Human life vs Animal life

[Woodsprite]

Why am I reminded of Bicentennial Man? :/

[auroraglacialis]

Baneful, I just want to say that we seem to generally agree on many things, so the debate is more a philosophical one, not so much one on how humans should behave

Originally Posted by Banefull

I disagree with Kurzweil Singularity. Having studied computers from the bottom up, in a nutshell they are just long chains of logic gates. If you put a specific voltage in, you can always expect the get a certain voltage out.[...]If dolphins and gorillas were ever scientifically proven to be sentient then I would agree that they should be treated as such.

Well - some scientists who are strictily following a mechanistic view would argue that a neuron also is just a form of biological logic gate...
I mean - I do not agree to that really, but some people do believe this and believe as a conclusion that AI self awareness is possible.
The point I wanted to make by bringing it up here was that there are problems with both views - the yes-or-no view of something being sentient or nonsentient (which would given that humans look at the world with human eyes make humans the only sentient species and thus different from others, supporting the claim that humans are not like other animals) and the gradual model of various degrees of sentience (which would mean that there exists some sort of hierarchy of sentience and humans do not have to take the place at the top necessarily). 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. 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,.. ). 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?

My point here is that utilitarianism is a consideration that should be included. If you had two planets exactly equal in every way except for population, then with population being the only variable, you would choose to save the planet with more individuals. Now in reality, things aren't as simple as one variable.

Exactly - there is not only one variable and thus there can not be a rule to decide such a thing. Like what if the planet with the 9 billion is otherwise greatly deprived of biodiversity compared to the one with 7 billion - would that shift the decision, even if the change is only in the number of nonsentient (accoring to your distinction) species and individuals? What about a totally barren planet that has 20 billion people living on it, surviving in artificially filtered air and living on artificially created food. Would that be the choice compared to a planet of 1 billion people with a healthy biosphere and abundant life? If one takes sentience as a thing that assigns a higher value, the tendencies could be shifted that way. And I think that is what is happening now - civilized humans assign a much higher value to themselves according to their own definition of sentience and supremacy and thereby justify planetary degradation.

So I think as you said, intuition is incredible important, becaue these simple rules do not work out. One simply cannot throw one being into one bucket and the other in a second one and then take them to the scales and determine who has to die according to what it shows.

I agree in the sense that nonliving things should be valued by their ability to provide for living things.
If a mountain provides a habitat for many creatures, then I would have some qualms about blasting it apart.
If a mountain is completely barren, then by all means blast it apart if the minerals inside of it could provide supplies for higher forms of life. It would be a tragedy not to do otherwise as to not do so would be denying everyone benefits.

Well ok, so the line you draw here is that something has to be "useful" for something that we regard as alive to have a value. That is probably in most cases quite a valid decision, but in reality - few things exist that are out of any context. Everything is connected. That mountain, even if it is barren and holds minerals is part of the living planet. Disrupting it means disrupting life on the planet in some way. Maybe it is a good idea, maybe not. Maybe the minerals in it are Uranium and will poison the world or the mountain provides a certain climate in its vicinity or serves as a water catchment area.

however, our debate isn't about rules.

Oh in a way it is , I think. It is partly about the idea that people want to make rules on how to behave in respect to nature and other humans and they want to make a rule to distinguish humans from animals or want to make rules that tell them who shall live and who shall die - all that mentioning of how many of one species are worth the death of how many of another species are all too often about rules. In the end it comes to something like "if we can save a single child from death by killing all the individuals of one species [we see as useless because we do not understand their role in the web of life], it is worth it!".

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.

The source of debate among us stems from the fact that our values are different. You believe that things are equal whereas I believe in a hierarchy in the natural order of things yet both of us would advocate the same policy. [...] You speak of everything as if it as the exact same qualities as a human. You speak of inherent respect for mountains as if they had an identity and that nature can be insulted. As if the simple act of mining a mountain is somehow disrespectful. Or you speak of a plant as if it can be hurt. This is what I am scratching my head at.

