freak, Daniel Dennett, has made a career out of arguing that human consciousness is an illusion. And if that’s so, why bother with human rights?
Dennett’s philosophy that reduces all living things to
zombies devoid of an inner life provides the perfect rationale for racists,
fascists, and corporate capitalists obsessed with acquiring power and
wealth. The systematic disregard
of the inner reality of other human and non-human life forms is the cornerstone
of every species of oppression that humans inflict on others.
The Time magazine
special on animal mind may be a sign this horror is changing.
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