Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law • Hacker News Board

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

#611

Post by jallen_dot_dev » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

drewm1980 wrote: post #460

jallen_dot_dev wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Brains are mostly fat... so it could be the time for enough heat to transfer into the brain for it to melt and all the neurons short out. Getting too hot is way more dangerous for your brain than getting too cold. 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 big…

That's also what I figured does them in but I would think it'd take longer to conduct enough heat to do that. Considering cooking directions are 10+ minutes to cook through.

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

#612

Post by omnicognate » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 6:11 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #597

omnicognate wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a simulation based on the connectome and a trivially simple body, producing a very small piece of behaviour. I don't mean to minimise it, it's very cool and I'm not an expert. The video itself says that it is limited. As I understand it, C. Elegans displays a surprisingly large and complex set of behaviours given its (relatively) extremely simple nervous system. A database of thousands of these "behavioural ph…

That model's phase space is about 2000 bits, realistically speaking its behavior never repeats. It can't be searched either, our computational limit today is about 70 bits.

I'm not clear what you're saying there. You shouldn't need to exhaust the phase space to check if the model exhibits a particular behaviour, but perhaps you're not claiming that?

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

#613

Post by biofox » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 6:24 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #526

stickfigure wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting I should feel bad about squishing fruit flies?

Why do you squish fruit flies? They're harmless,

They lay eggs on my fruit, and in my plant pots... Not cool

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

#614

Post by TaylorAlexander » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:21 PM UTC

Lhiw wrote: post #449

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental g…

As a vegan how do you reconcile the thousands of insects and field animals that get culled during harvesting those lentils? I don't really have a problem with vegetarians but I do struggle to understand the lines they seemingly draw at random. Minimising harm should be a given for all but that doesn't rule out all meat eating that veganism somehow does.

People love to ask me this. One guy said deer are being run over by tractors so as a vegan I’m killing deer.

I don’t really see how only eating plants is a random line. As I said in my original comment living in an industrialized society includes some amount of harming animals (for example carbon dioxide emissions harm animals).

I’m actually designing a solar powered farming robot for regenerative agriculture so we don’t have to use harmful chemicals to do farming.

But in my mind there is a clear distinction between accidentally harming insects while harvesting lentils and intentionally breeding animals in cages for slaughter.

If you think that line is arbitrary and you can’t understand it, I’m not sure I can help.

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

#615

Post by TaylorAlexander » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

Yizahi wrote: post #446

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify. This seems pretty arbitrary. As a vegan I draw the line at plants vs animals and while it is hard to live in industrialized society without harming animals, it’s easy for me to see how dropping a lobster in a pot will cause the animal to suffer. I’m doing just fine simply not eating them. Why do mental g…

The thing is - lobsters are an easy problem. We can (theoretically) collectively decide that lobsters shouldn't be touched at all and nobody will be hurt (some fishers maybe?). But the same logic about "feeling" pain is applicable to practically anything as is demonstrated in the comments below. And then it becomes a humanity problem - can we kill living organisms for ANY reason? There is no easy, or even hard answer…

I’d be happy if we started at simply not killing lobsters and other animals for food (or for any other industrial purpose). You’re right that we could spend a lot of time debating the finer points of it but as you said: lobsters are easy. By that logic I would imagine so are chickens and cows and baby sheep (lamb) and pigs. So let’s start with the “easy” stuff. Whether or not we allow ourselves to harm insects or something while harvesting grains is another question. We could ponder whether it’s ethical to kill bacteria, but we’d die if we didn’t do that so let’s not fret about that.

A lot of people in this thread seem to be suggesting that since we can’t pin down an absolute answer we should what… do nothing? If you really mean to say that deciding not to eat lobsters is easy then let’s go with that logic and stop eating all the bigger animals too. Seems an easy place to start.

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

#616

Post by harpersealtako » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:34 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #543

wruza wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m aware that it may feel pain either just like I do, or in a different way. My question is why should I be agitated by this thought, iow what is the reason to reduce it. I don’t relate its suffering to my “soul” or a mental state. Not talking about morals here, I wouldn’t boil a live crab in a presence of people who would react negatively. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29305117

Your line of questioning gives me the shivers, because it applies equally to humans. You might be intellectually aware that you're causing someone to suffer, but - unless someone else is watching - why should you care? You say you're "not talking about morals" - what, then, are morals?

