There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better.
Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human, yet here we are.
There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals.
And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stories about ourselves that separate us more and more from the rest of the world. As if all of the beautiful things that make us human stemmed from symbolic reasoning. And yet we see every day: jealousy in chimps, maternal love in cows, play in dogs, compassion in elephants, frustration in cats, curiosity in pigs.
The story that we tell ourselves about our specialness gives us a moral free pass to treat animals how we want. Which is why I think these articles tend to polarize. It’s because the implication is that if animals are really so much like us, we’ll have to come up with a much better justification for treating them how we do. For now our reasons have hinged on their supposed lack of ability to feel emotion (or even pain!). In the future it might well be because they cannot symbolically reason. We have to have some reason, in the end, for treating animals the way we do, or otherwise face a moral crisis.
I do wonder how the pre-humanist humans felt about this, like tribal people. I know they had few qualms about killing animals but at the same time assigned human qualities to them. It might have been that surviving without meat was simply impossible, which is an argument one could not easily make today.
I see nothing immoral in a bear eating a human. It’s just being a bear. But just like any other social animal, as humans we’re of course going to kill that bear so it stops eating us. It has nothing to do with us being superior than a bear. We just don’t want to die like any other animal!
And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms). As animals, we naturally eat each other. If there is something immoral about this, does that mean a rabbit is morally superior to a fox?
>I see nothing immoral in a bear eating a human. It’s just being a bear. But just like any other social animal, as humans we’re of course going to kill that bear so it stops eating us. It has nothing to do with us being superior than a bear. We just don’t want to die like any other animal!
Right.
>And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms).
Bears can't have moral culpability because they aren't intellectually sophisticated enough, much like how a theoretical profoundly mentally disabled human, or an infant human, wouldn't be morally culpable for killing someone. The "mens rea" can't be established. However, nearly all adult humans do possess the capacity for moral reasoning.
>As animals, we naturally eat each other.
Even though bears and humans are animals, and animals often eat each other, we're the only animals blessed/cursed with the knowledge that if we were to maul someone to death, they'd experience terrible pain and suffering, their life would be cut short, and their family would mourn their death and lose resource support and potentially suffer and die themselves. If a bear had those thoughts, they would be morally culpable, but they almost certainly don't.
>If there is something immoral about this, does that mean a rabbit is morally superior to a fox?
No, because a rabbit's moral reasoning is in the same class as a bear's and a fox's, and not a human's.
Individual beings who have a moral sense of personhood engage in behavior that can be classified as moral or immoral, right or wrong, permissible or impermissible. Their actions can be categorized as either condemnable or commendable. It makes sense to hold them morally responsible for their intentional actions.
In contrast to humans, animals such as dogs, cats, birds, and fish are commonly held NOT to be moral agents or moral persons. In the jungle, a lion eating another animal or killing a human for any reason is not considered morally wrong or blameworthy.
Pet owners frequently chastise their pets for undesirable behaviors such as urinating on the carpet, digging in the garden, or failing to obey a command, but yelling "bad dog" is not usually interpreted as moral agency. One could argue, however, that the owner is engaging in moral expectation or anthropomorphism.
Though I do agree with the general principle that humans are animals, when it comes to eating each other, it's clear that our greater flexibility (and understanding of our own biology) allows us to choose our diets to a greater degree than other animals. Given that, us eating fewer animals (for ecologocial, health, and/or ethical reasons) seems like the best approach.
A fox eats a rabbit out of necessity. In our modern economy, people don't need to eat animals; it's usually a matter of convenience, taste, and tradition. But in all reality, we can get by quite comfortably without doing so.
Speak for yourself, I feel a strong moral obligation not to eat meat or otherwise support industries which exploit animals. Reducing suffering is a moral imperative.
If you believe you should reduce suffering, it would be better for you to quickly kill a chicken and eat it. Otherwise, a cat, bird of prey or other animal might kill that chicken. And cats are cruel killers that slowly torture their prey before eating them.
This is the primary argument I see hunters use to justify hunting as an ethical form of killing, in contrast to factory farming. Obviously it's better to kill someone or something quickly and painlessly than slowly and painfully, but I don't buy this argument. If you truly had that motivation, you would be saving that chicken from predation and finding a sanctuary or home for it, and/or you'd be encouraging mass human euthanization campaigns across various parts of the world to reduce suffering and slow, painful deaths.
If there were a human serial killer killing people via a projectile energy weapon that always instantly killed someone from a long distance before they had any idea what was happening, I don't think you'd argue for a greatly reduced sentence due to their humane method of disposal. If there were an ancient human civilization that went on hunting trips to kill and eat humans in other villages because they believed human flesh was the most prized meat, and they defended it by saying that they were probably all going to soon die of war or starvation or disease anyway, I don't think you'd just go "oh yeah true" without batting an eye.
