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Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

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Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#161

Post by gambiting »

Voultapher wrote: post #159
gambiting wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>There is no version of animal farming that if you did the same with humans wouldn't constitute human rights violations. Look at the way cattle and sheep are farmed over moorlands in the UK, the animals are literally left alone on land hundreds of hectares large, they live in as "natural" environment as physically possible. We can argue that a human left in those conditions would be unhappy with the still limited sp…

Humans are still imposing their will on these animals. They will still be used in one way or the other. If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that? Run around these free fields, but there are fences, and you will have to subject yourself to mandatory harvest long before the end of your natural lifespan. Ah and sometimes a dude will come around and shove a stick with a magnet down y…

>>If we substitute your children into their lifestyle, would you be ok with that?

Animals are not humans though, so this comparison is completely moot(for me anyway).

>>Humans are still imposing their will on these animals.

That's like saying that I'm imposing my will on my dog by making him live with me. Like....I guess you are correct? That doesn't automatically make it bad - if it does for you, then I guess that's where we disagree.

>> I talked about self determination

I don't believe animals have self determination in the first place, not it in the same way humans do. A cow is neither capable of deciding its own fate, nor is any attempt to give it such agency even remotely reasonable. Again, I expect we will disagree here.

>> but saying humane farming is like saying humane torture

Uhmmm, again, no not really, because keeping an animal on an open moor like in my example wouldn't be called torture by literally anyone other than the most extreme believer in animal rights. After all that's where these animals normally live, the fact that there is a fence there(sometimes there isn't even one, or if there is the animal might literally never come across it), is literally the only difference between "wild" and "farmed" animal here.

But for the sake of the discussion - do you then consider hunting wild animals ethical or humane? Like a bunch of deer living in a forest, and they just get shot one day - is that more or less ethical than killing a sheep that spent its entire life out in the open? What makes that difference?

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#162

Post by nabakin »

amatecha wrote: post #5

Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4

The original video https://www.instagram.com/insta.beakk/reel/CtIzWvDgWzX/ and there are more of him

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#163

Post by viraptor »

card_zero wrote: post #145
viraptor wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature is adaptation for survival. I think you're mixing up "the old ways" with "naturally beneficial ways". Your chances of survival and reproduction are much higher with access to modern toilets, delayed gratification, no unnecessary violence, and due to society asking for consent. It's perfectly natural.

So "natural" includes anything artificial, so long as it's adaptive. This is a peculiar definition of the word.

"artificial" itself needs expanding on to use in this discussion. Are tools artificial? Where's the threshold? Stick, hammer, wrench, electric drill? Or is it only natural if we're naked collecting fruit?

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#164

Post by amatecha »

nabakin wrote: post #162
amatecha wrote: post #5

Made me think of this video where a parrot is watching YouTube videos it likes, changing to different ones, and seeming angry when ads (or the owner lol) interrupt its video-watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZSNhJcKFf4

The original video https://www.instagram.com/insta.beakk/reel/CtIzWvDgWzX/ and there are more of him

Thank you! I've been trying for ages to find where this video was ripped from (as the link I found was very obviously not the original source)!

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#165

Post by card_zero »

retsibsi wrote: post #155
card_zero wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, good for you for asking this question despite being on the animal rights side. I wish I could say something useful as an answer. I could snipe at Jeremy Bentham for kicking it off in 1780 with shoddy reasoning: not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? he says, but this is really a side effect of an argument against slavery and contains no discussion of why reducing suffering is desirable,…

What makes it a good question? It's obvious that we can't conjure universally compelling moral axioms out of nowhere; all of our moral reasoning ultimately rests on fundamental values that one either cares about or doesn't. If our sceptic has the capacity for empathy with animals, we can try to convince them to elevate their empathetic response to the status of a moral value. But if they simply don't care, and insist…

I think, first of all, you're not wrong, but also, you're mostly wrong. People with completely separate value systems exist, but only theoretically, or historically. I know there's a lot of hand-wringing at the moment about society being fractured and divided, and it may be Pollyannaish of me to say this, but I think we're mostly all on the same side with approximately the same bunch of deep values, by the power of culture (and we more or less all come from the same culture, "modern"). We can have productive discussions, we can work it out. The Myth of the Framework is a relevant book.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#166

Post by vanderZwan »

philistine wrote: post #132
vanderZwan wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, but I suspect you mean compared to other hominids, while GP had non-hominids like chimpanzees and gorillas in mind, so I just wanted to make sure that that potential confusion is cleared up first.

Remember, our predecessors did not pal around with apes. They paled around with the ancestors of apes.

No, see, this is exactly the type of misunderstanding I wanted to clear up: there is an entire lineage of different hominids that came after the split with chimpanzees. If we consider gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees apes, then all of the hominids are apes. And all of those hominids either went fully extinct, or interbred with early homo sapiens to leave some living traces of their DNA with us, and then went extinct.

So "our predecessors" isn't specific enough. One might mean our pre-ape ancestors, like you do, or the subgroup of apes that is hominids.

Re: Parrots love playing tablet games. That's helping researchers understand them

#167

Post by vanderZwan »

xandrius wrote: post #135
12907835202 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't the idea that homo sapiens were more intelligent been debunked in favour of the idea that they were more social and that's what gave them superiority

How is possible to debunk something we have no direct information about? I mean a new "idea" is far from being able debunk anything, right?

Well, if they meant homo sapiens vs neanderthals, we have both skull sizes and genetic evidence suggesting that their brains were as capable as ours. We also have enough archeological sites of both early homo sapiens and neanderthals to have a decent understanding of the social structures we had. So it is possible to draw conclusions, even if it is never with 100% certainty.

Also, the debunking likely refers to the really old progressivist idea that any species that went extinct must have done so because it was inherently "inferior", instead of less well adapted to whatever changes the environment threw at them.

Either way, from what I understand the most recent well-supported theories of what caused neanderthal extinction is that their basal metabolic rate was so much higher compared to ours (due to adaptations to the ice age), that this simple caloric difference gave their body plan a long-term disadvantage over ours after the ice age ended[0].

And when I say "body plan" I refer to the part where apparently early humans and Neanderthals interbred so often that about 20% of Neanderthal DNA is still present in the modern human gene pool, and most humans have about 1 to 4% neanderthal DNA[1]. Similarly DNA from homo sapiens has also been found in neanderthal remains[2].

So were kind of reaching this point where Neanderthals and Denovisans seem to not quite match the definition that most people use when they say "different species". Our ancestors interbred a lot, and the genes that were advantageous stuck around. At that point using the word "extinction" without caveats becomes a bit misleading I think.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6d3uHSFxkM

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_genetics

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2FatwFjc-8

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