Multiple hominid species on Earth have had a technology gap on an unfathomable timescale. Indeed, the Denisovans developed stone tools tens of thousands of years before our own species.
We often look to the stars and wonder what other intelligent life is out there. I'm sure it's captured every one of our minds at some point. Dark Forest theory of the Fermi Paradox be damned, we want to share in the comfort of knowing that intelligent life exists. That we are not all alone.
But I wonder - had things been not much different, might we be cohabiting with an intelligent species, one perhaps tens of thousands of years ahead of us? Aliens on our own planet?
Would we even realize their sentience - would our minds even be comparable? Would their civilization fade to ruins before we came to sentience, and would we discover remnants of a long-lost civilization? Would they raze the planet to the ground and never provide us the opportunity to develop sentience?
So many questions. Are we in a similar situation right now with other hominids, who we've found to have a "theory of mind"? Are we morally obligated to not cut the nip of societal development in the bud for these species? And if this species suffers in developing and advancing, are we obligated to ease and accelerate their development?
For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure? As such, are we in a similar situation with other developing hominids?
When you think about it, it is possible that intelligent life developing on other planets is not a singular species but multiple species. And that's fascinating. I wonder what it must be like, to cohabit with a different species that is effectively your equal with respect to self-awareness/sentience, even if they are not your equal with respect to technology.
>For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure?
I mean, we already do that to an extent. There are "wild" tribes living in remote areas of the planet and surely they must suffer from illnesses which we have cures for, but in the name of leaving them alone we don't provide them with anything.
Actually, this is not true. It's a well-known problem that "uncontacted tribes" actually suffer from continual outside influence, with people living near them actively trying to "civilize" them, or people with zero consideration for the law committing crimes on or near the lands occupied by the tribes, in some cases attacking and killing the tribespeople to accomplish their goals. For example "uncontacted" tribes in the Amazon have actually recently initiated contact with local government officials to ask for help with cartel enforcers that killed members of their tribes to make room for their grow / transport operations. And in another example, the "uncontacted" Sentinelese tribe in the North Sentinel Islands has actually been trading with local fishermen for years, but it was not widely known because contacting the tribe is against the law. It was only recently revealed to be the case after that stupid American missionary went on his quest to "teach the tribe about Jesus" ("civilize them") and was killed on the beach, and the police were investigating ways to retrieve his corpse.
We absolutely do not "leave them alone". Or at least -- in the grandest tradition of human hypocrisy -- we just all agree to say we leave them alone if anyone asks, and just sort of pretend like our laws are foolproof solutions to things like preventing interference with "uncontacted" tribes, or stopping drug addiction, or preventing gun violence, or what have you.
Ethics and moralities of actually doing so aside for two moments...
1) I'm trying to imagine a sterilized delivery system of treatments that such tribes would be able to understand enough to use.
2) Similar to "how do we communicate to the deep future not to enter nuclear waste storage facilities", how do we communicate to such people when not only is there a language barrier but also a gap of hundreds [thousands?] of technological &c progress as well.
Giving them gifts from the gods (i.e. packages without contact) would only make them reliant on us and could have unknown effects on their culture, increasing (if they have it) human sacrifice in times of illness, for example.
That seems a rather different situation : we are not a difference species, and this "no contact initiative from our part" policy include consideration on our own civilization defects.
That doesn't discard the interest of the point, but that brings a call for more specific nuances depending on civilization discrepancies.
> Multiple hominid species on Earth have had a technology gap on an unfathomable timescale. Indeed, the Denisovans developed stone tools tens of thousands of years before our own species.
Nonsense. Hominin toolmaking and tool use go back more than 2 million years, long before the last common ancestor of humans and the Neanderthal/Denisovan branch. About all we can say about Denisovan tool use is that their technology, circa 100,000 or 150,000 years ago, was roughly the same as contemporary Neanderthal and human technology.
I learned yesterday that the Koala population is projected to go extinct in 15 years because a highly virulent strand of chlamydia has rendered them infertile. Scientist are researching a cure for them.
So yeah, I guess incomprehensibly advanced technological interjection isn't unprecedented.
> But I wonder - had things been not much different, might we be cohabiting with an intelligent species, one perhaps tens of thousands of years ahead of us? Aliens on our own planet?
I really loved your post especially that paragraph, which could easily spawn a dozen sci-fi stories or conspiracy theories.
