Pet peeve, literally a peeve about pets!

[Sair]

**It really is a good thing to have the freedom to believe as we wish about our animals and where they will end up. You can think as ***you *****wish and, luckily for me and many more just like me, I have the freedom to believe my pets and I will be together in heaven. I have never been able to trust people who don’t value the life of their pet as more than just a bunch of fur on 4 legs. You are missing out on so much…what a pity.

Thank you for your wisdom It’s a breath of fresh air on this thread to hear from someone who has no trouble with the notion of treating other creatures with compassion and care, who is simply happy to do so! And your attitude is instructive - although I find it very hard to feel pity for people who express malice towards animals, it is clear to us and to anyone else who has ever valued their relationship with a pet, or felt profound respect at the sight of an animal in its natural habitat, that we should feel sorry for those who have not had that experience, and are not open to it.

 

[Sair]

generally said, if you feel that way, and lack evidence, its because you are wrong.

you may have heard of it, its the condition in which a belief you hold is found to be untrue.

The thing is, you haven’t shown my beliefs to be incorrect, nor my arguments to be invalid. You have persisted in singing the same tune, over and over, and that leads me to believe that in fact you lack further evidence on which to be certain of your position.

yes and your ‘evidence’ of anthro is --appeal to authority and --appeal to the majority and --affirming the consequent and --verbosity

im sure i could go on, but do you need more specifics?

Some clarification would be appreciated, actually - are you talking about evidence I have presented for anthropomorphism being insufficient to produce all the evidence of animal affectivity, or your use of anthropomorphism as a blanket dismissal of all my evidence?

And I apologise if my verbosity has caused offence; but I freely acknowledge that I am a word nerd.

please then, show me proof of the emotions in animals? because all of it i have seen so far amounts to little more than projection and assumption, of those emotions.

Animals demonstrate outward signs of emotion. They are living, breathing, feeling creatures. They react to both positive and negative stimulation, in ways that haven’t been programmed into their hard drives. They learn to deal with different experiences, and can be trained to respond to abstract stimuli, because they can feel. Cats purr when they are contented - I’ve never heard a human purr. Dogs wag their tails when they are happy or excited, and they wag them differently when they are defensive - humans don’t even have tails to wag, so we can’t express emotions in the same way.

It may very well be that when my cats crawl into my lap and purr, they are appreciating the warmth rather than me personally. However, their demonstrated reluctance to crawl into the laps of people they have never met before seems like evidence that they prefer to get their warmth from a trusted source! Even if animal emotions are limited to simple perception of pleasant and unpleasant sensation - such perception being fundamental to survival - in this respect they are entitled to be free of unnecessary unpleasantness.

Furthermore, there is research being done into the phenomenon of anthropomorphism, with the aim of finding out just how much of a factor it is in behavioural research, and to what extent it is even possible for humans to understand the natural world with a non-human perspective.

I see your anthropomorphism and raise you anthropocentric arrogance. The truth is that you see no emotion in animals because you are determined not to see it. The trouble with using the accusation of anthropomorphism to dismiss my arguments is that it’s too easy to turn it around and say that the reverse is true of you.

thats the first huge assumption. emotions as humans experience them dont translate into emotions for animals, regardless of chemical similarities.

emotions as animals experience them are in all likelihood very different to how humans experience them. Every human has different emotional experiences as well. We have already covered this. Difference is not evidence that animals don’t experience emotions at all, which is what you seem to be trying to assert.

and as you seem to want specific logical violations this one is called affirming the consequent.

There we go. This gives me more material to work with. I can acknowlege that one can’t assume that all animals feel emotions just because humans can, or just because their neuronal arrangement is similar. That’s why the supporting evidence of behavioural study is necessary. I apologise if my explanation here isn’t clear - I have never studied logic as such, so I’ve had to do some serious reading up on the subject while posting to this thread. As for arguing from the proposition that exhibited characteristics are the product of biological structures, I’m not simply assuming this is correct. It has been extensively researched, in both humans and other animals, to a standard of proof that puts it at the very least beyond reasonable doubt.

why does the possession of sensors, equal the right to not have those sensors tripped?

a roomba has malfunctions sensors, does it become a moral wrong to step on a roomba, because it has those sensors.

Absolutely not. A roomba, or indeed a Plio or any other machine programmed by humans can only act according to its programming, never through its own volition. They aren’t alive, they don’t have affective consciousness, and it’s only immoral to destroy them in the sense that it’s wrong to deliberately destroy other people’s possessions.

you cant have a social relationship with a machine, meaty or plasticky.

i dont think i really have a social relationsship with the cats, i know it seems like it, but i dont have a social relationship with my roomba either.

it is an illusion called projection.

Well, of course you can’t have a social relationship with an animal, because you see them as tools for your use, and you are determined to think that they don’t have feelings. I don’t have a social relationship with my computer, even though I spend a lot of time with it. It’s just another tool. I can and do have a social relationship with my dog, which is mutually beneficial. Having him around makes me happy and gives me a good excuse to exercise, and I look after his needs, so that keeps him healthy, and by extension, contented and comfortable. That’s what social relationships are - an extension of symbiosis and an exercise in mutual benefit, whatever form that benefit takes.