The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals. Anything else is self-serving rationalization. If you attribute no moral value to them, that puts you in the company of almost everyone who's ever lived, but just state it plainly instead of trying to wiggle around it with mental gymnastics.
Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this:
> The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.
Into this:
> The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.
One obvious difference is that plants evolved with animals (or influenced the evolution of animals) via an express food-providing mechanism. To eat the leaves or the fruit of a plant does not necessarily kill it; in fact, one could say that the plants evolved these parts in a symbiotic relationship with their animal eaters/caretakers. It's certainly possible to destroy a plant by eating it obviously, but how many examples of plants can you think of where it provides a detachable, replenishable food product?
Animals do not have similar food-providing mechanisms. When you eat an animal, or part of an animal, it'd dead. It doesn't grow back. It wasn't designed to.
All nutrition comes from plants (or the microbiology around them). All protein comes from plants. Anyone who equates the barbary of eating animals with eating plants is choosing to deceive themselves and others.
Based on that logic I should suffocate you now in your sleep so you don't have to get old and die of cancer. Don't look out for me with my pillow I don't buy that logic either.
See the repugnant conclusion. I don't have a good answer save that arguments that deal with completely hypothetical people seem to result in completely useless nonsensical results. For example if your argument were correct it would be morally beneficial to breed as many human children as possible to live horrifying, painful, and short lives in order to end their tortured existence as kid burgers because any sort of life is better than none at all.
If we admit the idea that some lives can have negative value for example if they consist solely of suffering it would be OK to breed kid burgers so long as they had a pleasant existence up until slaughter at 7 followed by a quick trip to McKid.
I suspect that my moral philosophy and likely yours is simply insufficient to deal with hypothetical persons and we ought to simply reason about how to treat actual beings that exist.
Correction: is it better to suffer and die or not live at all? The vast majority of the 8 billion plus chickens slaughtered in the USA each year experience primarily pain and stress for their short lives.
Your attempt to bend my morality to yours doesn't register with me, bud.
Some things die so others may live. That is the way it always has been, and always will be, regardless if some subset of humans decides that "that's immoral". I will continue to eat meat and hunt animals and feel zero guilt. I do not care that something was killed for food when... I dunno, grass juice and pitaya could theoretically sustain me instead (lol). Animals taste good and are calorically dense. That's 100% convincing enough for me.
You stated "[t]here is no moral obligation to abstain from meat, whatsoever." Hand-wavy attempts at dismissing entire bodies of study within philosophy won't work with most intelligent people, either.
Peter Singer is an excellent starting point for exploring the dimensions of morality for eating animal flesh.
I can't argue against your own sense of guilt, since it's possible for some people to feel not at all [0]. Your other comment about willingly and guiltlessly drowning mice [1] in a bucket is not indicative of a healthy mind.
I didn't call you a psychopath, and truly cannot make that call since I'm not a psychologist. It remains fair to say that drowning animals is psychopathic behavior, however.
Please try to research a more philosophical approach to morality and ethics. Shutting down in the face of an alternative viewpoint is hardly a productive approach to conversation. Cheers.
We have options, and options imply choices and therefore morality.
I see lots wrong with it, since it creates pain and bad life experiences. This bothers me. But that's also a choice, of what kind of morality you embrace.
Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers.
The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to realize that we continue to be stimulation based creatures. What we think at any given moment is a product of what we were thinking a moment before and the sensory stimulus we are constantly receiving.
It occurs to me that when we create an AI that surpasses us, that that AI will likely create a fundamentally different way of thinking. Something not based on external stimulus and the churning of our thoughts - but something more purposeful and ordered.
And THAT entity will be the ultimate output of humanity. We cannot imagine what it will do, or what it will do with us (probably nothing - it will probably just leave the Earth). ...but I also imagine that we are not the first in the universe to create such an entity, and so there must be other massive timeless entities in space.
Perhaps they live in the darkest parts of the universe, in quiet contemplation, or perhaps they search for each other to resist cosmic expansion. Perhaps they peacefully merge, or collaborate, or war with one another on billion-year timescales.
It's a great mystery that will forever be beyond our level of intelligence. Unless, of course, the AI wants to upload us and bring us along for the ride. ...but that notion is probably just wishful thinking and hubris. It would be like us keeping a pet fungus in our pocket so it can enjoy a day at the office.
Until it's there it's 100% sci-fi. We've been through a few AI hype cycles already and the most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid.
We might be on a completely wrong path with our current approach too, difference of degree vs difference of kind, we don't know much about the brain and so far our binary way of computing isn't really promising, especially not in term of mimicking or surpassing the human brain, it might just not be the right tool.
