"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days."
Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
The article calls the data an "observation", made by the captain of a Rescue Boat from Sea World Foundation. From a peek at https://seaworldfoundation.com.au/rescue it seems clear that their job is rescue, not research.
Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both of those fronts by large multi-dimensional arrays of floating points sitting inside of... sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
When your afraid you can choose to ignore the fear, but you are still afraid and it has physical effects that can be measured. There is at least a trinary state of possible outcomes and as the situation space becomes more complex and solutions drift apart on all 3.
That's a very closed definition of grieving. So by your definition a future perfectly simulated human brain cannot grieve because no chemicals are involved?
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
One of the important overlooked aspects of this is how maltreatment of something that appears to be human-like in many ways by an actual human affects the person doing it.
I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
We’ve had 30 years of people killing digital people, often controlled by actual people without any obvious impact on violent tendencies.
I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
This is one of those things that really does need checked up on occasionally.
For example, do video games not cause violence because of something like being on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. We know it's fake therefore its fake.
Do does this break down when it gets "too real".
For example lets imagine a future VR video game that the inside game doesn't feel much different from the world we live in? Lets also imagine an interesting unique constraint in this video game. If you die in it you cannot play it any more. You play it for years safely and make romantic connections in it. One day someone kills your partner violently in front of you. You'd be pretty willing to take up violence against said person, right? How much of that violence would carry out of the game?
I don't want to make proclamations like the video game violence people did that were not correct, but I also don't want to assume as we make our simulacra more like us that it won't affect us somehow. Situations like this are rarely binary, and it's best to keep an eye on it.
Lastly, because LLMs can and do effect the real world with their actions, it's likely a good idea to error to the side of caution and at least be polite.
Or that time when they "discovered" that treating a person's mental illness by stabbing an ice pick through the eye socket and cutting up the brain was about as humane as Neanderthals bashing annoying fellow cave dwellers over the head with a club until the noises stopped.
My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.
... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.
The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages to technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?).
You can't really know for sure, but the typical argument (c.f. Chomsky & Berwick) is there was an enormous explosion in "cultural" products then. Before then, we don't see figurative art, and after we see all sorts of crazy things.
That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.
I don't understand why you are hostile to me explaining the idea. In any case, you can read their book to see the arguments they use (which are not just assertions, anti-chomskyans just ignore or strawman everything he says)
Probably not to you explaining the idea, but to Chomskys ideas that have not been panning out well lately.
Genetically is seems it's very unlikely there is a single gene spot that explains human language but a confluence of different factors feeding back into one another in linage we do not have genetic access to at this time. We've done a bit of gene testing around this now, and single gene flips aren't near enough. I think the best analogy would be like playing a video game where you have to flip a number of switched to the correct position to get the system to work together.
Again, I don't think you understand the substance of the claim. Have you read the book? Mutations don't need to be single gene flips and I don't understand why you think Chomsky thinks that. He compares it to the evolution of the first photorecepetive cell, e.g. a qualitative jump, but that the mechanism is likely quite simple in order for that qualitative jump to be possible.
People really do flagrantly misrepresent his claims.
Genetic drift between humans and the next closest species to us in the brain an gene areas that seem to affect speech. That includes neanderthal and other hominoid species that are now extinct.
How does it make sense to say that speech developed 60 kya when Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosomal Adam are commonly dated 200+ kya? Not to mention the recent advances within the past few years that more or less prove Neanderthals and Denisovans spoke as well. With that information Homo heidelbergensis almost certainly spoke as well and if I could bet on it, I would advocate that the smart money would be on Homo Erectus having some level of speech too. In fact a recent paper argues that case: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13752-025-00521-8 It's unfortunately not on SciHub though so I can't attest to it.
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
> Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
> we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special
We’re similar to other globally-consequential species. The oxygen-generating organisms that promoted the GOE, for example. What makes us unique is we can be self aware about that power. Refusing to see that isn’t humility, it’s nihilism.
Obviously God made us in his image and gave us all this to rule over, no way we arose from the same primordial soup as the bugs and rats. We’ve got souls, they don’t.
The difference is similar to that of people with insane net worth to normal people. You have lots of leverage to do globally impactful things (positive or otherwise). You're there by lining up a long series of met conditions, not by virtues only.
> Most animals are different from most others, we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special.
That's probably a similarity we share with other species, and I'd expect to a similar degree. We own pets, but sometimes we see cross-species adoption (and friendship*) in the wild, too.
* or at least "alliance", given we can't in general read minds yet, just a few special cases with fMRI machines etc.
Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.
Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
> Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
Man, I remember carrying a veal calf in a wheelbarrow away from it's grieving mother (who ended up distressed for days) when I was 16 doing some Summer farm work. It messed me up for weeks, and I still somehow went back to drinking dairy. Thankfully I've sworn off all animal products now, but the knowing cruelty of it I suppressed for a long time.
Ordinarily in Minecraft if you click a cow with a bucket it fills with milk, a simplistic model of how this works that reflects probably the level of thought most people have about where cow milk comes from.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
I’m hoping that at some point we’d be able to have free range cows that are only hormonally forced to make milk. And no calves need to be born (or killed).
You can keep the calf with the mother half of the time at the cost of some milk and the benefit of less vet costs for the calf, at least. Some very few places do that. They say the cows are much less stressed once they realize the calf will be back by morning after milking.
I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
> Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
You know, if there was a hypnotic drug such that I could be sure I'd remember nothing (and many, many similar caveats), I'd volunteer to be caused all kinds of pain, because I don't see why I should care. The only moral angle I can see is the question of who would want it and why. Research maybe? In of itself, it doesn't seem bad.
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
No, there's a difference, in that my clone would get PTSD or some similar trauma as a result, which is a waste of a large part of that clone's life. In the version where I'm drugged into forgetfulness, I've only wasted a day, for science and profit.
PTSD and other results of trauma do not require a memory of the thing happening to you. In fact often people don't remember the thing that caused the trauma.
It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.
You’re showing a lack of empathy for the instance of yourself that is experiencing all that pain. Simply forgetting it doesn’t make it right to not have empathy for the version of yourself that went through all the pain and suffering.
I guess this might be a matter of subjective disagreement, but I'm personally opposed to all forms of consensual human suffering and death. I'd be fine with wrestling being banned, a law mandating contact sports amend rules to become non-contact, ban MAID (voluntary/consensual human euthanasia), ban anything that involves violence or harm done to any human being, including consenting adults consenting to violent acts performed on them. But that's just my opinion, and others are free to disagree with me on that. Although I will add that if I had legislative power I would not have an issue enacting such bans into law, even if people may say it taking away "rights"; to which I'd respond that certain rights like free speech are essential to a functioning free society, but certain other rights have no moral basis for being a right. The U.S. Congress (and various U.S. states) over the years progressively banned dueling. And notably, dueling was a consensual activity between two consenting adults, one that sadly took the life of Alexander Hamilton, amongst many others.
I haven't seen it, but the premise is that you have a second self who is trapped at work and wants to escape. That's really not the same thing, and misses the point of my drug scenario, which is that pain and (simple) suffering outside of meaning don't have moral weight. In this TV show the inside-work-selves are leading meaningfully miserable lives, with the frustrated cognitive desire to escape. They have knowledge-forming thought processes that are being wasted.
I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.
Yea, this is where the argument has the biggest problems. If your heart explodes or you tear vessels in your eyeballs, or you have long term stress related tissue damage the fact you don't remember at all doesn't matter much.
The problem with memory is it exists in a lot of different places. Screw around too much and you can mess up organs or even your gene expressions. Nothing to do with your brain at all.
I used to suffer from night terrors until well into my teenage years. It made me think, I would never know how much I was supposedly suffering in the moment. But what does it matter, if I can't remember it?
> We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.
Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.
That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)
Pretty sure the Abrahamic religions promote the idea that we are special and god gave us the nature for us to feed ourselves, rule the rest. All that talk of lord, kingdoms etc.
It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
A dog knows that the cat won't enter the backyard if he thinks the dog is free to roam, but will enter the backyard if it thinks the dog is restricted to the enclosure.
I call that theory of mind, because the dog needs to distinguish what it knows and what the cat knows.
There is no survival for us without hurting some other living organism. Even a purely vegan diet (which does not provide the complete nutrition we need) hurts plants and other critters that also want to eat those same plants or use them for shelter or whatever. So, I agree that we probably shouldn't feel too superior or different from other living things, but we also don't need to beat ourselves up for hurting other living things. We can't eat rocks.
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
Doesn’t mean we have to eat people or murdering animals. A rare person beats himself up for eating salad, but I promise you majority of people around you have various reservations about murdering and hurting animals and people. Growing up in some cultures and being fed abstract clean pieces of flesh just allows people to compartmentalize.
You should certainly try to do the least amount of harm possible. We don't really understand what harm is in all cases. We don't fully understand the lived experience of a chicken or the lettuce plant we cut up or the rabbit that died because we ate his lettuce. You could really tie yourself in knots trying to figure out what is less harmful overall.
