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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

#151
post #141

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.

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

#152
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no moral obligation to abstain from meat, whatsoever.

Morality is like an ass: everybody has their own.

to try and extend this weird turn of phrase, human progress is the equivalent of making sure everyone's ass is clean.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#153

Earlier 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.

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 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

#154

Earlier 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…

Hilarious analogy. "Nuclear power vs. acorns".

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

#155
post #71

Earlier 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…

In regards to your loophole I’m reminded of the pretty famous Yellowstone study that showed when wolves are not artificially reduced by hunting their entire environment stabilized. Or is your loophole inferring that animals should be hunted so they can avoid their natural fate? Knowing that animals run away from their hunter I would think their natural fate is preferable to the animal than getting shot and killed.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#156

Earlier 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…

You stated "[t]here is no moral obligation to abstain from meat, whatsoever." Hand-wavy attempts at dismissing entire bodies of study within philosophy won't work with most intelligent people, either.

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.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29871272#29877761

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#157
post #102
post #98

Earlier 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…

You might be interested by neuromorphic hardware. The basic observation is that animal computation and silicon computation operate in very different ways. Animals use lots of neurons that perform comparatively poorly (slow, not deterministic) that are sparsely connected, but have a high degree of parallelism. Compared to say a computer chip, which uses relatively few components that all operate at very high speeds with a high degree of determinism, are very thoroughly connected, and do not operate at nearly the same degree of parallelism. So if we want to explore AI maybe we should try making hardware that is more similar to the goop in our heads.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#158
post #141

Earlier 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.

Based on that logic I should suffocate you now in your sleep so you don't have to get old and die of cancer. Don't look out for me with my pillow I don't buy that logic either.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#159
post #52

There 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…

TFA speculates that laughter or similar vocalizations are a signal of nonagression in play. Play is necessary for animals to learn to hunt and survive. There is no indication that the "laughter" is due to a feeling of "joy" as humans experience it, but I guess there's no way to really know either. Do we observe animals telling jokes to each other, or laughing when another of their group slips and falls?

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#160
post #98

Earlier 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…

>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!

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.

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