24 ms·

Scientists Are Rethinking Animal Cognition

159 points by jdnier 8y ago

joe_the_user 8y ago
Are all the things being called "consciousness" in this article really even the same? Whatever problems of Julian Jaynes' theory, we know that there are schizophrenics who often hear voices and be commanded by voices. Are they "not self-conscious" by the various other measures involved - ie, the mirror test and such. A lot of this article revolves around how much self-awareness is required by moral impulses to keep someone from eating an animal. The thing is, if basic self-awareness exists in nearly all creatures, then it means predators have eating these animals anyway and human evolved omnivore, I don't see the problem hear. Tell me this one is so special I shouldn't eat it and I might agree, tell all animals and I'll say you're calling for humans to outside the order that all other animals are in.
- DFHippie 8y ago
  I don't think the article is prescribing a particular moral position. It is saying, though, if you believe your choices are predicated on animals not being conscious, and therefore suffering no harm whatever your actions, perhaps your own moral system requires that you behave differently. This is the case even if lions continue eating zebras.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    Oh, the problem isn't the article arguing an ethical position. It's more the article is exploring a bunch of different concepts with all of them labeled "consciousness". I mean, would a "philosophical zombie" pass the mirror test? Does that even matter?
    - pdonis 8y ago
      > would a "philosophical zombie" pass the mirror test? Since a philosophical zombie's behavior is, by definition, indistinguishable from that of a conscious person's, yes, such a thing would pass the mirror test. As well as any other test of consciousness based on observable behavior that we could devise. IMO that's a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of a philosophical zombie. I agree that a lot of different concepts can get lumped under the label "consciousness", and that there is a wide spectrum of capabilities involved, not just a binary thing that's either there or not there. If the question is whether or not an animal is suffering, I'm going to go with observable behavior over theoretical concepts.
- moosey 8y ago
  If you are looking for a moral/ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit. If you are looking for an expansion of "The Subject" of ethics, if you will, then that's something you have to do for yourself. To consider non-human animals for consumption regardless of the ecological externalities is an ethical choice, not an ethical demand. I have expanded my personal considerations ethically to include other life on this planet, as their success is required for my continued survival.
  - joe_the_user 8y ago
    If you are looking for a moral/ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit. I wasn't looking but thanks. I mean, I'd say global warming can only be overcome by society-wide political action, not by individual choices. Collective action forcing different consumption patterns are the only way sorts of problems like this have ever been solved in the past.
    - moosey 8y ago
      And that's going to require a cultural change - a cultural change that will be far easier without tons of people supporting the current state of the agricultural industries. Society-wide political action is definitely what is needed, and being generally supportive of vegetarianism/veganism, and pressuring politicians to do the same, is an important part of that process.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - kaybe 8y ago
    I feel the consequences are a bit different. If you have ethical reasons, then no meat is ok. If you have ecological reason, a little bit (especially gras-fed or similar) seems ok (the only question is how much).
- merpnderp 8y ago
  Cattle, in particular are raised and harvested in far more humane conditions than in a state of nature. My friends raise cattle and pride themselves on giving them a happy healthy life until they are sent off to the stockyards. In contrast I just watched a video about two hunters freeing a buck that was entangled in the horns of another buck which was dead. The other buck had died from coyotes eating it, starting on its hind legs and hind end, in what must have been a gruesome, prolonged death. In the past I've seen animals which lie down to give birth killed the same way by coyotes.
  - rosser 8y ago
    I've also seen slaughterhouse videos depicting the most gruesome, heinous abuses inflicted upon livestock animals (beating them, stabbings, repeated shocking with obviously higher voltages than mere prods — often in front of their peers, who are queued for the same fate). I applaud your friends for their endeavor, but the fact that some in the livestock industry behave ethically doesn't change a whit the parts that don't. That nature, in its perpetual state of "kill or starve", behaves so callously is utterly irrelevant to how we can and should behave given our demonstrated capabilities and generally self-congratulatory "My gosh, aren't we the best thing that's ever happened?!" attitude.
    - QuotedForTruth 8y ago
      And the number of livestock with shitty factory lives is multiple orders of magnitude greater than the number on happy animal friendly farms.
  - cageface 8y ago
    Cattle raised on small boutique farms represent a tiny fraction of the livestock raised for beef, most of which endure some truly horrific treatment. Watch the film Earthlings if you're interested in knowing the truth. https://vimeo.com/209647801 https://vimeo.com/209647801
Bucephalus355 8y ago
