Yes, I still have a little food for thought, which ame to my mind
with this topic, and I viewed some youtube
videos and one of these videos I have seen
was the philosopher Daniel Danett, who told
that neurobilogists expressed the theory that
there is no free will in humans. So it happened
that we made progress in brain research and
I do not want to enter the details now.
Anyway, by new techniques of neuro-imaging
many things today can be seen.
How new connections in the brain are built
and so on, and from all these new findings they
they tried to find
the free will and did not
find it, and by this they concluded:
Free will does not exist, it is
an illusion. Then the philosopher claimed
thet from his point of view this is false.
I myself see it the same way,
there is something like free will and
if we can not prove it with our means of investigation
this does not mean that it does not exist.
This only means that our means of investigation are
not sufficient to find it,
but the conclusion I consider to be false
What do I want to say? The question is:
you can define by the free will whether
humans really have character,
that they are persons and so on and
similar I want to do this for animals.
The question, whether an animal is a person
or has a character. I do not want to
lump this together. With this you can also
answer, whether an animal has a free
will or not.
Following new results of the neurobiologists,
neither animal nor man has
a free will and this classification is
futile following
these findings.
Somewhen I chatted with a pal
abot the topic: Which person is most close
to you?
And I said: My rat.
Then he said: I would not see
the rat as a person.
Then I began to think whether
some humans see animals as
persons and some don't.
What is the reason for this difference?
Do we need this distinction, and why?
Last christmas, this is now
about a month ago, I came a little closer to
the solution. My grandma told that she
has problems with mice in the
barn , because they built a net
somewhere during the winter, so she
put toxic bait there to master this
problem.
And for me, who is living
with rats this sonded like:
You could say, in the barn a homeless
has moved in
to shelter from the cold,
and of course
I had to poison him.
When I tell this I see someone
is already laughing.
Told this way it
sounds very cruel. Without further thinking
making cold who is only looking
for a little warmth.
On the other hand: If it is about
an animal, it is somehow normal.
Especially an animal you are
used to poison like mice.
That's the way it is.
The I realized:
If I have two behaviours
which are identical, where only the
victim is different, suddenly one behaviour is
cruel, and the other behaviour is more
or less normal.
There is a contradiction in this.
My grandma is a lovely person
and I would not say she defines herself
by the cruelness she
causes these animals.
For her this is simply
something that has to be done.
Apart of this, she is one
of the nicest persons ever.
Then it came to my mind:
Could it be that we have to
make the distinction that animals are
something different than we are,
or no persons, or of less value, so that
we can mask our own cruelness?
If we say we are cruel to some
and very kind to others, this does not
sound consistent.
But when we say one is of another
category than the other, and are
applying double standards, then we
can integrate
our behaviours.
It might be that someone does
something cruel on the one hand and
is a nice person
on the other hand.
The more I thought about it,
the more I ralized
that this scheme is to
be found
all over the world.
For example in economy.
We live in an economical
very good land, but on
the costs of countries in the third world.
But we do not realize
this, we fade out that we
inflict atrocities
for our
good life.
We have the mechanism of suppression
which enables
for us a good life.
The mechanism makes us
miss the
consquences of our actions.
Then the question came to me:
Might it be that we classify
many animals as of low value
to appease our consciousnesses,
not to be force to live with the
cruelness we
do to the world.
With this thought
I want to close
Thank you
Dr. Buschmann out of the off: This is
called cognitive dissonance, a
known phenomenon in man.
For example there are simultaneoulsy
animals as source of food in factory
farms and on the
other hand a
pet dog, which is no
match. A divergence of
reasonings which
are not comaptible, simply
to appease the consciousness to be able
to better live with this.
The same scheme you can find in speciism,
racism, group building, in economical
and cultural differences. This is very widespread.
Thank you for the expert's addition.
For me it was the moment
I realized this contrast.
Thank you