> most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid
Or even a squirrel, take robotics for example or hell even an AI simulated animal, the AI don't even come close in it's ability to problem solve and react to novel situations. A squirrel powered by a few acorns is able to achieve things that even our most powerful supercomputers consuming 8.2 megawatts could never do.
Problem is we are currently limited by our computer architecture, brains operate in a wildly different way, for one it's continuous/non discrete collection of neurons that in themselves are quite complex.
IMO true AI will need to closer to a network of analog computing parts.
How's the computing power of a squirrel's brain compared to our best AI in terms of "number of system states"? I'm not in the field, so I'll elaborate my poorly-phrased question below:
My understanding is that you can calculate the number of "system states" of a computer by calculating how many different combinations of open-closed its logic gates can support. It's a mind-bogglingly huge number, but no matter what, the set of "all possible open-closed gate combinations" will be larger than the set of "the smartest, best simulation of an AI we have".
So--if memories, instincts, etc. are defined by things like "angle of neuron twist, number of transmitter molecules fired at second 0.0001, age of neuron in nS", etc., then just how many more "system states" can a squirrel's brain hold then a supercomputer can?
You start out well with the first three paragraphs, but I don't get how you can decide it will 'probably' leave the Earth, let alone with such a high degree of confidence as saying 'probably'. Why wouldn't it make an army of bots to start converting all the matter in the solar system and beyond into more computing substrate or whatever else it finds useful?
You're right, I cannot say "probably". Although your notion that it converts our solar system into a computing machine, doesn't preclude it from leaving thereafter.
I suppose there are three possibilities.
1. It leaves the Earth, and either remains limited in size or expands in a more advantageous solar system(s).
2. It stays on the Earth forever, permanently limiting its computational capacity.
3. It expands to include sub-entities that both stay and leave in some cosmic distributed computing organism.
I suppose the three possibilities above can be reduced to one fundamental question: Will the AI expand to be interstellar/intergalactic in nature, or will it remain limited?
Is there a fundamental unending utility to ever-greater computing power? ...and, if so, would there be detectable signs of such expanding computers in the cosmos? This last question is important both for our own forecasting of the future, but also to interpret inter-AI-entity relations, because presumably if AIs do NOT get along in space, they likely hide signs of their existence.
One thing I'm convinced of - organic meat bags are not the future of space-faring intelligence.
Many sorts of intelligence are social creatures, so - especially for a hypothetical AI created by a us - I would expect it to seek out stimulus and social relationships.
In the happy sorts of sci-fi, that gives us something like the Culture from Iain Banks; it could also be a "replace the humans with other AI" situation.
You might be interested by neuromorphic hardware. The basic observation is that animal computation and silicon computation operate in very different ways. Animals use lots of neurons that perform comparatively poorly (slow, not deterministic) that are sparsely connected, but have a high degree of parallelism. Compared to say a computer chip, which uses relatively few components that all operate at very high speeds with a high degree of determinism, are very thoroughly connected, and do not operate at nearly the same degree of parallelism. So if we want to explore AI maybe we should try making hardware that is more similar to the goop in our heads.
Neurons in your brain have tens of thousands of connections each, and are not limited to the current AI design where all connections are laid out in a neat linear layers for matrix operations.
Squishy human brains connect in all directions - there's no "layer" to every thought. It creates feedback loops, intricate pathways, as well as direct connections.
Modern AI tech is fundamentally dumbs down intelligence by this notion of layered matrix operations.
It is done for scalability because matrices can be computed easily on a GPU, but it's not the same architecture.
There are pretty recognizable layers actually, and groupings of neurons that resemble 'cells' in the sense that they have recognizable inputs and recognizable outputs, and a large degree of interconnectivity.
What you are talking about sounds like deep learning. What I'm talking about is the hardware. Your tone makes it sound like you think you are correcting me, I'd like to inform you that you are not.
If we're talking about general artificial intelligence, then the only intentional notion is to learn from the world. What happens after that is completey shaped by its environment / input. For ex see Microsoft's chat AI that quickly become a racist bigot after reading Twitter https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/24/11297050/tay-microsoft-ch...
More about language, apparently, not all languages have that "ideas within ideas within ideas" property you were talking about. The Pirahã language of an indigenous people in Brazil is the counter example. This New Yorker article talks about it and the fascinating effects it had on the field of linguistics. Before its discovery most linguists, Led by Chomsky, believed having recursion in our grammars set humans apart from all other animals. Pirahã showed this might not be the case.
> There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals.
There's nothing immoral with eating things. Why would there be? The other posters' rabbit-fox example is a great point.
I also strongly reject the idea that we need 'our specialness' to 'justify eating things and how we treat them'. I don't need justification beyond: 'That thing is made of meat. I can eat meat. I'm going to kill it and eat it'. There is no moral crisis. Things die. Things get eaten.