The entire trend of research in animal consciousness over the last 300 years has always been “animals turn out to be more conscious than we think”. If you look at how the London Zoo treated animals in the mid 1800’s, you’ll see how even the most scientifically advanced group (at the time) that was working with animals could have been so cruel without realizing it. Sometimes it unnerves me that we’ll realize 100 years from now that animals were more conscious than even we me imagined possible and our treatment now of them (specifically livestock) is was really really bad.
- spicymaki 8y ago
  I like to follow the principle "when in doubt, be kind."
- rafiki6 8y ago
  Same argument can be made for how humans have and still do treat other humans who they decided to label sub-human and thereby less worthy of living a suffering-free existence. The trend is when humans have too much power over literally anything, they almost always tend to abuse it.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    As recently as the 1980s, doctors did not provide anesthesia to infants undergoing surgery. They thought infants' pain response was just a "reflex", not a conscious experience of pain. https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have-consciousness.html https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have-consciousness....
    - colordrops 8y ago
      That's gruesome.
    - david-gpu 8y ago
      My understanding is that that was in part due to the difficulty of providing the right dosage that would provide pain relief without causing harm. Source: dad was an anesthesiologist.
nikkwong 8y ago
It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming that consciousness is unique to humans seems like quite a high-horse proposition for us to make about our species. The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes all the way down, i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with. Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.
- bunderbunder 8y ago
  I think that you probably cut pretty close to the crux of the matter right there at the end. It's a popular viewpoint because, from an ethical perspective, it's extremely convenient to hold. It limits your exposure to the sorts of tricky and uncomfortable questions that got me kicked out of Sunday school at a young age.
  - mercer 8y ago
    I mean, really, if we contemporary humans are still very capable of considering other humans less-than, it's no surprise that we're capable of much worse concerning animals.
    - jdironman 8y ago
      But, it does seem that as a whole we are getting better.
- 8y ago
Causality1 8y ago
God I hate articles that start with five pages of fluff. I don't care what the weather was like. I don't care what you did with your shoes. I don't care what the expression on your contacts face was when he greeted you.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  To each their own, but I appreciated the cultural knowledge of the Jains, a group I wasn't familiar with before this, and it dovetails with the topic quite well.
byteface 8y ago
Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West. I'm surprised they don't rebrand. For me consciousness means more about actually making a choice. You can be aware but unconscious. I guess this is where 'woke' comes from. Choice is a byproduct of your moral framework and if this is dictated to you then maybe you are not conscious? There are stages of awareness. You can pluck a string at it will vibrate. Arrange several in accordance with each other and you have an instrument. We ourselves are like instruments in that respect. You press our keys (senses) and things start to vibrate and reverberate. (yup i'm ripping Diderot). But I do feel strongly that all thought is just a diff between world states. I don't find anything particular profound about it. Western religions deprive animals of consciousness to feel better about eating them.
- 7402 8y ago
  > Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West. Are people confused about this statement? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika - "The swastika is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon in the cultures of Eurasia, used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions. In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s, when it became a feature of Nazi symbolism as an emblem of Aryan race identity and, as a result, was stigmatized by association with ideas of racism and antisemitism."
  - siedes 8y ago
    2020 Neo-nazi Goals: Turn Google logo(or anything they don't like) into a symbol of hate speech and everyone just goes with it since they can't think further than "bad man do x, x bad"
ggm 8y ago
I think the underlying point remains how do we feel about this. What I like, is the evidence-based models which point to higher cognition aren't now observational by anthropomorphism, but are founded on an experiment: I construct a situation which demands a higher order thinking function, and I put an animal into a test, and I observe sequences of actions, which demand indirect cognition, operating on future state, or about the self, and image of self, or cognition of the projection of "what it would look like if I could see it, from the other side" type models So the ethics has been there forever, but what is newer (I do not say new, because people did experiment before. They are just really well formed experiments now), is a constructed model based on better than belief: its based on experiment. The other side of the coin, is that some purely observational behaviour in higher primates now has to got back into the ethical pot: If we know chimps can do higher abstract reasoning, and we also observe chimps kill and eat the young from 'other' tribes, what do we now think about that killing and eating?
jxramos 8y ago
I heard something retold recently in this space that was very interesting about a distinctive feature for humans. And that is the ability to make a vow. That would be a pretty interesting topic to see how animals can communicate understanding of the far future and what not.
- double0jimb0 8y ago
  Sounds like a good thing for someone who wants you to take a vow to say.
