19-11-2004 22:25									#121
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quote: Originally posted by Kuciwalker You obviously haven't been reading my posts. For one, it's not really a biological question at all, it's a philisophical one (and I'd love you to find a cite for a biologist claiming degrees of sentience - it seems perfectly clear to me that either you actually are aware, or you are not). For another, I said that all evidence for the sentience of another being is circumstantial, but that we have the polite convention of believing anything that claims it is self-aware (and that you can extrapolate from your own sentience to other humans' sentience, because we have practically similar brains).

Darwin claimed it actually, in The Descent of Man, and a quick google search brings up the Professor of Biology at Colorado University.
The trouble is that even if a fox were to claim it was self-aware, you wouldn't understand it, because it doesn't speak. Incidentally, according to your definition, a child up to the age of about 15 months is a valid target for hunting/torturing/aborting.

	19-11-2004 22:27									#122
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quote: Originally posted by Spiffor Please prove me, then, why the lack of self-awareness would be the same as thelack of sentience.

Because I'm using the terms interchangeably. I'm using them both to mean the quality of actually feeling sensations. It's impossible to describe more clearly, really; it's that you actually see the image projected onto your retina, that you actually hear the vibrations in your eardrum.

quote: Remeber, you have defined self-awareness as such: any being that can say is aware of itself, is in fact self-aware.

In general. This is a polite convention, described by Turing. Obviously we would not count a program with it's only instruction being "print "I am self-aware"", it's more subtle than that. Anyway, I have to go now.

	19-11-2004 22:28									#123
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quote: Originally posted by Kuciwalker Because humans are self-aware. We feel the pain.

As does a fox.


I'm still waiting for you to explain the differences.

	19-11-2004 22:31									#124
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quote: Originally posted by Kuciwalker Because I'm using the terms interchangeably. I'm using them both to mean the quality of actually feeling sensations. It's impossible to describe more clearly, really; it's that you actually see the image projected onto your retina, that you actually hear the vibrations in your eardrum.

Then please explain me, when you're back, how you can pretend animals are deprived of it. From the beginning, this is the bone of contention.

	19-11-2004 22:41									#125
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I can't believe someone is seriously arguing animals don't feel fear or pain. Yeah, it's all some sort of elaborate fake on their part.

	19-11-2004 22:46									#126
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quote: Originally posted by Wezil I can't believe someone is seriously arguing animals don't feel fear or pain. Yeah, it's all some sort of elaborate fake on their part.

This argument was actuallly held by a mainstream French philosopher (René Descartes) ~300 years ago, who compared animals to elaborate watches IIRC. The argument was exactly the same, the animals are to react mechanically to stimuli, but they don't feel pain...

I have never seen someone with this philosophy explain why cows, before entering the slaughterhouse, crap themselves or even sometimes die of heart-attack before anything had been done to them.

Edit after Molly corrected my hideous blunder

	19-11-2004 22:46									#127
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You seem to be going by the viewpoint that humans were designed to be more special than the rest of your creation. For us that do not follow the consequences of intelligent design and therefore do not truly differentiate at a base level between humans and other animals your entire argument relies on an anthrocentric fallacy right at the starting point, which makes it pretty impossible to argue with you.

I'd argue that there's different levels of sentience from no nervous system, to a primitive nervous system like insects, to a full central nervous nervous, to human like sentience and abilty to describe ethics etc. You can scare animals, animals that think they're going to do die will behave exactly the same as humans (freeze with panic, loosen bowels etc). I don't think we should not eat/kill animals, but avoidance of too much distress is an obvious thing to do, and hunting with hounds relies on causing distress for the entertainment of the hunters. if the fox was killed within ten minutes they wouldn't like it..

	19-11-2004 23:00									#128
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quote: Originally posted by Oerdin The estate taxes put in place in the UK make being landed gentry pretty hard for more then a generation. More and more rural areas will be sold to developers if country folk aren't given the chance to preserve rural ways of life. Would you rather have a pretty English countryside or a big piece of urban sprawl?

You're wrong on just about every count.