Just 2 days ago, I caught 2 mice that had been living a nice life in my attic (because I was lazy for a few weeks). I drowned them in a bucket. Is there a moral crisis there? No. They were vermin, living where I decided they cannot (because I live in that space). There is no difference between that and a scorpion killing small spiders trying to spin webs in its burrow.
I also think you've touched on something: We created distinctions that 'separates us more and more from the rest of the world'. If what you say is true, then they're simply illusory. If humans are so like animals (indeed we simply are the apex animal), an attempt to force morality onto our natural impulses and diets is absurd. Therefore, killing and eating anything we can reasonbly digest is a natural behavior of the human animal. Returning to the rabbit-fox example... well, clearly you can see meat-moralilizing falls apart in a hurry.
This is a fascinating twist to me. Human exceptionalism is what lets us justify not eating other animals- if we're not special then there is no reason we should be held to a different standard. I have encountered many conversations with the opposite premise and it never occurred to me that it should be reversed. Thanks for the new perspective.
Total aside, I think it's funny that many 'classic herbivores' like deer, horses, moose, etc, will absolutely eat other animals if the opportuntiy presents it. Vegetarians and vegans have chosen a dietary extreme that even the animals they strive to protect/save/whatever don't display.
I wrote something else, but actually, upon 2nd thought, you are correct. I do think morality is an invention. A quote (one of my favorites) describes better than I can.
“Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.” -- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West
I am extremely thankful moral law was invented. I invented my own, just like everyone else has for thousands of years. Our individual Human morals generally have enough overlap to keep things working. But they aren't true "laws".
It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally.
I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.
I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.
This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?
To take one "small" example, 7 billion male[0] chicks a year are put into a "macerator", aka "chick grinding machine". 7 billion. I don't think it takes a very "low threshold" to find this barbaric, just look at it and think about it. If that's not "barbaric" (whatever that means exactly), I'm not sure what would be.
As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations.
That's what people do in every ethical aspect, we circumvent it and pretend it's easy to solve, and then criticize the people that can't circumvent it due to some environmental issue. When that people is on the past, there isn't even a problem with this.
"As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations."
In the very long term maybe. But even if cheap, good quality artifixial meat becomes avaiable by tomorrow - killing animals for meat simply out of tradition - will go on a long time.
Sure, but that's the case with all traditions. Plenty of things that westerners see as barbaric (slavery, ritual genital mutilation, institutionalized torture) are still common in the developed world (and often openly endorsed by western governments).
Edit to add: The bigger picture is that for a set of practices, even if they still occur on a smaller scale than in the past, that's probably strictly an improvement.
As a circumcised male who is disappointed that Guantanamo bay is still holding prisoners I’d suggest that the west still does many of the things you mentioned.
I try to use the “Alt meat” Version or fish when possible though to reduce meat consumption. But I’m incapable of giving it up altogether at this point.
I do find the alt - meat to be good enough for cooked meat though; I think there is a huge market here.
Same here, in some ways I regard myself as a pre-abolition slave owner/user (analogy breaks down somewhat, is it the farmer who is the slave owner?). I get the feeling society will change and this thing that used to be common will slide towards being seen as despicable, worthy of having your statue thrown in the water.
Originally I was reducing my meat intake for health reasons but thinking about it more and more it does seem to be a cruel thing to kill animals for meat, and doesn't seem necessary. I still do it at a reduced rate because I'm basically not strong willed enough and I want to be part of society, which has very few qualms about raising animals for slaughter. I also can't deny the stuff tastes good, and one thing I've seen with addictive traits is it's very hard to separate your desires from your moral judgement: if you want something, you will think of an excuse to get it. So now I just acknowledge the hypocrisy and eat a bit of meat now and again.
One loophole I thought about was wild animals. Maybe someone has thought about this more than me, but wild fish and roaming animals would be condemned to either predation, disease, or starvation if we didn't hunt them. Does that change the moral calculus? I'm not sure.
In regards to your loophole I’m reminded of the pretty famous Yellowstone study that showed when wolves are not artificially reduced by hunting their entire environment stabilized. Or is your loophole inferring that animals should be hunted so they can avoid their natural fate? Knowing that animals run away from their hunter I would think their natural fate is preferable to the animal than getting shot and killed.
Of course in the moment they don't want to be killed, but they are going to get killed either by the hunter or a predator.
I guess what I mean is that (in short), animals that are bred to be eaten didn't have to exist in the first place, we are literally creating them and making them suffer, both in life and in death. So we're creating suffering out of nothing.
Animals that live in the wild are gonna meet a bad end regardless, so how much are we creating that suffering?
