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Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

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Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#161

Post by vacri »

sethbannon wrote: post #73
ggreer wrote: post #42

If I had to wager money on what future societies would condemn us for, I'd bet a lot on our treatment of animals. Even if other highly-encephalized animals aren't conscious, they are still open to a wide range of experiences that we can empathize with. They can learn and play. They feel hunger and pain. Some species can even form friendships and mourn the passing of their kin. Despite all indications that our treatme…

Couldn't agree with you more. Upwards of 60 billion animals are slaughtered for human consumption each year[1]. The scale of it is mind-boggling. We just recently agreed on vegetarian team lunches at my startup to do our small part. [1] according to http://www.amazon.com/Animal-Rights-Current-Debates-Directio...

That actually sounds like a low figure to me - there are 7 billion people, so on average only 10 animals per person? Sure, cows are big, but fowl aren't.

But 'slaughtering' misses the point. Nature is constant slaughter. Despite what we think of nature as being a cuddly, friendly thing, the animals in nature are locked in a literally deadly battle. The reasons why herbivores generally startle so easily is because if they don't, they die, and die horribly. We think it's cute, but it's literally there to keep them alive.

The issue isn't 'slaughtering' as far as I can see - since that is an exceptionally natural state for an animal - it's how the animals are treated up until they're slaughtered.

Not to mention that if we're talking about sheer numbers of organisms, the ones that are slaughtered for actual consumptions are a drop in the ocean compared to all the animals that are slaughtered in farming. Mice plague? Hell, just normal mice, no plague? You rarely hear the vegetarian protestors complaining about the huge numbers of rodents killed in farming. It increases in magnitude as you go down, too (snails etc, and increase again for insects). I think it's funny that above we have a complaint about 'not eating the cute rabbit', yet no-one champions the rights of vermin, despite them dying in far greater numbers. Generally no-one cares about them, because they die 'over there' and don't end up in line of sight.

So yeah, treat meat animals humanely, that's a tenable goal, but 'stop the slaughter'? It requires wilfully turning a blind eye.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#162

Post by stephengillie »

GotAnyMegadeth wrote: post #90
leoedin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pain is a feedback sensor which indicates that something's gone wrong. You could build a machine with pressure sensitive grippers. You could even place a threshold on that, above which the machine reacted by moving in the opposite direction. Biological pain is just a complicated version of that. Pain is just our minds interpretation of damage signals. At what point do you draw the line. "This machine doesn't feel pai…

Do you reckon a machine could have a sensor that made it feel emotional pain when it thought about other machines feeling emotional pain, because they lost a machine that they were close to through an extreme level of physical pain?

If you had a processor communicating with other processors by some protocol (I2C, wifi, doesn't matter), you could build out a feedback loop where one processor's output becomes the other's input...and have one processor output audio when the other processor receives specific input...

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#163

Post by mtowle »

gnoway wrote: post #155
mtowle wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally nobody has ever done that. Try understanding his comment a different way. Like, say, that the human protections against violence preclude humans who chose to act violently, ergo if we extend that protection to animals, many of them would lose that protection as soon as it was extended to them.

To clarify, mtowle means 'them' as in 'the humans,' i.e. omnis will go to prison, be killed or endure some other form of violent punishment if caught eating meat. Good luck with that. Maybe it happens, but I'm not holding my breath.

No I don't. I mean there's no point in extending a protection if you're just going to take it right back.

> To clarify...

I recommend not doing this again.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#164

Post by Carwajalca »

cloverich wrote: post #91
Carwajalca wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military gets orders from politicians who get elected by US citizens.

Not to delve too deeply into a political debate, but I think a counter-point is fair: 1. Those elected officials are not elected by everyone - in the case of GWB's first term (which many probably think of in this military context) it wasn't even a majority that elected him. 2. Those that do elect officials have a very small choice (lets say 2-3 people who could practically be elected). Further, I'd argue that most on…

You're quite right in your counter-point. And besides it's not always clear beforehand what the key issues are going to be during a politician's term. I reacted more to the wording "Just because they are born in US doesn't make them responsible for the actions of the US military any more than someoe born in Canada, Brazil or Japan." I'd say US citizens are more responsible for US military actions than Canadians, however this definitely does not make the ordinary citizen responsible in the same way as an army general or prominent politician.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#165

Post by loceng »

cloverich wrote: post #91
Carwajalca wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military gets orders from politicians who get elected by US citizens.

Not to delve too deeply into a political debate, but I think a counter-point is fair: 1. Those elected officials are not elected by everyone - in the case of GWB's first term (which many probably think of in this military context) it wasn't even a majority that elected him. 2. Those that do elect officials have a very small choice (lets say 2-3 people who could practically be elected). Further, I'd argue that most on…

Then change the election system..

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#166

Post by cscurmudgeon »

Zigurd wrote: post #148
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have an assumption that consciousness is just a brain process.

I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.

Whatever I say will be a repeat of what has been argued for thousands of years. Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#167

Post by cscurmudgeon »

scotty79 wrote: post #146
cscurmudgeon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not as simple as that. We don't really know what consciousness is. We know its correlates but not how brains seem to cause consciousness. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#5 At this stage of our knowledge saying "computation X will be conscious" is just a statement of belief or a simple definition as there is no consciouness-meter that I can use to test it. Such statements are unfalsifiable.

It seems that conciousness is just eventual function of any adaptive system that's complex and poweful enough. Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.

Is a city containing a million humans conscious? If not, what is the criteria which rules out that city is not adaptive or complex and powerful enough?

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#168

Post by scotty79 »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #167
scotty79 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that conciousness is just eventual function of any adaptive system that's complex and poweful enough. Research mentiones that organisms as diverse as birds, mammals and mollusks advanced enough show some consciuosness. Mollusks are so different from us that they have evolved their own eyes from scratch, completely different from ours apart from functional elements.

Is a city containing a million humans conscious? If not, what is the criteria which rules out that city is not adaptive or complex and powerful enough?

Human to human link is too narrow for the whole city to be conscious. Same way ant colony is not conscious. I have no idea what is the threshold but my guess is that conciousness requires more connectivity by at least few orders of magnitude higher that any city can provide. Also there is a factor of time. For being that lives and observes human brain for 1 ns it's not concious mind. It's just elaborate bit of architecture.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#169

Post by Zigurd »

cscurmudgeon wrote: post #166
Zigurd wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not assuming. I just don't know any viable theories of how it isn't a brain process, and how one determines that not-a-brain process is or isn't present in all the variations in humans, brain injury cases, birth defects, etc.

Whatever I say will be a repeat of what has been argued for thousands of years. Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

> Maybe the human mind is too limited to understand the core of itself.

That's one of those things that sounds potentially profound but if you consider the strange consequences of physics on the very nature of reality, the ability to ponder the big or the small or the strange doesn't seem to present a lot of barriers to scientific thought.

Re: Prominent Scientists Sign Declaration that Animals have Conscious Awareness

#170

Post by michaelgrafl »

kryten wrote: post #121
michaelgrafl wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's a crass abstraction of what we are. To a philistine the Mona Lisa is nothing but a bunch of pigments applied to a surface. That's what makes him a philistine, after all.

It's an apt description of what we are. Only we think we are more. Perhaps we're not and the thought is just part of that feedback loop. Art, wine, music, maths. It's all just more inputs...

It's a marginal description of what we are.

It takes a true nerd living in a nerd bubble to interpret a human being as a data processing device.

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