  - jxramos 8y ago
    Maybe, but the interesting thing is that I think it identifies not just a difference of degree but of kind. For instance animals can use tools and build things and communicate and recognize self and so forth, where in each case humans dominate in the vast separation of degree we have taken each. I can’t think of any analogue where a vow would be a difference in degree to something. Maybe it’s along the ideas of abstract thought. I don’t know.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Some things like that certain animals like dogs don't learn/plan by imagination never made sense to me. When I want to teach a dog something, I treat him like a problem-solving agent. I pose the task as a solveable problem to him, like "touch stick to get food", and he will "compute" the necessary actions to touch the stick. Also they always said dogs/animals don't do impulse control, while dogs clearly display a range of that trait.
aklemm 8y ago
I recently slaughtered and butchered two young pigs as an exercise in getting closer to my food sources and an experiment in economy. The situation was six pigs in a trailer, and our task was to shoot two of our choosing. When the first pig was shot, he fell and lurched for a bit while blood spewed. The rest of the pigs were alarmed by the noise and the human in the small trailer. One pig came to investigate the dying pig. Quickly it went back to eating with the others. I mentioned this to the farmer and he said the pigs seem to understand fear of death but not death itself. Each year I get closer and closer to the idea that humans are shockingly not that different from other animals, but this set my idea back a bit. Of course, elephants are a counter-example to this behavior with their apparent mourning of the dead, so that has to be considered too.
- rv-de 8y ago
  Next step is going to India and yelling at children to stitch faster? Then you can justify wearing cheap clothes :D Possibly the pigs are just traumatized. Read Frankl's "Search for Meaning" to get a perspective on how even educated and highly civilized human beings can become insensitive towards death and dead bodies.
  - aklemm 8y ago
    It's unclear what point you're trying to make here and whether you understood my story. I have already read Frankl, but thank you for the suggestion anyway. Everyone should read it.
  - ASalazarMX 8y ago
    This remembered me a story someone told in Reddit months ago, which may or may not be true: Said guy had a wild hog family persistently ruining his crops, until he decided to camp and shoot them. When the family finally arrived, he aimed and shot the first in the head. The other hogs became curious, but continued eating while their relative lay bleeding right there. He shot another with the same effect, but missed a third shot, which hit a metal container and scared the bejesus of the remaining hogs, which fled. He was curious about why they were more scared from a loud noise that their brothers' heads mysteriously exploding.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
It's funny how animal cognition and animal welfare tend to be conflated. We are projecting our own empathy in a very irrational way. E.g. eating dogs is being frowned upon in large parts of the world because our empathy gets in the way. Even though it is a perfectly good source of protein. However, We eat pork and beef without much guilt even even though especially pigs are apparently quite smart compared to e.g. a purse sized dog with a brain the size of a pea. It's completely irrational. Cuddly-ness rather than cognition seems to be what drives our empathy. If you think about it, everything that lives (cognitive or not) also dies. Mostly this happens of natural causes and a lot of that involves being eaten by something else or if you lucky enough to avoid that by dying some long and painful death because of some disease, parasites, or accident. Natural death is mostly not very pleasant and typically really nasty even. So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some terrible fate by not eating them. Arguably, it's the opposite (or it can be). If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them. So, we stop the cruelty of killing them that hurts our feelings but we instead wipe out their existence. Not that I'm advertising animal cruelty but I'd say modern responsible farming produces good quality lives for the animals and good quality meat when we end them in a way that is comparatively quick and painless to what nature has to offer. I enjoy eating meat but am aware that eating a bit less is probably good for me.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I agree, this topic needs to be decomposed much further for people to have a productive discussion on it. Some extra decompositions: > So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some terrible fate by not eating them. That works out for small-scale farming, but most of our meat is factory-farmed. While the death itself may be quick, their lives are living hell. Nature doesn't get that cruel, on that scale. So we need to separate out death from life and suffering here. > If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them. The question is, why do we care about that? Evolutionary speaking, individuals rarely care about species; it's hard enough to get humans to recognize the concept of their species, and I sincerely doubt a cow or a pig is aware or interested in the fate of their own kind in general. Survival of animal species is something we value, for reasons ranging from emotional (nature is prettier with more stuff in it) to practical (genetic diversity). But I can't imagine a chicken being grateful for living in a cage on farm, because it lets chickens exist at all. Not judging any positions here; I just wish this topic was debated in a more structured way, with all the important aspects stated in isolation, and then related to each other.

