It's known as motivated reasoning. Specimens of our species are not known for disinterested rationality. We have deep interests in doing things to animals that animal cognition could make more unpleasant or expensive. An ancestor without this talent would have been less likely to become an ancestor. Think of how much tougher it would be to put a spear into a boar if you thought it was as sentient as your mother. You'd still do it if you were hungry enough but would pay a greater price.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108602660933816...

From my viewpoint, our current views on the killing of animals are as much a reflection of our cultural fear of death as anything.

Death used to be an ever-present part of life. Killing an animal was viewed as taking the life of something else to prolong your own. And all to often, people would die in horrific ways anyway.

Now, death is a thing we try to hide away and not talk about. So we also hide away the killing of animals for meat. Death is a taboo in our society in some ways.

This is clearly not the case, else nobody would be willing to work for a factory farm.

The opposite appears to be true. People become desensitized - at least the ones who can handle the initial shock. Also, in some regions of the world (and in developed countries), generations have grown up with a company mentality and seem incapable of considering things from any other perspective.

As someone who has recently joined that club, I agree. I have been hunting for years but this year I killed my first deer. The whole process changed something inside of me.

Because of my actions, this gentle creature went from breathing, living and doing whatever it wanted to being food.

While I was aiming my shot, she turned her head towards me and looked at me. I can clearly remember seeing her blink.

I put the arrow through her heart and lungs. I dragged her out of the woods. I gutted her and hung her up. I packed her body in ice.

These were things that I had seen done before but never did myself.

As I was field dressing the body, I looked at her and apologized, then I thanked her for providing healthy meat to feed my family.

In my mind, it changed venison from butcher paper wrapped meat that was leaner than beef into the flesh of an animal that was killed.

I don't know what she thought but I think she was, on some level, self aware.

Not sure exactly what that implies, but it would seem to suggest that it's hard to wrap these sorts things up with a bow.

There is also the simple, brutal reality of the food chain.

Being most aware and capable, also means seeing all of that, where the lesser beings are, and treating the world with respect.

Should anyway. Our nature easily demonstrates otherwise.

Animals are a lot like us. Simpler mostly.

Animals are a lot like us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism

But please, continue dismissing millions of people's beliefs as "paranoia".

OTOH, large numbers of people can absolutely exhibit collective paranoia. How many subscribe to Alex Jones?

It frankly seems no more or less odd to me than any other form of religious asceticism. From a purely practical perspective, sweeping the ground in front of you is probably not any more of a nuisance than the vow of silence that some Christian monks and nuns take. I'd personally find it to be less of one.

Interesting.

But I'm not budging on the paranoia statement. If your beliefs make you worry about killing random things you can't even see, say "bye" to any semblance of good mental health.

Even when we're extremely selfish and petty, if we take too much effort to take care of ourselves, that's generally fine, as long as it's legal and not too annoying -- but when others worry "too much" about yet others, and change their own behaviour accordingly, they can't possibly have "any semblance of good mental health"? Come on..

The insects at least actually exist, what of caring about random people that don't even exist yet, wouldn't that be even crazier?

> Well, suppose that we believe what we are taught. It follows that if there are dollars to be made, you destroy the environment. The reason is elementary. The people who are going to be harmed by this are your grandchildren, and they don't have any votes in the market. Their interests are worth zero. Anybody that pays attention to their grandchildren's interests is being irrational, because what you're supposed to do is maximize your own interests, measured by wealth, right now. Nothing else matters. So destroying the environment and militarizing outer space are rational policies, but within a framework of institutional lunacy. If you accept the institutional lunacy, then the policies are rational.

-- Noam Chomsky

In fact looks like my browser scrolled right past 3-4 paragraphs.

Now that I look, there was a stupid advert that pushed the content up and out of the way. Way to make a site, guys.

I wouldn't put a spear into a boar, but from a detached and clinical perspective I don't see why its sentience would make a difference. Advanced societies like China, the Europeans and the United States don't generally have any problem fielding an aggressive expeditionary army of people nominally willing to kill sentient humans, so I suspect the blocks are more economic and cultural norms than innate.

It also seems plausible that time and breeding has equipped a large number of people with limited emotions precisely so they can stab things without worrying too much about the philosophical aspects.

Furthermore, the soldiers who serve in the armies of the nations you mention who actually have to do any killing often end up with PTSD and sky-high suicide rates.

Humans may be more naturally hesitant to kill their fellow human beings than you think.

I don't know if I personally believe this is a good argument against panpsychism. The wasp may have a fractionally sized working memory in comparison to ours, yet still be conscious. I find it unlikely that panpsychism is realistic; rocks don't have nervous systems, for example, so the likelihood of them having the sensory peripherals necessary for creating experiences is unlikely in my perspective. As far as the wasp goes, I'm probably agnostic as to the answer to that.

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.

It crossed my mind recently in respect to AI consciousness, that all animals appear to be conscious at least to an extent - there aren't any that appear to be zombies I can think of, maybe they all got killed off. It made me wonder if consciousness as we know it, rather than requiring some step change for AI, is simply an inevitable outcome of sufficient processing, information storage, evolution and maybe some other factors. And therefore very much a continuum.

IDK.

In the former case, and probably the latter, there is a definite acceleration when they begin to appreciate the power of language.

This hasn’t stopped anyone, on the whole, from investigating and debating the problems and concepts of the fields.