Hehe - oh a mountain has an identity - no mountain is like the other, no shell is identical to another. Life on this planet is abundantly complex. And yes, I do respect the mountains and plants as well, at least in my thoughts - my lifestyle sadly does not reflect that (yet) as I was born into western civilization. It is not a crazy idea though. The idea of an animate Earth is one you can find a lot in indigenous cultures. This is what people mention shortly if they say that some mountain is sacred for some tribe. The mountain is part of life, it gives and takes from the beings that go about it. You cannot take the mountain out of its environment. I doubt the indigenous people who say that the mountain is sacred would accept it if you say that you will not affect the ecosystem services it provides by drilling a mine into it.

I agree that the main difference between us here is, that you see a hierarchy in nature and I do not see that. I would not say everything has "the exact same qualities as a human" though. Not at all. To the contrary, all has very different qualities. Nothing is the same or identical. It is in a sense equal that I do not feel like it is my place to set up a hierarchy, to determine who is on top and who is not. 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. (Sorry for that metaphor if it is not understandable - my mind thinks a lot in metaphors but I suspect they are not always so good to understand)

[ISV Venture Star]

Has anyone used the phrase 'tragedy of the commons' yet? Because that does seem to be the kind of problem we're facing.

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by Banefull

...

There's no need to be patronising. I know what a computer is and how it works. I've designed chips too. I've done a whole course on intelligent systems and AI.

Let us theoretically entertain the notion that a computer could be conscious. Such a being would only be an observer. A computer has no control over its output. It is predetermined. If you have these inputs you will get a certain output.

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.

I know what a logic gate is! I know every single kind including flip-flops and latches and how to create another gate type using only NAND or NOR gates. I do not see what relevance it has, AT ALL. Can you face the fact that someone here DOES know as much about this, if not more, than you? I also know what neurons are and how they work, and the structure of the nervous system.

Computers, in a nutshell, are basically just long chains of these logic gates etched onto a silicon chip. One could trace the long line starting with a set of inputs and reach an exact set of outputs. We merely study neural networks so that we can better optimize our chip designs and cut out unnecessary steps in the process. In that last diagram I posted, that circuit had a maximum 4-gate delay. The less logic gates that a signal has to pass through, the faster my processor can be (each gate has a delay in changing voltage). There are also other applications for optimizing individual component delay also.

Which doesn't change the fact that in just about any architecture, multiple passes through the ALU are required for a single instruction other than simple mathematical or logical operations.The speed isn't what is relevant here, the relevance is the fact that self-modifying code is possible, exists, and has exponentially increased in complexity and capability.
As I said in my earlier post, which you conveniently ignored, I am not talking about the kind of system that exists today which simply contain a very large database of scenarios and predetermined responses.

Aurora - you mostly have a point, but you are wrong that all extinctions are due to humans. Do you know what? Species went extinct long before humans existed. They will long after. Neither is it about rules. It's about survival. Yes, humans are massively overpopulated, but that does not mean they are responsible for every single thing that happens. Neither do they consciously make decisions about other species, it is (99%of the time) an unintended effect. Yes, that doesn't justify anything, but you can not say that the human desire to be warm, safe, comfortable, happy and not eaten by predators is wrong while you are sitting in a house, talking over the internet. Stop being naive.

[auroraglacialis]

I do not really see how the very wide and difficult topic of the "tragedy of the commons" fits into the topic on animals vs humans really. I think it can be debated and is certainly interesting, but it is a very anthropocentric concept, focussed mainly on nonhumans as a resource and not as living beings and I do not think it fits into this topic.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Aurora - you mostly have a point, but you are wrong that all extinctions are due to humans.

Oh that is true of course, but the present exctinction rates are elevated by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. this means 100000 years ago, 1 species goes extinct every day, now it is 100-200.

Neither do they consciously make decisions about other species, it is (99%of the time) an unintended effect.