159 points by jdnier 8y ago

Are all the things being called "consciousness" in this article really even the same? Whatever problems of Julian Jaynes' theory, we know that there are schizophrenics who often hear voices and be commanded by voices. Are they "not self-conscious" by the various other measures involved - ie, the mirror test and such. A lot of this article revolves around how much self-awareness is required by moral impulses to keep someone from eating an animal. The thing is, if basic self-awareness exists in nearly all creatures, then it means predators have eating these animals anyway and human evolved omnivore, I don't see the problem hear. Tell me this one is so special I shouldn't eat it and I might agree, tell all animals and I'll say you're calling for humans to outside the order that all other animals are in.

DFHippie 8y ago
I don't think the article is prescribing a particular moral position. It is saying, though, if you believe your choices are predicated on animals not being conscious, and therefore suffering no harm whatever your actions, perhaps your own moral system requires that you behave differently. This is the case even if lions continue eating zebras.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  Oh, the problem isn't the article arguing an ethical position. It's more the article is exploring a bunch of different concepts with all of them labeled "consciousness". I mean, would a "philosophical zombie" pass the mirror test? Does that even matter?
  - pdonis 8y ago
    > would a "philosophical zombie" pass the mirror test? Since a philosophical zombie's behavior is, by definition, indistinguishable from that of a conscious person's, yes, such a thing would pass the mirror test. As well as any other test of consciousness based on observable behavior that we could devise. IMO that's a reductio ad absurdum of the concept of a philosophical zombie. I agree that a lot of different concepts can get lumped under the label "consciousness", and that there is a wide spectrum of capabilities involved, not just a binary thing that's either there or not there. If the question is whether or not an animal is suffering, I'm going to go with observable behavior over theoretical concepts.
moosey 8y ago
If you are looking for a moral/ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit. If you are looking for an expansion of "The Subject" of ethics, if you will, then that's something you have to do for yourself. To consider non-human animals for consumption regardless of the ecological externalities is an ethical choice, not an ethical demand. I have expanded my personal considerations ethically to include other life on this planet, as their success is required for my continued survival.
- joe_the_user 8y ago
  If you are looking for a moral/ethical imperative to stop eating animals, then the IPCC report covers enough of the carbon and ecological costs of animal agriculture that it is something that you should quit. I wasn't looking but thanks. I mean, I'd say global warming can only be overcome by society-wide political action, not by individual choices. Collective action forcing different consumption patterns are the only way sorts of problems like this have ever been solved in the past.
  - moosey 8y ago
    And that's going to require a cultural change - a cultural change that will be far easier without tons of people supporting the current state of the agricultural industries. Society-wide political action is definitely what is needed, and being generally supportive of vegetarianism/veganism, and pressuring politicians to do the same, is an important part of that process.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- kaybe 8y ago
  I feel the consequences are a bit different. If you have ethical reasons, then no meat is ok. If you have ecological reason, a little bit (especially gras-fed or similar) seems ok (the only question is how much).
merpnderp 8y ago
Cattle, in particular are raised and harvested in far more humane conditions than in a state of nature. My friends raise cattle and pride themselves on giving them a happy healthy life until they are sent off to the stockyards. In contrast I just watched a video about two hunters freeing a buck that was entangled in the horns of another buck which was dead. The other buck had died from coyotes eating it, starting on its hind legs and hind end, in what must have been a gruesome, prolonged death. In the past I've seen animals which lie down to give birth killed the same way by coyotes.
- rosser 8y ago
  I've also seen slaughterhouse videos depicting the most gruesome, heinous abuses inflicted upon livestock animals (beating them, stabbings, repeated shocking with obviously higher voltages than mere prods — often in front of their peers, who are queued for the same fate). I applaud your friends for their endeavor, but the fact that some in the livestock industry behave ethically doesn't change a whit the parts that don't. That nature, in its perpetual state of "kill or starve", behaves so callously is utterly irrelevant to how we can and should behave given our demonstrated capabilities and generally self-congratulatory "My gosh, aren't we the best thing that's ever happened?!" attitude.
  - QuotedForTruth 8y ago
    And the number of livestock with shitty factory lives is multiple orders of magnitude greater than the number on happy animal friendly farms.
- cageface 8y ago
  Cattle raised on small boutique farms represent a tiny fraction of the livestock raised for beef, most of which endure some truly horrific treatment. Watch the film Earthlings if you're interested in knowing the truth. https://vimeo.com/209647801 https://vimeo.com/209647801

