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Why does a machine deserve compassion and respect? I mean heck I love that I can have an electric screwdriver but it does what it is designed to do.

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Peyote Road said: If they don't see color the same way, how do you know they feel physical sensations the same way? If you break your leg, you feel pain but you don't know that your subjective experience of the pain is the same as mine is if I break my leg. All we know is that we both find the sensation unpleasant, not that we share the exact same experience of the sensation. That is what is meant by subjective. How do you not understand that?

Even two non color blind humans might not experience colors exactly the same way. Even the same human, I for example, see colors slightly differently though my left eye vs my right eye. Hence the experience is subjective. We don't know for sure what it is like for other people or animals. This is not a difficult concept.

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Hawks and other birds of prey actually have 2 fovea.  The fovea is the spot on the back of your eyeball where you have the highest density of rods and cones. Beneath these you have a greater number of ganglion cells and so a higher representation in the retina and eventually on the visual cortex.  Hawks have both a central and a peripheral fovea. Humans only have a central one.

http://blog.eyewire.org/hawks-vision-different-humans/

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The myth that dogs don't feel pain like humans do, or at least, that they don't feel as much of it as we do, is partly the result of a legacy from their evolutionary origins as hunting  predators. Canines have inherited an instinct to hide any pain that is caused by injuries or infirmity. In the wild, an animal that is injured or infirm is vulnerable to attack, and there is a survival advantage to act like nothing is wrong even when something most definitely is. Thus our pet dogs still appear to act in a stoic manner. They suppress many of the more obvious signals of pain and injury to protect themselves and their social standing in their pack. They hide their pain to appear to be more in control of the situation, but unfortunately, because of this, it is often difficult for humans to recognize when our dogs are hurting.

The researchers sum up their results by suggesting that the prevention, early recognition and aggressive management of pain and anxiety should be essential to the veterinary care of dogs. They warn us that it is important to be sensitive to the subtle signs of pain in our pets, because the treatment of pain itself can be healing by reducing the stress that can prolong recovery.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/canine-corner/201109/do-dogs-feel-pain-the-same-way-humans-do

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Peyote Road said: You still haven't explained what you mean by physical experiences. In addition, why wouldn't you consider physical experiences subjective? You can't know that other beings experience them in the same way you do, hence they are subjective.

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Congenital insensitivity to pain is a condition that inhibits the ability to perceive physical pain. From birth, affected individuals never feel pain in any part of their body when injured.

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Peyote Road said: Is the body not a physical thing? Look, you're just horribly unclear. What exactly are you trying to say? You don't explain what you mean by physical experiences or self awareness. Just explain what you're trying to say, clearly.

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Peyote Road said:able to perceive or feel things.

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Peyote Road said:  What are you talking about? I never said machines deserve compassion and respect. You however, claimed they don't break. Defend your claims or admit your position is flawed. Instead you just move the goal posts.

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Peyote Road said: The basic concept of sentience is that beings that can feel pain and distress are considered sentient and deserve compassion and respect. Contrast this with a machine for example. The machine I use at work doesn't get a break, it doesn't get paid, it doesn't get the option to stop working there. It's basically a slave. Why do we not object to this? It's because we don't consider it sentient.

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A physical experience as in nerve activity due to interactions with the environment, your nervous system is no different to mine or any one else's. How you respond to sensations and the memories you have of those sensations can differ but the experience of them does not, if you slap your knee, you feel that physical sensation the same as anyone else would, unless of course you have congenital analgesia.

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By self awareness I mean an awareness of more than an embodied being, knowing of your own mind so to say.

The body is a physical thing, with nerves that underlie its activities.

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My query is that I think a level of self-awareness is present within interoception, which is an awareness of the activity of internal organs such as the heart. So I don't see how something can not be self-aware, yet at the same time be aware of the activity of their internal organs.

Simply I suppose I find it odd that an animal can be considered both aware of the state of its internal organs yet at the same time not self-aware in the sense of being aware about having a mind. 

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It seems fair enough to say that if a being can feel pain and distress it should be deserving of compassion and respect. I still have compassion and respect for machinery even though I wouldn't think it feels pain or distress, maintenance for tools is important yo. [/quote[

But if you had to shoot either a puppy or a machine and you wanted to make the most compassionate choice, I am guessing you would choose to shoot the machine, right?

