Nicker on 16/12/2013 at 17:49
Quote Posted by Muzman
From a moral philosophy standpoint this stuff is all quite interesting and has few easy answers.
From a practical everyday standpoint they ain't getting in the fold until Caesar says "
No!"
Let's not make the mistake of assuming that only great apes might achieve the capacity to take revenge for our historical callousness.
[video=youtube;gUGd_vMr8BU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUGd_vMr8BU&list=PLlSaFeesXDfTPzHPDXYRc2H882fc6cvl0[/video]
SubJeff on 17/12/2013 at 02:14
Quote Posted by Nicker
Despite what you might prefer, the lines are not self evident. Or if they are you have not made a case for that.
Okay, I'm bored so I'll bite. And DDL might want to read this and learn something.
Let me start by saying that I absolutely believe that although we use animals in a variety of ways, for food, as workers, in experiments and so on that are not just bits of property to do whatever we want with. All animals, in and out of human servitude, should be treated with respect and not abused. In cases where it's necessary to kill animals we should try our best to do it in the most humane ways possible and animals used in research should suffer the minimum amount possible. Indeed when I used to work in animal research I never let
anyone else execute any of my animals because they knew me and were comfortable with me, and so I was able to do it without distressing them. I was the only person in the department with this foible but all my animals were awesome and happy (I was the only one who was never ever bitten by their own animals) and I'd be damned if one of the lab techs was going to stick them in a gas chamber or guillotine them.
I eat a lot of meat and I'd stop buying from a producer if I knew they treated their animals badly, but I don't go out of my way to research this stuff because I've other things to do, like answer stuff on forums.
I don't think animals should be granted personhood because they are not people and I don't think sentience or intelligence or logical reasoning about a situation (in themselves) are reasons to do so. I don't want to get caught up in the semantics of human, person, people and the different legal definitions that exist in different countries. I'm just going to tell you what my reasons are. If you don't agree, feel free to tell me why. I've had about enough of the sniping in this thread though.
Although animals can to a lesser or greater extent, depending on the species and the individual animal, display clear signs of intelligence and sentience, they are not capable of communicating with us except for on the most basic of levels. Sure, you can call your dog and he can call you. You can tell him you're unhappy with him and he'll know and understand that, and vice versa. I'm sure dogs even feel guilt, though I don't think most cats do - if you catch your dog eating something he knows he shouldn't he may act guilty and sheepish but your cat will likely be all "what
are you making that goddamn noise for whilst I'm eating this smoked salmon?".
The thing is; you can't ask your dog
why he's unhappy and he can't ask you why you are. And that's my issue with it. If you give an animal personhood you give with it a set of protections and statuses, a set of rules that you expect other humans to abide by when interacting with the animal, that the animal neither understands nor has the capability of reciprocating in it's behaviour except by pure chance.
I love animals and one day I'm going to get a dog because they are awesome. I know that it's possible to build a really close personal bond with them, but I don't think they or any other animal should ever be classed as a person.
Nicker on 17/12/2013 at 06:26
In fairness, this thread was started as a discussion of possibly granting chimpanzees legal personhood so you can't just pretend it is irrelevant or distracting to this discussion. You have not been called out on your opinions about the ethical treatment of animals but on the quality of your argument, which was initially you begging the question followed by you making erroneous claims about animal intelligence and language.
That's not sniping, it's debate.
You have drawn your line and I for one understand your reasoning even if I don't agree with it.
SubJeff on 17/12/2013 at 09:08
You never sniped. And I understand what you were saying and I've already addressed the fact that initially I didn't.
DDL on 17/12/2013 at 12:14
Quote Posted by NuEffect
Okay, I'm bored so I'll bite. And DDL might want to read this and learn something.
...that you
really like talking about yourself? :p
Seriously, dude: coming out with a flat, blanket statement about how "incapacity for rational reasoning" disqualifies one from personhood, and finishing it with a rider that implied this was
not up for discussion? You can't help but laugh at that.
Back on topic, even allowing for the possibility that personhood might be conferred on non-humans would be at least a step forward in getting the message across that there's no significant fundamental difference between us and everything else. We're not particularly
special, just very successful (at the moment). Consciousness as a continuum rather than a divide. That sort of thing.
It's entirely possible that failure to understand WHY a dog is unhappy is because we're crap at understanding dogs, not because dogs are incapable of communicating. And vice versa. Communication with a whole range of animals capable of varying degrees of sentience might simply be something we're not
currently able to do, rather than something that is actually impossible.
demagogue on 17/12/2013 at 13:00
I think it would have been instructive if Neanderthal had never gone extinct--they'd be Portuguese BTW for the same reason Celts are today Scots & Irish, etc, although the history of the Portugal region would have undoubtedly played out much differently--but anyway then we'd have to deal with human rights that extended beyond our species, and the possibility that some cognitive capacities might be structurally different (still technically "human" though, if that's supposed to refer to the homo genus). I mean we can still think about it as an academic exercise, but it doesn't have quite the same immediacy without them, at least until Neanderthal get cloned.