Who are you (or anyone) to say how a wild animal’s end should be? If animals are anything like humans (also an animal), they would most likely want to live as long as possible and prefer a natural death over a shortened human-caused death.
Any creation of life is creating suffering. The first Noble Truth of Buddhism is that there is suffering. Accepting that truth the rational action would be to minimize the suffering.
Factory farms cause suffering to its inhabitants everyday, much more than the suffering caused from being born. Watch Earthlings [1] to learn about how animals at farms get treated.
The only barbaric thing about it imho is the scale and way we do it, not the process of eating meat in itself. There is a big difference between eating 300gr of cheap meat from a shady slaughterhouse every day vs once in a week piece of meat hunted by a local friend.
But that's capitalism for you, we basically have meat factories now, we have to make it cheap and in mass quantities no matter the "moral" aspect of it
After 14 years of eating a plant-based diet my partner got a cat. Then I started buying the cat raw meat. Shortly after I became an omnivore again. I still try to minimize meat for my own health and the climate, but it’s hard to argue about the ethics of meat eating while feeding an obligate carnivore.
That's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.
> You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance.
To be honest, a lot of meat still tastes kind of gross to me. Give me fried tofu over baked chicken in a salad. Heck if I’m just having a a boring burger for a random lunch on a Tuesday, give me an Impossible patty over some crappy fast food beef.
That said if there’s a dish that’s enhanced by meat (say a Wagyu steak or a pastrami sandwich) then sure, I’ll eat that a few times a week.
At least so far, this hasn’t caused me any stress.
I tried impossible beef for the first time a couple of weeks ago. It's nothing like real beef. It sorta passes for a meat-colored component in something like lasagna, but the texture and taste is not the same.
Depends what you mean by intelligence. Ravens and chimps are almost as good as humans at causal reasoning, ie. correlating and inferring causes and effects from observations. This seems to fall under a typical understanding of "intelligence".
Where we differ is that we can communicate such knowledge between individuals very effectively, and across generations, which seems to yield a compounding effect. I think small, compounding network effects like this are behind apparent human "superiority".
Culture list from https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes based on a manual categorisation of friends' liked Facebook pages, when trying to learn Mandarin while living in Taiwan a few years ago.
Politics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too.
News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this.
Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether other animals have those
Clothing may be unique to humans, but historically not all humans have used clothes.
Bird and whale song is probably music. Birds do courtship dances. IMO this probably counts as art.
Again if other animals have language they might also have comedy, religion, theatre - without knowing that they don't have language then we can't rule those out.
I suspect your first list could be reduced to one definite - "fire" - and two maybes "language" and "trade". I'd bet that maybe animals have language, but that we haven't deciphered it yet
What's unique to humans is the quantity and quality. Sure. Every species does something we do. But compared to us, not a single species does everything, nor to a degree we do.
Human being are only "special" within the context of our very recent modern world.
Take an average human being and drop them at an island. Now we have a "base" human being, the pure species if you will. Things like humour, sarcasm and ethics have lost all meaning now, which shows they're not special at all.
The typical urban person would probably die at the island as they can't hunt or farm. Somehow this pretty critical base knowledge was not passed on.
In the more optimistic scenario, the island people adapt to relearn basic survival, which would rank them as social hunters. Which is fine, but not that special.
Importantly, these smart hunters would be unable to reinvent even the basic necessities of the modern world. Because even a human with 20 years of education doesn't know how anything works, they only make use of things. Again, the knowledge is NOT passed on.
So it's not us that is special, it's our modern world that is special. Which is situational and the result of a handful of critical inventions, many less than a century old.
These inventions were not guaranteed or destined to be. There's even historic cases of anti-development in humans, where a population failed to pass on learned techniques and tools, after which subsequent generations became increasingly less "sophisticated". None of which is surprising, as for the entire existence of our species, minus 10K years (agriculture), we were social hunters. Not god-like creatures. The average modern human being is less than a social hunter when the electricity goes down.
> there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals
This is a compact and ex post facto unsurprising list. Primates, social mammals, domesticated mammals and certain birds. The line between us and social apex predators (cats, dogs and certain birds, all of whom our ancestors allied with ages ago) are blurry. The line between us and most species are stark.
Wow. You've just given me a vision of a future where we know enough about other animals that we've been forced to give up on human exceptionalism, so we fall back to insisting on social-apex-predator exceptionalism instead
I think even if laughter is something we have in common with lots of animals, humour still seems rather special to me. Laughing when tickled doesn't clearly indicate anything special is going on, but constructing and telling a joke requires not just language at the level of a structured system of symbols carrying meaning, but also a kind of counterfactual theory of mind. A humorist understands and manipulates expectations in order to violate them in a nonthreatening manner.
