It’s like… I had a whole pile of interconnected beliefs, and if you pulled on one it would snap most of the way back into place after. And Dominion pushed the whole pile over at once.
I suppose the update was that if someone describes meat production as “animals live a happy life on a farm, well-fed and taken care of, and then one day they are relatively painlessly killed” (which most people seem to believe, or at least pretend to believe), it is a complete bullshit (like, hypothetically possible, but most likely applies to less than 1% of the meat you eat).
This particular one? Nah. It’s two hours, I don’t expect it to tell me anything I don’t already know, and video is a uniquely bad medium for efficiently learning facts. (If there are specific, like, five-minute-long sections of the video which you think contain likely-novel information, I’ll watch them upon request. But really, I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before.)
I don’t expect it to tell me anything I don’t already know
I disagree and think you should watch it.
… how would you know?
Alright, how about this: name your choice of: (a) one key fact that the video conveys, which you think I’ll find surprising, or (b) one five-minute section of the video, whose contents you think I’ll find surprising.
Do you think the animals you eat have inner lives and are essentially tortured, or something else?
I don’t think that the animals I eat “have inner lives” in any way resembling what we mean when we say that humans “have inner lives”. It’s not clear what the word “torture” might mean when applied to such animals (that is, the meaning is ambiguous, and could be any of several different things), but certainly none of the things that we (legally) do with animals are bad for any of the important reasons why torture of people is bad.
“but certainly none of the things that we (legally) do with animals are bad for any of the important reasons why torture of people is bad.”
That seems very overconfident to me. What are your reasons for believing this, if I may ask? What quality or qualities do humans have that animals lack that makes you certain of this?
Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically do you think I’m overconfident about? In other words, what part of this are you saying I could be mistaken about, the likelihood of which mistake I’m underestimating?
Are you suggesting that things are done to animals of which I am unaware, which I would judge to be bad (for some or all of the same reasons why torture of people are bad) if I were aware of them?
Or something else?
EDIT: Ah, apologies, I just noticed on a re-read (was this added via edit after initial posting?) that you asked:
What quality or qualities do humans have that animals lack that makes you certain of this?
This clarifies the question.
As for the answer, it’s simple enough: sentience (in the classic sense of the term)—a.k.a. “subjective consciousness”, “self-awareness”, etc. Cows, pigs, chickens, sheep… geese… deer… all the critters we normally eat… they don’t have anything like this, very obviously. (There’s no reason why they would, and they show no sign of it. The evidence here is, on the whole, quite one-sided.)
Since the fact that humans are sentient is most of what makes it bad to torture us—indeed, what makes it possible to “torture” us in the first place—the case of animals is clearly disanalogous. (The other things that make it bad to torture humans—having to do with things like social structures, game-theoretic incentives, etc.—apply to food animals even less.)
I (strongly) disagree that sentience is uniquely human. It seems to me a priori very unlikely that this would be the case, and evidence does exist to the contrary. I do agree sentience is an important factor (though I’m unsure it’s the only one).
I didn’t say that sentience is uniquely human, though.
Now, to be clear: on the “a priori very unlikely” point, I don’t think I agree. I don’t actually think that it’s unlikely at all; but nor do I think that it’s necessarily very likely, either. “Humans are the only species on Earth today that are sentient” seems to me to be something that could easily be true, but could also easily be false. I would not be very surprised either way (with the caveat that “sentience” seems at least partly to admit of degrees—“partly” because I don’t think it’s fully continuous, and past a certain point it seems obvious that the amount of sentience present is “none”, i.e. I am not a panpsychist—so “humans are not uniquely sentient” would almost certainly not be the same thing as “there exist other species with sentience comparable to humans”).
But please note: nothing in the above paragraph is actually relevant to what we’ve been discussing in this thread! I’ve been careful to refer to “animals I eat”, “critters we normally eat”, “food animals”, listing examples like pigs and sheep and chickens, etc. Now, you might press me on some edge cases (what about octopuses, for instance? those are commonly enough found as food items even in the West), but on the whole, the distinction is clear enough.
Dolphins, for example, might be sentient (though I wouldn’t call it a certainty by any means), and if you told me that there’s an industry wherein dolphins are subjected to factory-farming-type conditions, I’d certainly object to such a thing almost as much as I object to, e.g., China’s treatment of Uyghurs (to pick just one salient modern example out of many possible such).
But I don’t eat any factory-farmed dolphins. And the topic here, recall, is my eating habits. Neither do I eat crows, octopuses (precisely for the reason that I am not entirely confident about their lack of sentience!), etc.