 

[BlyssfulDreamer]

**Well, at least you are taking your dog to the vet so he won’t give people “rabies.” I guess we should feel fortunate that you do that for him.

It really is a good thing to have the freedom to believe as we wish about our animals and where they will end up. You can think as ***you *****wish and, luckily for me and many more just like me, I have the freedom to believe my pets and I will be together in heaven. I have never been able to trust people who don’t value the life of their pet as more than just a bunch of fur on 4 legs. You are missing out on so much…what a pity.

I think we can enjoy both our animals & people, but that people must come first in all things.Believe me, sometimes animals are a whole lot more pleasant to be around than many folks I know, but human beings first still holds true. I think that was the original idea behind this thread-people are more important than animals & resources should be directed accordingly.We are children of God, animals are critters.

Of course, people should come first, that is a given IMO. However…I believe God put animals such as dogs and cats to be our companions. I contribute to the local animal shelter…but I also contribute to the city mission. Can’t one do both if they are able? If they are not able, then they must follow their conscience and their own free will…which is something that God also gave us to use.

 

[Sair]

.

you can say something so baldly amoral and flat out wrong, but then still imply that im some small minded brute?

I can and do, and I can say it again if you like. My dog comes before a human stranger in my order of consideration. This doesn’t imply that I’m going to chop up some random person and feed them to my dog, though. Merely that I’m not going to abandon those close to me for the sake of someone I’ve never met, and whose existence to me as anything more than a statistic is only theoretical. The ‘brutish’ inference comes from your expressed readiness to kill and eat any animal, and maybe even eat them without the killing part first, because your own survival is all that matters to you; the ‘small-minded’ inference comes from your demonstrated unwillingness to consider the plausibility of other people’s viewpoints.

you cant prove a negative, as in you cant prove the non-existence of something, i can only show what you consider evidence to be logically false, assumptions, or projections

To actually show this, though, you need to do more than just repeat the same set of statements and expect them to stand on their own.

if you still wish to assert that one can prove a negative, then please prove that there is no santa clause

i breathelessly await your arguments.

I can show that Santa Claus is highly improbable. I can wait by the fireside on Christmas eve and if Santa Claus makes no appearance, I can use that to support my conclusion that there’s no Santa Claus. That alone doesn’t make a body of evidence, though, so I’ll go in search of more. I can check the identity of every shopping-centre Santa and find that they’re not the real Santa Claus. More evidence, but still nothing conclusive. I can get everyone I know to repeat the Christmas eve experiment, and when they find that Santa doesn’t make an appearance, that gives more weight to the supposition that Santa doesn’t exist. Also, I can read a bit of history and discover that St Nicholas, on whom the figure of Santa Claus is based, was a real person who died hundreds of years ago. So I can conclude on that basis that there’s probably no Santa Claus, and that’s as good a proof as any you’re likely to get. Of course, it can be contradicted by a verifiable sighting of Santa Claus, but there hasn’t been one yet.

i would chalk it up to more of your insistence that i am an uneducated, small minded, brute. that or when you looked the phrases up you just took the first explanation that fit on google

you dont seem to credit me with understanding logical composition. another assumption that didn’t pan out.

maybe now you understand why ive repeatedly told you that one cannot prove a negative

The thing is, you can prove a negative, according to the laws of logic. If you can prove that you exist as a person, then you can also prove that you’re not nonexistent. The issue is the way you choose to phrase your proposition. You can say that you can’t prove that animals have no emotions. I can cunningly rephrase that to say that animals are unfeeling automatons. Bingo - you have a positive assertion that is logically provable. Logic is just a game with words, at the end of the day.

thats just it, it wouldn’t matter what someone else says, what logic says, or what the actual evidence says, you choose to believe.

If I were presented with a body of evidence that leads to the conclusion that animal emotion of any kind is extremely unlikely, then I would revise my position. I have yet to be presented with said body of evidence.

so its not a matter of evidence, its a matter of what you choose to believe.

Everyone chooses to believe what they believe. It depends on the evidence they find convincing. You choose to believe in the God of the Bible, because you find the evidence convincing, based on your own experience. I, however, have a different set of experiences that lead me to believe that the God of the Bible is a cultural construction, based on much the same evidence. I suspect we have both read the Bible, after all.

Similarly, I choose to believe, on the basis of my own experience and the supporting evidence, that animals have emotion and affective consciousness. I can see that they aren’t human, and that they often have different motivations for their behaviour than I or any other person would, and that their emotional experience is simpler than mine, but that is not enough for me to conclude that they have no emotion whatsoever. Furthermore, as I have previously stated, it’s better from an ethical standpoint to treat animals with compassion, because there’s every chance that they will suffer if we do otherwise. And when it comes to having the right to respect and compassion, I will apply the same principle to humans, because we’re animals too.

 

[Salonika]

warpspeedpetey:

2 things here

1. havent’ you all been trying to make the argument that the sophistication doesn’t matter?

