[skosch]

Self-aware consciousness is a pretty high bar, but how about the ability to experience suffering? The ability to experience reward? That question very quickly turns into "what is experience", or rather, "what isn't experience".

I don't find any of this intuitive, nor do I have answers to the ethical questions that follow (besides not eating animals, which I already don't). But I find it revealing how most people will fight tooth and nail to maintain that there is some magical threshold separating dead matter from precious, conscious life, without having given the topic much thought at all.

[pas]

The really nasty question is, do animals have a(n intuitive or other) concept of the future, and/or of causality? Do they feel dread? And when they experience suffering, can they know what does that mean to them?

Elephants might ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_cognition#Death_ritua... ).

Of course, life in the wild is not pretty. Not many of the wild animals are apex predators in their respective territory, and thus their deaths are usually not peaceful, and being hunted, having close calls with death almost daily is a very integral part of their life, so they probably have an evolved way to deal with the psychological burden of this.

And that's probably what domestication changed.

[skosch]

> so they probably have an evolved way to deal with the psychological burden of this.

I like that idea, but I don't understand how natural selection would favour animals that are less stressed about predators. Are you implying that the gazelle actually enjoys the thrill as it is running away from the lion?

[pas]

No, I most certainly not implying it enjoys it, but if something is not useful for survival and procreation, then that gets pruned out eventually. If there's enough selection pressure.

If dread, stress, trauma, shock, etc. leads to worse survival outcomes than a more calm basic set-point, then that's likely to emerge.

For example animals that form herds stick to the herd even if their family member is isolated from it by predators. Because they gain nothing by trying to somehow save the isolated member. (Because that would probably lead to more of them getting mauled to death.)

Sure, these animals are pretty defensive, but after a point they let it go. Do they suffer from it? Yeah, sure, they have very similar stress response, but they rarely (to my knowledge) are traumatized by these encounters. (Because they probably don't ponder, they don't think about what that encounter meant. It meant nothing for them, it's just life in the wild.)

For example Sapolsky spent years observing baboons and took a lot of blood samples, and measured cortisol levels. And those animals lead a very stressful life. ( https://news.stanford.edu/news/2007/march7/sapolskysr-030707... ) But humans and primates are the exception probably. And probably the more cognition one can do the more things one can worry about.

[selune]

Orangutans are capable of planning their routes in advance. [1] I guess that does indicate some concept of future, albeit not a far one?

[1] https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/orangutans-pl...

[incadenza]

Yeah, it is pretty remarkable. I consider it non controversial at this point that many of humans favorite meals are certainly capable of a lot of suffering.

[pas]

I think that was never a real question. Lobsters might or might not feel pain, okay, but bovines and other mammals certainly do. And birds are (can be) pretty intelligent (eg parrots).

So that's why they are supposed to be kept, raised and slaughtered in relatively humane conditions. (Eg. free range, and painless death.)