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My point was that a poorly designed machine is more likely to break than a well designed and maintained one.

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And that's relevant because?

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I don't even know what the goal post is anymore, I say physical sensations are real, that human beings are self-aware and that some trained animals like service dogs, dolphins and great apes are too. Is there even a dispute?

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I agree except I question why you include service dogs. I'm not saying service dogs aren't self aware but I think again raises questions about what we mean by self aware and to what degree. Why are service dogs self aware but not other kind of dogs?

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Peyote Road said: How do you know it feels the same? Our nervous systems ARE different. My nervous system is different to how it was 10 years ago I don't feel sensations the same as I did 10 years ago. There is no reason to assume I feel the same as other people either. Similar? Of course, but not exactly the same.

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How it feels about pain may be a mystery but that it does and through which anatomical mechanisms it does are not.

A different snowball of experiences sure, but not a different system.

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What we consciously see depends on the brains best guess of what's out there, our experience of the world comes from the inside out not just the outside in. The rubber hand illusion shows that this applies to experiences of what is and what is not our body, and these self related predictions depend critically on sensory signals coming from deep inside the body. Finally experiences of being an embodied self are more about control and regulation than figuring out what's there. Our experiences of the world around us and ourselves within it are kinds of controlled hallucinations that have been shaped over millions of years of evolution to keep us alive in worlds full of danger and opportunity, we predict ourselves into existence. - Anil Seth

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Peyote Road said:What knows the mind? What is this non physical element you seem to be alluding to?

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Peyote Road said:I agree with you for once. I guess it depends on how you define self awareness. For example, we are self aware in abstract sense. We are aware that we are aware. I would say my dog has self awareness, but she is not aware of the fact that she has self awareness. It's get so confusing because the same terms can mean different things and their seems to be varying degrees of awareness. It's also possible for a human to not be aware, for example at times I will catch myself acting on autopilot not truly aware of what I am doing. So not even humans are self aware in the abstract sense all the time, we simply have the potential for it.

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To quote a wall street journal entry called ‘Mainstream Science on Intelligence’(1994), intelligence is defined as “A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.”

Humans show all and more of these signs of intelligence but what is it that defines humans and makes us different to our animal counterparts? With recent animal genome mapping it’s easy to see that in physical, evolutionary terms, we have a lot In common with animals. Our biology is especially similar to those such as the great apes as we share 99% of our DNA with them.  We don’t share as much of our genome with other animals like dogs but it’s still a fair amount, around 80%. Beyond this there are fish, insects, snakes etc but for the sake of ease I’ll use only a few examples.

Our physical make up differs slightly to animals on the time scale of evolution but we are not only physical. We are so much more than the meat our bodies are made of. We have brains, we have thought, we have emotions and we have the ability of self-awareness, the one thing that appears missing in most animals. Although some people may not be aware of it, I said ‘most’ animals because in modern times we do actually see a lot of animals with skills in self-awareness.

The best examples of self-awareness in animals are in service animals that include dogs, seals, dolphins, birds, monkeys and apes to name a few.

These animals have some incredible abilities and are exceptionally helpful to humans with capabilities such as sniffing for prostate cancers or underwater mine detection.

Service animals can think for themselves, react to situations and make the best choices at any given moment, with these in mind it's easy to consider that service animals can display a considerable amount of intelligence. Intelligent behaviours like smelling cancers are not usual behaviours for dogs, the average dog is often known for eating their own faeces, a trait that wouldn't be considered intelligent by most.

So how is it that the average dog can be transformed into an animal with such incredible capabilities? The answer to this is the use of practices and techniques where intelligent disobedience is central to the training.
Intelligent disobedience is defined as an animal’s ability to go directly against their owner's instructions in an effort to make a better decision.  An example of this is a seeing eye dog stopping its owner on a crosswalk when there is an oncoming car. The dog has to identify the danger and decide on the best action to avoid it. The dog may stop the owner or pull them backwards in order to do so.

The ability to practice intelligent disobedience is central to defining the difference between an intelligent service dog and the average dog. This suggests that a dogs skill in practicing intelligent disobedience is a defining factor in what makes a service dog intelligent. Dogs can learn to practice and display intelligent disobedience because we teach it to them, and evidently intelligent disobedience is a learnable behaviour.