I do think there are cognitive differences that distinguish the homo genus from our primate cousins, IIRC something to do with a distinction between our depth of cognition (i.e., concept nesting, which is at the foundation of predication) versus other primates' breadth of cognition (e.g., a chimpanzee can memorize 20 cards in a blink less than a second; humans can't come anywhere close to that; IIRC it was in the order of 50 seconds or so)... It's a difference more in cognitive specialization than raw cognitive hoursepower per se, a trade-off in brain real-estate.
Also the abstraction of language has the ability to bootstrap from its own concepts, some arguing that our "selves" are almost like a parasite through language that has wrest control over our cognitive systems to their own ends. The punchline is that all this complicates what it means to be "human" or what's special about being human. Would we have thought our Pleistocene ancestors were human in the same way we are? They share our cognitive capacity, but the concept of self hadn't really taken hold yet. In the background BTW is the grounding for human rights; since some cultures don't even grant full rights to other humans, much less animals. Well sorry I'm raising more questions than answering still.
SubJeff on 17/12/2013 at 13:09
Quote Posted by DDL
...that you
really like talking about yourself? :p
Seriously, dude: coming out with a flat, blanket statement about how "incapacity for rational reasoning" disqualifies one from personhood, and finishing it with a rider that implied this was
not up for discussion? You can't help but laugh at that.
You can't have it both ways. Either you want me to explain my view, which necessitates me giving some background, or you want the brief version which wasn't entirely serious nor comprehensive (obviously).
I do agree with your idea that conciousness is a continuum. It seems that there is a big gap between us and everything else though. Even the most "intelligent" animals are a long, long way off what small children are computationally capable of. Sure it looks impressive when a chimp can play a computer game but they can only play the most basic games really.
It's possible that we just haven't figured out how to communicate with animals properly but if it hasn't happened by now then I don't think it's going to happen without the use of some major tech that we don't have yet. Just being able to find out that the reason an animal wants the other food because it got bored of the type you're giving it would be the most amazing thing right now.
DDL on 17/12/2013 at 15:26
There's a gap culturally, certainly. It doesn't necessarily follow that this also represents an intelligence/sentience/whatever gap, however.
Given how far we've come in the last 5000 or so years, it's pretty clear that cultural evolution is explosively fast compared to bog-standard genetic evolution, and this is dema's 'parasite' concept in a nutshell: as squishy meat-things, we're not significantly different from our primitive hunter-gatherer forebears, what sets us apart is that we're essentially 'carriers' for this whole language/culture thing. And we're actively involved in the process of passing this 'culture-parasite' on to subsequent generations (with the corrollary that active involvement is also
essential: if we stopped teaching our offspring, the whole thing grinds to a halt).
Which then brings us to the possibility that we could bootstrap up other species: if we teach dolphins to communicate, they might teach other dolphins, and in a thousand years we're all living under our new dolphin overlords. Or, more seriously, we might get to study the genuine, (semi)
de novo evolution of a whole new culture.
Could be fun!
And as to technology needed for communication: for a start, scientific and technological progress is
ludicrously fast, and secondly, we're already learning a ton more about animals and social interactions and thought processes using tech we have now (just being more observant makes a huge difference, I'd wager), so it's not necessarily wild conjecture.
Another wonderful story: apes are capable of (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santino_%28chimpanzee%29) forward planning!
Having said that, I now see he got castrated as a 'control measure'. And now I'm sad.
faetal on 17/12/2013 at 17:02
The thing which puts us an order of magnitude ahead of other species isn't necessarily just the teaching, since there are a bunch of other species which have demonstrated population-specific tool use, behaviour etc... What we have is the ability to synthetically encode thought processes in a manner which can be decoded by others. In a nutshell - written language. I can decode and assimilate the product of thousands of years' worth of exploration, discovery and experimentation by reading. Diagrams, videos, simulations etc only expands this.
If we could somehow create similar system for other species, imagine what cultures they could end up with (taking into account their other limitations such as fewer orders of intentionality etc...). Would be interesting for something like dolphins which can't transport their media about, they'd almost have to treat the linguistic archives like temples to make pilgrimages to.
/tangent
SubJeff on 17/12/2013 at 19:44
Quote Posted by DDL
There's a gap culturally, certainly. It doesn't necessarily follow that this also represents an intelligence/sentience/whatever gap, however.
Given how far we've come in the last 5000 or so years, it's pretty clear that cultural evolution is explosively fast compared to bog-standard genetic evolution, and this is dema's 'parasite' concept in a nutshell:
The reverse also doesn't follow. I think if we could have a deeper level of communication that doesn't involve some sort of mind-meld it would have emerged by now.
I get dema's point (reminds me of Snow Crash) but faetal has hit the nail on the head - animals don't store ideas and so aren't able to develop upon them. I'm sure higher primates could eventually do this but I doubt they'll ever store anything more complex than "do this to get food". Yes, humans probably started that way but if we're going to go that route then yeah sure in 1 million years chimps might have evolved to be people. They won't be the chimps we have now though.