Death duties are, in fact, absurdly easy to avoid. That's why we still have a landed gentry.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of Britain's countryside isn't used for hunting. You cannot hunt with hounds in areas where animals are grazing, crops are growing, or there are risky roads or railway crossings. You also can't hunt in forested, rocky, mountainous or marshy areas for practical areas. That's about 90- 95% of rural Britain out of the equation at any given time.

So are the vast majority of the countryside expanses where there's no hunting overrun with foxes? Nope. You see, there's a very large and efficient predator that controls their numbers nicely. It's called "the car".

Oh yes, on top of that our greenbelt laws would prevent undue sprawl.

	19-11-2004 23:05									#129
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quote: Originally posted by Spiffor This argument was actuallly held by a mainstream French philosopher (Blaise Pascal) ~300 years ago, who compared animals to elaborate watches IIRC. The argument was exactly the same, the animals are to react mechanically to stimuli, but they don't feel pain... I have never seen someone with this philosophy explain why cows, before entering the slaughterhouse, crap themselves or even sometimes die of heart-attack before anything had been done to them.

"French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650) taught that animals are simply machines, without souls, reason or feeling. The cry of a dog in pain, according to Descartes, is merely a mechanical noise, like the creak of a wheel. His beliefs found acceptance in ecclesiastical and scientific circles. Science was progressing quite rapidly in the 17th century; Descartes effectively removed all moral objections to animal experimentation."

http://www.all-creatures.org/murti/tsnhod-07.html

I believe when he flayed a dog alive he instructed his assistants to ignore the animal's cries.

	19-11-2004 23:06									#130
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The fact is that this issue goes far beyond a question of how we treat animals. It's now a point of principle that determines whether we're a democracy or not?

It has to be banned now, because otherwise once again we will see our democratically-elected representatives overruled by an undemocratic body due to the actions of a tiny but powerful minority.

That and the fact that I'm sick of the lies the pro-hunting lobby keep spouting.

	19-11-2004 23:09									#131
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quote: Originally posted by molly bloom "French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes (1596-1650)

That was Descartes

	19-11-2004 23:11									#132
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Hopefully soon you'll be able to give them the same response you give to pro-lifers ("You lost, get over it")...

	19-11-2004 23:26									#133
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Seeing as the alternative is to leave Britain an undemocratic nation, I'm quietly confident.

	19-11-2004 23:45									#134
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quote: Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn Wouldn't top my agenda, but still Well done. And at Ming who thinks the US is sooooo PC...

Do you really read things or do you just let fly with whatever is flaoting around in that head of yours?

quote: It's nice to see that other countries can be as silly at being PC as the good ole US of A...

That is what he said. Now how in the **** do you get him saying the US is better in this regard. Can you tell me that please. Enlighten all us please

	19-11-2004 23:47									#135
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As for the fox hunting. It doesn't bother me either way. It's entirely up to the Brits to fight over.

	19-11-2004 23:50									#136
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quote: Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp So are the vast majority of the countryside expanses where there's no hunting overrun with foxes? Nope. You see, there's a very large and efficient predator that controls their numbers nicely. It's called "the car".

More than effective here as well. I see more dead fox than live ones.

	20-11-2004 00:19									#137
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quote: Originally posted by General Ludd As does a fox. I'm still waiting for you to explain the differences.

The difference is that a fox doesn't.

Electrons don't "feel" being pushed by electric charges. A robot doesn't "feel" a touch sensor being triggered. They are not sentient. Neither are foxes.

	20-11-2004 00:21									#138
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quote: Originally posted by lightblue You seem to be going by the viewpoint that humans were designed to be more special than the rest of your creation. For us that do not follow the consequences of intelligent design and therefore do not truly differentiate at a base level between humans and other animals your entire argument relies on an anthrocentric fallacy right at the starting point, which makes it pretty impossible to argue with you.

I'm an atheist and don't believe in intelligent design. I don't believe I've used the word in the entire thread. If I have, it was in the sense of evolution designing something to do X, which is much easier to say than "natural selection with random mutation resulted in the predominance of this trait because it performs function X that is good for reproduction and survival".

My argument is that only humans are sentient, and this is a simple empirical claim; we really have no evidence that there are any other sentient life forms. Intelligent, maybe, but no evidence of sentience.

