John Page

mental state = dead? I agree with your overall tenor, but killing the subject hardly helps us zoom in on the componentry of life.

Cheers, John

Pyrrho

You don't have to wait until they are dead to cut into them. You will see the same stuff, nerves and so forth, whether the human or other animal is alive or dead, though, of course, what the things will be doing (or not doing) will be different (e.g., generally speaking, if you cut into a person who is alive and expose the heart, it will be 'beating', and it will not be 'beating' if you cut into a dead person). The point is, you will never be seeing something that is "mental states". Thus, any inference about mental states is always indirect, even if one were cutting into people to decide such things (which, in fact, is not how it is done anyway).

Whenever we say something about another person's mental states, it ALWAYS involves an inference from behavior (or a lack or behavior).

For those who don't like "behaviorism", I am not saying that the behaviors are identical with the mental states (nor, for that matter, am I denying such a statement; it is irrelevant to my point in any case). But one "knows" about mental states in others from behavior.

John Page

Point taken.
Inference about physical states is inference also, but I'll grant that the mental states of others are more indirect. The irony is that my mental state is what *I* directly experience.
Agreed, and I assume that sometimes our inference is correct.
Yes, but I think reality is as follows.
1. We share fairly common physiology as humans and our perceptions of colors, pain etc. are consequently similar (although they may drastically vary with abnormalities).
2. We can relate pain to each other because our physical states can be remembered and communicated. Thus we have a physcial state used to remember information about another physical state - we can call this aspect of mental states "memory".
3. When we talk about fish pain and the erudite posts here that indicate fish remember (what we call) painful suituations and modify their behavior in a Pavlovian dog manner, it is necessary to understand that fish are physically different structures.
4. In order to further discussion on the matter my current thinking is that one needs to explore how it is that we consciously feel and apprehend pain in order to develop a comparative fish model. Nagel's bat swoops again!
5. Finally, in order to build such a comparative model we need to use the concept of mental states (see item 2 above) and the processes that connect these stateful mental snapshots in order to reasonably understand our fish. (Whether they want to be understood or not).

Hope I'm making sense. For the computer geeks think hardware abstraction layer.

Cheers, John

VivaHedone

How do you define consciousness?

I believe that fish and all other animals are incapable of conscious thought. When we think, we do so in words - or, as I should say, we hear our thoughts in words. As fish don't have language, they can't think in words. Unless some totally different and, to us, incomprehensible method of thought has somehow evolved parallel to ours, then fish do not have conscious thoughts. They obviously think in some way - i.e. trying to avoid further pokes with a stick - but these 'thoughts' cannot be conscious. They do not 'hear' their thoughts, in the same way as we do.

This leads me to believe that fish have no subjective understanding of the world, although they clearly experience sensations. I find it impossible to imagine sensations without thoughts, and so cannot claim to know how much these sensations are 'worth'. For instance, if fish feel pain, they would no be able to actually consciously understand that they are feeling pain - does this make the pain any more acceptable? I don't know.

John Page

But they do have body language, yes? Otherwise, how could one explain group behavior? (How do they go to school? Heehee).

Cheers, John

tribalbeeyatch

I've heard this said before, but I don't buy it. I can only "think in words" through a conscious effort, and even then it feels more like what I am doing is thinking and putting my thoughts into words.

VivaHedone

That's irrelevant - unless they have a sophisticated enough body language vocab to actually think in it. My point is that all interpretation and use of body language would be performed by the brain without any conscious awareness by the fish.

I disagree that conscious effort is required to think in words. If you don't believe me, then try to stop doing so.

John Page

Viva:

Aside from the degree of sophistication issue (a red herring as far as fish are concerned? heehee) I agree that language does not necessarily require consciousness at the time of speech - e.g. talking in one's sleep. My point was merely that fish must use body language in some form in order to exhibit the variety of group behaviors that they do.

Cheers, John

Thomas Ash

Wait a second...
Do we experience our pain in words? I don't think we do. So in that case, there's nothing in their lack of sophisticated language to rule out the possibility that fish experience pain. And our (wordless) experience of pain is undeniably a concious experience, so this would suggest that fish could be concious without having sophisticated language.

John Page

Yea! Experience precedes language - Deconstruction authors its own deconstruction.