You've described the situation from 1-2 million years ago. Homo sapiens were not the only intelligent species, there were numerous hominid species at various points. We interbred, killed, dominated, and out-competed these species, to their ruin. I don't fancy meeting another, slightly more capable version of ourselves, as that would likely lead to the same outcome for us.
> the Denisovans developed stone tools tens of thousands of years before our own species
I wonder if it's possible that stone tools were developed only once by some early species and then just passed down through generations? What do we really know about those times?
Stone tools are very arkeological friendly, because they don't rot and because they are not reused later (like iron tools or marble blocks). So the story of stone tools is well documented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tool
A few of our ancestor species used the exact same model of stone hand tool (it's like a small axe) for a million years! It was even inherited between a few species.
Something like 1.5 million years ago, someone had the brilliant idea of improving it. It was another of our ancestor species. (I think that Denisovans branched before this but IANAA.) After that there are a few (slow) step of progressing.
---
You may be interested to read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture Some theory says that they were the first human to reach America. Other theories says that humans had already come to America but they had older stone technology and the Clovis people just brought the new stone technology that was much better. I can't find a clear report, and I'm not sure if there is a clear evidence of both theories. It's easier to track the use of the new arrow heads than track the users.
> observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones
Good! I, for one, appreciate selection pressure from our insect overlords, it's the only way Darwinism works. Seriously, science is serious business, and I can't stand namby-pambyism. We are supposed to die, it's narcissistic to believe you and yours are more important than the species.
it's healthy for forest fires to periodically burn out the accumulated brush and revitalize the ecosystem.
I disagree with just about everything you said. The ecosystem is worthless without an intelligence to experience it. For self-aware species, death is a disease despite the fact that it maintains a consistent ecosystem. As a self-aware being, we all should have the right to live and die on our own terms.
I doubt you would speak as you did if were, in fact, next to a loved one on their death bed.
But then again, this is all a matter of opinion. We're all entitled to our right answers :)
Escaping death and disease with technology is a slippery slope. If that technology disappears or is unavailable, it puts a species in potential peril. Selection pressure keeps the fitness of the gene pool resilient, although at a cost to many individuals. This is relevant to all species, human and otherwise.
(Minor nitpick, but I think you meant "sapience" rather than "sentience." Sentience is something that essentially all animals on this planet have, and just means the ability to experience sensations. Sapience appears to be unique to humans (and perhaps a small number of animal species) and refers to the ability to reason.)
We know elephants grieve for lost family members. We probably have the tools to cure many diseases they experience in the wild but yet we do not.
We have started to apply serious medical care to dogs and cats though. I can see perhaps over the longer term as material abundance increases we would actively setup "nature hospitals".
> Are we morally obligated to not cut the nip of societal development in the bud for these species? And if this species suffers in developing and advancing, are we obligated to ease and accelerate their development?
Perhaps we can start by preventing their extinction by stopping the destruction of of their natural habitat.
Truly a captivating thought. Though I must point out that stone tool technology has existed for over 3 million years. Doesn't take away from the questions you pose, however.
Look at how we don't expose isolated tribes in Brazil to civilization.
If we found a struggling intelligent alien species on a planet somewhere, would we interfere? Looking at how we handle the issue even within our own species, possibly not.
there are some theories about humans been the apex of physical evolution for things like body function, intelligence, memory, etc. So in other environments, human-like animals would also appear at some point. Later we have what we are creating now, a world not limited to our own physical limits. A digital/virtual and why not, spiritual world.
> I wonder what it must be like, to cohabit with a different species that is effectively your equal with respect to self-awareness/sentience, even if they are not your equal with respect to technology.
It sounds intriguing but unfortunately, I think that history teaches us that in reality we'd eventually end up with the problems of racism, but at a whole new level.
In many cases I guess one genocide the other specie.
They represent too much of an existential threat before both of those species reach rationality and altruism as constitutional finalities.
> After decades of research, it remains controversial whether any nonhuman species possess a theory of mind.
It should be important to note that whilst this result isn't particularly surprising, there is one giant glaring issue that can undercut this paper.
They define theory of mind based on past definitions and research, and base their methodology on methods that have arisen that seem to fit-for-purpose to those definitions.
Which would usually be fine.
However, during the Replication Crisis, basically everything to do with theory of mind was dashed to pieces. (Worth pointing out that more than 1/3 of psychological research was found to be un-replicatable.)
One of the main components of "theory of mind", "embodied cognition" was particularly badly hit by the crisis.
