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A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

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Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#91
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the suffering could somehow be guaranteed not to occur? Since that seems to be your only (main?) reason to give up meat, would you go back to eating it if the suffering didn't happen? I think the parent comment to yours is more about avoiding meat because of compassion to the intellect/consciousness. Rather than avoiding meat in order to eliminate any suffering that may occur during "production" of it. I'm cu…

Why care about the suffering, but not about the extinguishing of a life? If the moment to moment experience of a thing has value, but the thing's actual existence does not, why should (humane) murder not be legal? I do implore you to wake up -- you are deluding yourself for the sake of the pleasure. Death is a form of suffering. Whether the creature you kill knows it lives only to die for you, whether it can see and…

> Death is a form of suffering.

I don't think this blanket statement is true. eg: people often live long past the point that they enjoy being alive.

> Now, eating an animal that died of natural or uncontrollable causes, or using for-real excess milk or eggs?

What's "natural" in your opinion? Do you mean old-age, disease, natural predators or something else? Humans are natural predators. Death from old age/disease is often caused by environmental factors or stress.

Calling any of this "evil" is an interesting choice. Maybe this is all just how the world works and we have yet to accept that as a species. I do think our role in the food chain needs to be sustainably defined and understood.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the suffering could somehow be guaranteed not to occur? Since that seems to be your only (main?) reason to give up meat, would you go back to eating it if the suffering didn't happen? I think the parent comment to yours is more about avoiding meat because of compassion to the intellect/consciousness. Rather than avoiding meat in order to eliminate any suffering that may occur during "production" of it. I'm cu…

I think I'm somehow in the same situation, trying to avoid industrial farming in benefit of local, small farming. I can know for sure (for some of them) that the animal was well treated from the beginning of its life to the very end. I am asking myself if it is better for the animal to live a decent life even if it is to be killed and ate at the end or not to live at all.

My hang up is basically this:

If I want the animal to have a good life, why do I/should I get to (or even want to) decide when and why that life should end? It seems very contradictory to me and necessitates a need for the taking of the thing I’m apparently attaching value to.

Also I know I don’t physically kill these animals on a stop watch, but I vote for their death with my wallet. I don’t see a significant difference. Actually, I think it’s somewhat worse than it I carried it out myself. That’s why I generally try to only eat seafood that I selectively harvest while diving. I can guarantee the final moments were as brief as humanly possible and the rest of its life were as nature intended.

So, I really struggle with this one part where I decide the animal has worth and should therefor have a good existence. However, I’m also deciding it should only have that until I decide I want to deep fry its muscles or something. So it must be that I’m deciding to be a benevolent killer or something, which is certainly better than a ruthless one, but leaves me a uncomfortable nonetheless. I need to justify my own need or desire to continue killing, or at least profiting from the killing.

That’s the part I can’t do so far. Do I actually need to eat them? No, so far I really don’t. My health is still good after quite a while and the initial cravings have subsided. Do I want to eat them? No, not anymore, although I do miss it from a culinary perspective. Does that justify killing them? Well, would it justify killing someone’s dog if I thought dogs were delicious? Or any dog? No, never - the notion is absurd.

Well. I suppose some people eat dogs. This has a significant cultural element to it.

Nonetheless I really can’t bring myself to convince myself that I have any good reason to eat animals. Though admittedly I make an exception for fish and shellfish. I feel strange about that. I mean, when I get in the water those fish are arguably smarter than I am. One thing I justify the action by is that at least in the water they have a natural chance and environmental advantage. It isn’t a relationship of control and systematic murder from birth to death.

In time I suspect I’ll stop eating fish too. I don’t know.

The more I think about it the more it becomes an existential matter to be honest.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…

The realization that animals in factory farms have a capacity to suffer, and are undoubtedly subjected to this suffering for the majority of their lives, has made me cut my meat consumption from every meal to occasionally on the weekends. Would love to cut it out completely but have not mustered the willpower to do so. I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding…

> realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding to stimuli

I know what you mean, but on some level you and I are also "biological machines simply responding to stimuli". The difference is more in the complexity of said stimuli and responses in time and space :)

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#95

If anyone is interested in cephalopod intelligence I heartily recommend the book: "Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life" by Peter Godfrey-Smith.

