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I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs. Our seawater facility had octopus in several ta

I worked on classical conditioning of isolated invertebrate nervous systems for my Ph.D. I worked on sea slugs. Our seawater facility had octopus in several tanks. It became obvious that they easily recognized and differentiated among people who entered the lab. They would approach the front of their tanks when their caretakers (who fed them and cleaned their tanks) arrived, and would hide from the grad students who studied them. When I noticed that decades ago, I stopped eating octopus.

seec 2y ago
That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan. Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical. Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them. People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement). The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us. Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.
- skyyler 2y ago
  Some people have a conscious, as irrational and unprofitable as that is. I think it's a fairly coherent position to not want to kill and consume intelligent creatures. At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult. Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?

seec 2y ago

That's weird take unless you decided to be completely vegan. Cows recognize people very well too and will definitely flock to their feeder yet we have been eating them for centuries. In fact, one could argue that to allow domestication a minimum amount of intelligence is necessary in the animal otherwise it's impractical. Animals have various degrees of intelligence but that's hardly relevant. What matters is that they are not our own species and they are less intelligent than us so we can dominate them. People have been looking at some sort of morals in the food we eat, especially the animals, as if it mattered or made us better in any way (probably looking for some sort of religion replacement). The circle of life doesn't care about your morals/feelings and if some other species were to become dominant because of their intelligence, they would gladly eat us. Eating things in relation to their perceived intelligence makes no sense, but I guess you can very much go into the cult of veganism.

skyyler 2y ago
Some people have a conscious, as irrational and unprofitable as that is. I think it's a fairly coherent position to not want to kill and consume intelligent creatures. At the same time, I think it's kind of telling of the irrationality in your argument here that, in the first line, you claim that someone's line of thinking is weird unless they took it to the extreme logical conclusion of veganism. Then in your last line you call veganism a cult. Do you realize that you're arguing in bad faith, or is it unintentional?