So whilst this paper may be unsurprising, it rests on the laurels of stuff that has turned out to be nothing more than a polished turd, making the result questionable until such time as psychology has managed to recover the massive amount of ground lost.
All of psychology was hit by the Replication Crisis. 1 in 3 papers have results that are unable to be replicated. In any field that'd have seriously wide-reaching implications, but in psychology where so much relies on foundational theories like ToM it is extremely significant. This impact was worsened by the fact that so few psychological researchers choose to attempt to replicate results, due in part by the fact that doing so isn't incentivized by the industry.
Embodied cognition basically has not a single paper able to be replicated [0], so it's out the window.
This isn't to say that ToM is a flawed theory - in general, it's conclusion is probably true. Rather, psychology has some terrible, terrible, mainstream practices - things like outlier elimination and p-value rounding basically make it impossible to replicate a study unless the original author is involved.
But _assuming_, without evidence to the contrary, that the theory is still sound is denying the problem exists. Thankfully there is some research [6] attempting to show where the world is at with regards to this particular theory.
The study the article is about uses the fairly typical false-belief task. We've been using versions of it since '83, so it should be solid. Except it might not work at all when a person has autism [1], and as autistic people generally are aware of others and that others can differ in thought, the task may be flawed or our understanding flawed. Or maybe autism really does mean you lack something that fundamental [+]. There are other inconsistencies with it. [7]
The false-photograph task was developed in part because of the apparent limitations of the false-belief task. Unfortunately, Woodward's results haven't yet been replicated, just relied upon.
Before the crisis hit home, the research was leaning towards people with autism being ToM deficient, but replications don't show statically sound results that say it conclusively or not, thanks to p-value rounding, whilst some more recent research suggests we simply aren't measuring it correctly, and those results may be caused by the coping mechanisms employed. [2][5] Which, if true, suggests that the false-belief task may not actually be stimulating the right parts of any individual's mind, but rather just engaging them in something visually intensive.
A lot of our measurements of ToM, such as when using fMRIs, have been called into question, as they might just be falsely noticing the spatial orientation that happens during visual stimulus. [3] But again, there isn't enough replication to say definitively one way or t'other.
There's also some lesser issues. Some of the strongest ToM research suggests that the origin lies in mirror neurons [4], but the animals studied in the article of this thread don't have them, and animals possibly having ToM is extremely inflammatory within the broader psychological community. If you want someone to try and replicate your study, suggest that a particular animal has ToM. There's about a 50/50 success rate, which is not really encouraging.
Hopefully that's a little bit to chew on. As I've said, ToM probably does work. But we don't currently have the statistics to say it does.
[+] I'm not the right person to judge this. I have autism. Which, if the ToM theories are correct, means I lack the perspective to tell whether or not I have a ToM deficit.
Hey, lovely answer, I will take my time to go through all of this.
I currently research mental representation such as emotions in applied computing which is near-at-hand with ToM and although many of the theories seem intuitive, the replication crisis is something that really bothered me (since I come from a STEM background).
I will read through your post and definitely check the sources, thank you very much!
As for your last point, ToM+Autism might be one of the more interesting aspects of ToM research and as far as I can tell, we are far from conclusive theories.
I'm by no means an expert, I became interested when my ex-wife was being taught p-value rounding in her first year course, right before the Crisis became well-known, which with a background in statistics absolutely horrified me.
I haven't put in a huge effort to stay up-to-date, so hopefully the situation has improved some, but the community has seemed... Divided on whether or not replicating studies is even important.
I'm not defending psychology. But you've inserted your own narrative and interpretation into this group of studies which do not necessarily follow. In addition, although they are still important in a lot of ways this is a fast developing field and some of these studies are fairly old.
Your assertion that [2] and [5] are evidence of problems with the conclusion of [1] does not follow. [2] and [5] are findings of atypical neural activity in specific systems/areas of the brain in response to imitating and experiencing emotional stimuli. [1] is a finding that people with ASD score poorly on a test of theory of mind. It does not at all follow that they are evidence that the result of [1] is incorrect. They could just as easily by a reason why people with ASD are lacking in theory of mind rather than be evidence that the result is incorrect.
It's the same thing with [4]. I also don't see evidence to your claim that great apes do not have them. I only see a lack of any kind of studies on MNS in almost all animals. This is the only excerpt I found on them is in [9], and it says nothing of the sort, and it implies that there haven't been any attempts at observation of MNS in other animals including hominids/apes.