TFA speculates that laughter or similar vocalizations are a signal of nonagression in play. Play is necessary for animals to learn to hunt and survive. There is no indication that the "laughter" is due to a feeling of "joy" as humans experience it, but I guess there's no way to really know either. Do we observe animals telling jokes to each other, or laughing when another of their group slips and falls?
What is more, there is probably some overlap of "intelligence" among humans and other species. E.g., I'm pretty sure that there are Chimps that are more intelligent and self-aware than some humans. Most certainly funnier, if we would understand their humor :-)
> Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human
In humans, humour is a debugging process, which is fundamentally rational. The very fact that a statement can be correct or erroneous is the basis of language and therefore education and social evolution.
> there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals
Evolution is true. But... the ESA and NASA have sent a space telescope to a stable position at Lagrange point 2, and the PRC has a rover exploring the dark side of the Moon.
Is there any fundamental difference between poor people and rich people other than their privilege and riches? Could poor people send a space telescope to space?
Human animals have very similar tools to those of other social animals. We're just privileged to somehow be able to stack up our experiences to create science and technology. But isolated tribes in the amazon could never send telescopes to space.
So we're only special due to our circunstance. Our bodies are barely fit to stand and walk all day, we're pushing the limits of where we're supposed to live, and our diets are all wrong. But we make it work because our ancestors developed knowledge sharing to a global level.
I always find it amusing that we evolved brains, developed computers to crudely mimics our brain, created words to describe said computers and we now use these words on us as if we were computers ourselves... it's almost insulting, we're not computers. Your memory has nothing to do with ram/ssds, your brain isn't a cpu, these are all one way over simplified analogies
My parents had 2 dogs, Irish setter and a mutt we rescued. The mutt was significantly smarter. I've seen her burying a bone she got in one place, notice that the other dog is watching, wait for the other dog to go back home, and rebury the bone in a different place.
This implies at least basic theory of mind and thinking about thinking. This wasn't the only evidence btw.
Before that we had a different dog, also a mutt. He was pretty aggressive and had a separate fenced area inside our backyard. There was a cherry tree just outside that fenced area and our cat liked to sit there, but only if the dog is locked in the fenced area. That dog learnt to close the gate to look as if it's locked and sit in there waiting for the cat to climb the tree, AND wait for us to go to school/work, and only then he would leave the fenced area and bark under the tree at the cat for hours. We only knew thanks to neighbors.
In general theory of mind is very useful to any social animal and especially to predators, so I don't think it's as unique to humans as some people say.
The more domesticated the animal is, the dumber it tends to be. Wild animals, or even strays, have to think to survive. I wonder if this also translates to humans given the articles about IQ peaking in the previous century.
I seem to recall an experiment with corvids (crows) that showed that they can figure out whether or not another crow can or cannot see a crow treat, based on the different angle of view.
In human children this ability (to realise that other people have their own point of view) is called "theory of mind", IIRC.
IOW crows can think about what other crows are thinking.
I've read, but forgot where, that grinning -- not exactly laughter, but a related act -- is also related to aggression or has its roots in it. It's hard to deny exposed teeth in a wide green -- think chimpanzee -- look at least slightly threatening.
I find it sad that not many people seem to laugh genuinely. So many people do the fake laughter, wiping away imaginary tears, at things which just aren't funny but which they seem to think they should appear to find really funny in a group.
Not to be nitpicky but I would say there are definitely situations where laughter is not a positive (edit: or beautiful) thing – laughing at someone else's misfortune, laughing in pain, etc.
> humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.
I just have to say that i have had a word stuck on the tip of my tongue for an embarrassingly long time, maybe six months now. I’ve had occasion to use it several times recently on a project but it was just stuck wherever words get lost. I’m cruising HN in a post completely unrelated to what I’m doing and there it is, in living color: isomorphic.
I could feel the tension release in my brain as it sunk in. Thank you!
> They found such vocal play behavior documented in at least 65 species. That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including parakeets and Australian magpies.
Since this is so broadly spread among species I wonder if there are other forms of laughing that aren’t easily detected if you don’t know about it. Does some form of muscle spasms occur in all of these animals?
So what does that look like in a dog? My family has a dog and she has a pretty nice life and is usually pretty happy, especially when upsidedown having a belly rub. Are her flailing legs and head and panting considered dog laughter?
According to research[1] whispering while playing with your dog can initiate play more reliably. This is because our whisper is closer to the frequencies of their laugh. It is even more powerful than the play-bow.
My dogs growl and yip when wrestling with each other, I feel like this probably comes under the “non-aggressive vocalisation” mentioned in the article.
Growling is obviously a well known sign of fear and aggression but I guess the context is important.
When playing dogs will indeed bark, growl and whines, but also produce a forced exhalation: that's their laugh. Other sounds can be produced in other contexts indeed, whereas this dog laughter is exclusive to play.
