Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals. I think there's a natural tendency for humans to anthropomorphize, to project human behaviors and motivations onto other animals, which can get pretty extreme and silly in some cases, like how we project this assumption onto non-living phenomena, like a rainstorm or machine learning model. However, I think in the case of animals, especially complex charismatic megafauna, and especially especially things like highly social mammals, it's actually a better assumption that their internal experience and motivations may resemble ours than this ridiculous contrarian backlash against it we got in the last few hundred years, where now we're supposed to treat "These tiny variations on what we are are somehow so fundamentally ontologically different that we should assume we can understand nothing about how they think, or whether they even do at all, without doing a zillion RCTs" (and this dovetails conveniently with immiserating them to an unheard-of degree at an unfathomable scale by modern industry). Similarly-shaped contrarianisms are unfortunately still much of the dominant culture of institutions, but it's nice that some of them are losing their grip
>the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist behaviorism (e.g. John Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well over 50 years.
Maturana and Valera’s classic book Autopoieses and Cognition came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition, and even as a form of consciousness.
Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the way we mean it as recursive inner monolog—is coupled strongly to language.
Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger gets very close to this position. But at some point a quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem to me to be “unusual” to say the least compared to other species. (I watched the great movie “Arrival” again last night.)
My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the greatest of joys.
Thanks for the reading recommendations, that stuff sounds fascinating, and I'll admit that my reference to RCTs was perhaps an overly mean dig at overcorrection for methodological rigor, a tic I likely developed from my exposure to the pharmacological research world, which is in practice greatly stymied by hidebound institutional policies about what hypotheses can be considered and what experimental framings are considered evidence at all. Probably not an appropriate thing to apply to ethology, which I know a lot less about
It really isn't. I am making a claim about a pervasive bias in scientific institutions I view to be course-correcting. I'll acknowledge plenty of scientific results I dislike as being true. Like I really dislike that every room-temperature superconductor thus far hasn't worked, and it really sucks that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne and damages the immune system
It's not completely possible to separate questions like "what is true about the world?" from questions like "how should we behave?", because the former must inform the latter, and the latter intrinsically informs what we choose to look at, whether we acknowledge it or not. Pretending you have no opinions is disingenuous and counterproductive to the endeavor of objectivity, because that's simply not true of anyone, and acknowledging one's biases is strictly necessary for mitigating them. Nonetheless, it is not "politicizing science" inherently to like or dislike certain results, or to think institutional biases exist
Love to hear stuff like this, both because it's interesting in its own right, and because the fact that it gets published and taken seriously gives me hope that we're finally getting our heads out of our collective asses with regards to the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals.
My take on this, is that this was never, ever an issue. Only city folk have a disconnected, weird view of the world. Rural people, who live and interact with far more wild animal life on a daily basis, 100% know that animals have intelligence, care for each other, none of this is foreign or strange to those living closer to nature.
But there is also another angle to consider. Take a look at WWII. Take a look at wars around the world right now. Take a look at violence in our communities.
Now take a look at how humans treat animals. Notice anything similar?
We aren't being cruel to animals, but as a species, we're just acting as we act towards each other.
Do you really believe that a person that beats their dog, won't beat another person, given the chance?
This isn't about animal husbandry, whether for food or for resources (wool, milk, eggs, etc). When you look at non-industrial farms, small family run farms, they in most cases treat their animals with care, and empathy.
Even "the end", slaughter time, is quick, as painless as can be, with care and concern. There are videos on youtube for how you can slit a chicken's throat, and let it bleed out, without it really realising anything is happening. There are videos for breaking the neck (as an alternate), without the chicken having anything but a second of "oh no". Quick, fast, as painless as possible, endless people have this goal.
The end is going to come for these birds, but my point is -- you can see people DO care. Have always cared.
Is every small farmer like this? No. But my point is, is every human kind to other humans? We have psychopaths, sociopaths, unemphatic people who treat humans poorly.
So my premise here is, that animal abuse and human abuse go hand in hand. That we actually treat animals, and ALWAYS have treated animals as thinking, reasoning beings, but also through history have treated them like us.
I basically agree with most of what you've said here, but I'm not talking about humans in general, I'm talking about epistemic authorities. As I said, I think the intuition that leads people to the conclusion that animals think and feel is natural for most people, and I also think there was an era where scientific institutions by and large took the position that because intuition isn't rigorous and explainable, anything we have intuitively come to believe must be wrong. This contrarian bias shows up in more places than just our beliefs about non-human intelligence, too
The whole "intuition" thing is a hard push from historical, pre-scientific method and really you don't want to go there. Letting science be dictated by "intuition" is massively wrong, so while I agree that those involved in husbandry are going to be closer to the fact than those displaced, at the same time you cannot use intuition to validate truth.
Bear in mind that "intuition" can also be steeped in "because God says so, of course!"
Back to additional, historical schisms.
I recall being taught how "mankind" was "separate from animals". In the Christian bible, man was created in "god's image", separate and entirely outside of the scope of the rest of the world, and the life forms inhabiting it.
Book for Genesis and all that.
