Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no moral obligation to abstain from meat, whatsoever.
Speak for yourself, I feel a strong moral obligation not to eat meat or otherwise support industries which exploit animals. Reducing suffering is a moral imperative.
UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
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Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#152Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no moral obligation to abstain from meat, whatsoever.
This is ignorant of so much contemporary philosophy / analytical ethics. The amount of convincing arguments for needlessly causing suffering in beings that clearly experience it are vanishingly small.
Some things die so others may live. That is the way it always has been, and always will be, regardless if some subset of humans decides that "that's immoral". I will continue to eat meat and hunt animals and feel zero guilt. I do not care that something was killed for food when... I dunno, grass juice and pitaya could theoretically sustain me instead (lol). Animals taste good and are calorically dense. That's 100% convincing enough for me.
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Until it's there it's 100% sci-fi. We've been through a few AI hype cycles already and the most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid. We might be on a completely wrong path with our current approach too, difference of degree vs difference of kind, we don't know much about the brain and so far our binary way of computing isn't really promising, especially not in term of mimicking or surpassing the h…
> most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid Or even a squirrel, take robotics for example or hell even an AI simulated animal, the AI don't even come close in it's ability to problem solve and react to novel situations. A squirrel powered by a few acorns is able to achieve things that even our most powerful supercomputers consuming 8.2 megawatts could never do. Problem is we are currently limited b…
How's the computing power of a squirrel's brain compared to our best AI in terms of "number of system states"? I'm not in the field, so I'll elaborate my poorly-phrased question below:
My understanding is that you can calculate the number of "system states" of a computer by calculating how many different combinations of open-closed its logic gates can support. It's a mind-bogglingly huge number, but no matter what, the set of "all possible open-closed gate combinations" will be larger than the set of "the smartest, best simulation of an AI we have".
So--if memories, instincts, etc. are defined by things like "angle of neuron twist, number of transmitter molecules fired at second 0.0001, age of neuron in nS", etc., then just how many more "system states" can a squirrel's brain hold then a supercomputer can?
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.
Same here, in some ways I regard myself as a pre-abolition slave owner/user (analogy breaks down somewhat, is it the farmer who is the slave owner?). I get the feeling society will change and this thing that used to be common will slide towards being seen as despicable, worthy of having your statue thrown in the water. Originally I was reducing my meat intake for health reasons but thinking about it more and more it…
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is ignorant of so much contemporary philosophy / analytical ethics. The amount of convincing arguments for needlessly causing suffering in beings that clearly experience it are vanishingly small.
Your attempt to bend my morality to yours doesn't register with me, bud. Some things die so others may live. That is the way it always has been, and always will be, regardless if some subset of humans decides that "that's immoral". I will continue to eat meat and hunt animals and feel zero guilt. I do not care that something was killed for food when... I dunno, grass juice and pitaya could theoretically sustain me in…
Peter Singer is an excellent starting point for exploring the dimensions of morality for eating animal flesh.
I can't argue against your own sense of guilt, since it's possible for some people to feel not at all [0]. Your other comment about willingly and guiltlessly drowning mice [1] in a bucket is not indicative of a healthy mind.
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…
Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers. The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to…
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speak for yourself, I feel a strong moral obligation not to eat meat or otherwise support industries which exploit animals. Reducing suffering is a moral imperative.
If you believe you should reduce suffering, it would be better for you to quickly kill a chicken and eat it. Otherwise, a cat, bird of prey or other animal might kill that chicken. And cats are cruel killers that slowly torture their prey before eating them.
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#159There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…
Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…
I see nothing immoral in a bear eating a human. It’s just being a bear. But just like any other social animal, as humans we’re of course going to kill that bear so it stops eating us. It has nothing to do with us being superior than a bear. We just don’t want to die like any other animal! And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms). As animals, we natura…
Right.
>And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms).
Bears can't have moral culpability because they aren't intellectually sophisticated enough, much like how a theoretical profoundly mentally disabled human, or an infant human, wouldn't be morally culpable for killing someone. The "mens rea" can't be established. However, nearly all adult humans do possess the capacity for moral reasoning.
>As animals, we naturally eat each other.
Even though bears and humans are animals, and animals often eat each other, we're the only animals blessed/cursed with the knowledge that if we were to maul someone to death, they'd experience terrible pain and suffering, their life would be cut short, and their family would mourn their death and lose resource support and potentially suffer and die themselves. If a bear had those thoughts, they would be morally culpable, but they almost certainly don't.
>If there is something immoral about this, does that mean a rabbit is morally superior to a fox?
No, because a rabbit's moral reasoning is in the same class as a bear's and a fox's, and not a human's.