“As a result, there’s a risk of creating a new legal framework built on pseudoscience.”
Yup. I know people who support animal rights for sensible reasons, and then I know people who are absolutely horrendous about it, like the relative who would keep repeating, “would you eat a retarded child then?” (his words), even if animal intelligence hadn’t actually come up in the conversation.
The people who are more horrendous about it also tend to automatically reject any ideas that plants might have anything like intelligence or memory:
I like the idea of respecting animals – and plants – for what they are, rather than trying to assign everything some weird pass/fail based on 19c norms.
to my mind, it jibes with what we’re learning about how we do a fair amount of our thinking in our gut. given the content of the article, it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the gut flora are acting as a kind of decentralized network piggybacked onto the gut nerves and the spine is like the transatlantic cable, the data pipeline between gut and brain.
my speculation as a layperson is just blue-sky nothings, admittedly. but if so, this would necessarily mandate that some form of intelligence occurs even in microscopic organisms.
Antibiotic treatments are known to kill off the gut flora. I wonder if in the re-growing stage there could be correlations with work or school performance, or with problems with e.g. social or athletic goals.
This is going to sound far down the anecdotal track – because it is – but I noticed that for a long time after I had my gall bladder out, I had no imagination at all, but my analytic skills seemed to improve slightly. I used to write at least one flash fiction piece a week, so I really noticed it.
The surgery was about as uneventful as such a thing could be: endoscopic, virtually no complications (they had to make the belly button incision a little bigger because the bladder was more inflamed than expected). I actually really enjoyed my week off recuperating. But creative work just vanished.
I hope the change wasn’t permanent. Did you get back to normal? And did they use anesthesia? I sometimes wonder about how long the aftereffects of anesthesia last.
It’s getting back to normal, and yes they used anaesthesia – which my entire family has a history of weird reactions to. Anaesthesia is a whole other area of cognitive function enquiry.
I just wonder if the anesthesia was the reason for the period of lack of imagination. I suspect recovery from it can take a lot longer than most people realize.