Don’t think anyone has said that animals and humans feel the same and are able to do the same things. What we have challenged is that animals’ responses are all chemical programming.

Also a number of us have said that even if animals respond out of chemical programming that does not mean that they do not feel pain, hunger etc nor that they should be treated well (which even you have admitted is appropriate - unless of course a human might miss out on something as a result).

Also you’ve said that all humans should be well treated because they are human even if they have some feature or charactertics that limits their abilities that you consider only humans have eg able to produce art and or literature.

warpspeedpetey:

2 things here
2. the roomba can be programmed to respond to stimuli in a catlike manner, the cat has just evolved certain chemical programming
the only difference would seem to be in the programming

Or by who does the programming.

Also the cat continues to evolve, the roomba does not.

warpspeedpetey:

if we are just animals, whats wrong with that?, its just evolution, we are just another evolutionary pressure for the biosphere to adapt to, if we go to another planet, wouldn’t that still just be applied evolution?

Why should we see ourselves as anything other than animals - given our bioloigical similiarity to other mammals. And what’s to say we wouldn’t muck up another planet?

warpspeedpetey:

are you saying we should stop evolution now, because everything is ‘good enough’?

Of course everything isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough while all the inhabitants of the earth do have the necessities they need.

However some people would favour stopping evolution because they consider that the changes of the last few hundred years have made the world worse. Others want a world where only the strong survive.

warpspeedpetey:

because animals are little chemically programmed meatbots, would you take care of a roomba, or a super catlike roomba, over a human being? no

why would you care for a meat bot over a human being?

I don’t see the dichotomy you see - either care for other living things or care for a human being. There are very few situations in which we can’t do both.

warpspeedpetey:

humans first, then, if you must care for stray roombas, than feel free. but as long as there are people suffering, it is morally wrong to give their bread to the meatbots.

From what I’ve read about them I think all it would do would be to “kill” the roomba or result in a large bill to get it fixed. But then I shouldn’t get it fixed as the money should go to humans.

warpspeedpetey:

They offer you comfort? they put you on their little cat couches, pull a freud?

of course not, their response indicates no understanding of your emotional state.

Often they provide more comfort than a human does. They don’t tell you what to do. They don’t make conditions for their apprioval. They aren’t sarcastic and they don’t think they the answer to every question to everything.

 

[Salonika]

---

I don’t know, I tend more to take my dog to the vet so that he won’t spread rabies to people.Ditto for the fleas and we brush his hair so we won’t be bothered by it shed all over the house. I bet my dog could care less.

I value my dog as a pet & a pretty cool animal, but I about gag when I encounter over-the-top, goopy,sentimental, quasi-theology stuff like the “Rainbow Bridge” baloney where you’re supposed to meet your pets “on the other side.”(Check the thread about meeting your pets in heaven.) Please…:

Hope your “I tend more” includes taking you dog to the vet when it’s sick!!!

About “Rainbow Bridge” and similar ideas - I too find them over the top but I see the value in them if they help people not to remain enmeshed in grief over their animals’ death.

I think that marking an animals death is fine - and cannot understand how someone would not do so if especially if the animal has been a loved family member for a number of years.

 

[Salonika]

Sair in reply to warpspeedpetey:

Animals demonstrate outward signs of emotion. They are living, breathing, feeling creatures. They react to both positive and negative stimulation, in ways that haven’t been programmed into their hard drives. They learn to deal with different experiences, and can be trained to respond to abstract stimuli, because they can feel. Cats purr when they are contented - I’ve never heard a human purr. Dogs wag their tails when they are happy or excited, and they wag them differently when they are defensive - humans don’t even have tails to wag, so we can’t express emotions in the same way.

It may very well be that when my cats crawl into my lap and purr, they are appreciating the warmth rather than me personally. However, their demonstrated reluctance to crawl into the laps of people they have never met before seems like evidence that they prefer to get their warmth from a trusted source! Even if animal emotions are limited to simple perception of pleasant and unpleasant sensation - such perception being fundamental to survival - in this respect they are entitled to be free of unnecessary unpleasantness.

…

Emotions as animals experience them are in all likelihood very different to how humans experience them. Every human has different emotional experiences as well. We have already covered this. Difference is not evidence that animals don’t experience emotions at all, which is what you seem to be trying to assert.

Well, of course you can’t have a social relationship with an animal, because you see them as tools for your use, and you are determined to think that they don’t have feelings. I don’t have a social relationship with my computer, even though I spend a lot of time with it. It’s just another tool. I can and do have a social relationship with my dog, which is mutually beneficial. Having him around makes me happy and gives me a good excuse to exercise, and I look after his needs, so that keeps him healthy, and by extension, contented and comfortable. That’s what social relationships are - an extension of symbiosis and an exercise in mutual benefit, whatever form that benefit takes.

Sair, I agree with your comments and appreciate the care you always take with your posts. I also appreciate your persistence in this tread.

I think that both tone and choice of words are very important and try to avoid the clever off the top of my head comment. Not easy sometimes.

