I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never been around animals? Do you truly have believe humans are that special?
On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.
This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.
That straw man could fatten a whole cow.
Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.
Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.
How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?
To live in the forest like humans do? Because then they would absolutely teach them language, and show them how to make fire and use sticks and stones.
> How would they score on common IQ tests?
Common human IQ tests? Very badly, they would probably not do much with the paper other than maybe take it with them for fire starter, and would just wander out of the room.
On an IQ test you could conduct with great apes? Like various physical puzzles which hide treats? Very well presumably. They would have dexterous hands and great eyesight and problem solving skills, and oral traditions.
The cognitive dissonance in that statement is blinding. Even in the pre-agrarian hunter-gather millennia of human existence, human societies the world over independently figured out housing, carried the knowledge for fire and the wheel, had intensely complex (relative to every other species on the planet) communication and social skills. They all came up with ways to develop knives, arrows, cooking+eating utensils, protective clothing, complex hunting strategies, etc.
Like, yeah...they didn't have computers in front of them, but all of the inate skills that allows modern humans to conceptualize, build, repair and utilize those things existed just as inately in them. You could teach one of them about things piece by piece...you'll never be able to do that with even a chimp, let alone a cow.
No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.
You're claiming that humans, without modern society, are somehow in the same realm of intelligence of even the next "smartest" animal (chimps), despite the fact that human intelligence is blatantly orders of magnitude higher just from mere observability let alone deep comparison of neural activity, reasoned and logical thought, and social interaction.
Especially if you start breaking things down into slime molds, ant colonies, plant interactions and somehow conflate relatively simplistic and predictable pattern-based behaviors to high-order reasoning and abstract thought that humans inately possess.
Is that to say human thought is non-deterministic and unpredictable? No, I'm not making that argument. I'm saying that the levels of abstraction and complexity is so much higher that it's blatantly fallacious and misleading to compare them.
I personally think human communities and societies emerge into a super-intelligence while single individual remain distinctly bland or unimpressive, provided the community leaves some room for the unusual to potentially thrive and find their niche.
An individual human is clearly and blatantly observably more intelligent and capable than an individual chimp.
The fact that y'all are speaking in such abstracts is telling in its own right. No one is saying animals are incapable nor that they don't possess plenty of abilities humans lack, however in the specific fields of strict intelligent thought processes (reason, abstraction and logic) and social interaction; it's not even a comparison.
The vast majority of animals can't even recognize themselves in a mirror let alone conceptualize other planets, atomic structures, mechanical processes and forces, mathematics, abstract concepts, create social contracts, etc.
It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
This is true, but it takes a great deal of creativity and awareness of a species, to create a “mirror-test” that applies to said species.
The naive mirror test is flawed. That’s not say most species will pass; just that it was laughably bad experiments that are being revisited.
> It's just....ridiculous to even be having a discussion on this. It's honestly akin to discussing vaccines with a COVID denier.
Why is it ridiculous? Nobody is saying humans aren’t smarter.
You’re looking at the end results of societies to prove that we’re orders of magnitude smarter; but take away our ability to write and record knowledge for the next generation: What are we left with? How scalable and robust are oral-tradition cultures?
Also note that none of the things you’ve mentioned came naturally to humans: It took many millennia of trial and error to build up and even so it takes the threat of homelessness starvation for the majority to give a shit and learn this stuff.
Instead, I’d argue it takes a great deal of self-awareness and humility to tease out what gives us the leg up over other species, even if it makes some uncomfortable.
Very, considering we started at the exact same point as all of those other "equally" intelligent creatures.
So yes, it's ridiculous.
We have human societies that never moved past hunter/gatherer; or basic agriculture. Or perhaps reverted back.
Does that imply that they’re somehow less intelligent? And so, by an order of magnitude?
I don’t expect anyone to change your mind—that much is clear—but for someone like me it’s an interesting question because it gets to the heart of what it means to be intelligent; aware; and driven.
Even the standard “man is the measure of all things” has more nuance than at first glance.
As to the IQ tests, they can't ethically run them on uncontacted people. There have been many studies on indigenous people's that include a focus on intelligence. However, a major factor that usually comes up is that the format of standard IQ tests tend to be biased against indigenous people due to things like language issues.
Humanity will do just fine ignoring the suffering of animals however smart they are.
We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.
It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.
People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.
Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?
1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.
It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.
However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.
It worked for the first world.
(This is, as I understand it, a very basic summary of Bill Gates' approach).
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
Strangely I see more people volunteer the lives of others than their own to fix the planet. Never much initiative there.
Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.
These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.
That doesn't change the fact that all else being equal, half as many people emit half the amount of CO2.
You're going to kill half the country and keep average household size, age, income structure and ability to build nuclear power plants the same?
Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.
So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.
When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.
Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.
It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.
We are living through the peak Earth population right now; it will likely be degreasing in 50 years.