Could you elaborate? It seems to me more accurate to say that whether there is, in fact, any “guilt” is dependent on whether there’s sentience. Where is the hypocrisy?
I hope it’s all right to butt in here—I think the animals I eat have inner lives, and the ones I raise for food are less tortured than the ones who live on factory farms, and also less tortured than those who live without any human influence. I think that animals who live wild in nature are also “essentially tortured”—those which don’t freeze or get eaten in infancy die slowly and/or painfully to starvation or predation when their health eventually falters or they get unlucky.
I think the humans who supply the world with processed food have inner lives and are essentially tortured by their circumstances, also. I think the humans who produce the commercial foods I eat, at all stages of the supply chain, are quantifiably and significantly less happy due to participating in that supply chain than they would be if they didn’t feel that they “had to” do that work.
If I was to use “only eat foods which no creature suffered to create” as a heuristic to decide what to eat, I’d probably starve. I wouldn’t even be able to subsist on home-grown foods from my own garden, because there are often days when I don’t particularly want to water or harvest the garden, but I have to force myself to do so anyways if I want it to not die.
I agree with you on the principle that torturing animals less is better than torturing animals more, but I think that the argument of “something with an inner life was tortured to make it” does not sufficiently differentiate between factory meat and non-meat items produced by humans in unacceptable working conditions.
Your points seem valid. However, it does seem to me overwhelmingly likely that there’s more suffering involved in eating factory farmed meat than eating non-meat products supplied from the global supply chain. In one case, there are animals suffering a lot and humans suffering; in the other, there are only humans suffering. I doubt that those humans would suffer less if those jobs disappeared; but that’s not even necessary to make it a clear win for avoiding factory farming for me.
I think most people know that nearly all food animals are kept in really unpleasant conditions, and that those conditions don’t remotely resemble what you see in books for young children or whatever. I suspect most people understand that conditions got worse when “factory farming” was introduced, but that life for most animals on farms was never all that great.
I think that they avoid thinking too much, and for preference learning too much, about the details… because they’re in some sense aware that the details are things they’d rather not know. And I think they avoid thinking about whether categories like “torture” apply… because they’re afraid that they might have to admit that they do. If those matters are forcibly brought to their attention, they remove them from their attention reasonably quickly.
So, yes, I assume many people have less extreme beliefs, but that’s in large part because they shy violently away from even forming a complete set of beliefs, because they have a sense of what those beliefs would turn out to be.
The people who actually run the system also eat meat, and know EXACTLY what physically happens, and their beliefs about what physically happens are probably pretty close to your own… but they would still probably be very angry at your use of the word “torture”.
“Torture” means actions taken for the purpose of inflicting extreme suffering. Suffering is not the purpose of factory farming, it is collateral damage. This is why “torture” is the wrong word.
Whats your dictionary? Google says:
“the action or practice of inflicting severe pain or suffering on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.” which feels closer to the word’s meaning (as I use it)
This definition technically also doesn’t apply. It fails at least the “someone” part as animals are not someones.
However, and more importantly, both this objection and yours aren’t really relevant to the broader discussion as the people who “avoid thinking about whether categories like ‘torture’ apply” would only care about the “extreme suffering” part and not the “purposeful” or “human” parts (imo).
In this respect this is an inverse non-central fallacy. In a non-central fallacy you use a word for somthing to evoke an associated emotional response which in the first place got associated to the word for an aspect not present in the specific case you want to use it for. Here you are objecting to the usage of a word even though the emotional response bearing aspect of the word is present and the word’s definition does not apply only because of a part not central to the associated emotional response.
Excellent point. I totally agree. I will cease using the word torture in this context in the future, because I think it gives people another way to think about something other than the thrust of the argument.
The salient analogy for me is if animals (as in bigger mammals, not centrally birds or rats) are morally more like babies or more like characters in a novel. In all three cases, there is no sapient creature yet, and there are at least hypothetical processes of turning them into sapient creatures. For babies, it’s growing up, and it already works. For characters in a novel and animals, it’s respectively instantiating them as AGI-level characters in LLMs and uplifting (in an unclear post-singularity way).
The main difference appears to be status quo, babies are already on track to grow up. While instantiation of characters from a novel or uplifting of animals look more like a free choice, not something that happens by default (unless it’s morally correct to do that; probably not for all characters from all novels, but possibly for at least some animals). So maybe if the modern factory farmed animals were not going to be uplifted (which cryonics would in principle enable, but also AI timelines are short), it’s morally about as fine as writing a novel with tortured characters? Unclear. Like, I’m tentatively going to treat my next cat as potentially a person, since it’s somewhat likely to encounter the singularity.
