Insects are more sensitive than they seem
bbc.com
bbc.com
This begs for further elaboration.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/ants-vomit-to-form-social-bonds [1] https://elifesciences.org/articles/20375.pdf
Honey bees definitely do it.
I would dearly love to hear more about this!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nausicaä_of_the_Valley_of_the_...
Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own
If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.
Sometimes I see ants eating almost dead ants. Which means that while I write this, several billion women are being eaten alive and feeling all kinds of emotions. When there is no queen, the ant that eats the most protein becomes the queen.
And spiders with their webs... it's always such a horror to look at their captives.
And if souls exist and they possess the first available just born organism (FIFO queue) after we die, then that would mean it is a low chance to be born human again, at least for now. I was mentally prepared to become even a broiler chicken, but not an insect.
Or if there is suddenly a multiverse, but every universe can have only one consciousness which tries to live everyone's life one-by-one (also FIFO). That would mean we would have to live many quadrillion lives before becoming a human again. And also if we suddenly have to also live every possible route/branch within the many-worlds interpretation, that becomes too depressing.
(If you are going to reincarnate as a hymenopteran, go for Polistes, that's my advice. Social, but on a smaller scale and in a looser style than Vespula and hornets, and with size and brains enough to manage a degree of personality that ants in my experience don't seem to. Also, you'll be able to fly! That seems like a considerable benefit entirely in its own right.)
This synthesis, the emotional synthesis of experience, then aids decisions. And is a key component probably of the biological OODA learning loop.
Emotions may be necessary for AGI. Or at least help us get there.
And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”.
Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.
Pigs and chicken have it probably even worse.
A world with our demand for milk, eggs and meat is not possible without ridiculous amounts of harm for all animals involved.
Cows, pigs, goats, horses, fish, clams, etc. will all be fine without us killing them by the billions.
The distinction is important because otherwise condoms would be murder. (Which, in fairness, some cultures do believe. But they also believe that chanting at wine turns it into literal blood. So as open minded as I am, I have a hard job taking their view points seriously.)
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-n...
I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals.
Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.
The fact that animals die horrible deaths in the natural world is entirely irrelevant to our moral obligations to induce suffering.
We can cross the plants-feel-pain bridge when and if we get there.
But does anyone really believe plants are sentient? Nope! So we are likely able to completely avoid needing to worry about that.
Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.
One observation that never ceases to amaze me is watching crows interact with common buzzards. It looks as if the crows are harassing the buzzards until they retreat. AFAIK, these birds do not compete for the same food, nor do buzzards eat crows. I don't think it likely, but I would not be surprised to learn the crows do this just for fun, or as a kind of "team building exercise".
And I still wonder if dogs think it is weird when humans pick up their poop.
Or "my shit's so valuable it needs to be saved, I must be important".
We will look back on our current understanding of animals feelings one day like we look back on Descarte, who vivisected dogs because he was convinced they had no feeling whatsoever.
For a good overview of the history of, and philosophy of, discussing animals capacity to feel I suggest “A Plea for Animals” as continued reading.
And as far as the fetish for anthropocentrism is concerned, it is a western religious thing deeply rooted in psychopatic (as opposed to empathic) abrahamic tradition, which proved to be a superior memeplex here.
(yeah it touches a nerve, doesn't it)
But hey, I'm not the one implicitly advancing the claim that anything not clever enough to be human is a meat robot. You're the one doing that, and so far you've done nothing but assert it. Why don't you source it and actually defend it, instead? Until then I don't see why anyone should take it all that seriously.
In any case, if you're attempting to make an argument here, its thesis could stand considerable clarification. I'm not even sure whether you're intending to agree or not with my own argument, so would you like to elucidate a bit on what point you're trying to make and how you support it?
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11243513_Visual_sig...
The first one makes a jump from quantity to quality. But, counting to three and counting to whatever is not a qualitative difference. A definition of "personality" is required to define where it starts, and it is easy to conceive interpretations which allow for broad labelling.
The second one is just a caveat. As John had to tell his wife as he surprised her in bed with Frank, and she went "Yes but you know you are jealous and a bit paranoid".
Plants, too. Guess I'll read up on airatarianism.
Which does not change facts a tiny shard. The argumental level is in the epistemic mode, not in the aletic.
"It seems like A". "Yes but humans are biased". "Ok, it probably still seems like A".
Having less reasons to believe A does not imply having more reasons to disbelieve A.
