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Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

lse.ac.uk

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Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#171

Post by shakna »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #159
bardworx wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: i don’t have a dog in the fight…or a branch on a tree, in this context. Sentient is defined as able to perceive or feel things. The paper linked discusses how trees can “communicate” and “feel” based on release of specific chemicals. An exert from the introduction: “Recent research has revealed that plants can sense their neighbours without direct physical contact; mechanisms for this include detection of…

I feel like Star Trek handled the question much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ol2WP0hc0NY Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience. Calling trees sentient is just nonsense. And I mean that literally. I try not to dismiss people's work out of hand, b…

> Intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness seem like three reasonable requirements. I don't really buy the "consciousness" requirement, but it's a stab at what most people associate with sentience.

That would be _sapience_, not _sentience_. Which is the point. Sentience is a ridiculously low bar to clear.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#172

Post by robbrown451 »

phonypc wrote: post #93
chrisweekly wrote: post #11

Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs, whereas an octopus is a creative, playful, intelligent creature with amazing capabilities. It seems strange to group them together.

> Crabs and lobsters are basically bugs Not really. You might as well say humans are basically zebras.

"Bug," in its most common usage, is a large category that includes spiders, insects, and other arthropods. Crustaceans (which includes pill bugs a.k.a. roly polies) are arthropods.

So I'm not seeing your zebra analogy.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#173

Post by Igelau »

agravier wrote: post #23
moeris wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The bar for sentience is quite low. It only means that one is capable of feeling sensations. (For example, Wikipedia gives the definition, "Sentience is the capacity to experience feelings and sensations.")

Why are not all animals recognised as such under that law?

Because we can only wager hazy guesses as to what it means to experience. If a line is to be drawn, than it must be drawn in seemingly inconsistent and arbitrary ways.

There is a mimosa in a garden near me that will close its leaves when you touch it. Is it experiencing the sensation of touch?

(Edit: mimosa pudica, sometimes also called the shameful plant on account of how tenderly it seems to fold itself)

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#174

Post by onemiketwelve »

nemo44x wrote: post #156
Mikeb85 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we know cattle, sheep, chickens and pigs are sentient yet we consume them. Why would we make an exception for octopods and shellfish?

1) Find animals (behaviors) some people eat (do) but most don’t. 2) Make an appeal to some emotion to politically limit their harvest (acceptability). 3) Expand this program to the next least popular animal (behavior), repeat, etc. 4) Congrats, you’ve changed public opinion on what animal to eat (behavior) is moral and ethical. This is the formula of progressivism.

5) if animals don't want to get eaten why would God (make) them out of food? Checkmate (atheists)

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#175

Post by xvilka »

musingsole wrote: post #138
peanut_worm wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boiling to death is pretty cruel even for nature. Getting eaten alive honesty doesn’t even sound as bad.

You'll die faster dropped into boiling water than watching over hours as bears eat your guts and then wander off once their sated. I assure you, getting eaten alive is far worse than boiling to death.

Venturing into the wild without good weapon is not a smartest thing to do. The problem I'd that weapons that can quickly and effortlessly kill the bear are often unavailable to general public.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#176

Post by onemiketwelve »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #137
systemvoltage wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is actually insane that there is so much violence in nature. Every minute, there are millions of living things dying – many with unimaginable pain. The evolutionary engine is absolutely merciless. If I want to be terrified, I think what if we, instead of at the top of the food chain, were just second. It terrifies me to no end.

"Top of the foodchain" is not where you think it is. Parasites that eat lions inside-out are at the top. Or the plague.

Viruses that eat parasites are actually at the top. And on top of that? Soap

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#178

Post by nimih »

musingsole wrote: post #135
crehn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they experience pain and fear, like [...] probably also many plants Out of curiosity, do you have any data to share that supports your perspective?

Yeah, their observations of their behavior over a history of catching and eating them. Oh, you mean tabular, quantitative data? Come off it.

Admittedly, it would be cool if the OP had net_utils_by_specie_empirical_timeseries.xls just sitting around on their hard drive.

Re: Octopuses, crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient beings under UK law

#180

Post by nisse72 »

colechristensen wrote: post #154
elcano wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the trend of using the 'Latinx' term falls under the hypercorrection definition or there's something else to describe it. I'm not passing judgement on the inclusiveness intention, but the English word for Latino and Latina is just Latin, which doesn't have gender. There's no need to mix linguistics with algebra and add a gender variable to the latin word.

Coming from gendered languages, most Hispanics either don’t know about Latinx at all and the ones that do, most of them think it’s inappropriate. It is a bit strange to try to remove gender from a word for people who mostly speak a gendered language. It seems mostly to be a virtue signaling thing among a rather small almost exclusively American, english as first language subculture. A bit like the bathroom I saw in a…

There is a Swedish expression: nobody is named, and nobody is forgotten.

Usually you hear it in a workplace setting when people (often, a subset of the correct group) are being acknowleged for an acheivement of some kind.

As soon as you try to enumerate all of those groups you will undoubtedly forget someone, who will then take offense at the omission. So the saying is a reminder to not single out anyone.

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