Of course it is. There are only few cases humans actually want to exterminate other species, though sometimes that is the intention - at least locally (wolves, mosquitoes, rabbits, rats, mice, cockroaches,...). But it is accepted by this culture that these extinctions happen. And even if it is not about extinctions, it is about accepting the death of many animals, some of them go extinct for the benefit of civilization.

You can not say that the human desire to be warm, safe, comfortable, happy and not eaten by predators is wrong while you are sitting in a house, talking over the internet. Stop being naive.

Oh THAT argument again. For once it is "ad hominem" and secondly it is not true - why can I not say that? Can I not criticize capitalism because I use a computer that was made by capitalist corporations? Or I cannot criticize the use of oil because I am using buses and cars? Or I cannot criticize the deforestation of the Amazon because I am living in one of the countries that profits from it? If that would be true. We could never criticize anything! And in any ways, that was not really the point in this thread anyways - I did not even say a thing in this thread against that humans as all animals have needs and desires - the whole point was how do we humans relate to animals and in extension to that question to plants and mountains and rivers... and what does that mean for our needs and desires? And furthermore is there a justification for humans to make decisions on who may take how much and who dies and who lives in the nonhuman world?

[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.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Banefull

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.

Yes you do. That quality in this case is sentience. "We" chose it to seperate us from animals because it is something that from our experience does do that seperation. If dolphins were proven to be sentient by whatever means "we" desire to prove that, there would be other claims of seperation.
Civilized humans have a long history in defining what seperates humans from animals, what "makes us human". It used to be things like walking upright, using tools, recognizing oneself in a mirror, language, culture,... all of this once was considered to be what makes humans different from other mammals and thus defines us. It all got dismantled. Now what is left is a rather arbitrary and philosophical concept of sentience. It is not even easy to define sentience and certainly it is not easy to say whether or not other animals have something equivalent. We see the world in a combination of 3 colors, red, green and blue. Other animals have 2 colors or 4 colors or can see infrared. They look at the same world, but they see something different. Would we say that they are inferior because they have a different vision? Because they do not "see like we do"? Or because they do not "feel like we do"? I acknowledge of course that what we define as sentience is something that seems to be different in humans from other animals, but so does vision or the ability to breathe nitrate instead of oxygen. We are different from other animals as they are different from each other, but that does not in itself have a value assigned to it except the one of diversity. "We" assign a value to sentience (or more precisely to the form of sentience we understand as such) to give a reason why humans should be in charge, stewards, controllers, managers, dominators or rulers of Earth.

Animals cannot grasp abstract concepts such as inferiority.

Hmm - does a lion not know that he is superior to his prey in some aspects? Or that some of the game animals are inferior to others? Maybe the animals do not think in it abstractly, but they have an intuitive knowledge. Who is to say that abstract knowledge is in any way "better" than intuitive knowledge?

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

Well, I do not agree with a mechanistic world view in general, but even under that assumption - what do you define in that context as being "on the top"? A predatory food chain? There is not really that much of a hierarchy as humans understand it in that either. A deer (as an individual or as a species) does not strive to become a predator, it does not "try to be on the top". And all elements of a "food chain" are in fact part of a web more than a chain. For example salmon - they are near the top of the food chain in the ocean, eat smaller fish who eat even smaller fish who eat zooplankton who eat phytoplankton. The salmon then swim upstream where they are caught by bears and birds, their remains and the excrements of these birds are then literally feeding the forests there - the trees and plants. I think the concept of seeing this as a hierarchy is artificial and a reflection of the desire of humans who live in a hierarchy to find this form of organization as a fundamental principle in nature - to justify a form of organization they themselves are not good in dealing with. By rationalizing it as a principle of nature, their unrest is calmed by the impression that that state of being is "natural".
What makes humans (or more precisely humans in industrial civilization) different from other animals is that they invent linear realtionships. That they can take but not give back. This is true for a lot of the things humans consume. It ends up as waste in sealed landfills, is burned or shoved underground or recycled for human use. Some of the things are turned into toxic products that are then given back to the web of life. Instead of nurturing other animals and plants in that web, civilized humans all to often take without giving back or give back something that cannot be used again with value.
And this is what makes 'the world before [civilized] humans "interfered" the ideal paradigm' - the absence of true waste - of the creation of something that cannot be consumed by others or only be processed at a cost. Like styrofoam, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, plastics, CFCs.

