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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

#161

Post by wcarron »

boston_clone wrote: post #156
wcarron wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]. Yo…

It is exceedingly hilarious that you took:

1. I drowned two rodents that lived, shit, probably bred, and carried diseases through my walls and attic

2. I eat meat and feel no guilt

And then used that to call me a psychopath. Thank you for the amusement. Goodbye.

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

#162

Post by wcarron »

mbil wrote: post #147
wcarron wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing immoral with eating things. Why would there be? The other posters' rabbit-fox example is a great point. I also strongly reject the idea that we need 'our specialness' to 'justify eating things and how we treat them'. I don't need justification beyond: 'That thing is made of meat. I can eat meat. I'm going to kill it and eat it'. There is no moral crisis. Things die. Things get eaten. Just 2 days ago,…

'That thing is made of meat. I can eat meat. I'm going to kill it and eat it' I am made of meat -- hopefully we don't cross paths!

Post-breakfast you're good. I get peckish again around 4-5pm though, so watch out!

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

#163

Post by kwyjibo1230 »

Heinlein wrote in Stranger in a Strange Land that "Man is the [only] animal who laughs." Who's laughing now? (Rats and cows apparently).

All jokes aside, interesting research. We find ourselves more similar than dissimilar to our less sentient counterparts each year.

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

#164

Post by throwawayboise »

jdavis703 wrote: post #124
toper-centage wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.

> You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. To be honest, a lot of meat still tastes kind of gross to me. Give me fried tofu over baked chicken in a salad. Heck if I’m just having a a boring burger for a random lunch on a Tuesday, give me an Impossible patty over some crappy fast food beef. That said if there’s a dish that’s enhanced by meat (say a Wagyu steak or a p…

I tried impossible beef for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It's nothing like real beef. It sorta passes for a meat-colored component in something like lasagna, but the texture and taste is not the same.

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

#165

Post by etcet »

jdavis703 wrote: post #151
etcet wrote: 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.

We can just stop breeding chickens for the slaughter?

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

#166

Post by meowface »

jdavis703 wrote: post #151
etcet wrote: 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.

This is the primary argument I see hunters use to justify hunting as an ethical form of killing, in contrast to factory farming. Obviously it's better to kill someone or something quickly and painlessly than slowly and painfully, but I don't buy this argument. If you truly had that motivation, you would be saving that chicken from predation and finding a sanctuary or home for it, and/or you'd be encouraging mass human euthanization campaigns across various parts of the world to reduce suffering and slow, painful deaths.

If there were a human serial killer killing people via a projectile energy weapon that always instantly killed someone from a long distance before they had any idea what was happening, I don't think you'd argue for a greatly reduced sentence due to their humane method of disposal. If there were an ancient human civilization that went on hunting trips to kill and eat humans in other villages because they believed human flesh was the most prized meat, and they defended it by saying that they were probably all going to soon die of war or starvation or disease anyway, I don't think you'd just go "oh yeah true" without batting an eye.

The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals. Anything else is self-serving rationalization. If you attribute no moral value to them, that puts you in the company of almost everyone who's ever lived, but just state it plainly instead of trying to wiggle around it with mental gymnastics.

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

#167

Post by [deleted] »

etcet wrote: post #141
wcarron wrote: post #134

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.

[deleted]

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

#168

Post by cowninja »

meowface wrote: post #160
jdavis703 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Individual beings who have a moral sense of personhood engage in behavior that can be classified as moral or immoral, right or wrong, permissible or impermissible. Their actions can be categorized as either condemnable or commendable. It makes sense to hold them morally responsible for their intentional actions.

In contrast to humans, animals such as dogs, cats, birds, and fish are commonly held NOT to be moral agents or moral persons. In the jungle, a lion eating another animal or killing a human for any reason is not considered morally wrong or blameworthy.

Pet owners frequently chastise their pets for undesirable behaviors such as urinating on the carpet, digging in the garden, or failing to obey a command, but yelling "bad dog" is not usually interpreted as moral agency. One could argue, however, that the owner is engaging in moral expectation or anthropomorphism.

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

#169

Post by adamc »

jdavis703 wrote: post #116
alecst wrote: 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…

We have options, and options imply choices and therefore morality.

I see lots wrong with it, since it creates pain and bad life experiences. This bothers me. But that's also a choice, of what kind of morality you embrace.

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

#170

Post by q1w2 »

medstrom wrote: post #109
q1w2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 start out well with the first three paragraphs, but I don't get how you can decide it will 'probably' leave the Earth, let alone with such a high degree of confidence as saying 'probably'. Why wouldn't it make an army of bots to start converting all the matter in the solar system and beyond into more computing substrate or whatever else it finds useful?

You're right, I cannot say "probably". Although your notion that it converts our solar system into a computing machine, doesn't preclude it from leaving thereafter.

I suppose there are three possibilities.

1. It leaves the Earth, and either remains limited in size or expands in a more advantageous solar system(s). 2. It stays on the Earth forever, permanently limiting its computational capacity. 3. It expands to include sub-entities that both stay and leave in some cosmic distributed computing organism.

I suppose the three possibilities above can be reduced to one fundamental question: Will the AI expand to be interstellar/intergalactic in nature, or will it remain limited?

Is there a fundamental unending utility to ever-greater computing power? ...and, if so, would there be detectable signs of such expanding computers in the cosmos? This last question is important both for our own forecasting of the future, but also to interpret inter-AI-entity relations, because presumably if AIs do NOT get along in space, they likely hide signs of their existence.

One thing I'm convinced of - organic meat bags are not the future of space-faring intelligence.

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