[rowyourboat]

I am surprised again and again that people are surprised that animals, and social ones at that, have thoughts and emotions and relationships. Have you never been around animals? Do you truly have believe humans are that special?

[strken]

I don't think people are surprised that animals have thoughts and emotions. No farmer I know of thinks cows aren't capable of being trained: the ones down the road from my parents line up in an orderly queue to go into the dairy every morning and afternoon, including leaving a gap across the road and giving way to cars.

On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.

[mo_42]

Your second description involves many aspects of human culture. No matter how smart cows are, they'll never think this way.

Then, a big difference of humans compared to other animals is accumulation. We create stuff (buildings, language, knowledge, ...) that further generations will use. To really compare, I'd say, we have to take that away.

Let's assume some people decide to go back into the forest. They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest. After some generations, a scientist discovers them.

How would we compare them to humans and other animals like the great apes? How would they score on common IQ tests?

[krisoft]

> They go there with nothing and teach their children only the necessary skills to live in the forest.

To live in the forest like humans do? Because then they would absolutely teach them language, and show them how to make fire and use sticks and stones.

> How would they score on common IQ tests?

Common human IQ tests? Very badly, they would probably not do much with the paper other than maybe take it with them for fire starter, and would just wander out of the room.

On an IQ test you could conduct with great apes? Like various physical puzzles which hide treats? Very well presumably. They would have dexterous hands and great eyesight and problem solving skills, and oral traditions.

[deaddodo]

Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?

The cognitive dissonance in that statement is blinding. Even in the pre-agrarian hunter-gather millennia of human existence, human societies the world over independently figured out housing, carried the knowledge for fire and the wheel, had intensely complex (relative to every other species on the planet) communication and social skills. They all came up with ways to develop knives, arrows, cooking+eating utensils, protective clothing, complex hunting strategies, etc.

Like, yeah...they didn't have computers in front of them, but all of the inate skills that allows modern humans to conceptualize, build, repair and utilize those things existed just as inately in them. You could teach one of them about things piece by piece...you'll never be able to do that with even a chimp, let alone a cow.

[mo_42]

> Are you honestly trying to say humans living in a primitive society would be comparable to most other animals (not even "intelligent" ones such as chimps)?

No, I'm not trying to say that. I'm trying to express my belief that the gap between the intelligence of humans and other animals is much smaller. Looking closely at chimp communities or dolphins shows that they also have complex communication patterns. Even trees in a forest communicate. So this is also an expression modesty because humans don't understand yet too much about communication of other creatures.

[deaddodo]

But you're misframing the point. No one is saying animals (or even simpler living life) can't communicate or do basic reasoning.

You're claiming that humans, without modern society, are somehow in the same realm of intelligence of even the next "smartest" animal (chimps), despite the fact that human intelligence is blatantly orders of magnitude higher just from mere observability let alone deep comparison of neural activity, reasoned and logical thought, and social interaction.

Especially if you start breaking things down into slime molds, ant colonies, plant interactions and somehow conflate relatively simplistic and predictable pattern-based behaviors to high-order reasoning and abstract thought that humans inately possess.

Is that to say human thought is non-deterministic and unpredictable? No, I'm not making that argument. I'm saying that the levels of abstraction and complexity is so much higher that it's blatantly fallacious and misleading to compare them.

[nobodyandproud]

The datapoints are sparse, but are “wild-childs” an order of magnitude more intelligent than the animals they bonded with?

I personally think human communities and societies emerge into a super-intelligence while single individual remain distinctly bland or unimpressive, provided the community leaves some room for the unusual to potentially thrive and find their niche.

[giantg2]

I mean, they have isolated tribes that have seen limited outside contact even today. In the absence of outside contact, their culture is not as bland as in your example. Perhaps the formation of culture, religious beliefs, and higher levels of thought is one of the aspects that do make humans special.