Thanks all, for these references! My wife is into cephalopod intelligence. I'll forward this to her and ask if she has any other recommendations. I do know there are a couple of websites for cephalopod enthusiasts: https://zapatopi.net/cephnews/ https://tonmo.com/

My wife sent me these that she has read and recommends:

Textbooks:

Cephalopod Cognition by Anne-Sophie Darmaillacq (Editor), Ludovic Dickel (Editor), Jennifer Mather (Editor)

Cephalopod Behaviour 2nd Edition by Roger T. Hanlon (Author), John B. Messenger (Author)

Personal anecdotes:

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness Paperback by Sy Montgomery

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#96
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why care about the suffering, but not about the extinguishing of a life? If the moment to moment experience of a thing has value, but the thing's actual existence does not, why should (humane) murder not be legal? I do implore you to wake up -- you are deluding yourself for the sake of the pleasure. Death is a form of suffering. Whether the creature you kill knows it lives only to die for you, whether it can see and…

> Death is a form of suffering. I don't think this blanket statement is true. eg: people often live long past the point that they enjoy being alive. > Now, eating an animal that died of natural or uncontrollable causes, or using for-real excess milk or eggs? What's "natural" in your opinion? Do you mean old-age, disease, natural predators or something else? Humans are natural predators. Death from old age/disease is…

Thanks for taking the time. It's an interesting argument that many people live past the point that they enjoy life, but I doubt you are really suggesting we would be right to kill those people without their direct consent. Euthanasia, where it is at all accepted as moral, typically requires consent. If you think you can get the consent of an animal to kill it, well... let's cross that bridge when we come to it! Regardless, 'death' in this instance is still not necessarily a pleasure -- it may just be the option with the least suffering, and even if there are exceptions to death as a form of suffering, it doesn't seem far off base. As living beings, we value life.

Next, I agree that "natural" could mean a lot of things. In this case, understanding that we're discussing moral involvement, I'm speaking about whether or not you have moral involvement in causing the death.

Paying for a burger from McDonald's is indirectly asking for the death of the cow. They wouldn't kill it if no one bought burgers, but we all know that people do buy burgers, so the blame is diffuse. We all share. But you, in eating it, still profit by the being's death, and it was ultimately a deed done for your benefit when you chose to pay them. Of course it is more direct if you pay a butcher to slaughter a cow, and far more direct if you wield the knife. Hit a deer with your car by mistake? Maybe that's like manslaughter levels of culpability.

As a sidebar, is a cow killed by a wolf a natural death? It happens 'in nature', and the wolf couldn't live without killing other things, so it is natural for a wolf to kill a cow. But... is the death a natural death? I do not feel it is. I cannot blame the wolf (as it does not know better and does not possess other actual options, like we do), but I do not think the cow exists for the wolf. To paraphrase Kant I think, each being is an end unto itself. The cow's most natural death is one of old age, i.e. what we would legally call 'natural causes'. Suppose that health care could have extended its life, well sure, but there's a limit of practicality.

Last, it would be possible to justify literally any act from the position of "maybe this is just how the world works and we have to accept it" -- so, again, sure. But slavery was 'just how the world worked' for a long time, and I feel I am better off, and I can think of a hell of a lot of other humans who are better off, for us eventually having not just accepted it. There are similarities.

Veganism is really the only choice that's morally consistent, intellectually honest, and doesn't rely on special permission. It is ultimately not really arguable that it is a terrible thing for us to do to breed them, to keep them, to manipulate them, to harvest their products, and to kill them, especially in the ways we do. One must rely on ideas like 'might is right', 'we are inherently special for reasons that must be taken on faith', or 'nothing really matters anyway, everything is relative', which are exactly the arguments that have been used to justify all past atrocities of our doing.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#97
post #80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have family who still live a pretty rural life, close to nature. They care very little about animals compared to my urban friends and family. They view animals as little more than "moving things" or simply food.

You may be mixing apples and oranges... The degree of ‘compassion’ one has toward an animal is not directly correlated to one’s opinions as to its intelligence. My uncle raised pigs. A frequent topic of conversation was how smart they are. Without question, they’re smarter than dogs. (I had a pet pig growing up.) Yet, we ate then. An even more brutal example: slavery. It was obvious and undeniable that human slaves w…

Fair point. Interesting that human beings can keep those separated.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#98

As someone who trained my dog to sit and wait for me outside a shop while I got coffee, which was a similar delayed gratification and I didn't even use treats, I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.

Obedience and intelligence are different things.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#99
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because none of them have evolved a tongue and vocal apparatus capable of making the correct sounds. And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands. I suspect babies do have similar problem solving abilities…

>And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla) Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier. >I'm no cognitive scientist but I t…

I'm a cognitive scientist. Intelligence is such a badly defined concept, it's almost useless to reason about "intelligence".

In humans, intelligence is often defined as "what is measured by an IQ test", which obviously doesn't work for either babies or animals.

So while you can say "some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words, just like most babies", you can not really say "being able to tell words/people/emotions apart means an organism is intelligent"

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#100
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…

> I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony. I don't think that cephalopods are arrogant when they eat other creatures, although I suppose they may be gluttonous. Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?

I think what you're suggesting is footed on the appeal to nature fallacy. What happens in nature is natural and therefor good.

Also, I'm not sure a cephalopod has evolved the physical and mental capability to vary its diet on command such that it can choose if it will feed on other animals or not.

At some level humans and cephalopods are just animals, and equivalent in that regard, but I'm not sure I accept the equivalence far beyond that or especially when it comes to morality.

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