[FrustratedMonky]

I was referring to 'people' as in general public, including STEM people on HN.

I doubt many of them were reading Nagel or contemplating Stanford studies on this subject.

Maybe you are objecting to 2022 versus slightly earlier, 2016? Is 6 years for public opinion to change really the hang up? In my haste, I had used slang terminology of 'a couple years', and everyone did the math, said that is 2022, and objected to the year 2022? OK. I had the dates wrong. Go with 2016.

Maybe 'dogs' are a bad example, since even the Pope says they go to heaven.

But you can't deny that for Pigs, Cows, Chickens, that up to 2005 and even up to recent years ~2020, it was commonly accepted that they were not conscious, and not intelligent and thus have no ability to experience pain.

Pigs are more intelligent than dogs, but plenty of dog owners eat bacon and don't think twice. So what is the difference? They are both conscious right?

So consciousness is not what we use to provide any moral standing?

The article was about how to 'test' for consciousness. The discussion was, could you apply it to AI. I was simply saying, that for many years 'intelligence' was used as a substitute indicator for consciousness and now that AI is 'intelligent' people were re-defining that indicator.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9704368/ https://academic.oup.com/icb/article/40/6/847/187565 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mila.12498

[staticman2]

"But you can't deny that for Pigs, Cows, Chickens, that up to 2005 and even up to recent years ~2020, it was commonly accepted that they were not conscious, and not intelligent and thus have no ability to experience pain."

I'm not sure if you mean the majority opinion was they are not conscious? If so I do deny this outside of survey data showing otherwise.

I was alive since 1982 and have noticed no cultural shift on this topic. I imagine for most people whether animals are conscious has little to do with whether it's okay to eat them, I recall someone in high school once saying "being a vegetarian is stupid because animals eat other animals."

The U.S. president first pardoned a turkey in 1963 and it's been an annual tradition since 1989. I recall an author possibly making an overly speculative argument linking this to the fact most people in modern times grew up with children's movies like Bambi depicting animals as sentient.

[FrustratedMonky]

I wonder if the view shifts measurably by region/state in the US.

There is definitely a right leaning/religious view that animals are not conscious. And this was the dominant opinion in the US for many decades. When I think back on when I encountered these opinions the most, it was mostly in Midwest and South. When I was living on east coast, there was more opinion's like you are expressing.

Even a few years ago when UK passed laws about squid and lobster. It was right wing pundits that were just howling at how stupid it was since these animals are not conscious.

Guess what we call the 'public', versus what we are exposed to locally, is the real disagreement here.

(I'd say the Turkey thing was a joke, not any indication of sentiment. Probably more a joke about crime, not animals.).

[staticman2]

People are full of contradictions but the internet tells me 44.5% of U.S. households own dogs. Did those right leaning religious people own dogs, and would they have said, "Sure my pet is not conscious?" if asked?

Or was it only the delicious animals they love cooking that aren't conscious?