 

[Sair]

Sair, I agree with your comments and appreciate the care you always take with your posts. I also appreciate your persistence in this tread.

I think that both tone and choice of words are very important and try to avoid the clever off the top of my head comment. Not easy sometimes.

Thanks

Since I started posting to this thread again, I’ve been trying to stay a bit more levelheaded!

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Well, you did seem to agree with the notion that animals could very well be happy to be eaten by humans, since, as you believe, such is God’s design for them.

first, what led you to that idea?

second, the part where you anthropomorphize "happy’ onto the dog. i wouldn’t do that. how can the meat bot be happy to be eaten?

It also tends to run counter to your feelings regarding animals being nothing more that automatons. If the dog would put up a fight, it clearly has a preference for staying alive.

or its chemically programmed like every other animal

No robot could exhibit that preference, largely because they’re not alive

.

how bout rock sock 'em robots? programnming servos is not a big deal.

and theye are just as alive as animals. different chemistry sam e process

And the “outclassing” remark was based solely on a comparison of our respective arguments throughout this thread. I have presented extensively reasoned, supported and for the most part, logical arguments.

youve stated one logical fallacy after another, you consistently anthropomorphized animals, with nothing but your desire to interpret evidence in a manner supporting your cause.

i.e, similar systems must be the same.

What you have done as repeatedly assert, with limited or no support, that animals don’t have feelings, and that any attempt to suggest it’s even possible for them to so is automatically dismissible as anthropomorphism.

as anthropomorphism is a long held error int hinking, see the wiki, on its history.

your just saying its ok.

So, yes - in the field of argumentative skill, the greater strength is demonstrably mine.

thats laughable, ive been having to coacfh you on what evidence actually is, what your misinterpretation of logical fallacies neede correction. even wht is considered bias in evidence.

your “demonstrations” and arguemnents are logically, intellectually and rationally bankrupt.

you prefer animals to people, you stated that,

you demonstrated a basic flaw in humanity, the exact one in the op.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

A couple of comments here. Arguing that animals have emotions and affective consciousness is deeply relevant to the subject of whether, in certain situations and on the basis of certain rights, they deserve to be treated with equal compassion to humans. Secondly, your demonstrated inability to either acknowledge or effectively challenge evidence has nothing to do with my ability to present it.

youve only presented anthropomorphic ‘evidence’ you have presented no evidence at all and i have expalaine dwhy in each case.

if you care to back up this statement than please list, what you evidence you think is relevant, i will be happy to officialy, in one post for all to see. explain why it is not reasonably adequate evidence.

put you posts, where your posts are, so to speak.

And lastly, you know nothing about me other than what I have chosen to make public on this forum. If you are such a skilled diviner that you can predict with certainty, on that basis, how I will act in your given situation, then there are plenty of questions I could ask you!

your a human being, thats all i need to know, you would eat the dog in a starvation situation.

and since i have admitted freely that i would eat the dog. ask what ever questions you like.

In all seriousness, even I don’t know how I would react to being starving, or indeed any other life-threatening situation. I don’t lay any claim to the heroic fortitude of a saint, but then I have yet to experience a situation that required me to rise to the challenge!

yet, everyday there is a human being whose food is given to animals, if you dont know how you would feel, just imagine what a normal reaction would be.

It might not be credible to suppose that you would do so, given your stated bias against animals, but as we have already established, I am not like you - I am open to many more possibilities than just your solution of attacking and eating the dog. As I said, I don’t know precisely what I would do in the situation, but I do know what my ideals and ethics are. I would like to think I would act upon them, but I have yet to be tested to that extent.

so, eesentially im right, you would eventually eat the dog if youwere starving, but you would really, really, really try not to?

 

[warpspeedpetey]

The thing is, you haven’t shown my beliefs to be incorrect, nor my arguments to be invalid. You have persisted in singing the same tune, over and over, and that leads me to believe that in fact you lack further evidence on which to be certain of your position.

once again, you cant prove a negative,

i have no evidence to offer that shows aqnimals have emotions either, the assumption from similarity is what your calling evidence. thats wrong, its just an assumption.

Some clarification would be appreciated, actually - are you talking about evidence I have presented for anthropomorphism being insufficient to produce all the evidence of animal affectivity, or your use of anthropomorphism as a blanket dismissal of all my evidence?

various things you have claimed were evidence account for various logical fallacies. and flaws in rationality.

give me an argument, and i will tell you what the problem is.

And I apologise if my verbosity has caused offence; but I freely acknowledge that I am a word nerd.

yeah, we call em 50 cent words. spend all the cash you want

Animals demonstrate outward signs of emotion.
They are living, breathing, feeling creatures.

please give any evidence that you think proves that animals demostrate outward signs of emotion.

They are living, breathing, feeling creatures. They react to both positive and negative stimulation, in ways that haven’t been programmed into their hard drives.

whats your evidence that they operate ouside their instinctual behavior?

They learn to deal with different experiences, and can be trained to respond to abstract stimuli, because they can feel.

have any evidence for this either? i think its all response to stimuli like a roomba responds to a wall, or stairs, or a low battery.