As to the IQ tests, they can't ethically run them on uncontacted people. There have been many studies on indigenous people's that include a focus on intelligence. However, a major factor that usually comes up is that the format of standard IQ tests tend to be biased against indigenous people due to things like language issues.

[whoknowsidont]

To be fair, large swaths of the human population don't really come to the second realization either.

[Mandelmus]

> On the other hand, a lot of people who claim animals have thoughts and emotions seem to think that cows have complicated human-level thoughts like "I am an oppressed cog; my owner will send me to the glue factory when I am too old to give milk, and yet I must queue up regardless, for my spirit is broken; my calf has been taken and I will never know if he got a college degree; life is pure suffering." This seems unlikely to be true.

That straw man could fatten a whole cow.

[tehjoker]

The part about "my calf has been taken" doesn't seem so far fetched though.

[strken]

Yes, but do we know how a cow experiences the loss of a calf? The loss of a human child is very painful because of human comprehension of permanence, death, and the future. Is a cow thinking "I can't find my child, I am sad, I'm going to bellow and walk around for a few days searching" or is she experiencing a longer-term loss which she understands as the irrevocable death of her calf + social isolation from the experience + the end of her personal dreams for the calf?

This is what I meant by "my calf has been taken and he'll never get a college degree". I'm not saying that a cow isn't upset when you take her calf away, but I am skeptical that she is capable of being upset in the way a human would be, or for as long and as deeply. I'm skeptical that even earlier humans from a time with ~50% child mortality would be as sad as a modern mother upon losing a child, just due to the relative normality of the loss.

[ornornor]

I’m surprised too. But I suspect it’s more because it’s a very inconvenient truth: what about factory farms, the suffering we make billions of animals go through so we can eat them cheaply, and having to change our habits to accommodate this reality? It’s way easier and socially accepted to ignore this entirely and assume animals are dumb so it’s ok to keep doing what we do to them.

[peyton]

The broader context is a lot of the Western philosophy we rely on today formed around the same time we started building intricate machines, and those thinkers also wondered whether animals were just really intricate machines. Nothing nefarious. It’s probably fine if we express more gratitude towards these animals like we used to.

[threeseed]

9 million people die every year from hunger.

Humanity will do just fine ignoring the suffering of animals however smart they are.

[nine_k]

Meat, especially beef, is an utterly inefficient way to produce food.

People die from hunger not because the world is not producing enough food, and even not because the world is not trying to feed people in distress. It happens mostly because local politicians or warlords tend to steal or grab the humanitarian aid, or straight out not let it in, in order to preserve their power structures, and themselves on top. They don't mind killing some compatriots for that, with guns, or with hunger, no matter.

[satvikpendem]

All food is not fungible, people eat meat because they want to eat meat, not other foods. Given that as a constant, find more efficient ways to make the same end product, because that is much less work than convincing whole swathes of people to want a different end product. Hence, lab-grown meat or plant-based meat have been way more effective at convincing people than decades of campaigning by those who want people to eat less meat.

[assimpleaspossi]

I think the real problem is there are too many people.

[nine_k]

No, not this, to my mind.

When the world was much smaller, the same problems persisted. The Great Famine of 1845 in Ireland happened not just because crops failed in Ireland. England had enough crops, and the world was ready to sell more, but the British government kept Irish ports closed for imports of foods, and English Protestant farmers were not very keen to sell to Irish Catholics (fun: both considered themselves Christians). Estimated world population at the time was about 1 billion.

Man-made famines are a really common thing all along the human history; just consider the medieval sieges of cities, and routine deliberate destruction of enemy crops. This was happening when the world had merely 300-400M people.

It's not too many people. It's too little wisdom, and too much cruelty, per person.

[briansm]

Then again, if you believe that it's not 'too many people' and you also concede that population will continue growing as it has for the last 650+ years and the planet obviously isn't growing then surely you must also concede that at some point it has to become 'too many people', the only question is when.

[p-e-w]

The elephant in the room that any discussion about social issues will bend over backwards to avoid mentioning.

Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.

Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.