Bucephalus355 8y ago

The entire trend of research in animal consciousness over the last 300 years has always been “animals turn out to be more conscious than we think”. If you look at how the London Zoo treated animals in the mid 1800’s, you’ll see how even the most scientifically advanced group (at the time) that was working with animals could have been so cruel without realizing it. Sometimes it unnerves me that we’ll realize 100 years from now that animals were more conscious than even we me imagined possible and our treatment now of them (specifically livestock) is was really really bad.

spicymaki 8y ago
I like to follow the principle "when in doubt, be kind."
rafiki6 8y ago
Same argument can be made for how humans have and still do treat other humans who they decided to label sub-human and thereby less worthy of living a suffering-free existence. The trend is when humans have too much power over literally anything, they almost always tend to abuse it.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  As recently as the 1980s, doctors did not provide anesthesia to infants undergoing surgery. They thought infants' pain response was just a "reflex", not a conscious experience of pain. https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have-consciousness.html https://www.livescience.com/28848-babies-have-consciousness....
  - colordrops 8y ago
    That's gruesome.
  - david-gpu 8y ago
    My understanding is that that was in part due to the difficulty of providing the right dosage that would provide pain relief without causing harm. Source: dad was an anesthesiologist.

nikkwong 8y ago

It surprises me that people could claim that the inverse would ever be true. As in, why would the default be to assume that animals are not conscious? Claiming that consciousness is unique to humans seems like quite a high-horse proposition for us to make about our species. The question as to how far down consciousness goes is still a matter of debate. The idea that consciousness goes all the way down, i.e. to rocks et al. is called panpsychism in philosophy. I don't think that's likely, since our best bet is that consciousness is maybe/probably an emergent property of information processing in the brain. How complex that information processing has to be to result in consciousness is an interesting proposition, and could be hard to determine given the subjective nature consciousness to begin with. Still though, I can't imagine experiencing consciousness, responding to stimuli the way I respond to stimuli, and thinking that animals/bugs that also respond to stimuli in the same manner as we do are not conscious. The fact that this assumption has permeated culture throughout history seems like a very obnoxious oversight and has probably led morally sane people to enact morally insane abuses towards animals and I think that is a shame.

