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"She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

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Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#41

Post by sweetheart »

short_sells_poo wrote: post #39
Voultapher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you fooling here? Yourself? Imagine your children being born into one of these farms. There is no self determination. Only because we are not overtly cruel doesn't mean we don't treat them like slaves. "Look at my slave, now that I impregnated her she gets to have a couple more square meter to walk around in until her children are taken away from her." Not all farms are equally bad, but there is no farm where…

Are there bad actors in farming even in Switzerland? Sure. But the majority of the farms I've been to have treated their animals with respect and kindness. The cows actually spend most of their time out on the pastures grazing freely. They are only taken indoors when the weather gets too cold for them in winter. It's very far from what people picture when talking about industrial farming in the US. It is true that th…

Treating an animal well sometimes does not mean that the animal was treated well. It's nice that the cows you're talking about are given lots of access to pastures, but that doesn't mean that anything else can be done to the animal without it qualifying as disrespectful or unkind.

I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was kind or respectful. Can you?

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#42

Post by blendergeek »

sweetheart wrote: post #41
short_sells_poo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there bad actors in farming even in Switzerland? Sure. But the majority of the farms I've been to have treated their animals with respect and kindness. The cows actually spend most of their time out on the pastures grazing freely. They are only taken indoors when the weather gets too cold for them in winter. It's very far from what people picture when talking about industrial farming in the US. It is true that th…

Treating an animal well sometimes does not mean that the animal was treated well. It's nice that the cows you're talking about are given lots of access to pastures, but that doesn't mean that anything else can be done to the animal without it qualifying as disrespectful or unkind. I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was…

When a lion kills a gazelle on the savannah, is that "kind and respectful"?

No, it's just part of the "circle of life".

Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc).

If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#43

Post by bheadmaster »

Voultapher wrote: post #38
zilti wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of farms where animals are treated well and with dignity. At least over here in Switzerland. Source: worked at one, and saw a lot of them (my father worked as a vet).

Who are you fooling here? Yourself? Imagine your children being born into one of these farms. There is no self determination. Only because we are not overtly cruel doesn't mean we don't treat them like slaves. "Look at my slave, now that I impregnated her she gets to have a couple more square meter to walk around in until her children are taken away from her." Not all farms are equally bad, but there is no farm where…

If you start treating farm animals as humans, where do you draw the line?

Is growing vegetables also inhumane, since we're controlling every aspect of those plants' lives?

Is doing pest control in your own house a mass murder, because you're killing a colony of cockroaches or termites?

Is washing your hands a genocide, because you're killing millions bacteria and tiny parasites on your hands?

That kind of extremist empathy is fatal to humanity. I'd rather choose to be cruel than dead.

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#44

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

rocqua wrote: post #24
paulrudy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton. I feel very weird about this too. This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system , an article of faith, as the m…

Occam's razor does support the mechanistic view. It is certainly necessary to explain the entire world, and it is sufficient to explain intelligence. So by Occam's razor we should accept it is the best explanation of intelligence. That doesn't mean we have to give up on understanding the mechanism. Nor does it mean we shouldn't try to find out if it isn't a sufficient explanation. But calling it an unsupported belief…

You can't apply Occam's Razor to things you don't understand, because that's just claiming to explain something without actually explaining anything.

Intelligence and consciousness are two of the things we don't understand.

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#46

Post by Voultapher »

bheadmaster wrote: post #43
Voultapher wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who are you fooling here? Yourself? Imagine your children being born into one of these farms. There is no self determination. Only because we are not overtly cruel doesn't mean we don't treat them like slaves. "Look at my slave, now that I impregnated her she gets to have a couple more square meter to walk around in until her children are taken away from her." Not all farms are equally bad, but there is no farm where…

If you start treating farm animals as humans, where do you draw the line? Is growing vegetables also inhumane, since we're controlling every aspect of those plants' lives? Is doing pest control in your own house a mass murder, because you're killing a colony of cockroaches or termites? Is washing your hands a genocide, because you're killing millions bacteria and tiny parasites on your hands? That kind of extremist e…

Respectfully, every comparison you made seems like a false equivalence to me. I'd argue extrapolating from the human perspective to a cow is much closer than to a cockroach. Personally I draw the line at "complex" emotions, somewhere between insects and fish. Yes, that line is arbitrary and I can't prove it. But so is drawing the line at, humans and nothing else that isn't cute. You can't prove the validity of that line either. So what are we left with? Is it so unreasonable to extrapolate from one mammal to another?

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#47

Post by dhosek »

There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside).

There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun to imagine in a sort of Erik von Däniken way.

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#48

Post by the-chitmonger »

dhosek wrote: post #47

There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside). There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun…

That man may not have the respect of any academic community but damn it if he isn't entertaining to watch.

On a more on-topic note, our growing understanding of animal intelligence has definitely made it harder for me to justify eating certain kinds of meat. My day-to-day is a bit too stressful to make the switch entirely to vegetarianism, but once my financial and personal situations have settled I'm looking forward to a less guilty lived experience. (This is of course not to say that you should feel guilty for eating meat - just my personal take)

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#49

Post by BuildTheRobots »

dhosek wrote: post #47

There’s a part of me that kind of wonders whether the Jewish Kashrut laws are meant to protect the most intelligent animals: the best-known laws (cloven feet, does not chew the cud, that which swims in the sea but does not have scales) end up protecting pigs, cetaceans and cephalapods (plus other stuff that’s not so bright, but put that aside). There’s no rational reason to believe this, of course, but it’s still fun…

I blame this on watching Babylon 5 when I was younger (spoiler: same souls), but when they started using animal organs and heart valves in human surgery, it made (religious) sense to me that it was going to be pig.

As you say, not a really rational belief, but I always like it when disperate ideologies point in similar directions.

I think rationally, it's far more likely that Kashrut laws were designed to protect humans from eating certain more risky animals, especially 3-4,000 years ago in a place with high heat and little refridgeration, but I'll never actually know.

Re: "She's bouncing the ball" – the uncanny way octopuses play

#50

Post by legacynl »

roenxi wrote: post #2

> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning." The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to s…

> like how humans feel cold and put on a jumper.

This is actually a bad example. Although cold being uncomfortable is instinctual, the way how people deal with feeling cold is not instinctual at all. People use different methods of dealing with the cold depending on situation, culture, experience.

In this way your example actually speaks for the claimed forethought, because in this analogy the octopus knows (from experience or speculation) that he will be uncomfortable when trying to sleep if he's exposed and he decides to 'put on a jumper' by putting rocks in front of the entrance.

Also instinctual behavior is in general much less sophisticated. Like an infant animal starting sucking when encountering a nipple shaped object or a moth circling a light bulb because it always tries to keep the brightest source above it. It could be that pulling debris around him before sleeping could be instinctual, but it would be very unlikely for that to include the process of looking for suitable rocks beforehand.

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