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Guide dogs are taught intelligent disobedience in a variety of ways. The most common is to use some level of aversive training methods. For teaching intelligent disobedience in a traffic situation, first the dog is taught how to safely cross a road with their trainer. This is done by stopping at the down curb, waiting for a “Forward” command to go forward then walking straight and directly across the road at a good pace to the opposite up curb. Most schools teach their guide dogs to stop at the up curb, indicating to their handler that they have reached the opposite side of the road successfully.

Once a dog can do this and shows no fear of the traffic, the intelligent disobedience portion is trained.
http://servicedogcentral.org/content/node/422

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How it feels about pain may be a mystery but that it does and through which anatomical mechanisms it does are not.

A different snowball of experiences sure, but not a different system.

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The mind knows the mind, and as I've said before, the brain, the adrenals and the heart.

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And I wouldn't shoot a machine over a puppy if it was my grandmothers life support.

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Not all machines need a break, and it's kinda hard to be relevant when you're talking about a contrast of sentient beings and machines.

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You said our nervous systems are different, I say our nervous systems are not anatomically different.

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The mind can recognise changes in heartbeat is one way how the mind as I see it would know the mind.

By more than an embodied being I mean being aware of awareness.

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You made a hypothetical, and I gave a hypothetical answer.

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Peyote Road But if you had to shoot either a puppy or a machine and you wanted to make the most compassionate choice, I am guessing you would choose to shoot the machine, right?

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My response was meant to indicate that what I would choose to shoot would be relevant to the context of the situation I found myself in. So my own preferences for saving an animal or a machine would be related to the personal value I place upon them. Like if I bought a new car and I had to choose between it and a puppy, there'd be a funeral at the pet cemetery.

And I didn't go along with the spirit of your analogy?

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Ad hominem (Latin for "to the man" or "to the person"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is in which an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

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I used the word anatomically to clarify that the nervous systems we have, and how they function are the same.

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Peyote Road said: How do you know it feels the same? Our nervous systems ARE different. My nervous system is different to how it was 10 years ago I don't feel sensations the same as I did 10 years ago. There is no reason to assume I feel the same as other people either. Similar? Of course, but not exactly the same.

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Sudly said: How it feels about pain may be a mystery but that it does and through which anatomical mechanisms it does are not.

A different snowball of experiences sure, but not a different system.

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Peyote Road said: But if you had to shoot either a puppy or a machine and you wanted to make the most compassionate choice, I am guessing you would choose to shoot the machine, right?

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My point was that you don't feel the same about your experiences but that you do have the same physical experiences.
You said what you meant, so I clarified. 

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You experience physical sensations in the same way as I or anyone else does, as in if someone else takes morphine with you then you'll both experience that sensation.

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I don't see much of a difference between machines and most living things, only that one is made mostly of meat and evolved instead of being designed and built. Though I said most because I do see there as being a difference between human beings, machines and animals which is related to the idea of sentience.

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Interoception: (Physiology) physiol sensitivity to stimuli originating inside of the body

Interoception is contemporarily defined as the sense of the internal state of the body. It encompasses the brain’s process of integrating signals relayed from the body into specific subregions—like the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex—allowing for a nuanced representation of the physiological state of the body. This is important for maintaining homeostatic conditions in the body and, potentially, aiding in self-awareness.

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Introspection: the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.

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However someone responds to it that morphine takes the same path in the body, like with alcohol how who ever drinks it gets drunk with enough of a dose.

If there's no morphine sensation then how about being 'drunk' on alcohol, or 'high' on marijuana? Do you not think these are experienced in the same way? You know 'that sensation' of hitting your knee? Of burning your tongue? Of morphine on the system?

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I think my quarrel is in that I trust neither of the definitions we gave for sentience because I think there is a sense of self awareness involved, albeit it through involvement of intelligent disobedience, interoception and introspection.

More so that sentience in my view should involve both interoception AND introspection.

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I think all organisms are aware of their surroundings and have a capability to respond though I don't think all organisms are capable of introspection.

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Introspection: the examination or observation of one's own mental and emotional processes.

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