621–630 of 704 posts
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"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.
It's more like saying humans are apes.
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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 o…
Are you suggesting I should feel bad about squishing fruit flies?
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Yes. The bar for sentience is quite low. It only means that one is capable of feeling sensations. (For example, Wikipedia gives the definition, "Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.")
Does an arduino have sentience? It can certainly sense stuff via its gpio pins. As for "feelings", I don't know, would having a state machine that transitions between "happy" and "sad" based on gpio inputs count?
Not yet..
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Funfact you didn't want to know today: Figs are technically not vegan (nor vegetarian) as during the (highly complex) pollination process some fig-wasps have a wild time in the fruit, where eventually some of the wasps die and get absorbed by the fruit.
The wasp is completely digested. You're no more eating a wasp when eating a fig, than you are eating grass when eating beef.
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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 d…
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People didn't think human babies could feel pain until the 1980s[1], and commonly did operations w/o anesthetic. [1]: https://www.newsweek.com/when-doctors-start-using-anesthesia...
General anesthetic has been shown to cause brain damage. Surgery on infants without anesthetic has been shown to cause emotional differences in children. There's no good solution. Doctors were weighing consequences with little data.
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The wasp is completely digested. You're no more eating a wasp when eating a fig, than you are eating grass when eating beef.
Hmm ... how does that work? We are obviously not eating cow stomach when eating a steak?
(Yes, I know tripe is not really stomach.)
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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 y…
Will there be a law prohibiting other predators, not humans, from hunting these animals?
That is absolutely not comparable and equates to FUD. In a healthy and normally operating ecosystem hierarchies of animals exist and make sure the ecosystem stays in balance. Yes, there are predators killing octopuses and crabs out there in the wild, but it's not to sell them in underwater restaurants and boutiques for a hefty markup to finance the underwater economy. Every animal that kills other animals, apart from…
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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?