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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

Disrespectful? Of whom? It's a work of fiction. There's really no need to find something to offend you wherever you look.

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of other animals

but yeah I'm not sure that was the right word, just seems wrong. basically humanism seems like racism but towards other species. I guess speciesist?

This is a rather new stance, history books may one day label it as enlightened (I believe they will). We are not there though, and your stance is not obvious to the majority of people. I do experience that this is sentiment is growing. I personally see it as the moral high ground (both from the animal well-fare as the environmental perspective), whereas I didn't only a couple of years ago.

It's just as hard to prove that it's a new stance as an old one since people didn't have any way of writing down their feelings about it in a way that we'd know (or the time to do so)

I think there are quite a few ancient civilizations which clearly had great respect/reverence towards other animals and often gods have features or personality traits of particular animals

The fact that the old testament specifically states that humans have dominion over other creatures means that it needed to be said - even back then there had to be people who didn't think so, or felt guilty about it

My take was that other animals didn’t exist either, in the story.

well the story makes it seem like the only way to get emotion is by making humans. but every vertebrate has basic emotions. mammals and birds have complex emotions. humans are actually logical and emotions don't just happen randomly.

if the machines have no emotion it's probably because they didn't need them to survive (no predators? no natural selection?). which begs the questions, how did the machines get there?

>how did the machines get there?

Instead of a Boltzmann brain, a Boltzmann machine?

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