There is nothing on whether or not hominids do not have MNS, and on dolphins there is only (at this time) conjecture. On the other hand animals having mirror neurons but not having theory of mind does not mean that mirror neurons are not necessary for forming theory of mind. It just means that it's more complicated than that. [8] asserts that it is a part of it. In fact MNS is now believed to be a separate system from the ToM system (even if they are related and interact) [10].
Although [3] cast some doubt, it is by no means a conclusive dismissal. It essentially says one area of the brain previously studied probably has several different functions instead of just a social-cognitive one. It shows only that the specifically relevant previous work is less conclusive. It is also from 2007, and has nearly 1000 citing papers. One such paper that is fairly highly cited is [10], which compensates for issues presented by [3] by looking at a different area of the brain. Here is another study which examines a different aspect of the brain [12]. It also cites a few studies which it cites as specifically showing reduced activity in regions in the brain which are part of the ToM/mentalizing system.
It is not obvious to me from the evidence you've provided what the problems with ToM are, especially with regards to people with ASD.
> Our central question, however, was whether there is any evidence for a direct supporting role of the mirror system during mentalizing tasks. Apparently not.
and
> This conclusion is contrary to suggestions that the mirror system might aid the mentalizing system to inferring intentions of others.
[10] Doesn't seem to support the idea that the mirror system is at all involved in ToM. It may cite other papers, but the conclusions are not in support of that concept.
---
> They could just as easily by a reason why people with ASD are lacking in theory of mind rather than be evidence that the result is incorrect.
I didn't rule this out. However, from the evidence we have, there isn't enough to rule it in, either. The neurological patterns being seen could simply be the mirror system, which doesn't seem to have to be involved with ToM being active. We don't understand enough.
If the test is incorrect, then there isn't a reason to believe people with ASD are ToM deficit.
Further, the result that people with ASD have a mirror system deficit hasn't always been reproduced. [0]
[12] Brings out the statistician in me a bit. They use Bonferroni correction, which while it works, it isn't the most suitable way of dealing with the problem on hand. If instead they'd used Sidak correction, the resulting confidence may have been different. They would have ended up close to the same result, but if they've made this very simple mistake, (choosing a correction method that has known applicable flaws, in fact probably the weakest familywise method), what else have they done?
> the mean z score for ToM overconnected clusters was correlated with ADI-R Social and ADI-R Communication scores (r = 0.45, P < .05 and r = 0.51, P < .01, respectively), although neither survived Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
If it didn't survive simple correction over multiple comparisons, then it probably isn't significant. However, rather than looking at that, this value that can't survive correction lead to their conclusion that their first hypothesis and second hypothesis were correct.
I don't have the time or energy required to use the supplied data to re-evaluate the given data, but currently there does appear to be the suggestion that this paper is a victim of P-value hunting.
Which is kind of the point. These practices are incredibly wide-spread, and incredibly harmful to the whole field.
> [10] Doesn't seem to support the idea that the mirror system is at all involved in ToM. It may cite other papers, but the conclusions are not in support of that concept.
Well, like I said it's a quickly growing field...[8] is a review from 2001 early on in the discovery of mirror neurons (although I know at some point or another their existence was disputed...not sure if that's still happening) and contains a lot of conjecture, [10] is a meta-analysis from 2009. I would say [10] is correct, so MNS may even be a red herring in the conversation on ToM.
However, if you're responding to confusion over this statement:
> One such paper that is fairly highly cited is [10], which compensates for issues presented by [3] by looking at a different area of the brain.
I believe the paper I attempted to cite here was in fact [11], which is also one of your citations, [5]. In it's discussion it asserts that the area of the brain relevant to the paper is "functionally and spatially dissociable from nearby dorsal clusters which respond to attentional reorienting", citing [3].
>I didn't rule this out. However, from the evidence we have, there isn't enough to rule it in, either.
I absolutely agree...but you asserted [2] and [5] 'suggested we simply aren't measuring it correctly', which they don't. I just wanted to clarify this wasn't the case. [7] suggests that, but absolutely not [2] or [5].
>Further, the result that people with ASD have a mirror system deficit hasn't always been reproduced. [0]
What you're saying is true, but this review doesn't support the assertion that people with ASD do not have a ToM deficit. It brings up two theoretical explanations for why people with ASD 'have difficulty understanding goals and intentions of others', and shows that evidence towards one of the theories, the 'broken mirror theory' is shaky at best and evidence is leaning against the broken mirror theory at worst.
