[Avodah] anti-meat rhetoric "according to Judaism"

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 10:50:55PM -0400, T613K at aol.com wrote:
:> Which was  created separately from every other animal.

: It was different from every other animal in its  ability to speak and 
: express its thoughts in words, but its feelings and  "thoughts" were those 
: of any other even slightly intelligent animal.  Even  a dog would have 
: something of the same "thought" -- or rather, emotion of surprise --
: if an owner to whom it had always been loyal, and who had always
: treated it well, suddenly started kicking and beating the dog one  day.

To which R Simon Montagu added on Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 03:02:00AM -0700:
: Yesh mishna mesaya`t lach: It is explicitly "pi ha'aton" which was created
: specially, not the donkey herself.

I don't recally think a diyuq in lashon in an aggadita about an
exceptional donkey is grounds for conclusions about the rest of the
animal kingdom.

People don't just have the mechanics of speech beyond that of the animals.
We have souls of the type "medaber". Even the sign-language speaking
apes are not medaberim. So whatever is meant by the donkey's mouth being
created before the rest of the donkey, and distinct from the animal
kingdom, it doesn't undo this model of types of soul which grows to be
ubiquitous among the rishonim.


The question is how dibbur, in the sense of identifying human beings
with the term "medaber", and the "nishmas chayim" of Bereishis with the
Targum's "ruach memalela", describes something distinct to humans and
not to Koko the gorilla and her ability to use ASL?

:>: b. The calf who ran away because it didn't want to  be 
:>: shechted....

:> Still, where do you see that the calf was aware of its own  thoughts 
:> in this story?

: Who said anything about the animal being aware of its own  thoughts?  

That's the whole point of the thesis I'm positing -- that animals aren't
aware of their own thoughts, and thus don't suffer. They respond to pain,
but without that self-awareness, they could never think "I am in pain",
and thus the pain never translates to what people would call suffering.

: I specifically denied that "self-awareness" was necessary in  order to 
: experience suffering....

I don't see how this sentence is meaningful. In particular how does one
"experience suffering" if suffering is a mental state, and the animal
isn't aware of its own mental states?

To put it another way, the concept of "suffering" is by definition being
self-aware of being pained.

...
: I don't even know where "being aware of one's own  thoughts" comes in for 
: human suffering.  When I was in labor I was  definitely suffering but I never 
: had any thought like, "Well here I am, thinking  about how awful this is 
: and how I can't wait for it to be over."

But you knew you were in pain. Even if you never bothered to consciously
go a third level and think about that knowledge.

I think that in general you're not defining self-awareness the way I am.
E.g. from the conclusion of your post:
: I'm still trying to wrap my head around the question of why you  think 
: the only choices are to be a German philosopher or to be Pavlov's  dog.

: But personally I have not experienced meta-cognizance more than two or  
: three times in my whole life.

When you solve a math problem in your head, are you aware of the steps
you took to find the solution?

Let's shift tracks from steam-of-consciousness type thought to koach
hadimyon...

Say I asked you "Does an elephant have hair?" The verbal way to resolve
it would be something like this: Elephants are mammals, all mammals have
hair, and so unless elephants are the exception to the rule, they must
have hair. Elephants are well known and discussed animals. Could they
be an exception to the rule and I don't know it? Nah, they must have hair.

On the other hand, when I think about someone, and realize he has red
hair, I don't simply pick up another fact about the person, I have the
experience of seeing red hair. I can remember and reproduce the image
of him and his red hair in my mind. The knowledge isn't reducable to
words, it involves qualia, attributes of internal experience. And when
I imagine what he would look like with black hair, I manipulate an
image, not simply reason with concepts reducible into the words of my
seikhel. There is a shared feature to seeing and hearing something when
it happened, remembering the event, and imagining what the event would
be like. When I remember my son's face, I do not simply remember facts
about it translatable into my seikhel, the flow of words in my head. I
actually recreate the experience of seeing it. When I remember last Yom
Kippur's Kol Nidrei, I reproduce the experience of hearing the Chazan
sing it, the congregation singing along.

This is the "koach hadimyon", "the ability to make likenesses". It
is usually translated as "imagination", but this translation is
anachronistic -- the word "imagination" changed meaning since first
coined by Aristotilians (such as the Rambam). Dimyon is the laboratory
of my thought experiments.

Solving the elephant problem through dimyon, you can remember elephants
you saw, or saw pictures of. The detail may be blurry, so you may have
to manipulate the picture a bit. Finally, a version of the picture which
has a tuft of hair at the tail, maybe (if your memory is good) some downy
hair around the eyes and ears, strikes you as the most familiar, the most
real. And again you could reach the conclusion that elephants have hair.

Note that both require being aware of one's thoughts: there is no stream
of consciousness without a "listener" hearing the thoughts. There is no
dimyon without an observer (and listener) watching the theater. This
is a kind of self-awareness essential for the idea of "free will" to
be meaningful. Free will is the ability to choose one's actions and
reactions, which is impossible if one can not perceive which thoughts
to choose among.

And therefore, the ru'ach, the seat of will, must be self-aware. Conscious
thought comes from the awareness of our thoughts, including our awareness
of that awareness itself, and so on in an infinite regress. Free will
comes from being able to monitor one's thoughts and edit them based on
judging what one monitors.

I am arguing that this is the ruach memalela -- not merely speech,
but the internal communication whether via words or dimyon.

And it's certainly a critical piece of bechirah. How can one modify
one's thoughts without those thoughts themselves being among the inputs
to our thinking?

Animals, that lack bechirah, do not have there own thoughts as fodder
for further thought. Their entire aparatus is far more like the computer
I'm typing on than like my human soul. They have pain -- it's a stimulus
meaning something is off and ought to be avoided. But without knowing
they are in pain, do they experience suffering?

I'm arguing no, and further, that this lack of possible experience of
suffering is reflected in the dinim of tzaar baalei chayim, as well as
in the prohibition of a chazan saying "al kan tzipor yagi'u Rachamekha."

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I think, therefore I am." - Renne Descartes
micha at aishdas.org        "I am thought about, therefore I am -
http://www.aishdas.org   my existence depends upon the thought of a
Fax: (270) 514-1507      Supreme Being Who thinks me." - R' SR Hirsch