Well, I was not really trying to assign rights & privileges. Perhaps it was a poor example.
I’m amazed that it was ever assumed that babies don’t feel pain. However, at least I don’t remember experiencing any, and I had an inguinal hernia at 6 weeks. But it’s been a while.
If we consider that “having consciousness” is not binary but analog, and that animals can have varying levels of it, then the slippery slope at least is understandable. But it does lead to moral quandaries, like the stepping on an ant business I mentioned above:
Ah consciousness - we all take it for granted but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Of course, free will doesn’t act like that. If, of course, it exists.
Perhaps Prof Goff understands neither Darwin nor divine creation?
Put a rock in a grinder, you get sand and eventually perhaps using some kind of Oppenheimer Grinder you get those atoms or molecules. The same can not be said of your cat.
Beat me to it.
That’s a category error. Consciousness is a phenomenological experience, like visible light, not an ontological concept like ether. That’s also why it’s not a theory. A theory would be that I assume you are conscious, i.e. that you experience the self-awareness I do. Likewise, the only person you know is conscious is yourself. From that you extrapolate to others, but it’s always unavoidably an assumption, albeit a practically very useful one.
In contrast, an ontological scientific explanation would describe how the experiential phenomenon of consciousness arises, so we wouldn’t have to assume what is and what is not conscious. But what you personally experience is that phenomenon the word consciousness defines. It is there for me, and also for you unless you’re a philosophical zombie.
Even if I am a series of executable programs running on a computer and all my inputs are fabricated by a programmer generated by iterative algorithms or whatever, and my assumption of your consciousness is wrong, there is still a process which apprehends its own existence, even if it, AKA I, am badly wrong about the underlying nature of that existence.
Note: a philosophical zombie is a hypothetical entity or process that can fool a conscious being into ascribing it consciousness through the same assumptions we do each other. This is a consequence of what philosophers call the Problem of Other Minds.
You know, just for the novelty of it, some day I dream of running across a concept Randall Munroe doesn’t have a comic for. 
Just drop me off at the airport.
Ouch! Incidentally, John Scalzi has a philosophy degree. So that’s one successful example. I flirted with getting one, but physics and engineering were less frustratingly open-ended. When someone asks me the difference between philosophy and science, my pithy response is that science tries to give answers and philosophy just answers questions with questions. For example, even I could poke holes in my above reply to @MildBill, but pretty soon it would all devolve into pulling the rug out from under semantics.
As delighted as a rock can be.
I kid. But really. Terminal B.
That’s good fun in the right time and place! Alas, this may not be the time and place.
Something weird about that gal.
With living things you eventually get atoms too. Mostly H, O, C, N, S, and P, with a smattering of other elements thrown in. Principle is the same, though there is a lot more organization in the living case prior to grinding.
I’m the last to judge, but I whistle nervously not at the attempts to make a human-like face, none of which AFAIK have come close to fooling me yet, but at the amazingly talented human makeup artists who convincingly make themselves or others look like the physical simulacra (dolls, anime and so forth). Not saying they shouldn’t do it. Just recognizing that I’m not quite as prepared for the post-human era as I once thought I was.
Exactly the point
Count me in that as well.
Veering slightly off-topic, but Charlie Stross once said something which resonated with me, and I’m paraphrasing here, that in the 80’s he wanted to be the first person on his block with a neural up-link, but now he wants to be the first person with a neural firewall.
I’m confused now, I’ve been drinking, again.