bunderbunder 8y ago
I think that you probably cut pretty close to the crux of the matter right there at the end. It's a popular viewpoint because, from an ethical perspective, it's extremely convenient to hold. It limits your exposure to the sorts of tricky and uncomfortable questions that got me kicked out of Sunday school at a young age.
- mercer 8y ago
  I mean, really, if we contemporary humans are still very capable of considering other humans less-than, it's no surprise that we're capable of much worse concerning animals.
  - jdironman 8y ago
    But, it does seem that as a whole we are getting better.
8y ago

Causality1 8y ago

God I hate articles that start with five pages of fluff. I don't care what the weather was like. I don't care what you did with your shoes. I don't care what the expression on your contacts face was when he greeted you.

faitswulff 8y ago
To each their own, but I appreciated the cultural knowledge of the Jains, a group I wasn't familiar with before this, and it dovetails with the topic quite well.

byteface 8y ago

Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West. I'm surprised they don't rebrand. For me consciousness means more about actually making a choice. You can be aware but unconscious. I guess this is where 'woke' comes from. Choice is a byproduct of your moral framework and if this is dictated to you then maybe you are not conscious? There are stages of awareness. You can pluck a string at it will vibrate. Arrange several in accordance with each other and you have an instrument. We ourselves are like instruments in that respect. You press our keys (senses) and things start to vibrate and reverberate. (yup i'm ripping Diderot). But I do feel strongly that all thought is just a diff between world states. I don't find anything particular profound about it. Western religions deprive animals of consciousness to feel better about eating them.

7402 8y ago
> Jainisms logo makes it a barrier to entry for many in the West. Are people confused about this statement? See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika - "The swastika is a geometrical figure and an ancient religious icon in the cultures of Eurasia, used as a symbol of divinity and spirituality in Indian religions. In the Western world, it was a symbol of auspiciousness and good luck until the 1930s, when it became a feature of Nazi symbolism as an emblem of Aryan race identity and, as a result, was stigmatized by association with ideas of racism and antisemitism."
- siedes 8y ago
  2020 Neo-nazi Goals: Turn Google logo(or anything they don't like) into a symbol of hate speech and everyone just goes with it since they can't think further than "bad man do x, x bad"

ggm 8y ago

I think the underlying point remains how do we feel about this. What I like, is the evidence-based models which point to higher cognition aren't now observational by anthropomorphism, but are founded on an experiment: I construct a situation which demands a higher order thinking function, and I put an animal into a test, and I observe sequences of actions, which demand indirect cognition, operating on future state, or about the self, and image of self, or cognition of the projection of "what it would look like if I could see it, from the other side" type models So the ethics has been there forever, but what is newer (I do not say new, because people did experiment before. They are just really well formed experiments now), is a constructed model based on better than belief: its based on experiment. The other side of the coin, is that some purely observational behaviour in higher primates now has to got back into the ethical pot: If we know chimps can do higher abstract reasoning, and we also observe chimps kill and eat the young from 'other' tribes, what do we now think about that killing and eating?

jxramos 8y ago

I heard something retold recently in this space that was very interesting about a distinctive feature for humans. And that is the ability to make a vow. That would be a pretty interesting topic to see how animals can communicate understanding of the far future and what not.

double0jimb0 8y ago
Sounds like a good thing for someone who wants you to take a vow to say.
- jxramos 8y ago
  Maybe, but the interesting thing is that I think it identifies not just a difference of degree but of kind. For instance animals can use tools and build things and communicate and recognize self and so forth, where in each case humans dominate in the vast separation of degree we have taken each. I can’t think of any analogue where a vow would be a difference in degree to something. Maybe it’s along the ideas of abstract thought. I don’t know.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

Some things like that certain animals like dogs don't learn/plan by imagination never made sense to me. When I want to teach a dog something, I treat him like a problem-solving agent. I pose the task as a solveable problem to him, like "touch stick to get food", and he will "compute" the necessary actions to touch the stick. Also they always said dogs/animals don't do impulse control, while dogs clearly display a range of that trait.