Cats purr when they are contented

what makes you think its contnetment? thats projection.

I’ve never heard a human purr

yeah i cant purr,

Dogs wag their tails when they are happy or excited, and they wag them differently when they are defensive - humans don’t even have tails to wag, so we can’t express emotions in the same way

thats more projection,

It may very well be that when my cats crawl into my lap and purr, they are appreciating the warmth rather than me personally. However, their demonstrated reluctance to crawl into the laps of people they have never met before seems like evidence that they prefer to get their warmth from a trusted source!

my cats dont know a stranger. and they sit in the sun, and on the floor registers

Even if animal emotions are limited to simple perception of pleasant and unpleasant sensation - such perception being fundamental to survival - in this respect they are entitled to be free of unnecessary unpleasantness.

even if that were the case, humans experience actual real emotions, so it still seems immoral to give charitable budgets to animal shelters, becuase people are suffering

then add in th lack of evidence for your assumptoions here and the argument only gets stronger for my position, that its immoral tol give strays the resources that can be used for people.

Furthermore, there is research being done into the phenomenon of anthropomorphism, with the aim of finding out just how much of a factor it is in behavioural research, and to what extent it is even possible for humans to understand the natural world with a non-human perspective.

of course, if there is no evidence of something, then everyone must be biased against it. at least that seems to be what your saying.

I see your anthropomorphism and raise you anthropocentric arrogance.

for which there is plenty of evidence, i.e. you and i are having this conversation, that fact alone signifies our superiority.

The truth is that you see no emotion in animals because you are determined not to see it.

the truth is that you see no emotions in animals either, you project your emotions onto them. i dont

 

[warpspeedpetey]

The trouble with using the accusation of anthropomorphism to dismiss my arguments is that it’s too easy to turn it around and say that the reverse is true of you.

anthrocentrism isn’t the opposite of anthropomorphism,

also anthrocentrism is sustainable in its own right by the evidence of civilisation,

futherm thats a relatively recent term, made up by environmentalists, because they were tired of getting hammered wit the anthropomorphism, that has been cosidered an error as far back as the greeks.

emotions as animals experience them are in all likelihood very different to how humans experience them. Every human has different emotional experiences as well. We have already covered this. Difference is not evidence that animals don’t experience emotions at all, which is what you seem to be trying to assert.

no, im asserting that there is no evidence of animals having emotions of any kind,

to me, they are, from what we actually know about them is that they are a collection of nano molecular machines, called cells, that are chemically programmed by evolution to display specific behaviors that allow their sequences of dna to be propigated

they are nothing more than chemically programmed meatbots.

There we go. This gives me more material to work with. I can acknowlege that one can’t assume that all animals feel emotions just because humans can, or just because their neuronal arrangement is similar.

this is exactly what i have been saying the whole time, and now you blithely agree.

That’s why the supporting evidence of behavioural study is necessary.

and thats where bia comes in,

asking an animal behaviorist, if animals have feelings, is like using the bible to prove Christianity.

thats why such evidence cant be trusted.

I apologise if my explanation here isn’t clear - I have never studied logic as such, so I’ve had to do some serious reading up on the subject while posting to this thread. As for arguing from the proposition that exhibited characteristics are the product of biological structures, I’m not simply assuming this is correct. It has been extensively researched, in both humans and other animals, to a standard of proof that puts it at the very least beyond reasonable doubt.

yes, similar structures, produce similar chemicals, we are biologically closely related, but those similarities do not equal emotions.

we know we have emotions because we can experience them. asuming that animals must have emotions because they have similar structures as us, their chemical cousins, is just that an assumption not evidence.

further you said this, and they seem contradictory to me.

There we go. This gives me more material to work with. I can acknowlege that one can’t assume that all animals feel emotions just because humans can, or just because their neuronal arrangement is similar

Absolutely not. A roomba, or indeed a Plio or any other machine programmed by humans can only act according to its programming, never through its own volition. They aren’t alive, they don’t have affective consciousness,

how do you know an animal is any different, that they arent acting on their programming?

if sophistication is our standard, that still supports my argument, we are much more sophisticated.

and how do you know that animals have affective conciousness, and which interpretation are you using?

and it’s only immoral to destroy them in the sense that it’s wrong to deliberately destroy other people’s possessions

.

thats how i feel about meatbots

Well, of course you can’t have a social relationship with an animal, because you see them as tools for your use, and you are determined to think that they don’t have feelings.

what im not an animal too? ive spent a whole lot of time with animals and never had a social relationship with them, no dinner, no drinks, etc

I don’t have a social relationship with my computer, even though I spend a lot of time with it. It’s just another tool. I can and do have a social relationship with my dog, which is mutually beneficial. Having him around makes me happy and gives me a good excuse to exercise, and I look after his needs, so that keeps him healthy, and by extension, contented and comfortable. That’s what social relationships are - an extension of symbiosis and an exercise in mutual benefit, whatever form that benefit takes.

if thats your standard, then you are haveing a social relationship with your computer.

having a computer can make you happy playing games, you socialize here on it, you perform maintanence keeping it in running shape, and by extension, contented, you, as we all are then, exercising a symbiosis of mutual benefit with your computer.

see what i mean? there all just robots without some serious objective evidence.