[wbazant]

Sure, these conflicts are caused by people, but 'there' s just too many of us' isn't a suppressed thought, just a bad one that we have since moved on from. Overpopulation was a trendy idea in the 70s that inspired many ugly policies, like sterilisation of ethnic minorities.

[ajuc]

Poplation growth is slowing down everywhere, in the developed world (which uses the most energy and resources) it's been negative for some time.

Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.

So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.

[zemvpferreira]

Because the base of our moral system is a right to human life.

Strangely I see more people volunteer the lives of others than their own to fix the planet. Never much initiative there.

[zztop44]

“Directly addressing that fundamental problem”… what did you have in mind?

[astrange]

> Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.

Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.

These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.

[yvely]

This is a common sentiment, but I have yet to hear any reasonable proposal for solutions. It certainly is talked about a lot in my experience.

It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?

1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.

It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.

[Roark66]

No, the real problem is there isn't enough people. If one Einstein is born per 1bln people, imagine what kind of progress in culture efficiency, technology, and ideas in general we would make as a species if there was 1T people (tera as in trilion).

[Earw0rm]

None. At our current efficiency levels, 1T of us would destroy our home planet's ability to support ourselves in a week.

If we want to go multiplanetary and support populations of that kind of size, we have to get much better at optimising our footprint. Which probably requires ethical/philosophical innovation as well as hard science/technology. What we have now is too wasteful and inefficient to scale up in that way, indeed so much so that it risks poisoning itself before it's able to develop those capabilities.

[lupusreal]

You're presuming that Einsteins are born and destined to greatness regardless of their environmental conditions. What if Einsteins require particularly social/environmental conditions to reach their full potential and furthermore, what if those particular conditions cannot arise when people are packed together like sardines in a can?

[giantg2]

This statement ignores a ton of other factors, and provides a particularly poor example. What did Einstein do to alleviate hunger? Most of his contributions remain theoretical or applied to things that don't directly help the population (or haven't paid off yet).

Even if you have someone who is intelligent, will their contributions actually make life better for people? Or will their ideas become commercially corrupted and be used for greed (Edison commercialization vs Tesla gifting)? Will they complicate our lives or provide harm along with some benefit (social media, TV, etc)? At such a small rate of the population (using your 1/1 billion), would a truly good idea gain traction? Maybe the idea to eliminate or restrict meat is theoretically a good one. But are you going to convince all the people to support it? Then how much impact will it actually have?

There is no magic solution nor hyper intelligent person that will save us.

[johnnyworker]

In this day and age, people aren't still starving because the animals and plants don't give up their nutrients easily enough, but because humans trample and prey on humans at worst, or neglect their suffering at best.

And empathy is empathy, I doubt you can outright ignore the suffering of animals while having a whole lot for the suffering of humans.

[frakrx]

Less meat consumption should lead to more production and decrease in price of of other types food. Also despite all the suffering in the world people still care very much about the wellbeign of dogs and cats. If anything with inflation and more and more wars around the globe the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.

[giantg2]

The inputs into meat today are things like soy and feed corn, which aren't particularly good for people. It's not quite as easy as just not eating meat. Many of the farms need to switch to other crops that are healthy which requires different machines, more labor, or other factors. You probably aren't going to see too much drop in other food prices since much of the cost of foods (especially corn and soy related) is in the processing and distribution, not in the actual growing. Then you need to convince people they want to eat whatever the new product is. You could give people something made from scraps similar to dog food, but that's not going to go over well for a bunch of reasons.

[randomdata]

> the world needs cheaper food now more than ever.

We are getting there. The price of food has crashed pretty hard over the last couple of years, and we're already back to 2019 levels, with little sign of that trend stopping. Barring some major shift, food will be cheaper than ever by next year.

It may not actually be cheaper food that you need, but rather cheaper retail workers. While food has crashed, the price of food in the grocery store still seems to be climbing.