There are three questions here which are being muddied together:
1. Does the MNS have a role in development of ToM?
2. Do people with ASD have a deficient MSN?
3. Do people with autism have a ToM deficit?
The answer to 1 appears to be, we do not know, however as the mentalizing/ToM system can act independently to the MNS, this may not be material to question 3.
The answer to 2 appears to be, it's as of yet inconclusive, and the review you posted seems to assert evidence is mounting to the contrary.
As for question 3...all current measures seems to point towards 'yes' [13], however, all current measures are also disputed as to whether or not they are accurately measuring ToM [14]. The method discussed in [7], is actually not the only method used to study ToM in people with ASD. It is an explicit (verbal) method (such as those referenced in [0] of the parent comment), and 'implicit' (visual) methods followed which used eye tracking (it is not yet clear whether these tests measure different things or the verbal tests are simply ineffective). These methods found impaired mentalizing in people with ASD [15]. More recently, more methods have arisen [14]. Here is one of the linked studies with an interesting discussion [16].
So, frankly it wouldn't be correct in my eyes to say it's certain in any way that people with ASD have a ToM deficit...but at the very least progress and improvements in methodology don't seem to have yet cast significant doubt on conclusions reached by previous research in this topic.
Unfortunately I'm unable to give input on your comments on p-value hacking for [12] since I don't have expertise. But at least the papers subject is on the mechanism rather than the degree to which people with ASD have a ToM deficit, so it doesn't affect the overall discussion too much.
> As for question 3...all current measures seems to point towards 'yes' [13], however, all current measures are also disputed as to whether or not they are accurately measuring ToM [14].
I think this where we're getting stuck.
For me, if a methodology is in doubt, then so are any conclusions that rely upon it. If the methodologies are in doubt, then the conclusions shouldn't be used as a foundation for anything.
Whereas for you, it seems that you'll continue along with the previous belief until such time as new methodologies quantitatively say one way or the other.
I wouldn't say I hold such a strong position. I tried to make my conclusion fairly noncommittal ("it wouldn't be correct in my eyes to say it's certain in any way that people with ASD have a ToM deficit"). My knowledge has evolved along with this conversation (hence why we may have seemed 'stuck'), so perhaps my conclusive tone of writing was inappropriate, which may have created a false impression of certitude.
Back when I was in school for mathematics and taking a few grad classes (my math knowledge drained out unfortunately quickly) I was told by a colleague that the Riemann Zeta hypothesis was generally regarded as 'true', and that it's not uncommon for mathematicians to do research proving theorems on the condition that the Riemann Zeta hypothesis is true. Point being, don't think there's anything wrong building on something which we may not yet know to be true...as long as caveats are stated up front.
My parents had 2 dogs. The smarter one understood that when she buried some bones while the other dog watched - she later reburied it somewhere else when the other dog was at home.
She also knew not to go into the living room while father was there (because she was technically forbidden to do that), but went to that room when father was away.
I'm pretty sure she had some kind of theory of mind.
I recommend Carl Safina's "Beyond Words", which is an in-depth look at elephants, wolves, and orcas, and I recommend the audio book form, because he rants, with sincere anger, about how obvious it is that these animals display theory of mind.
For sure, apes are very intelligent. I've seen a few clips where orphaned apes have recognised humans years after they last met. I've also seen a case where an orangutang was spotted using a 'spear' to catch fish.
I heard a scientist telling about one of his colleagues that was showing towels of different colors to an ape, to see how the ape could point to an image or word (don't remember) corresponding to its color. At some point he presented him with a blue towel, and the ape kept pointing at "red". After a few retries from the scientist, the ape pointed to the little red tag of the towel, and went laughing.
I recognize the value in doing these experiments, but is anyone surprised? I would have been far more surprised if our closest relatives could not demonstrate a theory of mind.
I totally agree. I have noticed that the implicit skepticism for the faculties of animals that you're picking up on is not just present in this research, but seems to represent the attitudes of psychologists and philosophers generally--or at least it does in my university.
Every time it came up in one of my classes (I'm thinking of three: epistemology, learning and cognition, and philosophy of language) there was always somebody around ready to act authoritative on the matter and squash the idea that animals are more capable than we think they are.
On two separate occasions, elsewhere on campus, I found conversations among students in those classes but not majoring in either philosophy or psychology (like myself) where there was unanimous agreement that those disciplines have a stick up their ass about the subject.
