Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

> House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals > every year that they don't need or want to eat.

"Recreationally" is carrying a lot of weight here. I suspect that cats kill birds and mice because that's their instinct; it has nothing to do with conscious thought, much less a need for recreation. And that probably is the explanation for most (maybe all) of your other examples as well.

I guess I was very ignorant about the elephant example! Thanks for the links

>Animals generally have no qualms at all about killing or even just mutilating other animals.

Humans generally don't either. Individuals do, but as a species humans regularly kill other humans.

>invertebrates often consume their prey alive

And humans use the oh so humane factory farms.

>cats and other small predators often hunt just for the fun of it, killing but not eating their prey.

>On the more purely painful evil side, invertebrates often consume their prey alive, inflicting agonizing deaths with no issues on whatever they may be eating.

Sharks are caught en mass, the fins cut off, and the sharks dumped back into the ocean to slowly die, for shark fin soup.

Have you heard of trophy hunting? Have you seen the pictures of mountains of bison sculls for the American West?

>Plenty of vertebrates kill and consume their babies, especially when frightened.

Even in our modern "1st world" society, scared teens still abandon newborns in dumpsters. Many societies throughout history did not consider babies "real people" until a certain age because they may need to abandon them if resources were particularly scarce.

>They also often abandon old and weak members of their packs, leaving them to die of hunger or cold or similar deaths.

Maybe you should read stories of cities under siege, famines, wars, governmental collapse, etc. Humans now live nice comfy lives most of the time, unlike animals “in the wild”. Human societies that lived closer to the edge of survival made callous choices about life or death you are spared from.

Humans have enough cognitive ability to stop themselves from killing for fun (so when they don't, we deal with them using human invented laws), while anteaters eat ants for nutrition.

Animals in general cannot reason at a high enough level to avoid instinctual behavior.

> if we apply human moral standards to the animal kingdom

Which we should not, since human moral standards are for humans. Animals can at best behave in a way that suits us.

Or in summary, since we can be nicer, we should. Animals can't, so making excuses for human evil saying "animals are more violent" is a non starter IMHO (no one is making excuses for humans here , AFAIK).

Of course we can define violence in a way that does not include morals, which would make my argument "defending animals" void. But my (probably not the most benign) interpretation was that the definition of violence used was one that included some sort of morality, as if animals could do better.

Very interesting convo, thanks.

Humans just have the cognitive ability to be violent on a larger scale. Otherwise I also don‘t really see much of a difference to animals.

I agree that people aren't ready to discuss this.

BTW I just saw this video: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1twl7oj/r...

Yeah, that's corvids. Very obviously working towards goals and thinking quickly. Doesn't surprise me. Where I live, we have both magpies and jackdaws and I cannot describe them better than "harmless, but very organized gangs".

Just a few days ago I saw them raiding an open trash can and two strongest(?) birds were fishing out edible stuff from the inside and throwing it to their waiting friends outside. I mean, beak to beak: the raider just looked back, measured the throw, and the other bird perfectly caught the morsel and ate it.

What if one day they do? Or appears to be, in the way that you couldn't distinguish? Will you update your priors?

My purpose was to say that humans might not be capable enough to see what's there beyond just rocks and gases. Actually, this should be a popular view, because, according to modern theory, the observable universe accounts for only 5% of its mass, with the rest consisting of dark matter and dark energy.

It is hard to estimate how much human egocentrism takes in the space, though.

And BTW, ants are quite capable of understanding their environment in order to survive and thrive.

Those are your own standards of achievement you are applying.

Other species may look at us and think we're wasting our lives and potential making a bunch of people rich at our collective expense, and ruining the environment as we do it.

We are only "special" in the sense of "different" (and we may not be that on any universal scale), not necessarily in the sense of "better", and very possibly we're not better, and may very well Great Filter ourselves out of existence in short order.

Other animals aren't so "special" as to have a Doomsday Clock sitting at 11:58:45.

"What alien species you have in mind, that is more capable/consciouss about the universe and how to shape it?"

Claim was that we are special in the "universe", it's not that I'm aware of alien life, it's that poster is pretending to know that we are alone.

"But they did not. We "won" so we are special."

Congratulations, if winning a lottery makes you better, I guess top 1% of 1% are the best we have to offer.

"it gives argument to devalueing human life to artificial life"

We have proven time and time again that we are not better than other animals and statistically, we are very similar to animals if not worse. I wasn't even talking about artificial life, which is sure to be superior as it's being created with accelerated evolution processes, just like bacterial generational evolution, it will learn to do everything it's environment rewards it for.

"Meaning people with feelings and emotions might suffer, in favour of GPU's with electricity"

I agree with you and I am in the camp that wants it to be done better. But alas, recent events have unveiled the ugly truth of the society, societies follow the whims of the ones who won the lottery, and everyone else is just mute observer. We could on any day collectively decide as consumers to not use Amazon, Netflix, ChatGPT to save our collective selves, but we won't because we are not "one for all species".

I don't know what face we have to call ourselves better organism given our history. Sure we can point to few people who are better, but on average we are better?

“The model mimicked the output of the training data” is a less impressive press release.