[ornornor]

And westerners throw away an obscene amount of edible food on a daily basis. I don’t see how being more compassionate and opting out of participating in animal suffering will make people who don’t have enough to eat have more to eat.

[actionfromafar]

Lower grain price?

[ornornor]

This makes no sense. Animals eat grain. We eat the animal. Animal has to eat 10x the calories in grain for 1x the calories to whoever eats the animal. VS 1x the calories in grain if you skip eating the animal in between.

[BeFlatXIII]

Those 9 million can be properly nourished on a plant-based diet.

[dfgfek]

How smart were those 9 million people? Given that most of them live in zones where they couldn't apply even the simplest agriculture techniques, I would say not much.

[jhanschoo]

What is your argument here relating to the original argument?

[nine_k]

Humans are special, but in more subtle ways than "thinking vs dumb". I think it's safe to assume that all higher mammals have some idea about the world around, themselves, their kin, etc, with a social structure of sorts, unless they are solitary. Many of them, like wolves, pass their learned experience to their progeny, that is, possess and sustain a culture. Some of them, like cetaceans, are officially considered conscious. (And there are comparably intellectual birds, too.)

Humans have unique achievements, like constructive syntax, or overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures, or mathematics, but these stem from a really tall intellectual base humans share with other mammals.

[frakrx]

Dont forget the birds sone birds like corvids and parrots are roughly intellectualy equal to primates and cetaceans.

[justanotherjoe]

I'm an atheist, but the book of genesis put it very well on this subject. There is one emotion that is unique to humans. It is not compassion, or sense of justice or fairness, aninals have those. It is shame. Which is unique to humans.

On a related note, I heard some interesting theory by Robin Hanson on Lex Fridman's podcast. The guy said that the ego is our brain's attempt at forming a story around the brain's decisions (which are made pre-thought). It's crazy to consider that what we are is just our brain attempt at storytelling to justify ourselves.

[jhanschoo]

> It is shame. Which is unique to humans.

Dogs have shame, though.

[isoprophlex]

> overcoming of the Dunbar number limitation in cooperative structures

... but only barely ;)

[nine_k]

Look at any armed forces. An army worth the name is always larger than 150 people.

Then look at Walmart or Amazon. Then consider democracies in countries with tens and hundreds of millions of people.

[c048]

I've lived around animals all my file, even my SO grew up on a farm. Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?

Simply because we have similarities does not equate that animals experience things the same way. We know this because we have a better understanding of what goes on in a more limited human brain (be it a child or neurodivergent) compared to a healthy adult one.

I frankly compare this humanization of animals as a sign of not having sufficiently worked and lived with animals, with apophenia/pareidolia playing a large role.

[atoav]

Maybe also depends on what the animals are used to. As someone who grew up in the alps with free roaming cows, these are some clever animals. They definitly know what they are allowed to and what not, they have character differences, etc. The frolicking they do when they are let out in spring is not something you would forget.

If you look at cows who never where outside you the same nuanced behavior isn't that easy to spot, they become much more dull and complacent.

I grew up with animals and I would definitely say they have feelings. Of course it is hard to say how deep those go, or how refined they are and whether they are comparable to human feelings, but there are clear similarities: cows get afraid in bad weather or when they see something they don't know, a mother cow will be proud and protective over their calf, some will be mischiefous and ashamed once you catch them doing something they shouldn't do. That is not nothing. Sure inside that cow could be a complex Rube Goldberg machine that makes it look like fear, pride or shame to us silly humans, but given that we are both mammals evolutionary more likely is that these emotions are at least somewhat similar because they served similar purposes. What cows think is a much harder question. They are surprisingly clever if they think no one is around (and they have a very, very good sense for that).

Edit: Obligatory reference to Gary Larson: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_tools

[c048]

Agreed on all points.

[callmeal]

>Why on earth do you (or anyone) think they experience thoughts, emotions and relationships in a human way?

GP poster did not use the qualifier "in a human way". Take that away, and it's really hard to argue that animals do not experience thoughts, emotions and relationships. If you say otherwise, it makes it really hard to believe that you lived around animals all your life.

