"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days."
Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
Fair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours).
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days
And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas?
Why possibly days and not possibly weeks?
but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed
Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down.
it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty
But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
You are correct. The underlying scientific article is clear on the timeline of observations. My problem is with the editing done by the phys.org article.
The article calls the data an "observation", made by the captain of a Rescue Boat from Sea World Foundation. From a peek at https://seaworldfoundation.com.au/rescue it seems clear that their job is rescue, not research.
Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive.
It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
You might also argue that although there may be a non-emotional argument for why grieving could be beneficial, it’s possible or even likely that evolution encoded this instinct in something like emotions. Just how evolution encoded the tendency to care for one’s family and community in emotions for humans.
Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.
Indeed. The same goes for widows at funerals. I mean, has anyone ever dissected the brain of a grieving human and said “aha hah! Here it is!! The grief!”
Do books grieve? I ascribe the same kind of interaction to llm's. They work on a different substrate than us and their perception of reality, if there is any, will be wholly different than our perception because of the constraints of the substrate itself.
Not to mention the lack of continuity of existence kind of precludes any deeper and more meaningful interactions with the self.
I am not saying that they are unable to feel, but at the current structure and ephemeral existance they are unable to do so, they lack the minimum prerequisites.
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
That's a very closed definition of grieving. So by your definition a future perfectly simulated human brain cannot grieve because no chemicals are involved?
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
One of the important overlooked aspects of this is how maltreatment of something that appears to be human-like in many ways by an actual human affects the person doing it.
I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
We’ve had 30 years of people killing digital people, often controlled by actual people without any obvious impact on violent tendencies.
I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
I'll write the dissenting opinion that the models still aren't very good at planning rather it's the agentic harness and prompts thereof that are giving us better planning ability on long and larger tasks.
My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.
... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.
The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?).
You can't really know for sure, but the typical argument (c.f. Chomsky & Berwick) is there was an enormous explosion in "cultural" products then. Before then, we don't see figurative art, and after we see all sorts of crazy things.
That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.
I don't understand why you are hostile to me explaining the idea. In any case, you can read their book to see the arguments they use (which are not just assertions, anti-chomskyans just ignore or strawman everything he says). For example, it's not a massive mutation, but specifically a very very small one: the theories called "minimalism" for a reason.
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
That obviously doesn't mean that we're not different--we obviously are, and it's not intellectually honest to deny it. There are SO many examples of things that have some common trait but are obviously different--skyscrapers and huts are both buildings, but they are different. Cheetahs and Usain Bolt both run fast, but they are different. Bacteria and oak trees are both alive, but they are different. "alike" and "different" are both words, but they are different. And so on ad infinitum.
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.
These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
Category error started at "we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals".
Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals.
Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
A baby's brain is in super-sponge mode. They lack experience and control. Just because they don't yet speak doesn't mean they would not have something to say.
That a drunk person shouldn't make critical decisions and nor should a toddler is different than equating a baby's experience to someone asleep or in a coma.
My 2yo had memories from over a year prior. She would bring up things that surprised us. She later forgot that stuff, but she always had a larger window of experience to pull from than we expected.
Treating kids like coma patients ignores that experience and window of memories. You bet your ass you could traumatize / condition a baby to fear. You cant do that to someone in a coma. I doubt you can condition someone purely in their sleep too fwiw.
We should assume a rich experience until proven otherwise.
I 100% agree. My point is that approximately all humans will go through these phases/episodes, and spend some small fraction of their lives below "conscious/sentient/sapient" threshold of whatever metric one could propose - and we should not classify individuals by where they happen to be on that scale at the current point in time.
(In contrast, every bacteria and every amoeba will clock below threshold of any reasonable metric 100% of the time.)
Expand this to 1-minute before birth, 1-month, 4-months, keep going. Fetal brain development is mature enough by 6 weeks that reflex and movement start.
That's a very selective interpretation of what GP said, in fact I don't see how you even got to that conclusion.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
Man, I remember carrying a veal calf in a wheelbarrow away from it's grieving mother (who ended up distressed for days) when I was 16 doing some Summer farm work. It messed me up for weeks, and I still somehow went back to drinking dairy. Thankfully I've sworn off all animal products now, but the knowing cruelty of it I suppressed for a long time.
