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Comment by jqm | Hacker News Reader

At what point does sentience end? Whales? Rats? Birds? Fish? Insects? Plants? Bacteria?

Because something has a higher order nervous system does that mean we have to assign it equal rights? How high an order of system would be required to have equal rights? Why does it really matter how something else feels other than members of our own species?

For the record I generally agree with not keeping killer whales in captivity. I'm just asking the question so we know the position has been well considered.

Perhaps "slavery" is a bit too strong? (And that's without even getting into "you say that like it's a bad thing....").

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If you're interested in these questions I highly recommend the book "Beyond Words" by Carl Safina. He embeds with researchers that have been living with different species for decades. Cataloging the exploits of individuals and families across generations. We should not simply assume animals have the same experiences as humans, but we should also not assume they don't. Safina's book shows as we're actually investigating this question we're discovering there's likely a lot more richness to the animal experience than we expected. Fascinating subject, and beautifully written book.

I've no idea where we can draw a line on "sentience". But when it comes to creatures that seem highly likely to be on the same side of the line that we are, I think its far better to err by being too generous with our definitions.

If you literally have "no idea where we can draw a line", then you're begging the question by even talking about "creatures that seem highly likely to be on the same of the line." You don't know where the line is, so you can't know where creatures stand with respect to the line.

No animal is even close to anything approaching human intelligence. Apes are the most human-like animal we know, but there's no push against keeping them in zoos. They're too ugly, so it wouldn't play well.

Animals have a greatly inhibited sense of consciousness and continuity. They deserve respect as a resource, but they don't deserve "rights" of any kind.

Our relationship with wild/animals can be better understood by giving more sympathetic ear to tribal people around the earth. I personally find the western liberal logic to far more rely on mutual-exclusion principle than required.

I come from India where we literally and figuratively worship plethora to animal gods. We made our bullocks work like slaves in our field and yet for us they were members of family. Humans in the house-hold did not start their food until the Animals were served their food first. Same for temple elephants, bullfight bulls, snakes etc. it was a relationship that both used Animals and yet respected them for their "life".

In last decade or so a lot of western funded NGOs are on prowl painting all Hindu traditions as "exploitative towards animals" demanding ban on almost everything from bull-fights to temple elephants.

Solutions sometimes exist in plain sight but we refuse to look.

I think it was the political philosopher Robert Nozick who posed a related question: If it's acceptable for humans to eat "lower" life forms, then would it be acceptable for a much more intelligent or sentient alien race to eat humans?

That's a question where its extroidinarily hard to draw the line. Assuming it is immoral to consume another life form, then there goes 100% of our food source (plants are life and show some intelligence in aggregate).

If nothing can consume anything else then life can't exist.

I'd argue that their ethical standards are wholly separate from our own. For humans, self-preservation as a race is very important.

Not only that, but plants respond to stimuli, remember, chemically 'moan' when sick, scream when they are being harmed or killed (grass cutting), and talk amongst each other (again, chemical triggers).

If you don't eat living things, that leaves milk and honey.

I'm not saying "become X-ist". I'm saying that in order for us to live, others must die. Plants, animals and others aren't inherently worth more or less than we humans. But it's our responsibility to remember their sacrifices so we could continue.

And fruit. It leaves fruit also. Fruit is produced to be consumed and doesn't take life in consumption.

By that logic, computers are alive. They let you know when they are 'sick' (they crash), scream when being overworked (loud fans), and talk amongst each other (the internet).

Failing to draw a line between two things doesn't mean that they are the same. Plants do not possess a nervous system capable of metacognition. Killing and eating a plant is not the same thing as killing and eating a mammal, bird, or fish.

A computer I'm reasonably sure isn't alive. But the internet with emergent behaviours, I'm not so sure. But that's a "Ghost in the Shell" style discussion.

> Plants do not possess a nervous system capable of metacognition.

Scientists aren't so sure. And we're only finding out more chemical 'sensors' that allow different sensing of our environment. As for a nervous net, it was thought "No"... But again, more study shows that it's not true.

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-09/new-research-plant-int...

http://www.dw.com/en/when-plants-say-ouch/a-510552-1

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden...

> Killing and eating a plant is not the same thing as killing and eating a mammal, bird, or fish.

That's just moralizing. There is no basis in which to say that X life is better or worse than Y life.

None of your links touch on metacognition. Scientists are very sure that individual plants do not have metacognition. Sensing and communicating are not metacognition.

>That's just moralizing. There is no basis in which to say that X life is better or worse than Y life.

Did I say anything about morality? No. Did I say that plant lives were "worse", or animal lives were "better"? No. I said killing a plant was different than killing a mammal. Do you disagree with that assertion?

Define metacognition for me. I wouldn't be surprised if a forest (an organism composed of many trees and such) had a way to store memories for example. Ants have several forms of external memory assuming the colony is a single organism. Its harder to say if a forest or an anthill can reason about itself in part because we don't really understand how cognition works.

Edit: Killing a plant might be more similar to killing off chunks of an organism's brain cells. As such it may be ethical to kill individual plants assuming we maintain the integrity of any existing colonies.

Depends on how tasty we are to them and or if we had the ability to resist.

I think "sentience" is a political and religious concept, a vestige of the days when it was simply assumed that humans were unique, even blessed by God, and all other forms of life were just meat machines running blind algorithms. The truth is probably that sentience doesn't exist, only differing levels of complexity between one form of life and another.

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