(I'm not the person you were replying to but I am very interested in this conversation)

There's a specific carnal aspect to eating meat that I imagine is lost on a lot of people, especially when they don't have firsthand experience butchering animals. For me, it was when I was gutting the first deer I killed. There's this weird thing where you become incredibly conscious of the movement of your internal organs when you are holding another animal's warm entrails. It's almost entirely physical rather than mental, like what it feels like when you meditate on your breathing, except instead of breathing it's the pressure of food sludge sliding down your intestines.

I realized that me and the deer are both just slightly differently-arranged sacks of meat. I always thought I'd have some revelation about the sanctity of life when I killed a deer, but instead I felt an immediate detachment from it, like how I'm just part of an uncaring physical system ("nature") and that system doesn't care about my "morals" or lack thereof.

Sorry for the weird pretentious rambling. My response is that humans are part of nature, not apart from it, that nature has no morals or good or bad. Morals are just this weird thing human brains do to cooperate as individual members of a species to increase our fitness and individually to feel better or worse. I care about other humans because I care about them. I don't care about crabs because I don't care about them. They are two separate, non-intersecting roads in my brain. I don't mind if you think I'm a heartless psycho for articulating it this way, in fact the main drawback of this way of mental mapping is literally the social stigma of being considered heartless and cruel, which is why I am less likely to phrase it this way in IRL conversation. But I feel nothing when I crush a house fly (rather, I feel great satisfaction at getting rid of such a nuisance, and I think most others would feel the same), and feel nothing when I boil a crab alive except the pleasant anticipation of a delicious meal.

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

#617

Post by ClumsyPilot » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #235

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think most city dwelling office workers in the first world would eat steak if they had to kill and butcher a cow themselves? I hazard a guess that half would faint at the sight of blood. We have this meat industry that gides away all the nasty bits and we just get ouece of meat iwrapped in plastic. I have. No accusations against farmers doing what they have to do, but in the first world cities we have one gran…

As opposed to a villager going to a butcher to get their meat? Are we going to argue it's only moral to eat meat if you kill and butcher it yourself? Even the butcher probably isn't killing the animal. They're getting the carcass delivered to them.

"Are we going to argue it's only moral to eat meat if you kill and butcher it yourself?"

Not quite - if you've never done it, but you defend eating meat, you dont know what you are talking about and shouls not be taken seriously

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

#618

Post by MattPalmer1086 » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

SyzygistSix wrote: post #516

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this. Just read This is Water. Now I'm going to have to read all his other stuff.

Have fun reading Infinite Jest. I mean it seriously but it's a lot of book.

By a strange coincidence, it turns out my wife has a copy by her bed she hasn't read yet!

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

#619

Post by tagrun » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

urbdbdkxkd wrote: post #361

tagrun wrote: post #288

Not trying to argue it's OK to subject animals to unnecessary pain (it shouldn't be!), but from a pure logical consistency standpoint, are there many non-sentient animals? Why is it OK to not recognize mosquitos, rats, termites, deers, ants, etc etc which meet painful demise by humans as sentient animals while making exceptions for a few?

Its very logical. The current definition of sentience being proposed in the bill requires that an animal be able to perceive pain to be within scope (I'm not entirely convinced this should be a necessary condition, but that's what they've settled on) . When existing animal rights legislation was written lobsters, cephalapods etc. were considered incapable of doing this. The evidence now shows that they are capable of…

Insects feel pain though, can even have chronic pain, so I don't see how it is consistent logically: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/insects-can-experi...

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

#620

Post by robbrown451 » Mon, Nov 22, 2021, 8:35 PM UTC

phonypc wrote: post #603

robbrown451 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods. So I'm not seeing your zebra analogy.

If you want to expand the category "bugs" to include all arthropods, then "crabs and lobsters are basically bugs" is kinda circular/superfluous. My comparison at that point would become "humans and zebras are basically chordates"... which is true but not very meaningful in context.

It's not so black and white. Bug is not a scientific term (well, not in its common usage), so it has blurry boundaries. Some definitions say "insect-like", some say "small arthropod", and so on. Lobsters etc are clearly in the gray area. So "basically bugs" is pretty spot on.... it is similar to bugs in the ways that matter to the conversation.

And it isn't circular or superfluous in that conversation, since the point that they are similar to other arthropods (which we tend to not give a lot of concern to the pain they might experience), is relevant and seemed to have been missed by those passing the law.