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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

#381

Post by orwin »

jkepler wrote: post #364
shakna wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sentience always requires more than just reaction, but a memory component. That is, it can take a proactive response to avoid that negative stimuli in the future. However, measuring both of those is generally very difficult, and so determining if something is sentient can be difficult. The bar for sentience is basically, "is it more than automatic". Which is fairly low and easy to clear. It doesn't even require that…

So robots programmed to learn could be considered sentient ?

Yes, basically. If they learn continuously.

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

#382

Post by emptysongglass »

ramblerman wrote: post #376
emptysongglass wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the p…

> Evil men will do evil deeds but to get a good man to do evil deeds takes religion. I'm kind of surprised that this is a dillema for you. I.e. that you would rather watch the pets under your care, potentially in a confinement you placed them in get eaten up by mites, than intervene. And that the driving force for that inaction is somehow compassion. It sounds more like confusion.

This is uncharitable. I wouldn't rather. I (myself, as I am now) would rather save them from suffering.

There are thousands of years of analysis by Buddhist theologians on these and other subjects. One critique against intervention is by denying or cutting short the acute suffering of another one denies that being's opportunity to learn the truth of their experience: that what is suffering is independent of a lasting self and temporal.

I do not subscribe wholesale to beliefs because they are believed. The Buddha himself encouraged such critical analysis for oneself. And other religions do the same, though they are often passed over for what is easier: unthinking adherence. From the Quran, "reflect; you have vision."

I am not perfect and I am not blameless. My conflict is a thing I must clarify. Its resolution is wisdom.

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

#383

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

emptysongglass wrote: post #307
tagrun wrote: post #288

Not trying to argue it's OK to subject animals to unnecessary pain (it shouldn't be!), but from a pure logical consistency standpoint, are there many non-sentient animals? Why is it OK to not recognize mosquitos, rats, termites, deers, ants, etc etc which meet painful demise by humans as sentient animals while making exceptions for a few?

According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the p…

Can you see the mites, though?

The monks had a kind of sieve to filter out small animals from drinking water. There is a famous story when some of them developed extrasensory perception and realized the water they had been drinking contains millions of tiny beings invisible to the naked eye. They went to the Buddha and asked what they should do. The Buddha answered, if you cannot see them, that is fine.

I like this story because it shows there are some limits to how much we can avoid taking life, otherwise we couldn't live at all.

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

#384

Post by thepasswordis »

moeris wrote: post #19
monkeybutton wrote: post #6

Octopi I understand, but lobsters? They have less than half the nervous system of an ant [1]. Are individual ants sentient and worthy of legislating over? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of...

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.")

Is wikipedia itself sentient?

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

#385

Post by ben_w »

willis936 wrote: post #153
bumby wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some thought backed neuroscience that lobsters can't feel pain in the human conception of it because of the lack of a neocortex. I don't know how well that can be tested, but it goes beyond justifying it because "that's what paw deid"

A lobster being boiled behaves the same way a cow or dog or human behaves when being boiled. Seems strange to make the cutoff for acceptable treatment based around a wishy-washy ill-defined notion of "Can this thing that is very different than me feel pain? I promise I am not biased by the fact that I have vertebrae."

I assume lobsters are capable of suffering because that’s low cost for myself and has the potential to be correct, but “they respond to harm like a human would” is surprisingly weak evidence given my own reflexes will respond to pain well before the sensation reaches my brain, let alone passes through enough of my brain to reach the level of conscious awareness — if it was otherwise, I wouldn’t e.g. remove my hand from scalding water or stream fast enough to avoid injury.

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

#387

Post by sweetheart »

zaknil wrote: post #359
sweetheart wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the argument is good when every response is “I don’t care”. So many horrific things have continued in this world because of people saying exactly that.

The "everybody must care because I do" mindset is vastly more annoying and infinitely more destructive.

How so? The fight for animal liberation is the same as any other rights movement. It’s easy to see how those aren’t very destructive.

Also, you misunderstand: you shouldn’t care because I do. You should care because it’s right. Whether or not I personally believe it is irrelevant to anyone else’s moral obligations.

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

#388

Post by linspace »

emptysongglass wrote: post #307
tagrun wrote: post #288

Not trying to argue it's OK to subject animals to unnecessary pain (it shouldn't be!), but from a pure logical consistency standpoint, are there many non-sentient animals? Why is it OK to not recognize mosquitos, rats, termites, deers, ants, etc etc which meet painful demise by humans as sentient animals while making exceptions for a few?

According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the p…

It is hard enough (impossible?) to discriminate between living and dead matter. Counciousness does not simplify things. When choosing the correct action in our daily life requires solving harder problems than whether P=NP I think the only requirement is that we try.

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

#389

Post by pdpi »

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…

As I understand it, the problem is that you need to define “sentient” somehow, and whatever definition you come up with should be applied consistently to all organisms. If you want to capture all the organisms you think should be called sentient, trees are sentient according to that definition.

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

#390

Post by _wolfie_ »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #383
emptysongglass wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the Buddha, one should not kill any sentient being, sentient being defined as made up of the five skandhas: matter, sensation, perception, mental formations and consciousness. I had a very easy time following this rule until my houseplants were attacked by spider mites and almost simultaneously my rats attacked by a different species of mites. How does one watch the beings (I don't apply "being" to the p…

Can you see the mites, though? The monks had a kind of sieve to filter out small animals from drinking water. There is a famous story when some of them developed extrasensory perception and realized the water they had been drinking contains millions of tiny beings invisible to the naked eye. They went to the Buddha and asked what they should do. The Buddha answered, if you cannot see them, that is fine. I like this s…

What did the monks who could see them do though? Died from thirst?
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