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Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

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Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#101

Post by sam0x17 »

pmarreck wrote: post #13

To forgive the tautology, intelligent creatures are intelligent. Which also means that love is possible. I mean... every person who's ever had a pet (of any sort) understands this (as I stare at the photo of my recently-deceased and very-charismatic cat). It may not fit into any naturalistic model that clearly separates humans from these other intelligent creatures (and ascribes all perception of humanlike feeling to…

Think of it this way. If you suddenly lost the ability to speak and didn't have fingers or arms and all you could do was swim, bump around, and bite things, you'd probably act a lot like a fish, but you'd still love and feel emotions like a human, we'd just have no way of knowing. We are extremely arrogant (and oddly so, in my opinion) in our assumption that "lesser" species don't have consciousness or that they have a dramatically lesser or reduced phenomenological experience of the world. I think animals think and have many of the same emotions we have, and we're just huge assholes. In the very least it makes sense for that to be the default assumption, rather than to assume by default that animals are unfeeling automatons and to literally disembowel dogs like Descartes did to be like "see, here it isn't experiencing pain -- it's just a meat machine that reacts in a preset way!"

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#102

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pweissbrod wrote: post #71
agumonkey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the video game analogy for this. animals may be 8 bits, we're 32 bits. Still whatever bits games are running on, they use the same basic formulas (in the metaphor, these are our senses, emotions and abstractions). It's indeed evident that we share a lot with animals. Even if they may not think as much, and can't communicate like us. I also believe that most important times in our human lives, are quite animal..…

I like this analogy. To take it further I'm equally as fine with me eating an 8-bit animal as I am with a 64-bit being coming into my house and eating 32-bit me :)

Easy to say when you don't know any 64-bit beings. Which is to say that it is easy to see the food chain as moral justification when you're at the top of it.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#103

Post by zackmorris »

pmarreck wrote: post #13

To forgive the tautology, intelligent creatures are intelligent. Which also means that love is possible. I mean... every person who's ever had a pet (of any sort) understands this (as I stare at the photo of my recently-deceased and very-charismatic cat). It may not fit into any naturalistic model that clearly separates humans from these other intelligent creatures (and ascribes all perception of humanlike feeling to…

Ya I'm troubled by this too. I'm really into bodybuilding but the human body simply can't recover unless it eats beef/salmon/eggs/chicken/etc at least one or more times per week, especially after the minor injuries that inevitably come with lifting weights.

As a general rule, I never eat mammals that are omnivores or carnivores, so pigs and anything higher in the food chain are out. Veganism is a little unrealistic IMHO, but you can certainly eat these in the following order from most to least and try to stay vegetarian as much as possible:

* diary products - eggs, milk, cheese

* shellfish - clams, shrimp

* fish - tuna, salmon

* foul - chicken, turkey

* beef

If you look at beef as sacred (as many cultures do), then the death of one cow can feed countless people. In terms of deaths vs nutrition, it's probably the best meat source. Unfortunately it has environmental consequences, for example the desertification in the west is due to cow and sheep ranching. Usually my only serving of meat each day is a turkey sandwich. Then a cheeseburger once a week for recovery. And I weigh 260 pounds, coming up on a 300/400/500 bench/squat/deadlift so if I can eat meat sparingly, anyone can.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#104

Post by joejerryronnie »

uhtred wrote: post #36
pmarreck wrote: post #13

To forgive the tautology, intelligent creatures are intelligent. Which also means that love is possible. I mean... every person who's ever had a pet (of any sort) understands this (as I stare at the photo of my recently-deceased and very-charismatic cat). It may not fit into any naturalistic model that clearly separates humans from these other intelligent creatures (and ascribes all perception of humanlike feeling to…

How can you continue to eat other animals if you feel the way you do about other animals?

I love animals. I also love to eat animals. I don’t have any trouble reconciling these two things.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#105

Post by KineticLensman »

Memosyne wrote: post #50

When I was a child, a school teacher showed me this hoax video of flying penguins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4 . Unfortunately, for a brief period of my childhood, I was under the assumption that penguins could indeed fly. By the time I had uncovered my teacher's subterfuge, I had already made a fool of myself by publicly positing that such penguins existed. Admittedly, my teacher was only playing a p…

Back in the 80's Penguins were used to illustrate a classic reasoning challenge associated with belief systems - non-monotonic reasoning [0]. The story went like this: you are an AI building a cage for a bird called Tweety. You reason that the cage will need a roof and perhaps a tree or two for Tweety to perch in. After having built the cage, Tweety arrives and you discover that he is a Penguin.

So I have also been somewhat distrustful of Penguins, especially those appearing in AI teaching examples. Tweety actually appeared in a load of other AI examples, although I can't recall his specific escapades now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monotonic_logic

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#107

Post by uhtred »

joejerryronnie wrote: post #104
uhtred wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you continue to eat other animals if you feel the way you do about other animals?

I love animals. I also love to eat animals. I don’t have any trouble reconciling these two things.

Then you don't love animals. Or, you are happy for living creatures you love to be killed and to eat them, which is scary.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#108

Post by airstrike »

uhtred wrote: post #36
pmarreck wrote: post #13

To forgive the tautology, intelligent creatures are intelligent. Which also means that love is possible. I mean... every person who's ever had a pet (of any sort) understands this (as I stare at the photo of my recently-deceased and very-charismatic cat). It may not fit into any naturalistic model that clearly separates humans from these other intelligent creatures (and ascribes all perception of humanlike feeling to…

How can you continue to eat other animals if you feel the way you do about other animals?

Because at the end of the day I have to eat and meat is a fantastic source of nutrients, many of which aren't found in a vegan diet like heme-iron.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#109

Post by EGreg »

louthy wrote: post #75
Memosyne wrote: post #50

When I was a child, a school teacher showed me this hoax video of flying penguins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4 . Unfortunately, for a brief period of my childhood, I was under the assumption that penguins could indeed fly. By the time I had uncovered my teacher's subterfuge, I had already made a fool of myself by publicly positing that such penguins existed. Admittedly, my teacher was only playing a p…

> but ever since that incident I have been distrustful of penguins Shouldn't you be distrustful of school teachers?

This just made me think of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OB8EYKXAys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cky5SQCeVJc

Based on this I would definitely distrust penguins, because this and this is definitely a reason for this.

Re: Penguin travels every year to visit man who rescued him (2016)

#110

Post by open-source-ux »

airstrike wrote: post #11

This is the most heartwarming thing I've read in a long time! It's like a real-life Pixar short. I know I will come back to this article many times in the future. Thank you very much for sharing. "Dindim" is a slang for money in Brazil, but in a very cute way. "Money" is "dinheiro" in Portuguese so Dindim is like saying the first part of the word twice.

"It's like a real-life Pixar short."

A bit off-topic, but there's actually something very similar: A 2008 animated short called 'Lost and Found' about a lost penguin and his friendship with a young boy. It's based on a children's book of the same name. The book and film are both charming and feature lovely visuals. The film was made by London-based Studio AKA:

https://www.studioaka.co.uk/OurWork/lostandfound

Edit: Just saw the comment from timthorn mentioning the same book.

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