Maybe I should accept that they're more familiar with the research in this area than I am, and therefore probably just correct, but I'm inclined to suspect a more particular bias. Like maybe certain influential folk in the recent past tried to make an academic stand for the specialness of humans (if there's a place for such a stand, it's in philosophy or psychology) and their work only travels in certain circles, which makes the cliques stand out to us muggles.
I've found academic discourse to be quirky like that.
That's the animal research and psychology research. You won't know until you have done. And it's the starting point of testing something more complicated.
Oh, I know that. By all means, run the experiments and do the tests. I’m just saying the results here are entirely unsurprising given we’re talking about animals that are effectively 99.5% the same as us at a genetic level.
>For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure?
When we slaughter other animals by the millions (often in very painful ways) though it can be avoided, are we in a position to ask such questions?
You personally have the luxury of reflecting on food ethics. That doesn't make the whole of humanity "cruel" and "lacking empathy".
Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.
That's a stretch...cows know of humans, they know specific humans, they fear the slaughterhouse in many cases. They may not understand their ultimate destiny, but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.
> but it seems a vast stretch to imply our buried-in-the-ground corpses are being eaten by ultra intelligent aliens.
That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :)
Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.
Almost every one in America has the "luxury" of examining food ethics, when 95% of people in this country actively consume a product made through what amounts to a holocaust.
Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.
I didn't say consuming meat products made by the modern factory farming system/methodology makes anyone a Nazi. I'm saying that consuming those products means you're consuming the products made by a system that actively commits genocide and torture at the scale of billions of lifeforms. That doesn't make everyone doing it evil, and I hope that as people come to read more and become more aware of what's going on they choose to stop their consumption of animal products. Individual agency is all we can have.
Why is it hyperbole? We slaughter 25 million animals a day in the United States. That amounts to over 9 billion animals a year. Do you attribute 0 consciousness to those animals, a complete and total unawareness of their suffering? Almost every single one of those animals goes through torture and standards of living no one would deign as humane if they were done on their pets.
Would you voluntarily clip the beaks of a chicken, pump them full of growth hormones, and pack them so tight they live on top of mounds of their own feces and degraded corpses of other chickens for a fraction of their natural lifespan before having their throats cut, often while not stunned?
Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.
What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?
Some people don't put any weight at all on animal suffering as long as a human benefits. You can't really prove that killing a pig isn't worth the ham you get, how would you even begin to make that objective?
Ultimately it's up to each and every human to make that moral judgement. I don't have a problem with meat eating in the abstract, our species have done it for years, but I do take issue with the idea that it's
1) a luxury to examine food ethics for the first world, when most people commenting on this website live in a land of plenty in terms of food availability and
2) an animal's suffering means absolutely nothing, when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done. Does our perceived superiority of consciousness entitle us to the vile exploitation of billions of life forms? Would an aliens superior technology visiting Earth entitle them to enslave us, since we'd be nothing more than animals to them?
> when I would bet that 99% of people visiting a slaughterhouse would be absolutely reviled by the modern animal condition with how animal farming is currently done.
I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.
I agree, there's many problems in the world that need to be fixed. Food should be more sustainable. We should make smarter, more conscientious choices behind how we choose our food. I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa. The amount of grain we feed to livestock would be enough to feed 800 million people -- we would consume less objectively if we were a plant based society.
The more I read this comment, the less I understand it. Following your train of thought, there'd be LESS people enduring that misery and LESS strain on the world's environments if we ate less meat -- we would need less land to grow mankind's food, and would require less imports from third world countries in doing so.
> I don't see why being plant based, a more sustainable and ultimately less cruel way of consuming food, should be rejected because there's cruelty to how we grow crops like quinoa.
less cruel to whom? I made it very clear that for me, your plant based, "more sustainable" way of consuming cause misery to lots of human-beings, and for me this is more vile and cruel than raise animals to eat nutritious and healthy food.
It depends what value you attribute to a life. For example, is the life of one adult human more valuable than the life of one hundred million adult chimpanzees? These things are very hard to quantify.
It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.
I think there are a few counter examples. Many pet owners have posted videos of their dogs and cats being protective of their (human) babies. In fact, Koko the gorilla was very affectionate towards her kittens.
And yet my dog would also regularly show up at the back door with a freshly caught bird’s legs sticking out of her mouth even though she was provided with ample and a wide variety of food.
It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)
I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.
Perhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).
Individually there are counter examples, but does any other species display empathy at the scale of another species? I doubt it. And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.
