[MDWolinski]

I recall an experiment with bees I read about where the bees were in a box. One path went to food, another to little balls which had no value to bees. Yet the bees would go “play” with the balls. The article and scientists state that this may show that bees make time for entertaining themselves.

I think it’s arrogance to assume only mammals can have consciousness just because we don’t have the ability to understand what that actually is. Yet, humans throughout history have used that belief to wreck havoc on the planet, other humans, and animals without regard for the consequences.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Play appears to be an adaptive behavior (i.e. something that evolved due to evolutionary benefit), and helps us learn via curiosity/exploration, as well as form social bonds with others seeking out those experiences.

It's not apparent why play (an energy-consuming behavior) would evolve in a species where there was no benefit to it - one without ability to learn as a result of the new experiences encountered. While bees do have limited learning ability, I doubt it is this general, so it seems more likely that behavior that appears as playful (bees "playing with" balls) is really some other instinct at work.

Plently of animals truly do play though - e.g. crows have been observed sliding down snow-covered roofs on their back, then flying back up to do it over and over!

[isodev]

Also as humans, we're incredibly good at being able to suspect all kinds of beings for having a consciousness, except the ones we tend to use for food or work. For example, folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses. I'd hate a future where we finally realize that they were all conscious, all the time, just differently than we are.

[automatic6131]

>folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.

Please control your observations for the people that spend time around cows and horses vs cats and dogs. As someone who has met a few farmers in their time, folks who keep livestock will tell you that cows & pigs have feelings. Sheep, ehh less than those two. And chickens? Even less.

[phkahler]

>> folks are way more comfortable talking about cats and dogs having feelings vs. say cows and horses.

Our family cat has empathy. It often acts like the stereotypical asshole - feed me and leave me alone - but when someone is feeling down, that cat will come lay close and rest a paw on them.

[galleywest200]

I suspect those folks have not spent a considerable amount of time with either cows or horses, and thus they do not know that they too have feelings. Horses absolutely have feelings...it used to be a war tactic to scare horses.

[heresie-dabord]

> except the ones we tend to use for food or work

Also excepting the humans whom we seek to exploit or attack.

[Fatnino]

Why would having consciousness take a creature off the menu?

We don't eat humans, because we are humans. Everything else is fair game.

If super intelligent aliens smarter than humans came here it would be OK to eat them.

[theonemind]

It seems to me like very few people would doubt that cows and horses are conscious? We just eat/use them anyway with a bit of cognitive dissonance.

[VS1999]

Is it arrogance? It's a huge uphill battle to prove that bees moving a ball around are "playing" and not just misapplying some other ingrained behavior, such as landing on a flower. It seems more like just pretending that animals engage in human behaviors because it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride.

[wzdd]

You could say -- and people do -- the exact same thing in support of the opposite argument, i.e. that it feels good and satisfies our sense of pride to pretend that humans are the only ones with such complex inner lives. So I think the "arrogance" claim should be retired, as it clearly doesn't add any value.

[jojobas]

I don't know, the fact that a cow can play doesn't mean we shouldn't breed them for meat.

[criddell]

Cow playing with a ball:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t98yf4T4hw

[Anotheroneagain]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F-fluUQApO8

[dantondwa]

And the fact that humans have feelings does not mean we can’t use them as slaves when needed.

See? Ethics are like that: there must be something we give value too, if we want to stop somewhere and build something. In that case, the core value being raised is that the ability to be aware, suffer and have emotions is morally valuable.

[jojobas]

Treating people decently is a part of social contract that no other animal can comprehend and accept, that's not playing with a ball, but that's not even the true reason this social contract exists.

The societies that have this social contract outdo those that don't, simple as that. If your version of treating animals was an advantage, Jainist countries would dominate the world. Yet they don't.

[nick__m]

Eating other species is the quite natural for omnivores... Remember that if a chicken was big enough to eat you it would ! (most birds ard opportunistic omnivores)

Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !

I concede that the existence of the animals raised in industrial condition is deplorable but the existenceof the beef and chicken I buy from a local farmer is pretty good: ample space, quality food, grazing in the summer, no predator... and the way it's killed is doesn't leave time for suffering.

Cow raised for milk in place where they don't use hormone also have a great life because when they are not well treated the milk production is suboptimal.

Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.

[twojacobtwo]

>Preaching for veganism is preaching for the genocide of those domesticated species because if they weren't raised for food they would not exist !

They existed as different, likely healthier versions of their species in the wild before we took control of their fates. If the original wild species died out since that time, then the genocide was already commited. If the original species still exists in the wild, then that proves your claim wrong.

Also, all we've done is made genocide perpetual. So instead of allowing the remaining ones to die, is it somehow kinder or more justifiable to perpetually slaughter untold generations of them?

Beyond that, we've now caused mass extinctions of other species in pursuit of raising these animals for slaughter (see: loss of bio diversity or clear cutting of the rainforests for ranching). So when do we stop acting like this endless cycle of genocide is somehow justifiable for the sake of avoiding genocide?

