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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

#191

Post by michaelmrose »

xxpor wrote: post #184
etcet wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can just stop breeding chickens for the slaughter?

Is it better to have lived and die, or not live at all?

See the repugnant conclusion. I don't have a good answer save that arguments that deal with completely hypothetical people seem to result in completely useless nonsensical results. For example if your argument were correct it would be morally beneficial to breed as many human children as possible to live horrifying, painful, and short lives in order to end their tortured existence as kid burgers because any sort of life is better than none at all.

If we admit the idea that some lives can have negative value for example if they consist solely of suffering it would be OK to breed kid burgers so long as they had a pleasant existence up until slaughter at 7 followed by a quick trip to McKid.

I suspect that my moral philosophy and likely yours is simply insufficient to deal with hypothetical persons and we ought to simply reason about how to treat actual beings that exist.

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

#192

Post by wyre »

lordnacho wrote: post #175
wyre wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course in the moment they don't want to be killed, but they are going to get killed either by the hunter or a predator. I guess what I mean is that (in short), animals that are bred to be eaten didn't have to exist in the first place, we are literally creating them and making them suffer, both in life and in death. So we're creating suffering out of nothing. Animals that live in the wild are gonna meet a bad end r…

Who are you (or anyone) to say how a wild animal’s end should be? If animals are anything like humans (also an animal), they would most likely want to live as long as possible and prefer a natural death over a shortened human-caused death.

Any creation of life is creating suffering. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that there is suffering. Accepting that truth the rational action would be to minimize the suffering. Factory farms cause suffering to its inhabitants everyday, much more than the suffering caused from being born. Watch Earthlings [1] to learn about how animals at farms get treated.

[1] https://vimeo.com/209647801?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&...

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

#193

Post by pleb_nz »

wombatmobile wrote: post #45
pleb_nz wrote: post #14

I had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species.

> I had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species. What humans believe about other species tells us a lot about humans, and nothing about other species.

Reminds me of

[My father] taught me “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird–you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,” and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on. Richard Feynman, “What Is Science?“, presented in 1966

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

#195

Post by lordnacho »

wyre wrote: post #192
lordnacho wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course in the moment they don't want to be killed, but they are going to get killed either by the hunter or a predator. I guess what I mean is that (in short), animals that are bred to be eaten didn't have to exist in the first place, we are literally creating them and making them suffer, both in life and in death. So we're creating suffering out of nothing. Animals that live in the wild are gonna meet a bad end r…

Who are you (or anyone) to say how a wild animal’s end should be? If animals are anything like humans (also an animal), they would most likely want to live as long as possible and prefer a natural death over a shortened human-caused death. Any creation of life is creating suffering. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that there is suffering. Accepting that truth the rational action would be to minimize the sufferin…

That's actually where I started thinking this way. My point was a side point though, I had already addressed the farm animals.

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

#196

Post by macrolime »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #62
Tepix wrote: 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…

Here's a few guesses, please correct me if I'm wrong about these! The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer. https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#cunninghams-law Culture list from https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes based on a manual categorisation of friends' liked Facebook pages, when trying to learn Mandarin while living in Taiwan a few years…

Several species can dance to music

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/01/297686709/t...

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

#197

Post by jrlocke »

naasking wrote: post #139
jrlocke wrote: post #80

This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented. As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human fee…

> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't rea…

Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?

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

#198

Post by naasking »

jrlocke wrote: post #197
naasking wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't rea…

Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?

What evidence would motivate such a distinction that doesn't ultimately reduce to special pleading?

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

#199

Post by burnished »

q1w2 wrote: post #172
burnished wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Neurons in your brain have tens of thousands of connections each, and are not limited to the current AI design where all connections are laid out in a neat linear layers for matrix operations. Squishy human brains connect in all directions - there's no "layer" to every thought. It creates feedback loops, intricate pathways, as well as direct connections. Modern AI tech is fundamentally dumbs down intelligence by this…

There are pretty recognizable layers actually, and groupings of neurons that resemble 'cells' in the sense that they have recognizable inputs and recognizable outputs, and a large degree of interconnectivity.

What you are talking about sounds like deep learning. What I'm talking about is the hardware. Your tone makes it sound like you think you are correcting me, I'd like to inform you that you are not.

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

#200

Post by second--shift »

dragonwriter wrote: post #176
wcarron wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this: > 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. Into this: > The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

The sole reason vegetable eaters find eating vegetables justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-animal life forms.

One obvious difference is that plants evolved with animals (or influenced the evolution of animals) via an express food-providing mechanism. To eat the leaves or the fruit of a plant does not necessarily kill it; in fact, one could say that the plants evolved these parts in a symbiotic relationship with their animal eaters/caretakers. It's certainly possible to destroy a plant by eating it obviously, but how many examples of plants can you think of where it provides a detachable, replenishable food product?

Animals do not have similar food-providing mechanisms. When you eat an animal, or part of an animal, it'd dead. It doesn't grow back. It wasn't designed to.

All nutrition comes from plants (or the microbiology around them). All protein comes from plants. Anyone who equates the barbary of eating animals with eating plants is choosing to deceive themselves and others.

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