Woah, woah, slow down. You’re talking about the edge cases but have skipped the simple stuff. It sounds like you think it’s obvious, or that we’re likely to be on the same page, or that it should be inferrable from what you’ve said? But it’s not, so please say it.
Why is growing up so important?
Reading between the lines, are you saying that the only reason that it’s bad for a human baby to be in pain is that it will eventually grow into a sapient adult? If so: (i) most people, including myself, both disagree and find that view morally reprehensible, (ii) the word “sapient” doesn’t have a clear or agreed upon meaning, so plenty of people would say that babies are sentient; if you mean to capture something by the word “sapient” you’ll have to be more specific. If that’s not what you’re saying, then I don’t know why you’re talking about uploading animals instead of talking about how they are right now.
As a more general question, have you ever had a pet?
the word “sapient” doesn’t have a clear or agreed upon meaning, so plenty of people would say that babies are sentient
Human babies and cats are sentient but not sapient. Human children and adults, if not severely mentally disabled, are both sentient and sapient. I think this is the standard usage. A common misusage of “sentient” is to use it in the sense of sapient, saying “lizard people are sentient”, while meaning “lizard people are sapient” (they are sentient as well, but saying that they are sapient is an additional claim with a different meaning, for which it’s better to have a different word).
Sapients are AGI-level sentients, with some buffer for less functional variants (like children). Sapients are centrally people, framed from a more functional standpoint. Some hypothetical AGIs might be functionally sapient without being sentient, able to optimize the world without being people themselves. I think AGI-level LLM characters are not like that.
uploading animals
Uplifting, not uploading. Uploading preserves behavior, uplifting changes behavior by improving intelligence or knowledge, while preserving identity/memory/personality. Uplifting doesn’t imply leaving the biological substrate, though doing both seems natural in this context.
By far the biggest and most sudden update I’ve ever had is Dominion, a documentary on animal farming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQRAfJyEsko
It’s like… I had a whole pile of interconnected beliefs, and if you pulled on one it would snap most of the way back into place after. And Dominion pushed the whole pile over at once.
What was the update? In what direction?
I suppose the update was that if someone describes meat production as “animals live a happy life on a farm, well-fed and taken care of, and then one day they are relatively painlessly killed” (which most people seem to believe, or at least pretend to believe), it is a complete bullshit (like, hypothetically possible, but most likely applies to less than 1% of the meat you eat).
I didn’t and don’t think very many people believe that or ever have.
You think people eat meat despite knowing the animals are essentially tortured? Or that beliefs are just less extreme?
I eat meat and know all of this stuff about factory farming, AMA.
Did you watch the documentary?
This particular one? Nah. It’s two hours, I don’t expect it to tell me anything I don’t already know, and video is a uniquely bad medium for efficiently learning facts. (If there are specific, like, five-minute-long sections of the video which you think contain likely-novel information, I’ll watch them upon request. But really, I’ve seen this sort of thing many times before.)
I disagree and think you should watch it.
Do you think the animals you eat have inner lives and are essentially tortured, or something else?
… how would you know?
Alright, how about this: name your choice of: (a) one key fact that the video conveys, which you think I’ll find surprising, or (b) one five-minute section of the video, whose contents you think I’ll find surprising.
I don’t think that the animals I eat “have inner lives” in any way resembling what we mean when we say that humans “have inner lives”. It’s not clear what the word “torture” might mean when applied to such animals (that is, the meaning is ambiguous, and could be any of several different things), but certainly none of the things that we (legally) do with animals are bad for any of the important reasons why torture of people is bad.
“but certainly none of the things that we (legally) do with animals are bad for any of the important reasons why torture of people is bad.”
That seems very overconfident to me. What are your reasons for believing this, if I may ask? What quality or qualities do humans have that animals lack that makes you certain of this?
Sorry, could you clarify? What specifically do you think I’m overconfident about? In other words, what part of this are you saying I could be mistaken about, the likelihood of which mistake I’m underestimating?
Are you suggesting that things are done to animals of which I am unaware, which I would judge to be bad (for some or all of the same reasons why torture of people are bad) if I were aware of them?
Or something else?
EDIT: Ah, apologies, I just noticed on a re-read (was this added via edit after initial posting?) that you asked:
This clarifies the question.
