[3cats-in-a-coat]

You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume? Quite a funny take, because there's literally no other option.

The reason a power plant, or factory, or any machine at all doesn't "eat" what it's made of is because human engineers are the digestion enzymes and protein factories. We digest raw materials (amino acids) into parts (proteins) based on plans and schematics (DNA), and then we put them into the machines.

This is what your body does by itself. It's a factory that keeps building and rebuilding itself. That's in fact the only viable option for a resilient system. Think what's better, having kidneys, or needing dialysis? Self-sufficiency is always better for resilience and flexibility. Which... again, any intelligent species would know.

The purpose of this story is to jolt us out of the status quo and see things from another perspective. A species having advanced culture doesn't mean they have no biases and prejudices based on their preconceived notions.

We also fancy ourselves intelligent, but we have zero regard for "lower" lifeforms. In fact, we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends such as:

    1. If someone abuses a pet dog or cat, we may put them in jail.

    2. At the same time we abuse, kill and eat farm animals on a vast scale. Pigs are no less intelligent that a dog or a cat.

    3. Yet if someone has a pet pig, we may call law enforcement on them for animal abuse, even if they take good care of their pig.

Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we are.

[wavesbelow]

> Those three don't belong together in any way. Yet here we are.

The difference here is degree of humanization of an animal. Recent Andrew Huberman podcast with a former FBI hostage negotiator[1] touched upon the topic.

In animal research labs, the researchers are disallowed to name the animal subjects, only to assign numbers or codes.

In a hostage situation, simply letting your captor know your name increases the chances of your survival. Conversely, having your face covered reduces the chances.

Humanization and dehumanization of things, living beings, other humans and ourselves is something that we generally tend to do. A lot of cruelty in the world can be traced to this observation.

1. https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGh...

[pixl97]

>You think an advanced species would be surprised that we're made of what we consume?

The problem with advanced species we we have a sample size of one.

The problem with this sample size is it gives us no idea on the probabilities of intelligence looking anything like we think it does. In fact there is a non-zero probability that any intelligences we meet that cross space will have nothing to do with the host intelligences that created them. At least with our current knowledge of physics we don't see any way that digital 'life' could bootstrap itself. But currently us carbon based lifeforms are furiously cranking away at making thinking rocks that are built in factories. The fact that humans have a 4 billion long uninterrupted chain of molecular factories has nothing to do with other forms of life needing that at all.

Of course, if an AI kills another AI embodied AI is that much different from us killing a human and eating them?

[3cats-in-a-coat]

Our sample size is way more than one actually, maybe if we just abandon the superficial concept of "advanced". For example the way insects organize in a colony and your cells organize in a body and humans organize in society is identical bar some circumstantial distinctions. When a principle comes about, reinvented independently so many times, we as intelligent beings need to realize "hey maybe that simply what it's like in general".

Most of what we are is actually none of our doing. Most of our discoveries are incidental (including in medicine, we don't know how many of our drugs work for example), and we're clearly unprepared to live in the world we ourselves created, hunched over keyboards in claustrophobic offices or locked up at home.

We're not an advanced species, our society is in-between a "colony" and "multicellular organism" and more and more of our advancements are created by computers for computers. We don't understand a lot of how an AI works, it trained itself, we just did back propagation and observed the prediction error get smaller over time.

Similarly today CPUs are designed by software written on the previous CPUs, machines are engineered on machines, and so on. The digital civilization is bootstrapping itself and eventually might leave the cocoon.

Saying other forms of life won't have parts that self-maintain to a degree is quite odd, because it's logically impossible. You see if you are not made of semi-indendent parts, you become extremely fragile. What exactly you think is the alternative? This is not about silicon vs carbon or analog vs digital. It's more about basic logic.

[wruza]

  4. When one animal devours another in a cruel way we couldn’t imagine, no action. It’s *natural* nature, human has no right to intervene. 

These inconsistecies are a hint that you may approach it from the wrong side. 4 contains a hint on that.

[teddyh]

> we also exhibit odd and illogical cultural trends

Culture is illogical. If it was logical, it wouldn’t be culture.

[lo_zamoyski]

Huh? You don’t understand what culture is. The study of logic itself, science, philosophy, etc are all part of culture. Culture is a shared heritage without which you would still be cracking nuts open with rocks.

[teddyh]

Culture might lead to logic, but the pursuit of logic is not, itself, logical.

[otabdeveloper4]

Not illogical at all. A person that abuses animals is a potential menace to society - lack of empathy means they might easily abuse humans too. We are punishing sociopathic tendencies here.

Farming animals is not sociopathic, it's a business decision based on economic interest.

This works because animals don't have human rights. (Obviously.)

[hutzlibu]

"lack of empathy means they might easily abuse humans too"

So just in case, we should jail most of our animal farmers/slaughterhouse workers as well?

[otabdeveloper4]

No, because animals don't have human rights.

We jail animal abusers based on a real-world idea of "pre-crime". (Unmotivated animal abuse strongly correlates with unmotivated violence against humans. For this same reason cartoon child porn is also illegal.)

[3cats-in-a-coat]

You need to let this one simmer down and see how it is self-contradictory.