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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

#631

Post by Dylan16807 »

Eelongate wrote: post #511
Yizahi wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please define "feel". They experience structural damage - yes, same as every other living organism or plant if damaged. If I tear dandelion in half it will emit poisonous juice. Does it "feel" pain though? I think no. The "feel" part probably can happen only in the sufficiently large brain, and lobster most likely don't qualify.

"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain .

Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way.

It's complicated.

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

#632

Post by therealdrag0 »

MattPalmer1086 wrote: post #618
SyzygistSix wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have fun reading Infinite Jest. I mean it seriously but it's a lot of book.

By a strange coincidence, it turns out my wife has a copy by her bed she hasn't read yet!

A very common occurrence ><

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

#633

Post by Eelongate »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #631
Eelongate wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Feeling pain" has never been a particularly intellectual experience to me. Pain isn't some sort of abstract thought, it's a raw sensation that the harmed flesh itself seems to feel. When I step on a lego I feel it and flinch away from it before I even realize it. I guess that sort of reflex is what you're calling "experience structural damage" but I say it feels like pain .

Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way. It's complicated.

It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.

Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.

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

#634

Post by Dylan16807 »

joaosardinha wrote: post #465
rich_sasha wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory I hear from people who do it is that the animals die instantly in thermal shock. Would be great if someone in the know could comment; I'm certainly not endorsing this view!

My family does this, I remember watching them try to crawl out of the pot for the first few minutes so it's not true

Was the water boiling when they were put in?

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

#635

Post by int_19h »

imgabe wrote: post #313
int_19h wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Empathy is that thing which makes suffering exist in your mind when it exists in others. And even among the non-sentient animals, it can extend to other species. The reason why we have to take it further than they do is because we have the mental capacity to construct a self-consistent system of ethics out of it.

We have to? Why? Who or what requires this of us and by what mechanism do they enforce this requirement? How much further do we have to take it? What determines this limit? You might not find this as self-consistent as you think.

We have to take it as far as emphathy combined with reason (which extends our ability to empathize) will take us, precisely because this is the only self-consistent approach other than sociopathy. If you're advocating the latter, then I'll admit that it is also fully self-consistent, and rejecting it is really just an ethical axiom that I subscribe to.

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

#637

Post by imgabe »

wander_homer wrote: post #604
imgabe wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. > Yo…

> Wait, so unless I can come up with an exactly perfect list that flawlessly prioritizes every possible action that humanity could ever undertake, then I'm not allowed to have any opinion whatsoever about whether any given action is more or less important than anything else? By that logic, we should never choose to prioritize anything over anything else, and we should just select all actions by pure random chance. No…

> Also did you even consider that you often can't anticipate the value of an action?

And yet, we all must choose at some point to do one thing or another thing. Do you sit at home motionless all day, paralyzed by the inability to do choose the exactly most optimal action? Probably not. You make a choice based on some criteria. Is that criteria “will this make a lobster suffer for two seconds less”? I’m guessing probably not.

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

#638

Post by Dylan16807 »

Eelongate wrote: post #633
Dylan16807 wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we can suppress those nerves higher up and you'll never actually feel the pain. And you can trigger similar flinching reflexes with a focused tap to the right spot, which is clearly painless in every way. It's complicated.

It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs. Listen, I'm no vegan, I eat meat and I don't condemn others who do the same. But "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.

> It's not very complicated when you remember that seafood kitchens don't hire anesthesiologists to drug up crabs.

Look, I'm just saying that a flinch isn't proof of pain. I'm not saying they don't feel pain, but if you want to prove it then you need better evidence than a flinch.

> "X animal can't actually feel pain" is blatant cope and I don't go for that. If you can't stomach the reality of animals feeling pain, then stop eating them.

My policy is to go for a quick maximally-humane kill if you're not sure. But that doesn't mean every single animal definitely feels pain.

So again, it's complicated. For example, naked mole rats famously don't feel many kinds of pain, and those are mammals!

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

#639

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

nemo44x wrote: post #531
alex_smart wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is the formula of progressivism. The process seems identical to majoritarianism.

It's the opposite actually. It's the dictatorship of the small minority. Nassim Taleb write an interesting article detailing it [1]. 1] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

>> For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander (himself not Greek but Macedonian and spoke a different dialect of Greek) did not lead to an immediate deep cultural Hellenization.

Right. And the Spartans weren't Greek but Spartan and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Laconic dialect. And the Athenians weren't Greek but Athenian and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Attic dialect. And so on.

But I wonder, which is the one true Greek language that all those dialects were dialects of? And who were the true Greeks who spoke it?

Or should I ask, is every bit of information in the article just as dodgy as the bit I quote above?

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

#640

Post by cheese_goddess »

1270018080 wrote: post #80
phonypc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly everyone has recent ancestors that lived on a farm and loved playing with the animals. Once they were old enough to connect the dots and later saw the butchering process, they remained omnivores for the rest of their lives.

Yeah some people don't care. But I think there would be FAR less meat eaters if they weren't able to avoid the carnage.

People have been eating meat for thousands of years but mass-scale meat production has only existed for maybe a hundred years or so. I don't think what you say makes sense. If a majority of people were upset about the fact that animals have to die for us to eat their flesh, we woul have stopped eating meat very early in our history.
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