As for the answer, it’s simple enough: sentience (in the classic sense of the term)—a.k.a. “subjective consciousness”, “self-awareness”, etc. Cows, pigs, chickens, sheep… geese… deer… all the critters we normally eat… they don’t have anything like this, very obviously. (There’s no reason why they would, and they show no sign of it. The evidence here is, on the whole, quite one-sided.)
Since the fact that humans are sentient is most of what makes it bad to torture us—indeed, what makes it possible to “torture” us in the first place—the case of animals is clearly disanalogous. (The other things that make it bad to torture humans—having to do with things like social structures, game-theoretic incentives, etc.—apply to food animals even less.)
(No edit was made to the original question.)
Thanks for your answer!
I (strongly) disagree that sentience is uniquely human. It seems to me a priori very unlikely that this would be the case, and evidence does exist to the contrary. I do agree sentience is an important factor (though I’m unsure it’s the only one).
I didn’t say that sentience is uniquely human, though.
Now, to be clear: on the “a priori very unlikely” point, I don’t think I agree. I don’t actually think that it’s unlikely at all; but nor do I think that it’s necessarily very likely, either. “Humans are the only species on Earth today that are sentient” seems to me to be something that could easily be true, but could also easily be false. I would not be very surprised either way (with the caveat that “sentience” seems at least partly to admit of degrees—“partly” because I don’t think it’s fully continuous, and past a certain point it seems obvious that the amount of sentience present is “none”, i.e. I am not a panpsychist—so “humans are not uniquely sentient” would almost certainly not be the same thing as “there exist other species with sentience comparable to humans”).
But please note: nothing in the above paragraph is actually relevant to what we’ve been discussing in this thread! I’ve been careful to refer to “animals I eat”, “critters we normally eat”, “food animals”, listing examples like pigs and sheep and chickens, etc. Now, you might press me on some edge cases (what about octopuses, for instance? those are commonly enough found as food items even in the West), but on the whole, the distinction is clear enough.
Dolphins, for example, might be sentient (though I wouldn’t call it a certainty by any means), and if you told me that there’s an industry wherein dolphins are subjected to factory-farming-type conditions, I’d certainly object to such a thing almost as much as I object to, e.g., China’s treatment of Uyghurs (to pick just one salient modern example out of many possible such).
But I don’t eat any factory-farmed dolphins. And the topic here, recall, is my eating habits. Neither do I eat crows, octopuses (precisely for the reason that I am not entirely confident about their lack of sentience!), etc.
I apologize, Said; I misinterpreted your (clearly written) comment.
Reading your newest comment, it seems I actually largely agree with you—the disagreement lies in whether farm animals have sentience.
It’s kind of funny and hypocritical that we measure our guilt based on sentience.
Could you elaborate? It seems to me more accurate to say that whether there is, in fact, any “guilt” is dependent on whether there’s sentience. Where is the hypocrisy?
I hope it’s all right to butt in here—I think the animals I eat have inner lives, and the ones I raise for food are less tortured than the ones who live on factory farms, and also less tortured than those who live without any human influence. I think that animals who live wild in nature are also “essentially tortured”—those which don’t freeze or get eaten in infancy die slowly and/or painfully to starvation or predation when their health eventually falters or they get unlucky.
I think the humans who supply the world with processed food have inner lives and are essentially tortured by their circumstances, also. I think the humans who produce the commercial foods I eat, at all stages of the supply chain, are quantifiably and significantly less happy due to participating in that supply chain than they would be if they didn’t feel that they “had to” do that work.
If I was to use “only eat foods which no creature suffered to create” as a heuristic to decide what to eat, I’d probably starve. I wouldn’t even be able to subsist on home-grown foods from my own garden, because there are often days when I don’t particularly want to water or harvest the garden, but I have to force myself to do so anyways if I want it to not die.
I agree with you on the principle that torturing animals less is better than torturing animals more, but I think that the argument of “something with an inner life was tortured to make it” does not sufficiently differentiate between factory meat and non-meat items produced by humans in unacceptable working conditions.
Your points seem valid. However, it does seem to me overwhelmingly likely that there’s more suffering involved in eating factory farmed meat than eating non-meat products supplied from the global supply chain. In one case, there are animals suffering a lot and humans suffering; in the other, there are only humans suffering. I doubt that those humans would suffer less if those jobs disappeared; but that’s not even necessary to make it a clear win for avoiding factory farming for me.