Perhaps it is possible to eat them in an ethical way (like only eating them if they've died of old age), but as it stands, the number of e.g. cows that are raised and slaughtered in deplorable conditions make up the vast, vast majority of total cow 'lives' and there's no way we would have the space/resources to maintain the current populations in the conditions you describe as being acceptable.

>Animal rights activists, should focus on banning growth and milk hormones, ensuring adequate space and socialization, and minimizing transport of living animals. They should be killed on site and transported dead and refrigerated to the meat processing facility, something that is prohibited for no justifiable reasons.

This is a false dichotomy. Why not both? Most animal rights activists I see advocate for better conditions for the animals as well, if we are going to slaughter them anyway. And who even says we would have to let these animals die out entirely if we stopped eating them en mass?

[thefaux]

These come across as rationalizations to justify your lifestyle.

[zeven7]

> "playing" and not just misapplying some other ingrained behavior, such as landing on a flower.

Or that’s just what “playing” is. It sure seems like my cat’s way of playing is to “hunt” me.

[topherclay]

You are potentially talking about this one from March this year.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07126-4

[Anotheroneagain]

Once as a kid I caught a fly by its leg, it panicked.

[Trasmatta]

I think this anthropomorphizes consciousness too much. We tend to attribute aspects of behavior to consciousness, but I think those are two separate things. An LLM can be playful, but is likely not conscious (but hey, maybe they are).

[meiraleal]

Chemical interactions isn't the same as conscious. I would say that it is exactly the opposite: consciousness is the capability of ignoring your chemical reactions and do what your will says. For example to not eat when hungry, an unconscious animal can't do that.

[HPsquared]

That's just extra layers of chemical reactions.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

No... basic life support functions/instincts are controlled by the evolutionally older parts of the brain, but can be overridden by the the cortex (or equivalent).

The word "consciousness" is all but useless in discussing brain function, or even subjective experience, since it's overloaded and covers so many diverse phenomena. Good luck finding any two people who agree on exactly what the word means!

You seem to be talking more about "free will" than any aspect of consciousness, although there is no scientific basis for thinking that free will is anything other than a subjective illusion. Your cortex is able to override basic instincts, but is still doing so via neural outputs and chemistry. Why one person's cortex might override hunger in a given situation, while another person's cortex doesn't, really is not something they have any control over. It's chemistry and physics (not magic and "free will") all the way down. Your cortex does what it does because of how it is wired, which is a result of your personal life history. It's funny that we can often recognize this in others - guessing with high probability what they are going to do in a given situation, while still thinking that we ourselves are not controlled by our past and have the "free will" to do whatever we like (but in reality what we like is controlled by our past - there is no escaping it).

What we subjectively feel as ourselves making a decision to do something is really just us observing our own thought processes, over which we have no control. This is really the only place where anything that I would label as part of that fuzzy word "consciousness" is coming to play - this ability to self-observe.

This ability to self-observe and feel as if the observer (which is also just our cortex) is in control, is perhaps based on specific cortical pathways that evolved to further our cortex's predictive purpose/function. However, it's certainly possible to imagine a brain that was wired differently and didn't have this ability, although maybe in reality all animal brains with a cortex/equivalent, even a more primitive reptilian one, do have this ability?

Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).

[sanitycheck]

Agree entirely about free will, though I think the continued illusion of it is probably necessary to keep human civilisation running.

When I read about people (scientists, no less) apparently arguing that chimpanzees might not be conscious I wonder what planet they're on. It seems quite clear that every mammal is conscious in a way that most humans have always understood.

Apparently some ants pass the mirror test, so it should probably be uncontroversial to say that insects are conscious. Unless we think that also means ants have free will, that is - and for me, mulling over that problem is what led an acceptance that free will is not a thing for humans either. The usual belief in it results in the mess philosophy got itself into and has yet to extricate itself from, which feels a lot like how we spent thousands of years trying to explain God, a thing that also does not exist.

[meiraleal]

> Finally, getting back to the topic of this thread, it seems highly unlikely that insects do have this self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness, simply because they don't have an advanced enough nervous system/brain to support it. You can't think about something if you don't have anything (cortex) to think with. Animals as simple as inspects are really closer to what we think of as machines (although it seems this metaphor/distinction is rapidly going to become useless).

I'm glad that after your "rebuke", you concluded the same thing but called it "self-observational/awareness aspect of consciousness". Only a conscious animal could do that.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

You're using a circular definition there - "only a conscious animal can do consciousness stuff".

My "rebuke" wasn't intended as such - it was meant as a break-down of the mechanisms involved, and basically defining what this relevant aspect of "consciousness" (self-observation, in the way I described it) means.

Note that consciousness wouldn't actually be needed for an animal to override instincts - you could still imagine an animal that had a cortex but no self-awareness. I tend to doubt they exist, but not inconceivable. There's a medical condition called "blind sight" were patients report being blind, but can still navigate a cluttered corridor of obstacles, or gaze track moving objects, without being aware of it (i.e. they can see, but are not consciously aware of being able to see).