[c048]

'GP poster' said: 'Do you truly have believe humans are that special?'

[akkad33]

Maybe we should be asking "do humans feel emotions in a bovine way". And the answer would be an unsurprising no, so why should one spend any time stating and disproving the converse. Animals do not have to feel in a human way for their feelings to be valid. That does not make killing them and torturing them any less barbaric. And we can be humane in our treatment of animals regardless of what importance we give to their feelings. Cat and dog owners will tell you their pets have feelings. Numerous studies on pigs show they are more clever than dogs. Do they somehow have to develop humanlike emotions to count?

[c048]

The difference becomes important though when deciding where the line of 'torture' or 'barbarism' starts or ends. If you'd ask certain people, the act of castrating lambs with bands is barbaric.

I brought up neurodivergence before, but we have clear proof of situations where even non-healthy brains caused a clear difference on how that line can sometimes be interpreted. A very simple example is extremely repetitive work. Same goes for children.

[atoav]

Yeah but throughout a lot of western philosophy animals have been seen as totally incapable of feeling and thought. I had a philosophy professor (a year before his retirement) who was proclaiming just that.

As someone who also has visited seminars in ethics and animal ethics I will now recite the train of thought of Prof. Fink from Oxford:

That is obviously bullshit. Animals have feelings and thought (and we have the behavioral studies to show this to some degree). Yet we are not in a pixar movie and the animals don't have human-like interior worlds — but that doesn't mean they don't have their own variants that could be deep and rich in their own ways (or not, who knows).

Ethically the question for everyone of us is: Given a being that is very likely to experience feelings and though; given we don't know how deep the inner world of that being is — what is the right way to treat such a being? Do we assume it won't notice anything and treat it accordingly? Or do we side with caution and treat it carefully till we know more?

Of course to make things even more complicated the society we live in (in the form of previous generations) has made some of those choices for us already. So it might seem more normal to treat animals as if they have no feelings, because that is what we grew up with. But just because our ancestors did it that way doesn't mean it is ethically the right thing to do. Especially since we, unlike our ancestors, life in a world where survival without eating meat is not only possible, but doesn't come with huge downsides.

Many would say we are allowed to herd, hold and slaughter animals because we are more intelligent than them, and because they lack the inner life. But if an alien race or an AI came by that was more intelligent than us and had a richer inner life, wouldn't they then be right to do the same to us? Ethical systems should be universally applicable, not just when it suits us.

One could make all of this less complicated by ditching right and wrong and just asking who is stronger. But that isn't the kind of thinking that built the societies whose fruits we are all enjoying in the form of working division of labour, developed technologies, etc.

[ahartmetz]

From a cold utilitarian POV, ideas of justice and equity only need to be applied to those wo will, do, did, or might contribute to the common good (and the ones emotionally close to these), and would not do that if they weren't well treated. That is not the case for animals.

In fact, that is, I believe, a pretty good description of how things are. The treatment of animals will improve, if it does, by moving into the "emotionally close" group.

[jhanschoo]

> common good

There is a lot going on in what constitutes "common good" here. The standard "ethical" vegan position would contend that the happiness of animals count among intrinsic common good.

[c048]

How do plants fit in those thoughts of Prof. Fink?

[dotnet00]

It doesn't feel that surprising to me. I would've been in the same camp if I hadn't gone through a phase of being interested in random animal related trivia (eg wondering why so many mammals seem to enjoy being pet).

I just never really grew up with much interaction with animals, and what I did see was mostly stuff that could be passed off as just instincts without deeper thought.

It took actually thinking about their behavior and realizing that "being social" as an instinct includes having some level of intelligent emotions and relationships, it isn't just some mechanistic urge to be in a group based on some hardcoded rules.

[PaulHoule]

Over the break I was thinking a lot about C.S. Lewis an his issekai Christianity as well as the alternate-world Christmas of Terry Prachett’s Hogfather so I was really in the right mood when Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door.