It's simply that people in developed countries don't want to deal with the trouble of raising more than 1 or 2 kids because raising kids is difficult and expensive. You need 2 kids to replace the 2 adults, but then you add in other mortality factors and it drops below replacement.
Most of those people aren't agreeing that there are too many people, hell in cases like Japan, even their governments want them to have more children, they're just focusing on what strikes a balance for their comfort.
World hunger is not caused by too many people, it's entirely caused by our priorities. World produces more food than it needs and that production grows faster than the population.
Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?
There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.
Have you tried moving through a desert or a steppe in the dead of night, far from human infrastructure? It's damn dark, the land is literally darker than the star-strewn sky. Headlights give you only so much light, for the next 100-150m of the road maximum. Unless it's a really nice, well-maintained road, with reflector posts, etc (and usually it's not), it's really easy to lose your way if you drive a tad too fast. You either crawl, or choose to camp and wait until the morning light.
With a GPS map, you can proceed much more confidently. And a few hours may play a serious role in disaster relief.
I'm not saying GPS isn't useful. I'm saying it hasn't had a life changing impact for the masses that allows for a larger population (eg it's not providing more food, shelter, etc).
If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.
And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.
Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.
... but only barely ;)
Then look at Walmart or Amazon. Then consider democracies in countries with tens and hundreds of millions of people.
On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.
Dogs have shame, though.
Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one.
I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.
GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.
As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford:
That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows).
Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more?
Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides.
Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us.
One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.
In fact, that is, I believe, a pretty good description of how things are. The treatment of animals will improve, if it does, by moving into the "emotionally close" group.
There is a lot going on in what constitutes "common good" here. The standard "ethical" vegan position would contend that the happiness of animals count among intrinsic common good.
(via Wikipedia) for example, Bentham, the first formulator of says that utility is
> That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness ... [or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.
but the question is open as to whether or not the happiness of animals is included in it. So just as exploitation of many to a great degree for services like a relatively small increase in comfort of few (as in chattel slavery) would be negative utility for Bentham, the suffering of animals for food would be considered negative utility to the utilitarian animal rights advocate.
I brought up neurodivergence before, but we have clear proof of situations where even non-healthy brains caused a clear difference on how that line can sometimes be interpreted. A very simple example is extremely repetitive work. Same goes for children.
If you look at cows who never where outside you the same nuanced behavior isn't that easy to spot, they become much more dull and complacent.
I grew up with animals and I would definitely say they have feelings. Of course it is hard to say how deep those go, or how refined they are and whether they are comparable to human feelings, but there are clear similarities: cows get afraid in bad weather or when they see something they don't know, a mother cow will be proud and protective over their calf, some will be mischiefous and ashamed once you catch them doing something they shouldn't do. That is not nothing. Sure inside that cow could be a complex Rube Goldberg machine that makes it look like fear, pride or shame to us silly humans, but given that we are both mammals evolutionary more likely is that these emotions are at least somewhat similar because they served similar purposes. What cows think is a much harder question. They are surprisingly clever if they think no one is around (and they have a very, very good sense for that).
Edit: Obligatory reference to Gary Larson: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools
I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought.
It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.
They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”
Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)
Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.
Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.
I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video
How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many.
The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.
This is from a "good rated" slaughter house in one of the most advanced country on earth
The fact that animals are eaten in nature doesn't mean we can treat them like we treat metal ore.
Comparing eating animals to eating plants is just arguing in bad faith, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it
> The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous
Sure, and people in gulags don't realize it either, it's just work like every other work.
You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people.
Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.
The boring alternative explanation would be that doctors knew that anesthesia can kill a baby, because babies have a not fully formed lung system; and pain is temporal but death is permanent.
But this explanation does not inflame a social warrior heart in the same way. The rush of outrageine is much lower and less satisfying. Repeating the same arguments since 1820 without thinking a second about it, is much better.
It's also very well documented so no it's not about social warriors
A drug applied topically. Can be the same drug or other drug.
The problem is that religious thinking is not compatible with modern medicine.
Anesthesia inhibits thermoregulation on babies. It is common for core temperature to drop by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in the first hour of anesthesia. Sick babies can became hypothermic easily and struggle to keep themselves warm. Add anesthesia to that mix and you could be reducing the survival rate.
Some researchers also claim that anesthetic exposure can cause toxicity and neuronal apoptosis (death of neurons) in the developing brain of a baby, and this has the potential to became a long term problem in the later nerve development.
This is a problem particularly for premature infants. This babies sometimes need to pass by multiple surgical procedures with multiple anesthesia. Premature birth is a main cause of death in children, so they have yet a lot of things to address even without the toxics.
Avoiding punctual pain at any cost shouldn't never be the main (and much less the only) objective here. And adding a new risk to the medical procedure, just for ideological reasons, is very stupid.