Humpback whales appear to show empathy towards other species. We have 115 documented cases of them doing so (and it is a lot given how hard it is to observe them).
How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"
> And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.
Sounds like that applies equally to humans. There are cultures where cruelty towards dogs and cats is more common that empathy, and even in places where empathy is more common, individuals can still be cruel.
A "Save the Whales" campaign may seem like empathy towards another species, but it only exists because humans hunted whales so vigorously, and are also in the midsts of ruining their environments, so neither of those sound like examples of true empathy towards another species.
> How do you distinguish between individual acts of empathy and "empathy at the scale of another species?"
An invasive species (or if an imbalance occurs such as predators become scarce and prey population explodes) will just outcompete other species for resources with no empathy. Humans can certainly do that, but we also sometimes worry about preserving species and habitats.
Since we've caused more species to go extinct than any other invasive species in history, that's a remarkably ineffectual case of empathy.
In any case, I'd argue that this isn't real "empathy." We feel intellectually that we've done something wrong, and we even feel sadness about it (although possibly in a similar way that we'd feel towards abiotic ruin, like destroying all the arches in arches national park), but I don't think we truly empathize with the, say, beetles who are going extinct, as we cannot comprehend their minds in any way.
Since this whole discussion is about theory of mind, we should use empathy correctly: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another."
How many other species can afford the time to express empathy as much as humans do? Most of them are just struggling to survive, so it's not like we get a lot of opportunities to observe that behavior.
So two examples come to mind where it wasn't just survival. One, a wolf pack in Yellowstone invades another wolf pack's territory, chases them away from their dens, forcing their cubs to starve to death. And two, the brutal Chimpanzee war Jane Goodall observed between two tribes. A third example could be any ant conflict between two colonies where they could in theory both survive but instead choose to try and wipe each other out. In fact, some ants form super colonies instead of fighting one another.
I'm not sure humans have the most empathy. In fact, there's a good chance that even when other species have empathy to other creatures, we don't necessarily recognize it.
I think it's a mammalian thing, not just a human thing. It's right in the word: mammal, "of the breast." Animals which suckle their young. Some level of empathy for things other than oneself is required, and this spills over to other individuals and species. And for social animals, having a broader net of empathy that encompasses non-directly-related individuals, empathy also enhances survival. And I think you could make the case that animals sometimes help each other out when facing a common threat, i.e. warning of predators, etc. As humans, we can perhaps see the importance of spreading the net of empathy ever-wider.
Humans are also the species with the most intelligence and the most wisdom. That doesn't mean we still may not be very low on an absolute scale of intelligence and wisdom. Saying we're better relative to other species is pretty meaningless.
Robert D. Hare (known for Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised PCL-R) has described psychopath as intraspecies predators. Psychopaths relation to other humans is similar to how humans relation to other animals. Humans have pets they like, but they still put down or abandon their best friend if something else comes along.
If you reverse this line of thought, we are psychopaths in our relation to animals. Our relation to animals is selfish, callous, and remorseless use (interpersonal-affective factor) and chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle in or relation to pets (social deviance factor).
Humans have also tendency to act like predators towards our outgroup. Maybe this ability selfish, callous, and remorseless behavior is important part of being a human.
That's a rather extreme generalization, isn't it? Not all humans are equally remorseless and prone to carelessly harm others, whatever the entities they interact with and the acculturated categorizations they project on them.
Now we can certainly come with statistics of tendencies, but to my mind they seem to be condemned with cultural biases. Not only the human brain plasticity is molded by the culture where it is immersed, so any data will tell us more about the result of such a culture than about "human inherent tendencies", but even the way we will decide to analyze them and consider/interpret the outcomes will depend on our culture (and our current mood or other more "local" psychological factors).
With that in mind, it's hard to categorically conclude that humans are fundamentally "psychopaths in [their] relation to animals". Dominant cultures, offspring of predatory cultures, surely help to foster such a behavior. That doesn't require it to be an intractable instinctive trait.
> We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy.
I don't think that's the case. It's just ignorance that can lead to cruel behavior, which is just amplified the bigger our society is. That's more actionable than simply judging our species as cruel (call me naive, but I honestly think most of us want to be good).
Ignorance plays a large role, but even when people are overwhelmed with (accurate) information, I'd say over 90% of people still take the cruel but easier path.
