91–100 of 201 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. You've just given me a vision of a future where we know enough about other animals that we've been forced to give up on human exceptionalism, so we fall back to insisting on social-apex-predator exceptionalism instead
If we can’t acknowledge that complex tool wielding and laughter are potentially galaxies apart in terms of abundance, that future looks grim.
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…
How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it? Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. Sh…
That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way.
More concretely, the argument is as follows: just because a dog feels guilt doesn't mean (a) it's felt in an equivalent way to humans, nor (b) that the overall experience of a dog is equivalent to that of a human.
For those wondering which animals… > They found such vocal play behavior documented in at least 65 species. That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including parakeets and Australian magpies. Quote from the UCLA Newroom article referenced in the OpenCulture article, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/animals-laugh-too-ucla-an...
So in summary: primates, social mammals, domesticated mammals and vocal bird species?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it? Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. Sh…
>How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way. More concretely…
Regarding (a) I would have the exact same reply. Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. My experience of guilt may not even be equivalent to yours strictly speaking, and we belong to the same species, I assume ;-).
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…
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…
How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it? Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. Sh…
I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.
Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.
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…
And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stories about ourselves that separate us more and more from the rest of the world. As if all of the beautiful things that make us human stemmed from symbolic reasoning. And yet we see every day: jealousy in chimps, maternal love in cows, play in dogs, compassion in elephants, frustration in cats, curiosity in pigs.
The story that we tell ourselves about our specialness gives us a moral free pass to treat animals how we want. Which is why I think these articles tend to polarize. It’s because the implication is that if animals are really so much like us, we’ll have to come up with a much better justification for treating them how we do. For now our reasons have hinged on their supposed lack of ability to feel emotion (or even pain!). In the future it might well be because they cannot symbolically reason. We have to have some reason, in the end, for treating animals the way we do, or otherwise face a moral crisis.
I do wonder how the pre-humanist humans felt about this, like tribal people. I know they had few qualms about killing animals but at the same time assigned human qualities to them. It might have been that surviving without meat was simply impossible, which is an argument one could not easily make today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Politics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too. News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this. Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether…
Seems we may not be the only ones that cook after all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/03/411748170/ch...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Politics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too. News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this. Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether…