They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings.
Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value.
Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.
There's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them and left.
I guess my view of consciousness is different -- all living beings having consciousness, but perhaps not specifically in the form of the human mind or intellect.
These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some of those.
I know that word, and it is one way of describing what I was talking about, but it is not what I meant. My actual worldview is a superset of "all living beings are conscious". For example, I don't necessarily think that consciousness emerges from biology or complex interaction of matter.
Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of consciousness and the world though.
Neither I believe that consciousness emerges from biology or other things. I believe it is the other way around: it is from consciousness that emerges everything.
Sadly, we somehow confuse consciousness with the identity or individuality (ego). I believe the ego is just one modality (or subset) of consciousness.
for everything our logic is, it's not our main way of creating value. it's the one way we survive, hand in hand with a lot of ignorance. this planet has far more patience for us than we have for ourselves.
If they can paint, then so can I. And it took me years to learn how to do decent stickmen!
Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.
> we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime
My dad was born before the first transistor was built, and died in 2014.
When he was born, reasonable people thought they'd never see a nuclear chain reaction, never see supersonic flight, never see space flight, never have men walking on the moon.
In his lifetime, even after the invention of the computer, reasonable people thought they would never in their lifetime have a machine beat the best human chess player. One of his specific anecdotes was about "fitting all of Shakespeare's works on a ball bearing".
Even as late as 2004, the script writers for "I, Robot" considered it sensible to have that memetic Will Smith line "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" — my dad never saw Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, but he would have if he'd lived the average life expectancy.
No matter what exactly it is that you mean by "intelligent" such that it excludes what computers already demonstrate, a lifetime is a long time, and a lot can change.
A lot of the velocity you listed was not as quick as it seems.
Supersonic flight is a question of manufacturing processes more than anything; we could always scale engines to make more power, just that making them light while being producible to a specific degree of accuracy was difficult.
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and implemented successfully in 1945. Of course nobody would have thought of it - just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one. It's a question of looking at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings. We didn't put a stupid amount of effort into nuclear fission relative to how much it changed the world - I'm willing to bet that more cost has been put into r&d for office furniture than for the nuclear bomb.
Chess is a simple game of calculation, not a sign of intelligence. It merely reflects the ability to calculate, which is the strength of scalable computers. It just so happens that we came up with computers and they work well in this space - there's no telling of things we haven't discovered because we haven't thought to implement anything to do with them.
Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
These things were all called "impossible" — and in some cases "unthinkable" — when my dad was born; supersonic simply looks like "a question of manufacturing processes" because we here in 2024 already know (as a society if not as individuals) how to make a jet engine that doesn't melt itself during operation and a rocket that doesn't explode. Going to the moon was itself the metaphor for "you can't do that thing". Rutherford famously dismissed the idea of extracting useful energy from nuclear reactions as talking "moonshine".
Before Deep Blue, sensible people insisted that Chess "required" the human intellect and couldn't be reduced to mere calculation. When it turned out to the contrary, then the goalposts moved to Go because that game was too complex to explore the state space and you can't even write a simple function to estimate how good a move was the way you can add up piece point values in chess. And then Go fell, and people suddenly decided it wasn't special after all, and "what really matters is emotional intelligence, which machines will never replicate":
If it is sufficient to look "at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings", then that would also suffice for intelligence, because we are existence proofs that it's possible to make a ~1.5kg, 20 watt, human-level chemical intelligence.
Everything we've done with A.I. since the field began, has been theory and testing of attempts to replicate various aspects of our intelligence.
> Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
If you shift the goalposts like that, then you would fail any single human, and only have sapience for the species as a whole super-organism. The word has meant a variety of different concepts before reaching its current meaning, as the economic and technological milieu, as well as the existing body of works that they were expected to be familiar with and innovate on (but only a bit because too much change all at once makes people hate you*) all continuously changed the composer's capacities for grandeur. No single composer created the modern form ex nihilo, nor even any single step towards it from the ancient Greek σύμφωνος (harmony), each step was building piece-by-piece on those who came before.
But again, this is to miss the point. The people in 2004 who wrote that script, didn't have Del Spooner say "Sure, we all know robots can write a symphony or turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece, but can they invent the concept of symphony if we never told it to them?"
To put it another way, using your own words:
> just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one
And yet, about 20 years later, never mind the 77 since the transistor or the 80.7 years of average UK life expectancy? The path the scriptwriters went for was to have the character of Sonny respond "Can you?", pointing out that most humans can't compose or paint either, not by making Sonny create works faster than most printers can actually print them — a thing which is already possible for high end systems today, which those script writers couldn't conceive of.
And not just script writers: between graduation (2006) and the actual release of these models, I've had conversations with co-workers, software engineers, who didn't think that what these models do was possible.
> I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
But we absolutely can quantify intelligence, that's what IQ tests are and we've had them for ages, the problem right now is that we're not sure if there's a single "general" thing or lots of small skills in different areas. Humans seem to have a G-factor, but the machines keep passing all our tests almost as fast as we can fill in the gaps in this sentence: "sure, they can ${old test}, but they won't be intelligent until they can ${new test}".
I was lucky to spend a lot of time with elephants during my three years around Africa.
I feel certain future generations will look on us as barbarians for keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete cells. They are magnificent, and care deeply for each other.
One day when we speak to them I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it.
> I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it.
I don't know. Growing up with cattle, they regularly stood free, but then always waited around to let them back into their "concrete cells". They had every chance to escape, but never wanted to. They clearly preferred being there. Same goes for the farm dogs and cats. In fact, the cat population "mysteriously" kept growing without a corresponding number of kittens (in other words, foreign cats would voluntarily find their way into those "concrete cells").
It very well may have been a case of Stockholm syndrome, but regardless of the exact mechanics it is doubtful that they know that to be the case.
> Same story for mountain lions and lynx, etc. They are a far cry from cats.
Have domestic cats actually been selectively bred from those bigger cats? I thought they were preexisting hunter animals that just decided they liked living with us better than living in the wild
Domestic cats came from African wildcats. It was only a subset of African wildcats that developed a commensal relationship with humans. The wildcats that are not domesticated have very different social behavior and do not seek out humanity (nor live in social group like feral domestic cats do, etc.). Basically, we are seeing speculation: two populations launching into different evolutionary trajectories.
I'm genuinely interested in the distinction. Humans "breeding" animals is the same as any other environmental factor that affects evolution of a species.
I'm sorry, are you saying something like french bulldogs would have evolved just the same without human intervention? It seems like you are reforming the idea in a really obtuse manner in order to paper over the obvious distinction.
Where do you dream this stuff up? What continues to be asked is of what relevance the topic of breeding is to the subject at hand. Nobody is surprised that selective breeding is a thing, denies that it happens, or pretends that it hasn't shaped the animals. What nobody seems to want to answer is why it was brought to the discussion, especially when it was already, and explicitly, established that the exact mechanism for the animal's behaviour is irrelevant to said discussion.
No doubt it was posted for good reason, but so far nobody has been able to figure out what that reason is. To the rest of us laymen, an environmental factor is an environmental factor is an environmental factor. What makes breeding so different that it justifies violating the discussion that was taking place?
>What nobody seems to want to answer is why it was brought to the discussion, especially when it was already, and explicitly, established that the exact mechanism for the animal's behaviour is irrelevant to said discussion.
Who said that? As far as I can tell the discussion was the difference between domesticated cows and bison, and I didn't see anyone say breeding is irrelevant except you.
> What makes breeding so different that it justifies violating the discussion that was taking place?
What exactly are you talking about? You are being obtusely vague
>Where do you dream this stuff up?
No need to be rude, it's not helping anything. You are being rude to the other poster too, when it's your fault for not communicating clearly and just insisting everyone made the same assumptions as you when it's clear they didn't. Rather than make things clear, you just keep insulting people on top of things.
> As far as I can tell the discussion was the difference between domesticated cows and bison
The discussion was about how domesticated animals prefer to stick around humans even when they don't need to, negating the idea that all animals are of the opinion that "humans suck". It was established that the exact reason for why these animals behave that way is irrelevant to the topic, but then the comment about bison introduced the idea that it is relevant. After all, why would we see a post that is irrelevant? But there is no indication of where the relevance lies. Is selective breeding not an environment pressure like any other? What is noteworthy about it that justifies the violation?
> No need to be rude, it's not helping anything.
Intriguing. It would be interesting to hear the logic behind considering text spit out by a piece of software to be rude. Does rudeness not require human intent? Indeed, a human giving another human the middle finger might be considered rude (human intent) by a human observer, but a monkey giving the middle finger (non-human intent) is not traditionally considered so despite being an identical act. This seems to imply that you assign human-like qualities to software. But at the same time software is well understood to not be human-like. It operates using very different mechanisms. Which, then, seems like software should be treated more like the monkey than like the human, but clearly that is not the case.
Tell us more about your take! The other commenter does not seem to recall why he posted the comment about the bison, leaving that topic to be a dead-end, so let's entertain your tangent.
Why would I have any reason to believe your post was written by a piece of software? What a horrible "conversation" this has been. The point is to give fair readings to other posters here. Not whatever it is you are doing here.
I'll take that to mean that you see software, but okay, let's agree that appearances are not always what they seem.
What ultimately sets humans apart from the monkeys, to make the difference between human intent and non-human intent significant, is identity. Indeed, a human in a costume that is unrecognizable from an actual monkey, thus having no identity, would not conjure rudeness feelings when giving the middle finger any more than an actual monkey would. It is fair to say that identity is not necessarily one's outer appearance. Signing one's name is another way humans confer identity, for example.
Do you recognize a human identity here? If so, describe it for us.
If rude is an identity, that means when a human witnesses a crime, describing the perpetrator as "rude" to the police office on duty will be sufficient to track down and nab the criminal.
Ha. Not going to happen. "Rude" can describe anyone. It does not serve to provide an identity.
And this is how you want us to come to believe that software is human?
To be insufferable may be a quality of humans, but is decidedly not an identity. I suppose your message here is that there is no discernible identity, surprising no one? So, for what logical reason are we considering software to be human again?
I genuinely ask what is noteworthy about breeding that separates it from any other mechanism with respect to the topic at hand. There is no indication in the comment of how breeding actually violates the unnecessariness of the exact mechanics. I suspect it was posted without having read the thread that came before it, but we shall see when clarification is revealed, if the original commenter ever follows up.
I've read your comment above and the one above that multiple times.
I still don't understand what you are asking.
If you don't understand that breeding something for a certain trait will impact that animal, I suggest you go look at pugs or dash-hounds and the medical problems they now have as a result of very specific breeding.
It was established that the exact mechanics don't matter. But then you introduced an exact mechanic. This means that there must be something incredibly interesting or noteworthy about said mechanic to violate the notion that the exact mechanics don't matter.
But you have not yet shared what is notable about it. Breeding for a certain trait is farming 101. There is absolutely nothing interesting about that. So what have we missed?
I am still not following you at all. I honestly feel like either you or I are replying to the wrong comment chain.
> It was established that the exact mechanics don't matter
Please show me what was established and where. I genuinely don't know what you are talking about.
> But then you introduced an exact mechanic
Again, please show what I introduced and where.
>This means that there must be something incredibly interesting or noteworthy about said mechanic to violate the notion that the exact mechanics don't matter
Ahhh, really lost now.
> But you have not yet shared what is notable about it.
Notable about what?
Either one of us is staggeringly confused, or I'm having this conversation with an AI in training.
Yes, I am the one who is confused, which is why I started asking questions all those comments ago in a hopeful effort to try and become unconfused. But at this point you don't seem to even be aware of why you posted the comment, so I suppose we'll just chalk it up to an arbitrary thought crafted while in the middle of a somnambulism.
Based on your conversation with me, and the tangent one going sideways with freejazz, I have to assume you are actually a bot, and this is all just going around and around.
That is the beauty of Hacker News. It abstracts the content creation such that it doesn't matter if the content is created by a bot, a human, or an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters. How the content is created is just an implementation detail that is not visible to the user, nor does it affect the user. The user only interacts with the software. The software is why the user is here.
So, I say: Who cares? You already went into this knowing that it could be a bot and it didn't brother you one bit. Nor should it, because, again, it only being an implementation detail of the software means that it affects you in no way. A bot, a human, space alien, or an infinite number of monkeys are all just as good as each other. It makes no difference. No difference at all. So, what compels you to bring this up now?
But, getting back to the topic at hand, we'd still love to know how your comment at the top is significant enough to justify violating the established premise. If it is simply that you didn't bother to take time to understand the thread before replying, and that it doesn't fit the discussion, that's a perfectly acceptable answer. Although, admittedly, we cling to the hope that you actually have an interesting nugget hidden in there that will blow our minds when you finally get around to telling us about it!
Logically, the comparison is with comparable output of software in other instances, not people. To compare software with people here is like asserting that a cow is mooing in what seems like an excessive manner because people don't make that much noise. It does not serve as a useful point of comparison. Cows may simply moo excessively. In order to provide a meaningful frame of reference, you would compare the moos of said cow with other cows to make such a comparison.
Many animals fare better in captivity, including some wild animals. Elephants are an exception; wild elephants have longer lifespans than captive elephants.
I see no reason why elephants would seek out confinement when it seemingly harms their health and therefore presumably makes them feel worse.
I imagine they'll look at us the way we look at people a hundred years ago. There's some anger, some pity, some amazement at the people who bucked the trend. There's even some empathy for people who made bad choices.
That's if learn that elephants are like us. Maybe we'll find out their better then way we are or worse. Getting to know that answer over time will be amazing.
Decades ago, I was in Thailand at a safari park with a coconut cracked open from the refreshment stand, sipping the milk through a plastic straw.
An elephant did something deeply human and thugged that coconut right out of my hand, and into its mouth it went. Those trunks are quick and I, a dumb tourist, was not on guard.
Best thing I could do was pluck the straw from its maw, as that probably would not have been healthy.
Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's actually a better assumption that their internal experience and motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry). Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of them are losing their grip
>the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist behaviorism (e.g. John Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well over 50 years.
Maturana and Valera’s classic book Autopoieses and Cognition came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition, and even as a form of consciousness.
Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the way we mean it as recursive inner monolog—is coupled strongly to language.
Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger gets very close to this position. But at some point a quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem to me to be “unusual” to say the least compared to other species. (I watched the great movie “Arrival” again last night.)
My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the greatest of joys.
Thanks for the reading recommendations, that stuff sounds fascinating, and I'll admit that my reference to RCTs was perhaps an overly mean dig at overcorrection for methodological rigor, a tic I likely developed from my exposure to the pharmacological research world, which is in practice greatly stymied by hidebound institutional policies about what hypotheses can be considered and what experimental framings are considered evidence at all. Probably not an appropriate thing to apply to ethology, which I know a lot less about
It really isn't. I am making a claim about a pervasive bias in scientific institutions I view to be course-correcting. I'll acknowledge plenty of scientific results I dislike as being true. Like I really dislike that every room-temperature superconductor thus far hasn't worked, and it really sucks that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and damages the immune system
It's not completely possible to separate questions like "what is true about the world?" from questions like "how should we behave?", because the former must inform the latter, and the latter intrinsically informs what we choose to look at, whether we acknowledge it or not. Pretending you have no opinions is disingenuous and counterproductive to the endeavor of objectivity, because that's simply not true of anyone, and acknowledging one's biases is strictly necessary for mitigating them. Nonetheless, it is not "politicizing science" inherently to like or dislike certain results, or to think institutional biases exist
Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals.
My take on this, is that this was never, ever an issue. Only city folk have a disconnected, weird view of the world. Rural people, who live and interact with far more wild animal life on a daily basis, 100% know that animals have intelligence, care for each other, none of this is foreign or strange to those living closer to nature.
But there is also another angle to consider. Take a look at WWII. Take a look at wars around the world right now. Take a look at violence in our communities.
Now take a look at how humans treat animals. Notice anything similar?
We aren't being cruel to animals, but as a species, we're just acting as we act towards each other.
Do you really believe that a person that beats their dog, won't beat another person, given the chance?
This isn't about animal husbandry, whether for food or for resources (wool, milk, eggs, etc). When you look at non-industrial farms, small family run farms, they in most cases treat their animals with care, and empathy.
Even "the end", slaughter time, is quick, as painless as can be, with care and concern. There are videos on youtube for how you can slit a chicken's throat, and let it bleed out, without it really realising anything is happening. There are videos for breaking the neck (as an alternate), without the chicken having anything but a second of "oh no". Quick, fast, as painless as possible, endless people have this goal.
The end is going to come for these birds, but my point is -- you can see people DO care. Have always cared.
Is every small farmer like this? No. But my point is, is every human kind to other humans? We have psychopaths, sociopaths, unemphatic people who treat humans poorly.
So my premise here is, that animal abuse and human abuse go hand in hand. That we actually treat animals, and ALWAYS have treated animals as thinking, reasoning beings, but also through history have treated them like us.
I basically agree with most of what you've said here, but I'm not talking about humans in general, I'm talking about epistemic authorities. As I said, I think the intuition that leads people to the conclusion that animals think and feel is natural for most people, and I also think there was an era where scientific institutions by and large took the position that because intuition isn't rigorous and explainable, anything we have intuitively come to believe must be wrong. This contrarian bias shows up in more places than just our beliefs about non-human intelligence, too
The whole "intuition" thing is a hard push from historical, pre-scientific method and really you don't want to go there. Letting science be dictated by "intuition" is massively wrong, so while I agree that those involved in husbandry are going to be closer to the fact than those displaced, at the same time you cannot use intuition to validate truth.
Bear in mind that "intuition" can also be steeped in "because God says so, of course!"
Back to additional, historical schisms.
I recall being taught how "mankind" was "separate from animals". In the Christian bible, man was created in "god's image", separate and entirely outside of the scope of the rest of the world, and the life forms inhabiting it.
Book for Genesis and all that.
Anyhow the logic was that animals were one thing, and that "mankind" was NOT an animal. This made it easier for those steeped in a religious upbringing, but isolated from animal husbandry, to just mentally agree. I imagine, with a huff, 'But animals are NOT the same', and so on.
This also one of the reasons as to why evolution was so strongly fought. After all, "god said humans are separate from animals" and thus "we are not animals!! heresy!! no we did NOT come from animals!"
I honestly feel that we need more "this is how our ancestors thought" training in school, without the "let's present it in a poor light" or "good light" or any modification at all. There's so much work being done to re-factor historical fact into something palatable to the masses, and it just hurts all of us. We are nothing without understanding our own past.
We must always examine our culture with an eye to the past, and historical beliefs in the past, for us to truly understand why things are as they are now. And, why we believe what we believe now. Even with the majority of "Western" people somewhat detached from traditional religious upbringings, there is an immense cultural history and backload there, which permeates every aspect of our society.
I agree with you entirely that intuition constitutes fairly weak evidence of something being true, and isn't the sort of thing we should view as a source of data for empirical methods, unless we're studying the intuition itself as a cultural or cognitive phenomenon. Intuition can be hijacked, it can be dead wrong, and it can notice things but completely misunderstand their mechanism. Otherwise, why do science at all?
But the existence of an intuitive belief is also not good evidence against what that belief claims, either! I think scientists have in a few important situations found themselves encountering pushback where methodical empirical study comes to counter-intuitive conclusions, and the culture of science got itself trapped in a schizmogenesis feedback loop where results that sounded counterintuitive were seen as more scientifically sound merely on that basis (and, probably, because counterintuitive findings sound harder to do and thus more impressive). I think this is starting to course-correct, with terms like "boring science" (empirical tests which confirm an intuitive hypothesis) and "cultural evolution" (which some people use to prove too much, but the most solid form of the argument is basically that a commonly-held but illegible belief is something we should treat as a weak signal suggesting a potential truth rather than a negative one) becoming popular
Culture is an insidious force we should have tools for pushing back against, but it really throws the baby out with the bathwater to assume that no one who doesn't do rigorous methodological empiricism can come to know something, and that all such knowledge is necessarily backwards and stupid. Even a hypothetically perfect methodological empiricist who must justify all conclusions with legible evidence and repeatable methodology should treat an illegible belief as merely holding no evidentiary weight, not weight against that which is believed
Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either. Slaves were common in basically every society, and they had no rights. Some Greek polities would make token laws like "killing a slave is an affront to the gods" but sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was basically guaranteed.
Societies that have a caste system still apply different standards of morality to some people. Thieves and serial killers have a very different standard for morality than you or I.
> Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either.
Yes it was. Always. It's just that morality, being a human invention/illusion, varied from culture to culture and from era to era. Your examples ( slaves, caste system, etc ) isn't a lack of morality or non-application of morality, it's just different morality applied in different cultures. India has/had morality and the south has/had morality, just different morality than we do today in the US.
Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense. I asked basic questions in my comment. If an elephant has 'moral weight' then killing it is wrong. So must we arrest and prosecute lions who kill elephants? Do we arrest everyone working for national geographics for profiting off of snuff films?
The key argument is not that we ought to expect non-human animals to abide by human morals (although animals do seem to have their own moral codes that they abide by) but that human moral codes (which we hold humans to) ought to assign non-human animals a value much closer to the value that we assign humans than they often do.
> Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense.
This seems overly simplistic. For the sake of argument, I'll accept that moral judgments can only be made for human actions. But when those actions involve animals, they can still be made. People clearly make moral judgments about human cruelty to animals - every US state makes some version of animal cruelty a felony offense. The distinction between the presumed agency of the actor and the acted upon seems important here, and you are conflating them.
You misconstrued the lead comment. The “moral weight” of animals is conferred upon them by humans. Sure we do a bad job and are inconsistent. Pigs fine to slaughter and eat—-dogs not in our culture.
But almost all human culture gives some weight to life forms.