I think most people know that nearly all food animals are kept in really unpleasant conditions, and that those conditions don’t remotely resemble what you see in books for young children or whatever. I suspect most people understand that conditions got worse when “factory farming” was introduced, but that life for most animals on farms was never all that great.
I think that they avoid thinking too much, and for preference learning too much, about the details… because they’re in some sense aware that the details are things they’d rather not know. And I think they avoid thinking about whether categories like “torture” apply… because they’re afraid that they might have to admit that they do. If those matters are forcibly brought to their attention, they remove them from their attention reasonably quickly.
So, yes, I assume many people have less extreme beliefs, but that’s in large part because they shy violently away from even forming a complete set of beliefs, because they have a sense of what those beliefs would turn out to be.
The people who actually run the system also eat meat, and know EXACTLY what physically happens, and their beliefs about what physically happens are probably pretty close to your own… but they would still probably be very angry at your use of the word “torture”.
“Torture” means actions taken for the purpose of inflicting extreme suffering. Suffering is not the purpose of factory farming, it is collateral damage. This is why “torture” is the wrong word.
Whats your dictionary? Google says: “the action or practice of inflicting severe pain or suffering on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.” which feels closer to the word’s meaning (as I use it) This definition technically also doesn’t apply. It fails at least the “someone” part as animals are not someones.
However, and more importantly, both this objection and yours aren’t really relevant to the broader discussion as the people who “avoid thinking about whether categories like ‘torture’ apply” would only care about the “extreme suffering” part and not the “purposeful” or “human” parts (imo).
In this respect this is an inverse non-central fallacy. In a non-central fallacy you use a word for somthing to evoke an associated emotional response which in the first place got associated to the word for an aspect not present in the specific case you want to use it for. Here you are objecting to the usage of a word even though the emotional response bearing aspect of the word is present and the word’s definition does not apply only because of a part not central to the associated emotional response.
Excellent point. I totally agree. I will cease using the word torture in this context in the future, because I think it gives people another way to think about something other than the thrust of the argument.
The salient analogy for me is if animals (as in bigger mammals, not centrally birds or rats) are morally more like babies or more like characters in a novel. In all three cases, there is no sapient creature yet, and there are at least hypothetical processes of turning them into sapient creatures. For babies, it’s growing up, and it already works. For characters in a novel and animals, it’s respectively instantiating them as AGI-level characters in LLMs and uplifting (in an unclear post-singularity way).
The main difference appears to be status quo, babies are already on track to grow up. While instantiation of characters from a novel or uplifting of animals look more like a free choice, not something that happens by default (unless it’s morally correct to do that; probably not for all characters from all novels, but possibly for at least some animals). So maybe if the modern factory farmed animals were not going to be uplifted (which cryonics would in principle enable, but also AI timelines are short), it’s morally about as fine as writing a novel with tortured characters? Unclear. Like, I’m tentatively going to treat my next cat as potentially a person, since it’s somewhat likely to encounter the singularity.
Woah, woah, slow down. You’re talking about the edge cases but have skipped the simple stuff. It sounds like you think it’s obvious, or that we’re likely to be on the same page, or that it should be inferrable from what you’ve said? But it’s not, so please say it.
Why is growing up so important?
Reading between the lines, are you saying that the only reason that it’s bad for a human baby to be in pain is that it will eventually grow into a sapient adult? If so: (i) most people, including myself, both disagree and find that view morally reprehensible, (ii) the word “sapient” doesn’t have a clear or agreed upon meaning, so plenty of people would say that babies are sentient; if you mean to capture something by the word “sapient” you’ll have to be more specific. If that’s not what you’re saying, then I don’t know why you’re talking about uploading animals instead of talking about how they are right now.
As a more general question, have you ever had a pet?
Human babies and cats are sentient but not sapient. Human children and adults, if not severely mentally disabled, are both sentient and sapient. I think this is the standard usage. A common misusage of “sentient” is to use it in the sense of sapient, saying “lizard people are sentient”, while meaning “lizard people are sapient” (they are sentient as well, but saying that they are sapient is an additional claim with a different meaning, for which it’s better to have a different word).
Sapients are AGI-level sentients, with some buffer for less functional variants (like children). Sapients are centrally people, framed from a more functional standpoint. Some hypothetical AGIs might be functionally sapient without being sentient, able to optimize the world without being people themselves. I think AGI-level LLM characters are not like that.
Uplifting, not uploading. Uploading preserves behavior, uplifting changes behavior by improving intelligence or knowledge, while preserving identity/memory/personality. Uplifting doesn’t imply leaving the biological substrate, though doing both seems natural in this context.