Human life vs Animal life

[Banefull]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

My point then is that this is looking at it with a narrow field of vision. It is extremely anthropocentric. We have a certain definition of sentience and assign a value to that property precisely because these things are part of what makes us human... Some humans take something that makes them different from other animals and assign a value to that property and then justify with that a sense of superiority. That is sort of a circular deduction, isn't it?

With any viewpoint, we have to start somewhere. With your web of life view, you start on the premise that all things are equal whereas I start with certain attributes. If dolphins and gorillas were ever proven sentient, we would treat them accordingly. We are not simply picking qualities purely upon what seperates us.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Other animals may think that humans are very inferior because they need to make tools to do the things that they can do naturally (fly, swim, dive, hunt,.. ).

Animals cannot grasp abstract concepts such as inferiority.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Maybe I can give you a picture. You set up a pyramid or a tower and everything has a place in that building. Some things are more on top, others are more at the bottom and humans are in the penthouse. The contrasting picture would be one of many scattered buildings with only one ground floor. They all have different sizes and colors and shapes and the paths between them are forming a uncomprehensible complex network. Maybe there is a building with humans and it is bright red and shaped like a cube and humans like other red buildings like tigers and dogs or other square buildings like dolphins and chimpanzees, but they are more distant from the blue and round buildings of the birds or the bizarre shapes of buildings for grass. They have an affinity towards what is similar to them, but that does not mean that any of these buildings is on a hill overlooking the others or has the right to determine if some of the other buildings are to be demolished.

What makes the world before humans "interfered" the ideal paradigm? From a mechanistic viewpoint, everything is trying to be on the top.

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

And this behaviour adds itself up to 200 species that go extinct every day - and they go extinct because humans profit from it. Humans live longer, are warm, have an education, eat well, feel good and have medical inventions that prevent them from dying. So this civilization makes this choice 200 times a day without most people being aware of it really.

We are not the only creatures whose existence has caused massive extinctions. In the Precambrian explosion, the evolution of eye sight in predators resulted in many species going extinct. You should also note that the amount of biomass on the Earth has hardly been affected by our existence and activity.

Originally Posted by Human No More

Not true - look at the majority of algorithms - the output is not determined, not known, and based on the input. With some types, it varies from execution to execution with the same input. There are systems, today, that exist and are IN USE, that employ genetic algorithms. These are self-modifying and improve based on the quality of their results. That's essentially the biological process animals follow.

They may be subject to selection but that does not necessarily mean that computers will develop consciousness. Even with self mutating code, computers are still slave to their input.