thriving_earthw

Maybe a materialist biological exceptionalism position could be that biological substrates are capable of sending kinds of signals that silicon substrates are not, in the sense that brain matter especially might give rise to far greater complex processing in ways that we don't know about or appreciate yet, and which we may discover can't be efficiently recreated in silicon?

I don't know if I buy that argument or even if it makes sense. But yeah this all smacks inextricably of soul talk.

There really is. And it's worth making the effort! Wishing you luck.

I love that the researcher in the video is just hanging out in her living room and holding her cat while recording her portion of the explainer

Rational compassion being perhaps a distinctively human trait, needless animal slaughter and suffering is far more ruinous to my humanity.

Also the small farmers you are romanticizing hardly exist anymore precisely because of the returns to scale that lead large resource efficient factory farms to dominate.

Having to forcibly restrain an animal is clear evidence that they don't like it, otherwise I don't know what clear evidence you would accept. A good proxy for whether an animal likes something is when it shows aversive behavior around that thing!

The fact that your cat needs the medicine just means that the discomfort you are inflicting on your cat is ultimately with its best interest in mind. When we hurt an animal, or even kill one with its best interest in mind, we do it out of compassion.

When we forcibly impregnate an animal repeatedly and then take away it's calf (cows being viviparous animals, this causes them suffering), that is not in their best interest. Their suffering is not benefiting them, it benefits us.

We eat far more meat now at a time when far far fewer people are personally slaughtering animals than ever before in human history, so I think the claim checks out.

People who kill animals themselves regularly are probably subsistence farmers who consider meat a luxury, and what's more, the way they killed them was probably nothing like the incredibly high volume processing that goes on in a modern slaughterhouse.

I definitely think that if most people had to visit a modern factory farm and see the life cycle of one of these animals, kill it and process it, they would probably be shocked at what is legal.

This is called moral progress.

Also South Korea didn't end their dog meat industry because of international pressure, it's because incomes have been steadily rising and more households are purchasing dogs as companion animals and developing moral concern for them.

Compassion for animals isn't some U.S. conspiracy. There are animal rights activists all over the world.

And Halal slaughter is not humane by any means, but neither is slaughtering an animal with western stunning methods. 90%+ of pigs in the UK for example are stunned using C02 gas. I encourage you to watch undercover footage of this happening.

You mean no more raising tens of millions of pigs and billions of chickens in intense confinement?

Don't threaten me with a good time!

They have to forcibly hold them in place. You have to do this with pretty much all artificially inseminated animals.

Rape is not a terrible word to describe forcible penetration.

Man. Well at least all those macaques didn't die for nothing.

I don't think they'd use it, no. They seem to have behaved pretty rationally in response to foreign powers meddling in the region to me. You can wring your hands about them funding terror groups, but it's nothing that we and the brits haven't done over the decades in the region. Their resistance to Israel isn't irrational either.