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This is precisely why I’ve transformed my eating habits. I realized that while I can’t prove these animals have a conscious experience like mine (or one I would value as I do the human conscience, I suppose), I also can’t prove that they don’t.

We can all read and likely have many experiences indicating that animals, in many circumstances, actually behave much like humans do. And for all the arguments that animals do x or y because they’re responding to stimulus, well... So are we.

It really clicked a while back and since then, I just can’t go back. I no longer feel sufficiently different from a cow or a pig in order to feel comfortable eating them.

I certainly don’t judge others for disagreeing either though. Just as I don’t judge wolves for eating caribou or fish for eating fish. Humans operate under the illusion that they have free or stronger will than these animals, but I’m not sure that’s true anymore. I’m not even clear on why I had this revelation or why it matters enough to me to act on it! It’s all very absurd in a way.

The arguments around this seem paradoxical.

"Animal have a strong commonality with us, so we shouldn't eat them in the fashion that we don't eat each other.

But

"Animal has a strong commonality with us, and one species of animal will eat another species of animal. Even species considered herbivores will eat some meat when it comes to them (deer, etc). If we're like animals, what is wrong with behaving like them?"

At which point, the argument skews to look at what's different about humans (most often "we can choose good versus evil" etc)

That said, for all I know, some different, intelligent, omnivorous animal species has had a group or subculture that also decided to stop eating meat. Of course we actually know little about these things.

This is part of why I don’t judge others for eating animals. Plus, I do still eat fish. If I’m to judge anyone, it should be me first.

I also intended to some degree to be paradoxical, but I’m a terrible communicator so it wasn’t evident outside my mind. Like I said though, ultimately it all seems absurd to me. Digging deep into what is good or right or moral when it comes to these things is incredibly challenging. Ultimately I wonder why I’m trying to figure it out. What a strange exercise.

I definitely don’t subscribe to any naturalistic ideas about how people should behave. I do believe we are much like the animals around us - far more than we’d like to believe or acknowledge at times. I don’t believe that means what happens in nature and among other species is inherently good though. I don’t believe what humans do is inherently good either. I just don’t judge people for doing what animals, or humans, overwhelmingly tend to do. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense.

If I may, what made you become pescatarian (is that the correct term)?

I can’t pin point it and I wish I could.

One significant contributor was when I began spearing my own fish and became intimately familiar with the moment of choosing if you shoot a fish or not. I realized that in that moment I’m deciding something based on a significant number of factors, but ultimately, I was deciding to take a life. I wondered how different that is from how I indirectly took the lives of fish by providing demand in a market which catches and sells fish, apart from the massive amounts of bycatch in the industry. But really, is my indirect demand different from pulling the trigger?

I know those thoughts and experiences, along with experiencing fish in their environment, caused me to begin to wonder a lot more about the consciousness of other animals. Fish are quite aware of me, my eyes, where I’m looking or pointing things. They certainly suffer.

It’s a good question though and I wish I understood better what really tipped the scale. Sometimes it feels very irrational, but my ‘gut’ insists it’s the right thing to do. I still question if I should be killing fish.

Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours.

Sure, they could have all the same internal organs as us (at least with mammals, and reptiles/birds to a slightly lesser extent), a similarly structured brain, be evolved from the same common ancestors and exhibit all the same outward signs of being conscious and self aware but somehow be totally different from humans.

But that would be much more complicated than the simple explanation that they are just like us, but less intelligent.

Interesting book on this topic:

>In The Gap, psychologist Thomas Suddendorf provides a definitive account of the mental qualities that separate humans from other animals, as well as how these differences arose. Drawing on two decades of research on apes, children, and human evolution, he surveys the abilities most often cited as uniquely human -- language, intelligence, morality, culture, theory of mind, and mental time travel -- and finds that two traits account for most of the ways in which our minds appear so distinct: Namely, our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on scenarios, and our insatiable drive to link our minds together. These two traits explain how our species was able to amplify qualities that we inherited in parallel with our animal counterparts; transforming animal communication into language, memory into mental time travel, sociality into mind reading, problem solving into abstract reasoning, traditions into culture, and empathy into morality.

>Suddendorf concludes with the provocative suggestion that our unrivalled status may be our own creation -- and that the gap is growing wider not so much because we are becoming smarter but because we are killing off our closest intelligent animal relatives.

https://www.amazon.com/Gap-Science-Separates-Other-Animals/d...

> Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours.

For most mammals, everything is so similar...including responses to stimuli like light, sound, temperature, pain, pleasure, even predictive behavior (knowing when they have done something to provoke a human response) that the same principle leads me to believe it's likely they have a very similar experience.

Everyone who has lived with a dog has seen the sheepish ‘I fucked up look’ when you’ve got home instead of the pure exuberance usually experienced

You know immediately there’s a mess to clean up!

I mean they clearly dream too. If dreaming isn’t evidence of an inner life I don’t know what is.

I personally loved having this realization. All these creatures of the earth are probably having very rich and significant experiences. If it’s not limited to humanity, then wow, the world really is so alive.

I still struggle to imagine a bug having a conscience that resembles mine. I’m not sure why. I tell myself they don’t have the brains for it or the sensory capabilities or whatever. I’m probably wrong.

You may be interested in this Youtube channel, wherein a dog owner has been teaching the dog to use a gradually expanding set of talking buttons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXy7NTGHAyQ

There's another channel where someone's been doing the same with some measure of success with a cat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooCEYMaNL8I

You seem to have accidentally pasted the same youtube link twice? I'm definitely curious about the cat one and haven't seen that before :)

The duplicated link is now fixed.