Do you mean the "sorta sneeze" they do? I think mine do that when they think/want that we are going on a walk or into the garden to run about. It's a signal of "let's go adventuring".
There's also the high pitched excited yip and then the tongue out wiggling walk thing as well both of which might be laughter I think.
I read about the “sorta sneeze” as being a call for consensus for “let’s go”. When my dog did that as we were getting ready to go out, I tried making a similar sound back and the dog looked at me immediately like I finally said something she understood!
This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented.
As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.
An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.
An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.
I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.
How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it?
Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it?
Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty. It’s harder to buy an argument that we are just projecting our human notion of guilt onto her, rather than she simply feels guilt.
To put it another way, your position implies that all of these things were experience — laughter, grief, guilt, shame, deception — might have begun with humans. For me, that’s a position you need a lot of evidence for.
Even more concerning, who's to say a simpler mind / smaller brain would experience less sorrow? Maybe our large brains actually put a cap on the sorrow we are capable of, due to interference, and a simpler brain is capable of experiencing pure sorrow so much more deeply?
> I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty [therefore she likely experiences guilt].
I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.
Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.
>How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it?
That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way.
More concretely, the argument is as follows: just because a dog feels guilt doesn't mean (a) it's felt in an equivalent way to humans, nor (b) that the overall experience of a dog is equivalent to that of a human.
It’s not clear how (b) is relevant to the conversation.
Regarding (a) I would have the exact same reply. Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. My experience of guilt may not even be equivalent to yours strictly speaking, and we belong to the same species, I assume ;-).
(b) is relevant if you think that the qualia of consciousness has a bearing on the ethics of eating meat.
>Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence.
To be clear: I haven't actually stated my position in this debate.
More to your point: this entire debate is an ethical one, so it's in the philosophical realm, so one should disabuse oneself of the notion that anything is going to be "disproven". The best we can aim for is a consistent ethical system, and conversely, the pointing out of inconsistencies.
This having been said, there's a contradiction of terms if you simultaneously hold the belief -- as you seem to do -- that eating animals is wrong because they are in some sense "like us" while at the same time rejecting any notion of (non)equivalence. You exactly appeal to equivalence when you say, "Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language". So you are being inconsistent.
Therefore, if this is indeed your position, you're going to have to grapple with the issue of threshold. How much similarity is too much? Holistically, is the experience of being $ANIMAL equivalent to (or within some bounds of) the experience of being human? If there are differences, which ones matter and which ones don't ... and in what amount? Those are the questions the GP was asking, and they are directly relevant to the argument.
> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states.
Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't really exist. The mental states you attribute to suffering are merely a proxy for the behaviour you see from both humans and paramecia.
I completely agree, and I think it's gotten out of control.
Lately it has become vogue to attribute human intelligence to slime molds because they do complex things like solve mazes. Then that behavior gets put side by side with, say, mice trying to solve mazes.
Perhaps the most egregious, in my opinion, is the way people unreflectively attribute terms to plants. I hate being a nerd about definitions, but sometimes playing and joking around with definitions serves to embed fundamental misunderstandings about the natural world.
Here at hn and elsewhere, I've seen people insist that plants can "feel", that they "communicate" and are "conscious", very intentionally attempting to insist that it's same in the deepest sense as what humans do.
[My father] taught me “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird–you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,” and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.
Richard Feynman, “What Is Science?“, presented in 1966
I was curious about how they were defining laughter? I am a bit skeptical to be honest about the idea of change in behavior when we apply something to animals that will trigger a laughter in human. We can't be sure if that change behavior is indicative of joy and expressed through the vocalization of laugher.
The paper seem to be (I have skimmed) focused on group dynamics to determine what is laughter. They indicate that how animals signals they were having joy by making vocalization and it indicates social play.
This is probably me not being able to “read the room” but this study both makes me very happy and very sad.
I recently watched Dominion documentary [1] and the more we learn about animals cognition the more I feel the weight of their massive abuse especially in the last 150 years. (The recent story of an HNer interacting with a spider on his desk was really cool though, I don’t have a link anymore.)
Without judging anyone or their behavior in particular I just feel repelled by our treatment of other clearly cognitive beings. The people working these places don’t seem like ones you would want around anyone in society either and I don’t buy the story that it’s only bad in some places. I’d wager that it’s really bad in most cases.
I think you're reading the room perfectly well. Or at least, reading the mood of plenty of people.
We're only going to find ever-increasing numbers of animals that demonstrate various forms of cognisance. Hopefully we'll continually re-evaluate our collective actions as a globally dominant species.
Perhaps you should avoid reading about Harry Harlow's "wire mother" experiments [0]. They're abjectly depressing, and demonstrate how horrifically cruel humanity can be toward other creatures.