	20-11-2004 00:24									#139
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quote: Originally posted by Spiffor This argument was actuallly held by a mainstream French philosopher (René Descartes) ~300 years ago, who compared animals to elaborate watches IIRC. The argument was exactly the same, the animals are to react mechanically to stimuli, but they don't feel pain... I have never seen someone with this philosophy explain why cows, before entering the slaughterhouse, crap themselves or even sometimes die of heart-attack before anything had been done to them.

Because that has NOTHING to do with sentience. I could build a robot that does exactly what you say, but you wouldn't suggest that it was sentient or worthy of rights.

	20-11-2004 00:26									#140
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* Wezil adds Kuciwalker to the 'Prohibited from Farming' list *

Do you own a pet Kuciwalker?

	20-11-2004 00:27									#141
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No. Trying to make an appeal to emotion?

btw, if we accept animals as sentient, we have no real basis not to afford them any other rights we give humans, such as protection from other animals...

	20-11-2004 00:33									#142
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Since I am soo fed up with animals' rights' advocates discussions, I would like just to say to Kuciwalker: push the protection against other animals point. They never come up with an answer, at least not one that I've seen.

	20-11-2004 00:34									#143
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Well they can sue us for it I did know you were an atheist, which is why i was surprised to see you propone this rather theist few ("god created animals to server us" etc etc). If you want to pull it fully through then you should argue that humans are jsut machines as well as the only way to prove sentience is by assuming sentience exists in humans, and that it not a predetermined response of chemicals to external inputs.

I think a lot of mammals are aware of themselves as individuals, which could be argued as a basic form of sentience imo.

	20-11-2004 00:34									#144
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Also, should we have the DP for animals that murder other animals, or just incarceration for life?

	20-11-2004 00:36									#145
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quote: Originally posted by lightblue Well they can sue us for it I did know you were an atheist, which is why i was surprised to see you propone this rather theist few ("god created animals to server us" etc etc). If you want to pull it fully through then you should argue that humans are jsut machines as well as the only way to prove sentience is by assuming sentience exists in humans, and that it not a predetermined response of chemicals to external inputs.

We are machines. We, however, for reasons completely unknown, happen to be sentient machines. IMO sentience is an emergent property of matter - actually, an emergent property of simple calculation - but we can't really know right now. I think that if we simulated the motions of every particle in the human body in a computer, it would act exactly the same as an actual human body (i.e. there is no dualism or "external" soul that attaches itself to the body) and that the simulation would necessarily be sentient itself.

	20-11-2004 00:37									#146
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quote: Originally posted by Kuciwalker No. Trying to make an appeal to emotion?

Nope. Just wondering if there were any animals to be concerned about.

quote: btw, if we accept animals as sentient, we have no real basis not to afford them any other rights we give humans, such as protection from other animals...

It's one thing to engage in a BS philosophical argument about sentience and quite another to extrapolate it into the real world as you apparently do. Now you've even gone so far as to imply we need wilderness cops to police the freaking predators if one thinks an animal truly feels pain. You are silly and I won't go there with you.

Sounds like you desperately need to get the **** out of school ASAP and take a peek at the real world out there.

	20-11-2004 00:37									#147
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Humans ARE just machines, btw! Doesn't mean we shouldn't take care of ourselves, and ourselves only. Don't want to? fine, YOUR problem.

	20-11-2004 00:42									#148
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quote: It's one thing to engage in a BS philosophical argument about sentience and quite another to extrapolate it into the real world as you apparently do. Now you've even gone so far as to imply we need wilderness cops to police the freaking predators if one thinks an animal truly feels pain. You are silly and I won't go there with you.

Why do we need cops for people, but we don't have the same obligation to animals? Don't they have the rights not to be tortured, killed just like people? Why do we only punish people who do it to animals, but not animals that do it to animals?

	20-11-2004 00:52									#149
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Told you, I won't go there with you.

The gist of the thread is the humane treatment of animals. Apparently it is a concept of little use to you.

Do you exhibit any other symptoms of sociopathy?

	20-11-2004 00:58									#150
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No. I have complete respect for the rights of people. Animals are not people.

Are you pro-choice? Are you a sociopath?