Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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...

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