Another point of view could be intelligent animals like whales see another dimension of existence we simply cannot understand.

Maybe they just think further, they deeply understand the fractal nature of the laws of the universe and they came to the conclusion, that nothing they'll ever do will have an influence to improve anything at all, since nothing is really bad, so they just sing their songs and propagate reasonably? :)

/semi-sarcastic viewpoint

Maybe this comes across as an emo-anti-intelligence-nature-knows-it-best post. It wasn't intended to, at all. It even isn't meant to.

A major distinction of humans is that we are a cultural species. We have evolved to pass down large amounts of knowledge to the next generation.

Being good at communication (and motivated to use it for teaching) kind of follows from this. We are not game-changing smart at figuring out new tools. But we are excellent at copying innovations from others, remembering them and fine-tuning them over generations.

On this I highly recommend Joseph Henrich's book: "The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter".

There are a lot of components needed for civilization. In the case of humans, agriculture was a big one, as it led to the feasibility of cities and specialization of labor. Absent specific adaptations to agriculture, tool making is essential for it. Advanced civilization is greatly helped by written communication (although human history shows we can get pretty far without it), which again depends on tool making. Without the ability to make tools there is only so far a species can get.

Human superiority also depended on non-intelligent traits. Without evolving the ability to sweat, we might never have had the opportunity to develop civilization.

Regarding brain size, larger animals need larger brains just control their bodily functions, so looking at brain size without controling for body size does not tell you much.

If you look at brain:body ratio, humans are pretty high up, but not a crazy outlier [0] (figure 7.13), and not the best [1].

A simple ratio probably not the best test, and seems to favor small animals. A more advanced measure exists [2], but suffers from a bit of a fine tuning problem.

There is also an implicit assumption that "intelligence" is a single dimensional value, which is simply not the case. For instance, beyond being a tool for communication, language seems to be a tool for thinking as well, but is clearly not a result of a general "intelligence" we have. Our overall intelligence is likely the result of a bunch of specialized systems within the brain

[0] https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~ejchaisson/cosmic_evolution/do...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio#Compa...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient

Environmental conditions are a big factor as well. We've existed as humans for ~300k years, but it was only ~10k years ago that we learned agriculture and civilization-building. That coincided with the beginning of the Holocene Epoch, when the world got warmer, the glaciers melted, and the sea level rose by 400 feet. We must have had those capabilities all along, but it was only when the conditions were right that they were able to be fully expressed.

Regarding your brain-body ratio https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/18/eabe2101

Actually, I think many animals might communicate better than humans, but we don't know how they do it.

I wouldn't completely suprise me if their are certain animals using telepathic thought? Or, some way if communicitating we haven't a clue existed.

(And yes I know telepathic thought has been completely debunked in humans. Actually, there's a million sitting stomewhere if any person can successfully pass a institutes telepathic ability test. To date the money is still there, or a higher amount? My point is we know so little about other species.)

Well whales can communicate across thousands of miles without satellites so there’s one example! :)

> It seems to me more and more like the biggest, only real difference between most animals and humans is their lack of sophisticated communication. Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable.

How do you know all that? There is ample evidence that whales, and in particular orcas, have complex intelligence and communication. If you can't understand what a whale is talking about, I'm not sure how you can make these claims.

> Certainly they communicate; but they do not have access to our rich verbal symbols with which we can convey anything imaginable.

I mean, this whale seems to be doing about the same thing I do with my cats. I don't really see how you can derive any directionality here about how 'rich' their communication is from that. It's likely cats are intrigued and also baffled by what we're 'saying' when we do this.

That's not to say I think cats have as rich of communication as we do, just that we can't even manage to make much sense of other species' vocal communication, let alone mimic any meaning present in it, even when we are pretty sure it is actually simpler than ours.

From that it seems way overly confident to state that all failure on our part to recognize depth is because of a lack of it.

There's been some research on coyotes or similar animals, can't remember. They managed to figure out about 30 "words". Interestingly one of that tiny budget was for a human and another one for a human with a gun.

> only real difference between most animals and humans

But if I'm not mistaken this is not true of early humans, even "anatomically modern" humans. We don't really know when language evolved but it's probable that early humans did not "speak" for a long while.

Not sure why my morality has to change, doesn't matter if pig turn out to have conscious experience like mine, I will still eat it.

Ok, I’ll bite (no pun intended): if it were socially acceptable to eat people, would you?

I wouldn't, like I wouldn't eat dog/monkey even though its socially acceptable in certain place, in my mind its disgusting. Pig on the other hand its delicious.

That’s what I don’t get. Why are some animals acceptable to eat and some are aren’t? I know people who get totally outraged over dog or horse meat at but have no problem with beef or pork. Pigs are very intelligent and emotional. Way more than horses who aren’t that smart in comparison.

I can only speak for myself. I don't eat dog/monkey i think it because my upbringing/culture thus it create disgusting feeling in my brain.

I have no problem with pigs because I've used to it since childhood and i find it delicious. It has nothing to do with it being intelligent/emotional.

I find it hypocritical too, but there are some animals that also just don't taste that great compared to what is "common". Whale meat for instance resembles beef, in kind of the way alligator resembles chicken. But whale and gator are pretty terrible in comparison to the more common animal so they just aren't worth it to eat.