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.

For the latter I'd like to have a reference, as I do not really believe that to be so. Deforestation and increasing desertification certainly reduced biomass. Catching enough fish to deplete many fish species to less than 10% in number certainly does not keep biomass equal. Certainly other creatures caused extinctions, but not on the scale and in the timeframe civilization does. I am not firm in my knowledge on the example you put out here, but from what I know about evolutionary biology I would say that the slow development of eyesight slowly increased the pressure on prey animals, driving some of them to go extinct and develop into newer forms. Certainly during the End-Permian extinction, a class of simple bacteria resulted in the extinction of many species and caused a mass extinction following a change in conditions that favoured their growth (global warming followed by an all-tropical Earth with diminished oceanic circulation). But is that an excuse? If you argue with the sentience of human beings as their defining feature, should this sentient species not behave differently than these bacteria?

[Human No More]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Hmm - does a lion not know that he is superior to his prey in some aspects? Or that some of the game animals are inferior to others? Maybe the animals do not think in it abstractly, but they have an intuitive knowledge. Who is to say that abstract knowledge is in any way "better" than intuitive knowledge?

Interesting, but it's completely beside the point of understanding abstract concepts. The point is that a lion doesn't consider why it hunts, it just does. Selection of prey is based on probabilities - the probability that it won't escape, the probability of not being injured when attacking it, it being a known species (as opposed to ones like humans, which are unknown, and as such, they will generally not attack except in a defensive reaction when threatened). All very highly developed instinct and showing a degree of intelligence compared to many animals, but extremely far and a completely different thing altogether from sentience.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Human No More

Interesting, but it's completely beside the point of understanding abstract concepts. The point is that a lion doesn't consider why it hunts, it just does. Selection of prey is based on probabilities - the probability that it won't escape, the probability of not being injured when attacking it[...] a completely different thing altogether from sentience.

Oh that part of my post was not aimed at the topic of sentience. Of course neither abstract nor intuitive thinking really has anything to do with sentience.
You say that the lion does not consider why it hunts. That is probably true in that he will not ponder alternatives or think on the ethics of hunting. He has an intuition, a feeling of what has to be done. Humans use abstract thinking. They consider why they are using resources and energy and so on, they also reach to similar intermediary conclusions as the lion - probabilities of success and failure, but in the end, they still do it. Humanity as a whole knows that the ecologies of this planet suffer, that resources are indeed limited, that the planet is finite, that oil is finite, that people in some countries reap the benefits why most people pay for it. But as a group, as nations, states, countries, cultures, civilization, humans do not act upon that thing they pride themselves with so much. So what is it - are "we" unable to really use that abstract thinking to create something more positive or are we consiously destroying much of Earth? Can it be that abstraction actually is part of the problem, that by abstraction humans have the ability to seperate themselves from the intuitive knowledge and the emotional impact of their actions? A lion will not consider killing 5 game animals to sell 4 of them to get a new rifle. Humans can do such a thing. They are willing to sacrifice others not for their own survival but for their own comforts. They use abstraction to assign values to things that can be calculated against each other. They use abstract concepts like economy and money and compare them to living things. I am not so sure if that is a good thing overall - we have this ability but obviously we are not very good in using it properly...

[redpaintednavi]

Interesting debate. One can wonder how we sometimes should value humans vs animals. For example whos life is most worth, a hardened criminal that causes a lot of sorrow and grief due to his actions, or a very faithful and trusty dog who spreads joy and hapiness and good feelings? Perhaps a dog that even saves lives?