No, language is communication. Those numbers just sit there unless someone tries to get them to do something. There's nobody in there and nothing to communicate, and you might fairly ask whether, if that sand WANTED anything, it wished to just be let alone without being made to jump through hoops for the pleasure of humans.
Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
Ants don't walk in line over the stove. It may not be fear, but there is something hardwired that tells them not too, or they would be extinct long ago
We see roundworms with decentralized nervous systems show chemical traces of fear, so it is actually hardwired deep in organisms and has been there a very, very long time. Fear is just too useful as a survival mechanism.
When I was a little boy, with XY chromosomes, I enjoyed vinyl records and record players. I came across a nice flex-disc, from a magazine such as National Geographic, and it was full of whalesong, recorded with underwater microphones from the deep. (I am sorry for posting this a day too late to Talk Like a Pirate...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family.
And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations.
Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.
That's two ethology stories on HN on one day. Interesting as news for nerds, but it is becoming relevant to more nerds than just me ;-) . (the other one is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775579 "do birds have accents")
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 66.9 ms ] threadhttps://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-reside...
Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both of those fronts by large multi-dimensional arrays of floating points sitting inside of... sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
When your afraid you can choose to ignore the fear, but you are still afraid and it has physical effects that can be measured. There is at least a trinary state of possible outcomes and as the situation space becomes more complex and solutions drift apart on all 3.
Lmao.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
The definition of the word “simulation” is:
> A simulation is the artificial imitation of a real-world process, system, or event using a model
As we know, “all models are wrong; some models are useful”.
A “perfect simulation” is, then, an oxymoron.
i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.
it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.
people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.
...literally on this article.
I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
For example, do video games not cause violence because of something like being on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. We know it's fake therefore its fake.
Do does this break down when it gets "too real".
For example lets imagine a future VR video game that the inside game doesn't feel much different from the world we live in? Lets also imagine an interesting unique constraint in this video game. If you die in it you cannot play it any more. You play it for years safely and make romantic connections in it. One day someone kills your partner violently in front of you. You'd be pretty willing to take up violence against said person, right? How much of that violence would carry out of the game?
I don't want to make proclamations like the video game violence people did that were not correct, but I also don't want to assume as we make our simulacra more like us that it won't affect us somehow. Situations like this are rarely binary, and it's best to keep an eye on it.
Lastly, because LLMs can and do effect the real world with their actions, it's likely a good idea to error to the side of caution and at least be polite.
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
It's right there at the start:
During the almost two months of his life [...]
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.
Genetically is seems it's very unlikely there is a single gene spot that explains human language but a confluence of different factors feeding back into one another in linage we do not have genetic access to at this time. We've done a bit of gene testing around this now, and single gene flips aren't near enough. I think the best analogy would be like playing a video game where you have to flip a number of switched to the correct position to get the system to work together.
People really do flagrantly misrepresent his claims.
— Daniel Dennett
https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Most animals are different from most others, we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special.
We’re similar to other globally-consequential species. The oxygen-generating organisms that promoted the GOE, for example. What makes us unique is we can be self aware about that power. Refusing to see that isn’t humility, it’s nihilism.
They wrote "we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special".
I think in that sentence "special" is bound to "feel", it's not separable into an "is" statement-of-fact, and religion is absolutely about feelings.
That's probably a similarity we share with other species, and I'd expect to a similar degree. We own pets, but sometimes we see cross-species adoption (and friendship*) in the wild, too.
* or at least "alliance", given we can't in general read minds yet, just a few special cases with fMRI machines etc.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
What's the practical difference other than timelike distance between you rather than spacelike distance?
https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176/lecture-12
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.
I had a very gruesome femur break decades ago. I can remember begging to be knocked out because of the pain but there's no memory of the pain itself.
I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.
Yea, this is where the argument has the biggest problems. If your heart explodes or you tear vessels in your eyeballs, or you have long term stress related tissue damage the fact you don't remember at all doesn't matter much.
The problem with memory is it exists in a lot of different places. Screw around too much and you can mess up organs or even your gene expressions. Nothing to do with your brain at all.
Scary stuff.
That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.
Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.
That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)
It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
A dog knows that the cat will run when the dog charges. Is that theory of mind?
I call that theory of mind, because the dog needs to distinguish what it knows and what the cat knows.
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
Or you just didn't read the comment you replied to and made an assumption?
If people didn't want to get ate why did they make themselves taste so good?
I think that makes us really quite special.
Yeah, that's not grieving.
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9
Applies to all living organisms
I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family.
And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations.
Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.