Ordinarily in Minecraft if you click a cow with a bucket it fills with milk, a simplistic model of how this works that reflects probably the level of thought most people have about where cow milk comes from.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
I’m hoping that at some point we’d be able to have free range cows that are only hormonally forced to make milk. And no calves need to be born (or killed).
I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
You know, if there was a hypnotic drug such that I could be sure I'd remember nothing (and many, many similar caveats), I'd volunteer to be caused all kinds of pain, because I don't see why I should care. The only moral angle I can see is the question of who would want it and why. Research maybe? In of itself, it doesn't seem bad.
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long.
The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.
Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.
Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.
No, there's a difference, in that my clone would get PTSD or some similar trauma as a result, which is a waste of a large part of that clone's life. In the version where I'm drugged into forgetfulness, I've only wasted a day, for science and profit.
PTSD and other results of trauma do not require a memory of the thing happening to you. In fact often people don't remember the thing that caused the trauma.
It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.
You’re showing a lack of empathy for the instance of yourself that is experiencing all that pain. Simply forgetting it doesn’t make it right to not have empathy for the version of yourself that went through all the pain and suffering.
Yes, I am! Why isn't that fine? Not "right", you say.
Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.
I haven't seen it, but the premise is that you have a second self who is trapped at work and wants to escape. That's really not the same thing, and misses the point of my drug scenario, which is that pain and (simple) suffering outside of meaning don't have moral weight. In this TV show the inside-work-selves are leading meaningfully miserable lives, with the frustrated cognitive desire to escape. They have knowledge-forming thought processes that are being wasted.
I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.
Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.
That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)
Pretty sure the Abrahamic religions promote the idea that we are special and god gave us the nature for us to feed ourselves, rule the rest. All that talk of lord, kingdoms etc.
It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
I've heard scientists say dogs don't have theory of mind and making a big deal out of some animals that do have some traces of it, when any dog owner can confirm they do. I've seen my dog bury a bone in one place while the other dog watches, then rebury it in a different place when the other dog went home.
I've also seen my parents' previous dog pretend he's closed in the enclosure with the doghouse when neighbors cat approached even when he wasn't. Then when the cat came to their backyard the dog would run after the cat.
It's so obvious, it's baffling to me how science could ever miss it.
There is no survival for us without hurting some other living organism. Even a purely vegan diet (which does not provide the complete nutrition we need) hurts plants and other critters that also want to eat those same plants or use them for shelter or whatever. So, I agree that we probably shouldn't feel too superior or different from other living things, but we also don't need to beat ourselves up for hurting other living things. We can't eat rocks.
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
True herbivores have stomachs that can ferment B12 from the plants they eat. We do not
Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
Ants don't walk in line over the stove. It may not be fear, but there is something hardwired that tells them not too, or they would be extinct long ago
When I was a little boy, with XY chromosomes, I enjoyed vinyl records and record players. I came across a nice flex-disc, from a magazine such as National Geographic, and it was full of whalesong, recorded with underwater microphones from the deep. (I am sorry for posting this a day too late to Talk Like a Pirate...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family.
And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations.
Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.
That's two ethology stories on HN on one day. Interesting as news for nerds, but it is becoming relevant to more nerds than just me ;-) . (the other one is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775579 "do birds have accents")
Any parent here who has known this loss can relate. Didn’t think I’d see this on HN but yeah this is heartbreaking.
I’m sorry, my thoughts go out to you.
Ahh I appreciate that but I’ve not experienced it personally though I know friends who have.
Orcas have also been seen to carry their dead calf's around.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-reside...
"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days." Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
I'm confused by how that is speculation.
The key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.
Rather, the word “possibly” indicates uncertainty, the very foundation of science.
Are you trying to say that including the weasely claims makes the article better and more scientific? You are “possibly” right.
Fair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours).
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas?
Why possibly days and not possibly weeks?
Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down.
But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
"possibly days" is a quote from the article, which is linked.
You are correct. The underlying scientific article is clear on the timeline of observations. My problem is with the editing done by the phys.org article.
They are indicating a range (hours to days) for a value, and the “possibly” qualifier indicates some uncertainty in the range’s upper bound.
I'd say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.