IMHO there's different kinds of ignorance. There's a difference between the absence of knowledge and misperception of reality. The first is an intellectual type of ignorance: the lack of information. The latter is the lack of wisdom/insight and leads to superimposing a view of reality onto reality itself, which leads to cruel behavior and suffering.
Except that we 'invented' the empathy. Or the concept of it.
I'm all for acting ethically. And mostly because we are the creature to compose the concept of ethics.
Nature is an idea; a human idea... or a bucket of ideas. One that different people or cultures put different things into. One needs to be highly suspicious of anybody who appeals to nature for some value in itself, or as a source of natural laws. People tend to see in 'nature' what they already believe.
And I think a similar principle holds for how we apply ethics in relation to the not-human, natural world. Careful.
Yes and I hope some day that practice goes the way of common human slavery. Perhaps some day we will stop killing our fellow earth creatures. For now we still kill even other humans at will.
We're far from a cruel species lacking empathy. We need to eat, we're omnivores and it's more like our "production methods" have not yet caught up with our magnitude. We act like any other similar animal would do, except on an unprecedented scale. To reduce mankind through your favourite moral grievance also precludes any capacity for evolutionary change.
As an alien observer from a far one might wonder how humans might want to exploit my knowledge, technology or even the flavour of my flesh (if I have any). That's assuming that alien has mostly inquisitive intentions.
Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.
You're afforded the luxury of not doing that now, if you like. For the entirety of our evolution we did not have that luxury. Every primitive culture pre agriculture ate meat whenever they were successful at the hunt.
I can't believe someone downvoted this. Show me one counter example, I dare you.
Scientists can’t agree on how the intelligence of our primate relatives, but [...]
What does this even mean? Is editing just not done any more? Something like this as the _first sentence_ of an article make me doubt the quality of the entire article, in fact the entire publication.
Spot on. That the publication didn't find it worthwhile to accurately proofread the FIRST sentence of the article signals (to me) they are not worried about the reader's time and prevents me from taking their article seriously.
Copy-editing is just another wasteful business expense to be cut for increased profits. Journalism is profit-centric and copy-editors have been cut from the NYTimes, too.
We need to genetically engineer all apes and monkeys towards human levels of intelligence. It's their only hope for survival and a great hope to change our politics for the better incorporating more of nature into our civilizations.
Not sure what you're trying to say with this. Does this belong to a different thread?
Also, note that "learning styles" has come into some intense criticism re: its validity as of late. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism
It's like saying - there's a trained neural net with inputs: opacity of screen = 1 with expected output of searching target box. When tested, similar neural nets with similar training expected output of target box. Hence neural net has "theory of mind"
It'd be way more conclusive if the apes knew what was going on, and then decided to act to change the outcome.
> It's like saying - there's a trained neural net with input
It's not. There's a world of difference between a neural net and a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are some our closest evolutionary relatives. They are living animals with whom we share a great deal of our DNA (98.8% seems to be an often quoted figure). Therefore, conclusions that are likely given the observation "neural net shows similar behavior to humans" are vastly different those given the observation "Chimpanzee shows similar behavior to humans".
Your thought experiment is not equivalent to that described here as it does not have a similar complexity of interaction between actors -- in fact, it has no interaction between actors.
Your use of neural nets is also something of a red herring: you would have just as good a counter-example with two passive devices giving the same output on the same inputs.
We often look to the stars and wonder what other intelligent life is out there. I'm sure it's captured every one of our minds at some point. Dark Forest theory of the Fermi Paradox be damned, we want to share in the comfort of knowing that intelligent life exists. That we are not all alone.
But I wonder - had things been not much different, might we be cohabiting with an intelligent species, one perhaps tens of thousands of years ahead of us? Aliens on our own planet?
Would we even realize their sentience - would our minds even be comparable? Would their civilization fade to ruins before we came to sentience, and would we discover remnants of a long-lost civilization? Would they raze the planet to the ground and never provide us the opportunity to develop sentience?
So many questions. Are we in a similar situation right now with other hominids, who we've found to have a "theory of mind"? Are we morally obligated to not cut the nip of societal development in the bud for these species? And if this species suffers in developing and advancing, are we obligated to ease and accelerate their development?
For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure? As such, are we in a similar situation with other developing hominids?
When you think about it, it is possible that intelligent life developing on other planets is not a singular species but multiple species. And that's fascinating. I wonder what it must be like, to cohabit with a different species that is effectively your equal with respect to self-awareness/sentience, even if they are not your equal with respect to technology.