Dam, the angry backlash mindset shows up like clockwork, complete with my favorite triad of its hallmarks - vague references to "philosophers", invocation of numbers with the specific intent of saying buckwild unquantifiable shit, and the combination of personal attacks frothing with derision while simultaneously accusing me of thinking with "mindless emotions" for, I'm pretty sure, using language you've pattern-matched as overly compassionate toward things you don't respect
Anyway, I'm trying to get into less pointless arguments with people who open by demonstrating themselves unamenable to reason this week. Shoo, fly
I knew it. If you think modern industry is bad, it's 100000000x worse in nature. It is conservatively estimated that many quintillions of animals are killed by other animals in the wild each year.
Try using reason and logic rather than mindless emotions.
Well, not sure where they're getting their numbers from but a lot of animals (Ants/Flys) have very short lifespans so if there's 10,000 trillion ants I could easily see more than 0.005 quadrillion ants deaths a year (but not more than 0.06 quadrillion for ants).
(nah, the hash function of the vocalization mappings easily exceeds 512bits...)
I do wonder of they're actually naming themselves, or if they're being named by others.
Is there a handshaking protocol, where a bird says "hi I'm Fred" followed up by "greetings Fred!" "hiya Fred!"
or if it's more akin to schoolboy nicknames that stick. e.g. a bird yells at another bird "hey wifepooper, you're pooping on my wife!" and that target bird will never refer to themselves as 'wifepooper' but merely 'I'/'me', though other birds will refer to that singular bird as 'wifepooper'
> The thought of someday being able to address an elephant in a way it can understand is downright magical. To say, “Hello, I’m Tove. Please tell me your name.”
I truly believe that thinking other species are “less intelligent” than us comes down to our own inability to have a complex dialogue with them. Time and again, we have a pioneer who is somehow able to break this barrier through sheer perseverance. Then we get Kokos of the world. Now we’ve noticed traits resembling true human toddler like understanding in dogs and even some birds.
Perhaps one day, brain interface devices and machine learning will help us cross that barrier for good, and unlock a new age of learning from our peers in the animal kingdom.
There's a brief scene in Heavens River, book 4 of the Bobiverse series, where some characters spend some time with the equivalent of alien dolphins. The "dolphins" have a very limited language that main consists of names and one word inquiries and warnings.
For example, the local replicant who they know introduces his fellows. The dolphin speech is essentially "who? Marvin! Marvin friends?"
Which is basically "Who are the strangers? Oh it's Marvin! Marvin, are these your friends?"
I imagine most animal languages are at this level. And nothing wrong with that. For their lifestyles, many intelligent animals with a language like this are served perfectly well. Personal identifiers to call out friendly individuals, names for threats, maybe even general welcomes for fellow groups like elephants and whales that generally live in family groups and occasionally meet up for mating or due to resource constraints like grazing and seasonal water construction.
Regarding Koko, it isn't really clear if she really was able to have complex dialogues, or if that was wishful thinking on the part of her trainers.
In general, I don't think there are any animals that are as intelligent as adult humans. After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet? It's not like other animals had the opportunity to take over and rejected it.
Although I suspect humans are the most intelligent, it's possible that is us creating a standard specifically for our skill set and other species outperform us by equally reasonable but different standards.
> After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet?
Could be a lot of things. Sea life can't have fire, so no ceramics or refined metals.
We're unusually cooperative at multiple levels of abstraction; wolves have packs, ants have colonies, but we have global trade in information, energy, goods, and two nations of over 1.4 billion people each.
Opposable thumbs are really useful, relatively rare.
I kinda wish HN had a rule against submissions to sites with login walls related to news, articles, etc. Basically, content sites. It's constant these days and the only way to read the articles is via archival sites like this.
My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by unreadable content.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
(Not sure if this is what you mean, but) Blocking paywalls wouldn't make HN better. It would make it much worse, because it would exclude many good articles. That's why the rule is to allow paywalls that have workarounds, i.e. that the community can still read.
If anyone has a suggestion that would actually make the situation better, I'd love to hear it, because the current situation sucks, and has sucked for at least 10 years. It just sucks less than the alternatives we know of.
Great ask. I'm not advocating for paywall blocking. Something simple like a crawler that hits a paywall on an article automatically attempts the router du jour. Or a "paywall" flag users can tag that initiates, etc.
Nonetheless it can be an interesting article, and if it's interesting enough people can navigate around paywalls (archive...).
Otherwise I wouldn't have heard of this article and that would be sad. It's a nice read.