Perhaps animals think without language and experience a state that could be termed consciousness despite not having language. Sure, why not? But my point is that there is at least some grounds for this "high-horse proposition" because there is at least one important dimension along which humans differ from all other known animals.

Anecdotally, I definitely am thinking first and later applying words to the underlying concept. It takes practice, but it is possible to introduce a lag, of sorts.

Further, the best hunters, I’ve heard, are the most empathic. All the better to manipulate prey.

Even more, my cat is very expressive despite not having English. I can even identify patterns in his speech that clearly repeat for similar reasons. I spook him, there’s a meow for that. He’s hungry, there’s a meow for that. He’s tried and I’ve ignored 2 attempts of his to ask me for something and he’s pathetically resigned to his fate, there’s a meow for that. (Gets me every time)

You can also think without words. You do that any time you visualize something. Imagine an apple floating in an empty black space. Just reading these words probably put that image in your head. Now turn the apple around, look at it from all sides, above and below. I can definitely give you directions on what to do, but I have no idea how to think that visualization in words.

This isn't what I meant, or what is generally meant, by language.

Humans are distinguished by our ability to generate and understand novel sentences. This isn't a question of scale -- it's not a question of the number of things we have names for. It's a question of the ability to create and understand sentences that have never been created before. No other animal does this, as far as we know.

> You can also think without words. You do that any time you visualize something.

I'm not sure I can visualize something without naming it or describing it.

Say you're playing basketball. You're thinking in terms of the ball, the net, the other players, and so on, not thinking in terms of a language.

I can imagine that (for example) a bird building its nest finds itself in a similar situation. It's thinking in terms of the nest -- what shaped sticks to gather and where to place them -- even though it doesn't have any capacity for language.

Other cultures with different spiritual beliefs often much more commonly attribute more complex thoughts and feelings to non-human animals...

Only if approached from a materialist perspective. The thing about consciousness -- which is to say the experience of being that people believe separates them from, say, a brick -- is that it can only be verified subjectively. I have consciousness because I experience it, I only assume other human beings have consciousness because they are like me, but I have no way of proving that they are not just sufficiently complicated automatons pretending to be human.

The materialist(?) view that consciousness is entirely contained within the "material things" seems pretty clean and consistent. If you're experiencing consciousness, and I seem to be experiencing consciousness, and our brains - to the best we can tell - are essentially the same "sufficiently complicated automatons", then you can assume I'm experiencing consciousness too.

I don't think it goes 'all the way down'. In order to have consciousness we need a few ingredients: one of them is learning, another is having a task to accomplish - like finding food and fending predators. Another important characteristic is evolution and its requirement, self replication - without evolution there is no way to get to consciousness. That would restrict the places where it can apply, but notably it can apply to AI agents living in virtual worlds just as well as it applies to humans and animals.

In my view consciousness is that which protects the genes and the body (life and procreation). In the case of AI agents, genes could be related to architecture and hyper-parameters, and procreation could be an evolutionary algorithm. It's a simple and concrete definition which also asserts a purpose - the purpose of consciousness is to exist and to multiply.

That said, it's incredibly presumptuous to assume everything has consciousness just because you do. We are not all alike. You might have had a fever when you were young, and your consciousness emerged because of that fever. And people who didn't have that fever, don't have consciousness. A pretty silly possibility, but no sillier than "consciousness emerges from sufficiently many interacting neurons". Right now we basically have no clue, and it's arrogant to pretend otherwise.

To all the virtue-signallers in this thread talking about how cruel it is to kill animals, I would say: what's your stance on late-term abortion? Funny how a lot of the people who claim to believe cockroaches have consciousness, actually think it's virtuous to support killing unborn children.

this is not necessarily as hard of a moral conundrum as it seems. some people draw a distinction between deliberately killing a being that can survive on its own and withdrawing support that a being requires to live. this is somewhat analogous to the trolley problem: is it worse to kill than to allow to die?

By that same logic, I can walk into a hospital, go to someone on life support who can't currently "survive on their own", and unplug their systems, thus "withdrawing the support they require to live". If they die, is it really any different from killing them any other way?

To make the analogy even more accurate, let's say you are in a coma and will come out of it in 9 months. You can't survive without support now, but we know for a fact that you will come out of the coma after the 9 months have passed and will then be able to do so. Is it fine for me to shut down your life support half way through?

in the specific case of pregnancy, the support is given at significant personal cost and risk, which is not captured in either of your analogies.

However, I do acknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances, such as the birth posing a health risk to the mother, both mother and child being likely to die if delivery is attempted, etc. That would be the case of "not being able to afford it" in my analogy, or the significant personal risk you mention (at least I assume that's what you mean, as normal pregnancy is nowhere near a significant risk, with the current maternal death rate being 1 in 10,000). In those cases, I'd be willing to agree with you.

I still think I'm conscious, but this “Diagram of All Space and Time” by Carl Sagan suggests the stimuli available to us is small, alarmingly small, and perhaps nothing to boast about really. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18658357)

One comment says, "What humans can directly experience is of course small compared to the “all time” and “all space” and it would be invisible without the logaritmic scales used." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18662841)

I'd loosen up that and say 'neuron-like structures' instead of brain.

(Non-material in the sense where water flowing downhill vs. CPU computing gradient descent is material vs. non-material computation.)