[mikeash]

It's because insects have such a primitive nervous system that we don't see them as being aware in the same way that a dog is.

You draw the line somewhere, right? Drawing the line at a certain complexity of the nervous system is more sensible than drawing it at "animals" in general, IMO.

[Falling3]

Err on the side of caution. Draw the line as far as practically possible. We have a long history of underestimating the mental abilities of other animals. Heck, now we've got evidence of ants passing the mirror test.

[mikeash]

Do you breathe through a filter and sweep the ground in front of you like the Jains?

[dTal]

>as far as practically possible

There's a big difference in effort, and not much difference in outcome, between doing as the Jains do and simply endeavouring not to kill things on purpose.

[mikeash]

I don't see what's impractical about breathing through a filter and sweeping the ground. Inconvenient, to be sure, but that's far from the same thing.

I mean, I wouldn't do it, but it seems to me that if you're advocating "as far as practically possible" then it would include that.

[matz1]

I draw the line at Human and Not Human.

[mirimir]

Well, that is the biological norm.

And better than friend vs stranger ;)

[PerfectElement]

Any objective justification for that or just your own bias?

[labdsf]

Just as mirimir said, it is biological norm to draw line between your own kind and everyone else. For example, both dogs and cats don't kill each other, but dog can easily kill a cat.

[giggles_giggles]

Chimps form tribes and go to war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

[b6]

Both dogs and cats do kill each other. It is not uncommon at all.

[3131s]

Yep, cats fight brutally all the time. My wife's old cat was a fighter and had the scars to prove it. No doubt he had killed many cats, and then he eventually succumbed to an infection from a nasty neck wound acquired in a fight.

[0xFFC]

Ha ha ha, he was quite champion

[matz1]

Just because I'm human.

[TuringTest]

Are you a mammal?

[frostymarvelous]

Especially if we're adrift and starving. In that situation, the more complex the nervous system, the better.

[darth_mastah]

Why limit yourself? Draw the line between you and not-you. Such fun.

[Eleopteryx]

>You draw the line somewhere, right

Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science". Perhaps my consciousness is so dim relative to theirs that it would be analogous to me squashing a bug. I hope that their methods are advanced enough that they don't need to.

[freeflight]

>Yeah, I just have to worry about higher beings justifying the termination of my primitive nervous system "for science".

They might as well just terminate your primitive nervous system for their own nutritional needs or out of mere hunting instinct. Plenty of animals do this all the time, nature isn't romantic idealistic, it's ruthless and unforgiving.

[Godel_unicode]

Or alternatively, beautifully efficient.

[kwhitefoot]

Efficient at what? Efficiency is always relative to a particular goal, what did you have in mind?

[greggyb]

Propagation of a species.

[mirimir]

Eating other species does have selective advantages.

[balthamael]

Any consciousness vastly superior to ours would be so complex that we wouldn't even be aware of it. So it wouldn't matter what it would do to us. It's the same with most animals. We might as well be gods to them. An ant lives in a completely different reality. The whole concept of "animal rights" is based on the flawed notion of trying to equate our reality to that of completely different beings. Something that is unable to even understand the concept of rights is incapable of having them, or morals, to begin with. Rights are not given, they are taken. There is a reason why humans rule Earth and not gerbils. Rights or morals didn't exist until we invented them. There is no objective spiritual truth out there.

Consciousness requires a critical mass of brain power. A wolf is relatively intelligent but not conscious, they are biological machines that only think about killing and mating and they have been doing that, without change for hundreds of thousands of years. And if the environment doesn't change then they will continue being identical for hundreds of thousands of years more. Trying to give animals human properties is really very foolish. It's like trying to do that with computers, just because they can give us illusions of intelligence and consciousness, but because computers don't have cute faces and cuddly bodies nobody thinks about it. Evolution really is very efficient but brutally so. Only reason why humans have things like compassion is because it has been evolutionarily advantageous to us. A single human is really quite weak and underpowered, we need to cooperate, it's the key to our progress. It is also why we think babies are cute and why we are instinctively protective of them and why sex feels good. There really is no deeper meaning behind any of it. If we had evolved from tigers then the world would look very (brutally)different, because tigers are solitary and territorial animals that have absolutely no use for things like compassion, empathy or cooperativeness. We wouldn't think twice about killing anything if it suited us, not even other tigers and it would be completely normal to us. If some hairless ape came to us on his high horse and started preaching about morals and rights then we would think that he was crazy, and then we would eat him.

[frostymarvelous]

The fact that I just erased my comment out of fear that it would be misunderstood and downvoted to hell scares me.

[monocasa]

I mean, ants have passed the mirror test.