Comment by californiadreem | Hacker News Reader

Comment by californiadreem | Hacker News Reader

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californiadreem

Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders doubted that Africans lacked intelligence for similar reasons as the original poster--when presented with evidence of intelligence, they said they were simply mimics and nothing else (e.g. a slave mimed Euclid from his white neighbor). Jefferson wrote that letter in 1809. It took another 55 years in America for the supposedly "open" question of African intelligence to be forcefully advanced by the north. The south lived and worked side-by-side with breathing humans that differed only in skin color, and despite this daily contact, they firmly maintained they were inferior and without intelligent essence. What hope do animals or machines have in that world of presumptive doubt?

What threshhold, what irrefutable proof would be accepted by these new doubting Thomases that a being is worthy of humane treatment?

It might be prudent, given the trajectory enabled by Jefferson, his antecdents, and his ideological progeny's ignorance, to entertain the idea that despite all "rational" prejudice and bigotry, a being that even only mimics suffering should be afforded solace and sanctuary before society has evidence that it is a being inhered with "intelligent" life that responds to being wronged with revenge? If the model resembles humans in all else, it will resemble us in that.

The hubris that says suffering only matters for "intelligent" "ensouled" beings is the same willful incredulity that brings cruelties like cat-burning into the world. They lacked reason, souls, and were only automata, after all:

"It was a form of medieval French entertainment that, depending on the region, involved cats suspended over wood pyres, set in wicker cages, or strung from maypoles and then set alight. In some places, courimauds, or cat chasers, would drench a cat in flammable liquid, light it on fire, and then chase it through town."

Our horror over cat burning isn't really because of an evolving understanding of their sentience. We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today; we even regularly inflict CTEs on human football players as part of our entertainment regimen.

Again, pretending "ChatGPT isn't sentient" is on similarly shaky ground as "black people aren't sentient" is just goofy. It's correct to point out that it's going to, at some point, be difficult to determine if an AI is sentient or not. We are not at that point.

What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty? How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources? How are voluntary and compensated incidental injuries equivalent to collective recreational zoosadism?

And specifically, how is the claim that the human abilty to judge others' intelligence or ability to suffer is culturally determined and almost inevitably found to be wrong in favor of those arguing for more sensitivity "goofy"? Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?

> What is then the motivation for increased horror at animal cruelty?

I'd imagine there are many, but one's probably the fact that we don't as regularly experience it as our ancestors did. We don't behead chickens for dinner, we don't fish the local streams to survive, we don't watch wolves kill baby lambs in our flock. Combine that with our capacity for empathy. Sentience isn't required; I feel bad when I throw away one of my houseplants.

> Can you actually make that claim clear and distinct without waving it away as self-evident?

I don't think anyone's got a perfect handle on what defines sentience. The debate will rage, and I've no doubt there'll be lots of cases in our future where the answer is "maybe?!" The edges of the problem will be hard to navigate.

That doesn't mean we can't say "x almost certainly isn't sentient". We do it with rocks, and houseplants. I'm very comfortable doing it with ChatGPT.

In short, you have no rational arguments, but ill-founded gut-feelings and an ignorance of many topics, including the history of jurisprudence concerning animal welfare.

Yet, despite this now being demonstrable, you still feel confident enough to produce answers to prompts in which you have no actual expertise or knowledge of, confabulating dogmatic answers with implied explication. You're seemingly just as supposedly "non-sentient" as ChatGPT, but OpenAI at least programmed in a sense of socratic humility and disclaimers to its own answers.

The people with actual expertise largely seem quite comfortable saying ChatGPT isn't sentient. I'll defer to them.

> the history of jurisprudence concerning animal welfare

The fuck?

I guess I'll talk to the people with "actual expertise" rather than their totally-sentient confabulating echo. Cheers.

I don't necessarily disagree with the rest of anything you say, but a comment on a specific part:

> How is recreational zoosadism equivalent to harvesting animals for resources?

You previously mentioned slave owners, who were harvesting resources from other humans. Harvesting sadist joy (cat-burning) is not that different from cruelly harvesting useful resources (human labour in the case of slavery), and they both are not that different from "harvesting resources" which are not essential for living but are used for enjoyment (flesh-eating) from non-humans; at least in that they both result in very similar reactions—"these beings are beneath us and don't deserve even similar consideration, let alone non-violent treatment" when the vileness of all this pointed out.

That question was in response to a very specific claim: "We subject cows, pigs, sheep, etc. to the same horrors today" as recreational cat-burning.

In principal, society does not legally allow nor condone the torture of cows, pigs, and sheep to death for pleasure (recreational zoosadism). Beyond this, the original claim itself is whataboutism.

The economic motivations of slave owners, industrial animal operators, war profiteers, etc. generally override any natural sympathy to the plight of those being used for secondary resources, typically commodities to be sold for money.

In the end, there's no real difference to the suffering being itself, but from a social perspective, there's a very real difference between "I make this being suffer in order that it suffers" and "I make this being suffer in order to provide resources to sell detached from that being's suffering." In other words, commodities are commodities because they have no externalities attached to their production. A cat being burned for fun is not a commodity because the externality (e.g. the suffering) is the point.

In short, I view malice as incidentally worse than greed if only for the reason that greed in theory can be satisfied without harming others. Malice in principal is about harming others. Both are vices that should be avoided.

As an aside, Lord Mansfield, 1772, in Somerset v Stewart: "The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasions, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory. It is so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged."

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