 

[Sair]

first, what led you to that idea?

second, the part where you anthropomorphize "happy’ onto the dog. i wouldn’t do that. how can the meat bot be happy to be eaten?

Wasn’t even my idea, actually. I believe Shin fist posted the suggestion, and you seemed quite happy to affirm it.

how bout rock sock 'em robots? programnming servos is not a big deal.

and theye are just as alive as animals. different chemistry sam e process

It suddenly occurs to me to be surprised that you, as an apparently committed and convinced Catholic, would place human-created robots on a par with animals, whom you believe to have been created by God.

youve stated one logical fallacy after another, you consistently anthropomorphized animals, with nothing but your desire to interpret evidence in a manner supporting your cause.

You assume here that the cause comes before the evidence.

as anthropomorphism is a long held error int hinking, see the wiki, on its history.

your just saying its ok.

For ‘ok’, read ‘impossible to completely avoid’. As it happens, I have been reading up on the subject, and interestingly, it was first applied in the context of religion, where people accorded human qualities to gods.

It’s an accusation for which any behavioural scientist lays themselves open, and which is frequently used to question their findings regarding animals. It’s not just your idea, and it’s not always a valid criticism. In fact, many have criticised the criticism, claiming it is just a way of maintaining the perceived - and sometimes dearly held - distance between humans and other animals.

The fact is, it’s impossible for us, as humans, to see the rest of the world in anything other than a human context. That being the case, it’s not enough to say that anthropomorphism invalidates the evidence we have of animal emotions and consciousness - if that is true, it also leaves open to question the evidence we have for almost every other scientific, historical and religious discovery ever made.

thats laughable, ive been having to coacfh you on what evidence actually is, what your misinterpretation of logical fallacies neede correction. even wht is considered bias in evidence.

your “demonstrations” and arguemnents are logically, intellectually and rationally bankrupt.

Oh, is that what you’ve been doing? ‘Coaching’ me, huh? That’s a fairly sweeping presumption from someone whose own grasp of what constitutes evidence and acceptable levels of proof appears limited at best; and who is, by you own admission, unwilling to accept even the possibility that other worldviews have a claim to validity.

you prefer animals to people, you stated that,

you demonstrated a basic flaw in humanity, the exact one in the op.

If a preference for other animals was a ‘basic flaw in humanity’, don’t you think we’d have died out long ago? In extending my consideration to other animals, I am not exhibiting a preference either way. Humans and other animals are all valuable, in their different ways. It’s generally only humans, though, who have the power to make themselves appear obnoxious.

At the end of the day, all your self-righteous blustering has proved ineffective in changing my beliefs. If anything, it has led me to explore them more deeply, and what I have found has only strengthened them. To me, animal emotions and affective consciousness are self-evident, and it is also obvious that humans and other animals are of equal importance to the world, and have equal rights to live here. So I will continue to give what assistance I can whenever humans or other animals are in need.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

I can and do, and I can say it again if you like. My dog comes before a human stranger in my order of consideration. . Merely that I’m not going to abandon those close to me for the sake of someone I’ve never met, and whose existence to me as anything more than a statistic is only theoretical.

i assure you that a starving, or freezing person doesnt, feel like statistic, its very personal for them.

The ‘brutish’ inference comes from your expressed readiness to kill and eat any animal, and maybe even eat them without the killing part first, because your own survival is all that matters to you

you would do the same, and it is utterly without credibility to say that you would not.

the ‘small-minded’ inference comes from your demonstrated unwillingness to consider the plausibility of other people’s viewpoints.

yeah, im being small minded asking for evidence and all

To actually show this, though, you need to do more than just repeat the same set of statements and expect them to stand on their own.

you cant prove a negative as you just showed below

I can show that Santa Claus is highly improbable.

not the same as proving a negative,** prove** he doesn’t exist.

I can wait by the fireside on Christmas eve and if Santa Claus makes no appearance, I can use that to support my conclusion that there’s no Santa Claus.

or you weren’t a good girl this year.

That alone doesn’t make a body of evidence, though, so I’ll go in search of more. I can check the identity of every shopping-centre Santa and find that they’re not the real Santa Claus.

he doesn’t work at the mall.

More evidence, but still nothing conclusive. I can get everyone I know to repeat the Christmas eve experiment, and when they find that Santa doesn’t make an appearance, that gives more weight to the supposition that Santa doesn’t exist

.

15% think they saw him.

Also, I can read a bit of history and discover that St Nicholas, on whom the figure of Santa Claus is based, was a real person who died hundreds of years ago

.

the illuminatti made that up with the free masons.

So I can conclude on that basis that there’s probably no Santa Claus, and that’s as good a proof as any you’re likely to get. Of course, it can be contradicted by a verifiable sighting of Santa Claus, but there hasn’t been one yet.

so, do you still think you’ve proven a negative? why not?

you cant prove a negative.