Sure, it is one key aspect of decision making, of the role of the bounded economic agent, of the analyst applying Bayes to give advice - of the gambler placing bets on a sheerly practical need.
Not only hypoteses of minor ranking can still be truthful and productive: sometimes criteria adopted for the computation can have largely accidental aspects ("- John won the lottery // - Pah, winning is so improbable // - Well he did"; "We selected a good candidate // - Mah, don't get me started about interviewers // - Well...").
(Sorry: this is irregardless of any context of biochemistry and «neurotransmitters», which some would just call a concretion, an implementational side.)
It seems to be not unnecessary to note, that some, in history (prominently, authoritatively), have clearly advanced the idea that the same (or similar) principle applies to humans. Such "humanity" as a goal, not as a given. And "dishumanity" an intrinsic risk.
But at the conventions were breeders would sell them, and let people handle them for photos and such, they'd often explain how that particular spider was the more "laid back" one.
Part of that is probably just to calm people down, but I don't see why a spider shouldn't be able to have a bad day.
Mine certainly weren't 100% predictable but also had their more active/passive phases, would sometimes skip on food or sometimes be still aggressive even after being fed. Putting all that down to pure biological determinism feels a bit too simplistic.
Your jump to "feelings" is not that short; but one could note that, as «brain» is above better replaced by "nervous system", the one directly apparent thing of the nervous system is the peripheral side of sensation (feeling - that of "action" being the clearly functional one).
As always we still have plenty to learn, even if it's under a rock besides us.
It's like that spider vegetarian philosopher from Cenotaph Road.
There likely isn't. Despite the article trying to sell the idea that cockroaches are like your pet dog, all their claims are qualified.
That's a pretty large statement about the inner life of bugs.
How many legs have you got?
I do like wasps, and I have some skill and maybe a little talent at being very close to them without eliciting dismay, but even I would hesitate to wander into a yellowjacket bar! Even so, their own skill, which I have often observed, at telling whether or not a human means them harm, no doubt saved me any number of stings. I even later the same day got some handsome macro shots of one of them who'd had too much and ended up crashing on my front porch windowsill to sleep it off: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg
jokes aside, i was simply making a dumb model based on brain size, in the sense that we are supposed to have more neurons than insects but maybe the core structure is similar, they just have less room for fat and shallow details.
That said, to take this as prima facie evidence that insects are meat robots, the way behaviorists like to do, strikes me purely as motivated reasoning. There's no basis for it - no one yet has established an objective mapping between brain size or complexity and behavioral complexity, nor does this seem likely to happen soon. Ethologists, by contrast with behaviorists, spend most of their research time observing live, active animals in their own accustomed habitats - Jane Goodall, as opposed to that pervo freak Skinner - and it's no accident that all the really interesting results, from individual recognition by facial features in polistids to the likely range and spread of V. mandarinia in the Nearctic, are coming from biologists who take an ethological approach.
1Kb vs 1Mb is quantitative.
No-FPU vs FPU is qualitative.
It is in terms of software, not on hardware - or, of hardware structures that perform functions. Sometimes, yes, «something is missing». Olfactory difference between man and bear could be possibly quantitative; control of the individual fingers is qualitative (a present or missing module).
I can't speak to spider art, but I can somewhat to spider smarts. We hosted an orb weaver on our porch this year, and she found the best place to build her web for prey capture was right across the porch steps. Unfortunately, this also led to importunate apes occasionally blundering face-first into, and thus disarranging, her careful work - even when you're trying not to break anything, you can't help but snap a thread or two in disentangling yourself.
So, after a couple nights studying the problem, she started building her webs shorter but wider and higher up, maintaining roughly the same capture area but keeping the structure a good couple inches above human head height. (Or my and my boyfriend's height, anyway, we being both about 5'10".) She kept that up the rest of the season, and we got along just fine - I've had human houseguests who were less courteous and less skilled at finding a modus vivendi.
He wanted to show that animals are just automata, and believed that they are incapable of feeling pain.
You do not clearly show to be expressing out of reason, as opposed to other faculties involving "preference".
You know, it is possible to be critical without self-loathing.
I realize how people are raised is an important part of it, and yet adults should not be 5his stupid by choice.
One time, I had my dentist proudly proclaim animals don't have consciousness because it has been proven by scientists that animals don't know about death. I am no longer a client of this otherwise hot lady