Gomez & Infinite Regression

Gomez's definition of what it means to be conscious is inclusive of first, second, and third person awareness. His contention of a beings ability to have mutual awareness, whereby they can recognize other intelligent agents is enough to show the existence of a conscious being. He limits human bias of being self-aware which is a step beyond just being conscious. Going a step beyond conscious can be abstracted to infinite regress if we persist to add higher layers of consciousness. This will not only lead to infinite regress, but it will also create a species bias in that humans will be the ones capable of the higher layers.

Addition to Patrick Kelly's Critique of Andrew Mcnamara's Life of a Non-Human Animal

Patrick brought up a good point when he said, "their brains are not the same size or shape as ours and that is where we think our intellectual superiority comes from." I remember an anthropology major had come to my high school class and she said that anthropology was not always a respected field because it's theory on head sizes supported slavery. This does not mean the science today is not accurate, but  with regards to this time period it is inaccurate because minorities are some of the leading thinkers of today.

Lynch Does Not Parallel Donnovan

Lynch parallels Donnovan when he speaks on page 4 of his article about the intelligent economy of humans and compares it to animals. By addressing the fact that within our own species we tend to misunderstand each other, Lynch hopes to show that we can't even understand other species. If we can't understand our nature we can't understand anything outside of it. This is where Lynch is different from Donnovan.  Quantitative data is limited to the external and that is our medium used to make assumptions about animals that are not necessarily true.

An Argument for Animals

Today in class we were going over whether or not language is a necessary precondition that produces belief which gives rise to desire and in the qualifies and entitles a being to have rights. R.G Frey claims all of these are a necessary preconditions for an entity to have rights. However, his work does not accommodate for the auto pilot argument. For example, a human driving from work to home that does not realize how he or she got home isn't something that just happens successfully. Likewise, a monkey swinging from tree to tree isn't something that the monkey just gets up and does successfully. Both processes had to occur through habituation. Habituation is a conscious effort to do something to a point where it almost becomes effortless to the conscious entity. Using language as a method to teach is not a necessary precondition to judge consciousness because we do no know whether other being besides ourselves have language. However, we do know that conscious effort is necessary to adapt to a condition. For example, someone in class today mentioned that a wolf was raised by a lion and adapted its way of hunting without regard for its individual disposition compared to the entity that raised it. This wolf habituated itself to an environment that wasn't his own. It's diet may have been altered, but it yet survived like a vast majority of humans who can survive in various climate conditions and different foods that they were not always accustomed to.