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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

lse.ac.uk

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Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#331

Post by rembicilious »

forty wrote: post #254
traverseda wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably thinking of "sapient" which generally implies higher reasoning. "Sentient" means able to feel things, and it's pretty obvious that animals can feel pain.

It's not obvious at all. Actually it's not obvious at all that anything else than yourself can feel pain :) I agree that it's a reasonable extrapolation though :)

I have stepped on a dogs foot. It made a “Yipe!” noise and leapt back. Then it approached me “submissively”, with it’s head held low and tail down. It seems rather “obvious” to me that the animal felt pain, reacted suddenly to the sensation, and then completely changed it’s demeanour towards me.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#332

Post by ornornor »

AlexanderTheGr8 wrote: post #324
ornornor wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In animal kingdom, animals kill each other ruthlessly Not that long ago, humans routinely tortured, killed, raped other humans sometimes even just for fun (and in some places of the world very much still do). Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question. These two things can also be interpreted as lack of self awareness or any other prope…

> Humans (as a species) are destroying their ecosystem past the point of no return, putting their very existence in question. I strongly disagree. We have more food than ever before. More clean water than ever before. More safety and prosperity than ever before. More innovation than ever before. As for our ecosystem, humanity has solved any and every calamity ever before. And we will solve this one as well. Don't get…

> I don't understand this sentence. Can you clarify?

You’d be pretty dumb to saw off the branch you’re sitting on. Yet that’s what we’re doing. On the surface, we seem to be lacking any kind of self preservation instincts or « hive mind » to preserve our species. If, say, a bee was looking at humans trying to determine if we’re intelligent or not and they applied bee intelligence metrics, we’d miserably fail because every bee knows that the survival of the hive is what dictates their action and behavior, duh.

And yet we consider bees to be bug “automatons” but consider ourselves the most advanced life form around. But seen from a distance, without using human values as a framework for evaluating intelligence, we might be some of the dumbest species around.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#333

Post by ComputerGuru »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #330
ComputerGuru wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another common and ridiculous meme is the "pregnancy after having sex once" idea. Are you suggesting the odds of that are so low that they’re laughable? Because they’re not..

There's only (approximately) two days a month when a human female can get pregnant. It's not about frequency or intensity, rather it's mostly timing. (And sperm quality, but that's another thing people have no clue about.)

I was going to say three days, but it doesn’t matter. That’s 7% then turn it into a birthday problem (the world’s full of people having unprotected sex for the first time with someone at any given time) and there you go. Deduct points for bad form or bad sperm and it’s still a crazy number. It’s only a talking point when it’s the case, so it’s bound to sound like it’s happening to everyone.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#334

Post by roenxi »

emptysongglass wrote: post #320
philipov wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the teaching of Buddhism that one should learn to let go of attachments such as love, because they will bring you pain?

All attachments, yes. But I am neither a Bodhisattva or fully enlightened. In addition, the core crisis I am experiencing is whether it is ok to watch a being suffer greatly in its torment by other beings without intervention. If the only act which may stop the other being from their act of torment is an act that results in their death (medicine to the afflicted), is it blameworthy?

Any system of beliefs is going to have a few internal inconsistencies. Speaking from cheerful ignorance of what Buddhists actually believe, from my understanding the "don't kill things" is something in the nature of really good advice grafted on top of a philosophy that really an acknowledgement of impermanence and a set of guidelines around how to live with that. There is no sustainable belief system that stops its people from becoming soldiers.

If everything dies, at some level killing isn't such a sin. There are real practical populations if people use that as a serious philosophical starting point though.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#335

Post by omnicognate »

jjcon wrote: post #291
hi41 wrote: post #92

The essay "Consider the Lobster" by David Foster Wallace came to my mind. In that essay he describes how extraordinary the nervous system of a lobster is and how mindlessly and cruelly we boil them live. If David were still alive, he would definitely welcome this development. I really miss David. I am awestruck by his other essay "This is Water". I am amazed at his deep insights into human nature and how well he desc…

Lobsters have essentially the same number of neurons in their entire nervous system (including the “brian”) as a fruit fly does. Complex yes? Interestingly complex? Not even close. A cockroach has 10x more.

Not sure what you mean by "interestingly complex". To say we are nowhere near understanding the nervous systems of fruit flies would be a massive understatement. Even for C.Elegans, for which we know the complete connectome and much more besides (and which has a thousandth of the number of neurons a fruit fly does), we're not close to explaining (or simulating) the behaviour of the animal in terms of the properties of the nervous system.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#336

Post by freetinker »

rlonn wrote: post #316
emptysongglass wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the p…

I admire the jainist (?) philosophy of not killing, but it does seem incredibly impractical, to the point of being stupid even. How do you avoid killing mites on the ground when you go out for a walk?

Jain philosophy.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#337

Post by shakna »

tsimionescu wrote: post #304
shakna wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line for sentience is a very low bar to hurdle. Trees may demonstrate sentience [0]. The larger problem is that people are generally thinking of sapience, but sapience tends to be defined in axiomatic terms, so we don't have a clear understanding of what it requires or means. [0] https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...

Well, the bar for sentience is actually so low I am quite sure bacteria and even individual cells in multi-cellular organisms pass it - almost every living cell detects aspects of and reacts to its environment.

It is indeed incredibly low. Slime molds [0] can pass it. There is a memory component, which would prevent single cells from passing it, but it's not a metric that is all that useful in determining the intelligence of a species.

[0] http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.15891.43041

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#338

Post by sweetheart »

Wohlf wrote: post #327
glinkot wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that they wouldn't exist if not 'made for food' sounds like a pretty anthropocentric view, what do you base that view on? Aren't cows competing in the same genetic race for survival every other species is? They certainly aren't like a fruit that's designed to be appealing for consumption - except perhaps for the selective breeding we've done since domestication.

Because dairy and meat cows literally would not exist if not for human consumption, their evolution and continued existence is not natural. Their wild cousins is a different story though.

Why does this matter? They still feel and suffer just as much as their “natural” cousins, so it’s not like we should pretend we are granting them anything good.

Livestock raised for commercial meat and dairy consumption live horrible lives. Watch Dominion for free on youtube if you don’t believe me.

We should stop breeding these animals into existence.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#339

Post by londgine »

nisse72 wrote: post #180
colechristensen wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from gendered languages, most Hispanics either don’t know about Latinx at all and the ones that do, most of them think it’s inappropriate. It is a bit strange to try to remove gender from a word for people who mostly speak a gendered language. It seems mostly to be a virtue signaling thing among a rather small almost exclusively American, english as first language subculture. A bit like the bathroom I saw in a…

There is a Swedish expression: nobody is named, and nobody is forgotten. Usually you hear it in a workplace setting when people (often, a subset of the correct group) are being acknowleged for an acheivement of some kind. As soon as you try to enumerate all of those groups you will undoubtedly forget someone, who will then take offense at the omission. So the saying is a reminder to not single out anyone.

cool expression. how does it go in swedish?

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#340

Post by pensatoio »

adriand wrote: post #25
chrisweekly wrote: post #11

Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs, whereas an octopus is a creative, playful, intelligent creature with amazing capabilities. It seems strange to group them together.

I assume that Dr Jonathan Birch, Associate Professor at LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, and his team of scientists didn’t encounter this insightful perspective when they reviewed “over 300 scientific studies” in order to arrive at their conclusions… In seriousness though, this comment is a prime example of speciesism. Even if it were true that these crustaceans were “basically bugs” how doe…

Our "fellow animals" eat each other. I don't see a problem here.
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