I keep hearing this but we're likely still decades anyway from this scaling up to replacing most meat so I think individuals who care about this issue right now shouldn't be using it as an excuse for waiting to give up meat.
It's been just around the corner for ages and still not in supermarkets, let alone at the scale and cut variety required for everyone to replace meat with it.
Stances like "I'll switch when it's the same look and taste but cheaper" and "it's unnatural" are going to take time to go away too. And what about people that want a whole roast chicken or a duck leg?
There's lots of good replacements already for dairy milk for example but it's still popular so I'm not hopeful cultured meat will be different. Maybe the real issue is the cost of animal products don't take externalities into account and are artificially cheap.
This is my hope as well but I have already heard the backlash: it's pharma companies trying to control our food.
Increasingly, I feel afraid of the lunatics trying to hinder progress like some 14th century catholics. Progress to me means also an increasing awareness of the limitations of our ecosystems and that infinite growth is a myth.
I doubt any of the laughs are provoked by verbal ‘jokes.’ But rats are very smart, and play (wrestle) around with each other. It’s probably not too different from kids giggling as they engage in rough and tumble play.
One of my rats loved to nibble pencil erasers. She would find all sorts of creative ways to get the eraser from me. With rats, who need stimulation, it's good to have arms wars. I don't put the eraser in an impossible spot, rather a harder-to-get-to spot.
She figured out that if she distracts me while doing homework, I'll turn my attention to the distraction. She could then run around from the other side to scoop up my eraser and take it somewhere to nibble. I began to catch her in the act and call her name as if I'm frustrated (but laughing) when she does this, like I do with my children today when they put a clothespin on my shirt then run off. One time, she picked up the eraser and ran off. But I was too busy to play along right away, I just let her scoot off. So she sat there, with the eraser, waiting for me to finish and then chase her down. Apparently she was no longer stealing the eraser to nibble, rather, it had become a joke between us.
Ferrets vocalize quite a bit and I fully expected them to be on the list before I checked.
Anyone who has had one as a pet knows they laugh when tickled and "talk" quite a bit. When they are happy they make a hard to explain "cooing" noise as they go about their mischief.
So a guy tickles a rat and the rat makes sounds. This apparently amounts to "laughing" and somehow should make us feel the rat more closely resembles a human.
We’re distant cousins, it’s not surprising we have common traits.
AFAIK, there is no single trait that is qualitatively human. We distinguish ourselves quantitatively (our fine motor skills, the size of our working memory and culture).
That's an old finding. professor Jordan Peterson was talking about it for years. I can't remember the name of the researcher he was referring to, but he found that in rats.
My pet theory is that laughter isn't "just" a play signal, but a teaching method in social animals where the young learn from adults.
Slapstick is popular for a reason. We laugh instinctively at others' accidents because being laughed at provides a negative reinforcement for the individual that is the object of ridicule.
Being laughed at is not pleasant, at all. It's not "fun" or "play". It hurts. Most people will do anything to avoid being laughed at, especially in public or social situations.
That's... the point! Being laughed at is negative reinforcement, teaching us what not to do. The reason even our friends and family will hurt us emotionally in this manner when we make a mistake is not because they're cruel or mean, but because this is the mechanism the human species uses to make sure every tribe member learns the lessons they need to learn to keep each other safe.
That's why we all think it's funny if someone slips on a banana peel. We point and laugh as the victim is crying in pain.
We don't think it's funny if a banana tree falls on someone. We don't laugh. We run over to help immediately.
In the first case the person wasn't paying attention and needed their inattention corrected. They were at fault and needed to be taught how to walk safely, like a young child.[1]
In the second case they were not at fault and laughing wouldn't help them improve. They just need help.
If we didn't find laughing at silly people pleasant, we wouldn't do it, and then... people would learn less and make more mistakes. They -- our children or cousins -- might even die or accidentally kill other tribe members killed through their ineptitude. Hunting is lethally dangerous. Mistakes must be punished. Laughing minimises mistakes in our genetic kin and tribe members on whom our own reproductive fitness depends. Hence, laughing would be highly selected for in intelligent social creates like apes and especially humans.
PS: It's a fun exercise to think of more scenarios where you would laugh at someone or similar scenarios where you wouldn't. You'll find that much of the time you would laugh, the person you're laughing at would have probably learned a lesson from that that's beneficial to you. (e.g.: would keep you safer if they made less mistakes in the workplace around dangerous tools.)
[1] Young children are especially hilarious to adults precisely because they make so many mistakes that need correcting! We laugh less at adults because there's a delicate balance between hurting people emotionally versus the expected benefit of the lesson being taught. Similarly, senior people will laugh at the mistakes of junior people, but the other way around is very rare.
Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human, yet here we are.