451–460 of 704 posts
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Please let us know how large is large enough to feel pain. Is a bird brain large enough? A mouse? A dog?
That depends on the precise definition of the word "feel" which I don't see in these comments so far.
What does this mean in practice? By this definition, surely normal farm animals are sentient, but they are eaten, experimented on and frightfully frequently abused, so... what’s the change?
One significant change is that the practice of boiling live lobsters is now illegal.
I'm not any kind of animal rights activist, but it makes me feel upset just thinking about it :shudder:
Yes ,don't cook lobsters alive I would say. Most animals can definitely feel pain, maybe even insects. Don't cause them unnecessary pain. It's pretty said that the so called most intelligent animal species needs laws to understand that.
How not causing pain to animals when cooking them relates to intelligence? I suspect that my comment can sound blunt to you, so let me explain. When a human wants to eat something, their goal is not only to eat, but to do that without harming their emotional state. E.g. if I (or anyone) wanted to eat badly and catched an animal, I wouldn’t boil it alive, because it would scream of pain and hurt my mental state. But i…
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I feel like Star Trek handled the question much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience. Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, b…
It is very common for Science Fiction to use "sentient" where "sapient" is the correct word. Star Trek is no exception. Calling trees sentient isn't nonsense; your understanding of what the word means is simply incorrect.
I don't know (it's an actual question I ask myself, not some rhetoric vehicle), but the concept you declare as incorrect is so widespread it makes me wonder... (obviously, the meaning in the legal context we are talking about it's clearly on one side)
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I like jokes but all jokes aside Jordan Peterson’s material helped me get off of opiates
Seeing him strung out on opiates (edit: turns out it was benzos) made you get off opiates?
The man doesn't need to explain himself to overly left left wing redditors looking to try to take him down a notch or prove him wrong. I only metion redditors as your comment on benzos is the single most popular item to bring up in a discusson about him. His years of work and masses of public statements and appearances get dismissed with a single, ill informed snarky one-liner. The man is a treasure.
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…
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One significant change is that the practice of boiling live lobsters is now illegal.
I like to eat crab and lobster, but I never understood how anyone could boil one of them alive - even if it hasn't (or hadn't) been 100% proven they can feel pain, it seems such a horrible, horrible thing to do! I'm not any kind of animal rights activist, but it makes me feel upset just thinking about it :shudder:
Yes ,don't cook lobsters alive I would say. Most animals can definitely feel pain, maybe even insects. Don't cause them unnecessary pain. It's pretty said that the so called most intelligent animal species needs laws to understand that.
How not causing pain to animals when cooking them relates to intelligence? I suspect that my comment can sound blunt to you, so let me explain. When a human wants to eat something, their goal is not only to eat, but to do that without harming their emotional state. E.g. if I (or anyone) wanted to eat badly and catched an animal, I wouldn’t boil it alive, because it would scream of pain and hurt my mental state. But i…
You don't have to burst in tears, it's enough to be aware of some facts and deal with them. You deal with them by "not seeing, not hearing" (or not wanting to). It's fine.
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Couldn't a robot be programmed to respond to stimuli, and to communicate with other robots? Would that then be a form of sentience?
Yes, they could be, though the question usually arises about whether a living thing is sentient, and it's fairly natural and easy to define life such that robots are not living beings. Overall the point here is that sentience isn't a very useful measure of anything. If there were an explicit law recognizing the rights of all living things to a decent death, we would essentially be forced to become exclusive carnivore…
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>Does being a “bug” justify being boiled alive? I'm picking on your language choices rather than the overall point of your argument, but have you ever boiled a live crustacean before (and by this, I specifically mean fully submerging the animal under water that is under a rolling boil on a high-temperature flame)? They don't writhe in agony and try to escape; they die pretty much instantaneously (I'm talking no movem…
A quick search shows a lot of sites saying it takes about 3 minutes for death, though I don't know what the original source is. But that makes sense to me. I mean, how would boiling water cause instant death? Do you think if you were dunked in boiling water you would instantly die? Granted we don't have the same physiology as lobsters, but, what exactly is the physical mechanism that would cause instant death from 10…
Some brains can also rapidly shut down consciousness in response to overwhelming pain, but I suspect that's not relevant for lobsters... getting their limbs torn off and re-growing them is a thing. If a bigger lobster rips your arm off, you'd better remember where it happened and respect their territory.