They led with the question of “Do you think God made a mistake when he created the world?”. I thought about it really hard and answered “I could make the case either way.”

Where does evil come from? My answer is that “Well you try to push a fluid in a certain direction and it goes sideways and swirls…” (must have been a dynamicist in a past life)

Where we really differed from them the most I think was their insistence that humans are completely different from a spiritual viewpoint than animals which I’d reject completely because my experience with cats and dogs and horses is that animals seem very much to have a moral sense and to feel bad when they fail to match expectations. The first time I fell off a horse it seemed the horse felt a lot worse about it than I did and she seemed exceptionally contrite.

Sure people do have languages, beavers are never going to figure out that they could make much bigger dams with concrete, but animals do appear to have moral feelings which is consistent with the Buddhist idea that animals are subject to the law of karma, you can reincarnate as animal, etc.

[lm28469]

Not so long ago we had surgery on babies without anesthesia because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain

I imagine it's a mental safety mechanism, involving various degrees of mental gymnastic depending on the individual, otherwise everyone would be vegetarian/vegan after watching a single industrial farm/slaughter house video

[c048]

I doubt you've seen industrial slaughterhouse videos that aren't meant to sensationalize. I've even walked around in some, where all rules and guidelines are followed, and I can still eat meat just fine. The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous.

How do I rationalize it? Animals are being eaten in nature too, we at least don't eat them while they're often still alive (like in nature). Plants are living organisms too, and everyone eats those without a second thought. It's just that they don't pass a self-determined bar for many.

The environmental impact is a completely different question, unrelated to this.

[lm28469]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbgZQxd6J4

This is from a "good rated" slaughter house in one of the most advanced country on earth

The fact that animals are eaten in nature doesn't mean we can treat them like we treat metal ore.

Comparing eating animals to eating plants is just arguing in bad faith, you know it, I know it, everyone knows it

> The animals don't realize what happens and death is instantaneous

Sure, and people in gulags don't realize it either, it's just work like every other work.

[c048]

The only one arguing in bad faith is you, along with the cookie-cutter propaganda that you consume without further thought.

You're allowed to your own opinions and discuss them, but what you're doing is just regurgitating an opinion and trying to use THAT as a fact that should somehow persuade people.

Why is it that militants like you ever think that'll work in a discussion where you can't use pressure or force is beyond me.

[pvaldes]

> because people somehow thought they didn't feel pain

The boring alternative explanation would be that doctors knew that anesthesia can kill a baby, because babies have a not fully formed lung system; and pain is temporal but death is permanent.

But this explanation does not inflame a social warrior heart in the same way. The rush of outrageine is much lower and less satisfying. Repeating the same arguments since 1820 without thinking a second about it, is much better.

[lm28469]

what is topical anesthesia ?

It's also very well documented so no it's not about social warriors

[pvaldes]

> what is topical anesthesia ?

A drug applied topically. Can be the same drug or other drug.

The problem is that religious thinking is not compatible with modern medicine.

Anesthesia inhibits thermoregulation on babies. It is common for core temperature to drop by 1 to 2 degrees Celsius in the first hour of anesthesia. Sick babies can became hypothermic easily and struggle to keep themselves warm. Add anesthesia to that mix and you could be reducing the survival rate.

Some researchers also claim that anesthetic exposure can cause toxicity and neuronal apoptosis (death of neurons) in the developing brain of a baby, and this has the potential to became a long term problem in the later nerve development.

This is a problem particularly for premature infants. This babies sometimes need to pass by multiple surgical procedures with multiple anesthesia. Premature birth is a main cause of death in children, so they have yet a lot of things to address even without the toxics.

Avoiding punctual pain at any cost shouldn't never be the main (and much less the only) objective here. And adding a new risk to the medical procedure, just for ideological reasons, is very stupid.

[beebeepka]

Allowing other animals to be like glorious humans would mean they deserve better. Can't have that. Story as old as the world