The thing is, you can prove a negative, according to the laws of logic.

yet, it didn’t just work on santa now did it?

If you can prove that you exist as a person, then you can also prove that you’re not nonexistent

.

ok, prove it to me.

cogito ergo sum? thats only proof to you, its not objective, plus i dont get the relevance

The issue is the way you choose to phrase your proposition. You can say that you can’t prove that animals have no emotions.

thats my position, animals have no provable emotions.

I can ***cunningly?***rephrase that to say that animals are unfeeling automatons. Bingo - you have a positive assertion that is logically provable. Logic is just a game with words, at the end of the day.

if you rephrase it your making your own argument.

mine is that animals have no provable emotions,

if you want help on the arguement you just made, check out ‘determinism’ that should get you most of the way there.

If I were presented with a body of evidence that leads to the conclusion that animal emotion of any kind is extremely unlikely, then I would revise my position. I have yet to be presented with said body of evidence.

thats just it, you want us to believe that similar things, like chemical reactions, create in animals emotion like we have.

its an assumption that you think is likely. we call that opinion.

there is still no objective evidence of which you have already admitted.

Everyone chooses to believe what they believe. It depends on the evidence they find convincing. You choose to believe, because you find the evidence convincing, based on your own experience. I, however, have a different set of experiences that lead me to believe that the God of the Bible is a cultural construction, based on much the same evidence. .

im a theist, from the logical necessity of a non-physical first caused linked with the mathematical evidence of convergent messianic prophecies, through a reduction of possible universes, to an independent actor. thats why im a theist.

you have an opinion.

Similarly,*** I choose to believe***, on the basis of my own experience and the supporting evidence, that animals have emotion and affective consciousness.

I can see that they aren’t human, and that they often have different motivations for their behaviour than I or any other person would

,

those motivations are called ‘instincts’, or ‘chemically driven programming.’

and that their emotional experience is simpler than mine, but that is not enough for me to conclude that they have no emotion whatsoever

.

the default should be no emotion, as in you need proof to assign them emotions.

it’s better from an ethical standpoint to treat animals with compassion, And when it comes to having the right to respect and compassion, I will apply the same principle to humans, because we’re animals too.

except for the ones you cant see, after all they arent really people with family like you, children like, you, needs like you,

they are just statistics:blush: shame

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Don’t think anyone has said that animals and humans feel the same and are able to do the same things. What we have challenged is that animals’ responses are all chemical programming.

actually the argument that our advanced abilities dont make us superior was made earlier in the thread

so if they arent chemical programming than what are they free will? good luck proving that.

Also a number of us have said that even if animals respond out of chemical programming that does not mean that they do not feel pain, hunger etc nor that they should be treated well (which even you have admitted is appropriate - unless of course a human might miss out on something as a result)

.

but not placed before humans in any way

Also you’ve said that all humans should be well treated because they are human even if they have some feature or charactertics that limits their abilities that you consider only humans have eg able to produce art and or literature.
Or by who does the programming.

i dont get what you mean here, if evolution programs whats the difference?

Also the cat continues to evolve, the roomba does not.

heard of roomba pro, or elite? sure looks like roomba evolves to me.

Why should we see ourselves as anything other than animals - given our bioloigical similiarity to other mammals. And what’s to say we wouldn’t muck up another planet?

ok, but that supports my argument, if we are just animals, it seems that we would have no responsibility to other animals at all.

we might muck up a bunch, im not sure this one is mucked up yet though, al gore be darned.

Of course everything isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough while all the inhabitants of the earth do have the necessities they need.

However some people would favour stopping evolution because they consider that the changes of the last few hundred years have made the world worse. Others want a world where only the strong survive.

funny, but nobodies got a choice, evolution willroll on regardless.

I don’t see the dichotomy you see - either care for other living things or care for a human being. There are very few situations in which we can’t do both.

ive never said that, im saying that its immoral to use charitable dollars for animals, while people suffer.

From what I’ve read about them I think all it would do would be to “kill” the roomba or result in a large bill to get it fixed. But then I shouldn’t get it fixed as the money should go to humans.

go ahead, were talking charitable dollars, not every dollar you have. though that would be beautiful, G-d doesn’t ask that.

Often they provide more comfort than a human does. They don’t tell you what to do. They don’t make conditions for their apprioval. They aren’t sarcastic and they don’t think they the answer to every question to everything.

roombas comgfort me at least

roombas dont tell you what to do

roombas arent sarcastic

roombas, dont ask for evidence.

it seems you may as well have a roomba, you could project emotions like approval and comfort onto them as easily as you can anything else.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Hope your “I tend more” includes taking you dog to the vet when it’s sick!!!

About “Rainbow Bridge” and similar ideas - I too find them over the top but I see the value in them if they help people not to remain enmeshed in grief over their animals’ death.