aklemm 8y ago

I recently slaughtered and butchered two young pigs as an exercise in getting closer to my food sources and an experiment in economy. The situation was six pigs in a trailer, and our task was to shoot two of our choosing. When the first pig was shot, he fell and lurched for a bit while blood spewed. The rest of the pigs were alarmed by the noise and the human in the small trailer. One pig came to investigate the dying pig. Quickly it went back to eating with the others. I mentioned this to the farmer and he said the pigs seem to understand fear of death but not death itself. Each year I get closer and closer to the idea that humans are shockingly not that different from other animals, but this set my idea back a bit. Of course, elephants are a counter-example to this behavior with their apparent mourning of the dead, so that has to be considered too.

rv-de 8y ago
Next step is going to India and yelling at children to stitch faster? Then you can justify wearing cheap clothes :D Possibly the pigs are just traumatized. Read Frankl's "Search for Meaning" to get a perspective on how even educated and highly civilized human beings can become insensitive towards death and dead bodies.
- aklemm 8y ago
  It's unclear what point you're trying to make here and whether you understood my story. I have already read Frankl, but thank you for the suggestion anyway. Everyone should read it.
- ASalazarMX 8y ago
  This remembered me a story someone told in Reddit months ago, which may or may not be true: Said guy had a wild hog family persistently ruining his crops, until he decided to camp and shoot them. When the family finally arrived, he aimed and shot the first in the head. The other hogs became curious, but continued eating while their relative lay bleeding right there. He shot another with the same effect, but missed a third shot, which hit a metal container and scared the bejesus of the remaining hogs, which fled. He was curious about why they were more scared from a loud noise that their brothers' heads mysteriously exploding.

jillesvangurp 8y ago

It's funny how animal cognition and animal welfare tend to be conflated. We are projecting our own empathy in a very irrational way. E.g. eating dogs is being frowned upon in large parts of the world because our empathy gets in the way. Even though it is a perfectly good source of protein. However, We eat pork and beef without much guilt even even though especially pigs are apparently quite smart compared to e.g. a purse sized dog with a brain the size of a pea. It's completely irrational. Cuddly-ness rather than cognition seems to be what drives our empathy. If you think about it, everything that lives (cognitive or not) also dies. Mostly this happens of natural causes and a lot of that involves being eaten by something else or if you lucky enough to avoid that by dying some long and painful death because of some disease, parasites, or accident. Natural death is mostly not very pleasant and typically really nasty even. So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some terrible fate by not eating them. Arguably, it's the opposite (or it can be). If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them. So, we stop the cruelty of killing them that hurts our feelings but we instead wipe out their existence. Not that I'm advertising animal cruelty but I'd say modern responsible farming produces good quality lives for the animals and good quality meat when we end them in a way that is comparatively quick and painless to what nature has to offer. I enjoy eating meat but am aware that eating a bit less is probably good for me.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
I agree, this topic needs to be decomposed much further for people to have a productive discussion on it. Some extra decompositions: > So considering that, I feel quite OK about eating animals. The alternative of not eating them means that they would not have lived at all or that they would have died a nasty "natural" death. So, I'm not saving them from some terrible fate by not eating them. That works out for small-scale farming, but most of our meat is factory-farmed. While the death itself may be quick, their lives are living hell. Nature doesn't get that cruel, on that scale. So we need to separate out death from life and suffering here. > If we stop eating meat, there are entire species of farm animals that will likely go extinct because they only exist because we breed them. The question is, why do we care about that? Evolutionary speaking, individuals rarely care about species; it's hard enough to get humans to recognize the concept of their species, and I sincerely doubt a cow or a pig is aware or interested in the fate of their own kind in general. Survival of animal species is something we value, for reasons ranging from emotional (nature is prettier with more stuff in it) to practical (genetic diversity). But I can't imagine a chicken being grateful for living in a cage on farm, because it lets chickens exist at all. Not judging any positions here; I just wish this topic was debated in a more structured way, with all the important aspects stated in isolation, and then related to each other.