Consciousness, Death, Existentialism etc.

[Mr. Blonde]

It came up last night as I was just looking into the topic a bit. I think I understand what you are saying but it helps to use already-established language as the wikipedia for Hedonic Tone is a bit lacking.

However in terms of music I understand what you mean, but if we are going to speak about Tone then we need to also talk about Frequency. The pie chart was a simplification explaining what Christopher Ryan was communicating, not my personal opinion. Frequency/Gradient = same/same, with "5-sense limitation differences".

Are animals behaving a certain way to escape pain, to enhance pleasure, or both? It could be only one, in which case it is necessary to have a gradient.

Well we are discussing a social realm of academia then, ethology/animal behavior/Naturalism. The problem with these fields is that they have to be outside of the laboratory -- the scientific method works to an extent, but it adds into account the random and spontaneous variable of the natural environment, which is why social theory/predictions can never be completely accurate.

I love animals and don't want to see them suffer more than anyone else. I am not arguing against the harshness of Nature, but I am proposing an acceptance of it and lessening of suffering where we can.

Before we address the cruelty of Nature, in which we are the only animals to evolve highly enough rational thinking and a complex linguistic bank of ideas and concepts to draw on, and which can't even defend itself, perhaps we should mind to the planks in our own eyes before we criticize the speck in our Mothers'.

For example, what is your stance on zoos? On factory farming? On keeping intelligent beings in small cages, indoors, away from the grass, the sky, fresh air, trees, injecting them with industrial chemicals? On enslaving mammals from birth, ripping them away from their natural mothers ande environment and pumping them full of unnatural food and hormones to increase muscle mass so we can unconsciously consume meat en masse?

True empathy for the suffering of animals goes a bit beyond the Hedonic tone and goes more into the realm of radical, illegal activism.

Finally, the course of nature doesn’t demand that flesh consumes flesh, it didn’t for 3 billion years prior to animal predation, and there is no good reason to think it is necessary for future existence. What part of the definition of “animal realm” do you think requires predation?

I can cite many examples of carnivorous plants in nature if you want. Or I could say how the nutrients required in soil for plants to grow come from dead plant material (plant flesh). Or I could talk about one of my favorite topics, fungus, which evolved as basically a solution to decompose ("eat") plant matter and recycle it back into the soil.

So yes, as painful and absurd as it may be, the fact of the matter is that in order for Life to exist, in the 3-D realm, in our dimension, on this planet, is that in order for "complex" organisms to survive, some form of predation to acquire nutrients at a cellular level to the "animal realm".