I think that marking an animals death is fine - and cannot understand how someone would not do so if especially if the animal has been a loved family member for a number of years.

this was posted by Cracker Mom

 

[Sair]

anthrocentrism isn’t the opposite of anthropomorphism,

also anthrocentrism is sustainable in its own right by the evidence of civilisation,

futherm thats a relatively recent term, made up by environmentalists, because they were tired of getting hammered wit the anthropomorphism, that has been cosidered an error as far back as the greeks.

no, im asserting that there is no evidence of animals having emotions of any kind,

to me, they are, from what we actually know about them is that they are a collection of nano molecular machines, called cells, that are chemically programmed by evolution to display specific behaviors that allow their sequences of dna to be propigated

they are nothing more than chemically programmed meatbots.

this is exactly what i have been saying the whole time, and now you blithely agree.

and thats where bia comes in,

asking an animal behaviorist, if animals have feelings, is like using the bible to prove Christianity.

thats why such evidence cant be trusted.

yes, similar structures, produce similar chemicals, we are biologically closely related, but those similarities do not equal emotions.

we know we have emotions because we can experience them. asuming that animals must have emotions because they have similar structures as us, their chemical cousins, is just that an assumption not evidence.

further you said this, and they seem contradictory to me.

how do you know an animal is any different, that they arent acting on their programming?

if sophistication is our standard, that still supports my argument, we are much more sophisticated.

and how do you know that animals have affective conciousness, and which interpretation are you using?

thats how i feel about meatbots

what im not an animal too? ive spent a whole lot of time with animals and never had a social relationship with them, no dinner, no drinks, etc

if thats your standard, then you are haveing a social relationship with your computer.
having a computer can make you happy playing games, you socialize here on it, you perform maintanence keeping it in running shape, and by extension, contented, you, as we all are then, exercising a symbiosis of mutual benefit with your computer.

see what i mean? there all just robots without some serious objective evidence.

Give a man enough rope…

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Wasn’t even my idea, actually. I believe Shin fist posted the suggestion, and you seemed quite happy to affirm it.

im confused as to what you mean, please qoute the exact phrase you are talking about. i dont remember affirming any such thing.

It suddenly occurs to me to be surprised that you, as an apparently committed and convinced Catholic, would place human-created robots on a par with animals, whom you believe to have been created by God.

and your point is?

You assume here that the cause comes before the evidence.

as i have yet to see actual evidence, it did.

For ‘ok’, read ‘impossible to completely avoid’. As it happens, I have been reading up on the subject, and interestingly, it was first applied in the context of religion, where people accorded human qualities to gods.

wow, you read the wiki

and its not impossible to avoid, simply dont do it. you may talk in those terms, but to actually hold an anthro position as true is avoidable.

It’s an accusation for which any behavioural scientist lays themselves open, and which is frequently used to question their findings regarding animals. It’s not just your idea, and it’s not always a valid criticism. In fact, many have criticised the criticism, claiming it is just a way of maintaining the perceived - and sometimes dearly held - distance between humans and other animals.

The fact is, it’s impossible for us, as humans, to see the rest of the world in anything other than a human context. That being the case, it’s not enough to say that anthropomorphism invalidates the evidence we have of animal emotions and consciousness - if that is true, it also leaves open to question the evidence we have for almost every other scientific, historical and religious discovery ever made.

anthro is the symptom of seeing the world through the human context.

and there is still no evidence of animal emotions, there are ipionions and projections, no actual evidence.

Oh, is that what you’ve been doing? ‘Coaching’ me, huh?

yes, when you have to explain something, say logical fallacies, to someone we call that ‘coaching.’

That’s a fairly sweeping presumption from someone whose own grasp of what constitutes evidence and acceptable levels of proof appears limited at best; and who is, by you own admission, unwilling to accept even the possibility that other worldviews have a claim to validity.

because your opinion does not constitute evidence, please list your evidence and i will be happy to give you specific faults with each argument.

If a preference for other animals was a ‘basic flaw in humanity’, don’t you think we’d have died out long ago? In extending my consideration to other animals, I am not exhibiting a preference either way. Humans and other animals are all valuable, in their different ways. It’s generally only humans, though, who have the power to make themselves appear obnoxious.

your doing an excellent job of the obnoxious bit, and yes its a basic flaw in humanity, lions dont hang out with the lambs.

At the end of the day, all your self-righteous blustering has proved ineffective in changing my beliefs

.

here again you blithely admit your positions are beliefs. nothing can change beliefs, thats the point you have no evidence you have beliefs

If anything, it has led me to explore them more deeply, and what I have found has only strengthened them.

now you really believe what you believed before? ok…

To me, animal emotions and affective consciousness are self-evident,

because you have a belief, not knowledge founded on actual evidence.

and it is also obvious that humans and other animals are of equal importance to the world, and have equal rights to live here.

please some real evidence or an admission you have none would be great here.

So I will continue to give what assistance I can whenever humans or other animals are in need.

of course you will, you already admitted to the amoral position of making animlas equal to humans.

 

[warpspeedpetey]

Give a man enough rope…

and he’ll tie a meatbot to a chain in the back yard

 

[GodLovesTheSpek]

Save who or what can be saved and pray for the rest. Thy will be done.