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Bartholomew
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If a superior being is as advanced compared to us as we are to a fruit fly, would there be any immorality if that being swatted us like a bunch of fruit flies?
Bartholomew said:A fruit fly is only less sentient than we are--has less ability to experience than we do--by only a matter of degree.
loseyourname said:What exactly makes you think that? How much knowledge of the insect nervous system do you have? They don't even have brains.
learningphysics said:I'm no expert on insects or fruitflies, but here's an interesting article on the subject:
http://www.animalsentience.com/news/2004-02-14.htm [Broken]
loseyourname said:Did you read this article? The content isn't what the title suggests. All it says is that the neurons in the cerebral ganglion of fruit flies fire in synch when focused on a single visual image. I wouldn't even refer to this ganglion as a brain, technically. I don't know about the fruit fly, but insects I've studied personally (as a student, strictly - I'm not an entomologist) have multiple ganglia, and the ganglion used to process visual information isn't even necessarily the same ganglion used to process tactile information. There is a huge difference between showing a coordinated response to visual stimuli and feeling pain.
loseyourname said:Next time I'd use a less biased and more trustworthy source, too. The Compassion in World Farming Trust may not be the greatest expert when it comes to insect physiology. They didn't even give any citations for this article. What studies were they even referring to and what were the conclusions drawn by the scientists that actually performed these studies?
learningphysics said:But nobody in this thread was ever talking about pain, but about sentience (the ability to experience).
What can be taken as evidence that something is having an experience?
loseyourname said:True, but if a given being experiences visual sensations but not pain, the discussion does change a bit.
To be honest, I don't know. I've listed in the past varying responses to similar stimuli, both between individuals and between individual instances of the stimulus, self-recognition, along with signs of curiosity and any other emotion - all of these are admittedly anthropomorphic signs. It's not like we can just get in the head (or with insects, the cephalus and caudal thorax) and see if any representation of perceptual/emotional states is taking place.
learningphysics said:Are there 0 traces of these anthropmorphic signs in insects?
An alien species may portray much greater signs of self-recognition, curiosity etc...
Wouldn't that other species look at us and see beings that aren't having experiences... how is the way they would view us, different from the way we view flies?
Bartholomew said:If a god transforms a human being into a fly, atom by atom, at what point does the "human quality of awareness" suddenly disappear? Everything is a continuum.
Bartholomew said:If a superior being is as advanced compared to us as we are to a fruit fly, would there be any immorality if that being swatted us like a bunch of fruit flies?
Bartholomew said:The question is not about definitions, but about emergent properties of complex systems. At what point do the properties disappear when you gradually alter the system? Answer: for macroscopic systems, there is never such a point.
Bartholomew said:The "sorites" paradox? Never heard that one, but it's wrong because if the man has 1 hair left and you pluck it, it will make him bald when he wasn't before. This does not explain the car/rock transition.
Bartholomew said:If it's not possible to name the precise point at which the transition occurs--or at least to name the precise range of points--then the transition never occurs. When dealing with real-world systems we use fuzzy logic; there is never an absolute falsehood or an absolute truth about any real-world macroscopic object. It's all a sliding scale.
What I'm saying with respect to the car and the rock is, the fuzziness is inescapable. (vagueness of terms, okay, I see where you're coming from) There is no such thing as an absolute rock or an absolute car; that's why you can't find the dividing line. The terms are vague, and there is no way to make them precise without being arbitrary; the vagueness is a property of concepts themselves, not merely terms.
Now, I am not saying that a fly has all the abilities that a human has, calculus included, in the same degree that the human has them; instead, a fly has traces of all those abilities. The moment the god changes 1 atom in the human to make the human more like a fly, you can say that the human is less humanlike and more flylike. You just can't find anywhere when the human actually becomes a fly.
So, the fly does calculus very poorly compared to a human, with a degree of error close to 100%. But he does it.
chound said:Earlier during age of slave trade, people bought slave people and treated them as if they didnt have any feelings, flog them, whip them, and were lower than animals. If we could think that our fellow humans were lower than animals then the type II civ could think the same of us.
loseyourname said:They didn't even give any citations for this article. What studies were they even referring to and what were the conclusions drawn by the scientists that actually performed these studies?
Dissident Dan said:It says "Source: New Scientist" at the bottom.