Anyhow the logic was that animals were one thing, and that "mankind" was NOT an animal. This made it easier for those steeped in a religious upbringing, but isolated from animal husbandry, to just mentally agree. I imagine, with a huff, 'But animals are NOT the same', and so on.
This also one of the reasons as to why evolution was so strongly fought. After all, "god said humans are separate from animals" and thus "we are not animals!! heresy!! no we did NOT come from animals!"
I honestly feel that we need more "this is how our ancestors thought" training in school, without the "let's present it in a poor light" or "good light" or any modification at all. There's so much work being done to re-factor historical fact into something palatable to the masses, and it just hurts all of us. We are nothing without understanding our own past.
We must always examine our culture with an eye to the past, and historical beliefs in the past, for us to truly understand why things are as they are now. And, why we believe what we believe now. Even with the majority of "Western" people somewhat detached from traditional religious upbringings, there is an immense cultural history and backload there, which permeates every aspect of our society.
I agree with you entirely that intuition constitutes fairly weak evidence of something being true, and isn't the sort of thing we should view as a source of data for empirical methods, unless we're studying the intuition itself as a cultural or cognitive phenomenon. Intuition can be hijacked, it can be dead wrong, and it can notice things but completely misunderstand their mechanism. Otherwise, why do science at all?
But the existence of an intuitive belief is also not good evidence against what that belief claims, either! I think scientists have in a few important situations found themselves encountering pushback where methodical empirical study comes to counter-intuitive conclusions, and the culture of science got itself trapped in a schizmogenesis feedback loop where results that sounded counterintuitive were seen as more scientifically sound merely on that basis (and, probably, because counterintuitive findings sound harder to do and thus more impressive). I think this is starting to course-correct, with terms like "boring science" (empirical tests which confirm an intuitive hypothesis) and "cultural evolution" (which some people use to prove too much, but the most solid form of the argument is basically that a commonly-held but illegible belief is something we should treat as a weak signal suggesting a potential truth rather than a negative one) becoming popular
Culture is an insidious force we should have tools for pushing back against, but it really throws the baby out with the bathwater to assume that no one who doesn't do rigorous methodological empiricism can come to know something, and that all such knowledge is necessarily backwards and stupid. Even a hypothetically perfect methodological empiricist who must justify all conclusions with legible evidence and repeatable methodology should treat an illegible belief as merely holding no evidentiary weight, not weight against that which is believed
Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either. Slaves were common in basically every society, and they had no rights. Some Greek polities would make token laws like "killing a slave is an affront to the gods" but sexual, physical, and emotional abuse was basically guaranteed.
Societies that have a caste system still apply different standards of morality to some people. Thieves and serial killers have a very different standard for morality than you or I.
> Morality applied to humans wasn't universal either.
Yes it was. Always. It's just that morality, being a human invention/illusion, varied from culture to culture and from era to era. Your examples ( slaves, caste system, etc ) isn't a lack of morality or non-application of morality, it's just different morality applied in different cultures. India has/had morality and the south has/had morality, just different morality than we do today in the US.
Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense. I asked basic questions in my comment. If an elephant has 'moral weight' then killing it is wrong. So must we arrest and prosecute lions who kill elephants? Do we arrest everyone working for national geographics for profiting off of snuff films?
The key argument is not that we ought to expect non-human animals to abide by human morals (although animals do seem to have their own moral codes that they abide by) but that human moral codes (which we hold humans to) ought to assign non-human animals a value much closer to the value that we assign humans than they often do.
> Regardless, morals can only be applied to humans. Try to apply it to animals and you get nonsense.
This seems overly simplistic. For the sake of argument, I'll accept that moral judgments can only be made for human actions. But when those actions involve animals, they can still be made. People clearly make moral judgments about human cruelty to animals - every US state makes some version of animal cruelty a felony offense. The distinction between the presumed agency of the actor and the acted upon seems important here, and you are conflating them.
You misconstrued the lead comment. The “moral weight” of animals is conferred upon them by humans. Sure we do a bad job and are inconsistent. Pigs fine to slaughter and eat—-dogs not in our culture.
But almost all human culture gives some weight to life forms.
Dam, the angry backlash mindset shows up like clockwork, complete with my favorite triad of its hallmarks - vague references to "philosophers", invocation of numbers with the specific intent of saying buckwild unquantifiable shit, and the combination of personal attacks frothing with derision while simultaneously accusing me of thinking with "mindless emotions" for, I'm pretty sure, using language you've pattern-matched as overly compassionate toward things you don't respect
Anyway, I'm trying to get into less pointless arguments with people who open by demonstrating themselves unamenable to reason this week. Shoo, fly
I knew it. If you think modern industry is bad, it's 100000000x worse in nature. It is conservatively estimated that many quintillions of animals are killed by other animals in the wild each year.
Try using reason and logic rather than mindless emotions.
Well, not sure where they're getting their numbers from but a lot of animals (Ants/Flys) have very short lifespans so if there's 10,000 trillion ants I could easily see more than 0.005 quadrillion ants deaths a year (but not more than 0.06 quadrillion for ants).