But they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It's unnecessarily ambiguous.
The article calls the data an "observation", made by the captain of a Rescue Boat from Sea World Foundation. From a peek at https://seaworldfoundation.com.au/rescue it seems clear that their job is rescue, not research.
Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
Your pedantry and rigid lack of any insight is not representative of science just your own intellectual flaws
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Research requires pedantry.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
Do LLMs grieve?
Nope.
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
Do whales grieve?
Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence.
So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
"That isn't me" in the above comment means "I know I can grieve, but I can only tell indirectly other people can do so as well."
It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".
They exhibit behaviours that seem to defy alternative explanations, though I doubt anyone could say for certain whether they do or don’t
You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive.
Here's an article about orcas: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047
It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
You might also argue that although there may be a non-emotional argument for why grieving could be beneficial, it’s possible or even likely that evolution encoded this instinct in something like emotions. Just how evolution encoded the tendency to care for one’s family and community in emotions for humans.
Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.
No, they really don't. The article says
Yeah, that's not grieving.
What if I told you that marine biology is a large and rigorous field that is not fully encapsulated by TFA?
Indeed. The same goes for widows at funerals. I mean, has anyone ever dissected the brain of a grieving human and said “aha hah! Here it is!! The grief!”
No, of course I haven't been doing that, and it's going to be a while before I would have collected a representative sample anyway, if I had been.
How do you know that they don’t? And conversely, how do you know any other human than yourself do?
Do books grieve? I ascribe the same kind of interaction to llm's. They work on a different substrate than us and their perception of reality, if there is any, will be wholly different than our perception because of the constraints of the substrate itself.
Not to mention the lack of continuity of existence kind of precludes any deeper and more meaningful interactions with the self.
I am not saying that they are unable to feel, but at the current structure and ephemeral existance they are unable to do so, they lack the minimum prerequisites.
Insofar as grieving is an inherently, fundamentally a very particular chemical process, the answer is a resounding “no”.
If you simulate that chemical process in a computer, if necessary a quantum computer?
You don't even need quantum imo.
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
This is too mechanistic. You also choose which emotions to pay attention to.
Then, logically speaking, you get a simulation of griefing.
That's a very closed definition of grieving. So by your definition a future perfectly simulated human brain cannot grieve because no chemicals are involved?
Lmao.
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
A “perfect simulation” is no longer a simulation.
The definition of the word “simulation” is:
As we know, “all models are wrong; some models are useful”.
A “perfect simulation” is, then, an oxymoron.
do humans? or is it only because we're the ones doing the research and so we say we do?
i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.
it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.
people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.
...literally on this article.
You can give them emotional signals, but I feel like it's cruel to do so and would recommend against it.
One of the important overlooked aspects of this is how maltreatment of something that appears to be human-like in many ways by an actual human affects the person doing it.
I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
We’ve had 30 years of people killing digital people, often controlled by actual people without any obvious impact on violent tendencies.
I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
I know the point you’re making is half facetious—do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
I'll write the dissenting opinion that the models still aren't very good at planning rather it's the agentic harness and prompts thereof that are giving us better planning ability on long and larger tasks.
So they're good at planning but only when used certain ways.
No, only when use in conjunction with not-LLM software
It's like that time when they "discovered" that babies can feel pain.
I can barely read Jill Lawson's letter:
From: https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/pediatric-pain-history... / https://archive.vn/5hTuT
There's Descartes dog too.
Can we unbury the lede here? Did Jeffrey survive?
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
From the link in your parent: "Jeffrey passed away five weeks after the surgery at Children’s Hospital National Medical Center."
It's right there at the start:
During the almost two months of his life [...]
Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
Other animals use fire, while we continue to seem unique in creating it. Fire hawks take burning sticks and alight brush to flush prey.
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
Humans had completely mastered fire by about 200,000 years ago - after 800,000 years of experimentation.
Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.
Probably due to the need for profanity after getting burnt.
I can't in good conscience upvote short form jokes on HN, but that got a laugh out of me.
The need for profanity came much earlier - due to smashed thumbs, gouged fingers, etc. while learning to make primitive stone tools.
How can we date the origin of speech?
You can't really know for sure, but the typical argument (c.f. Chomsky & Berwick) is there was an enormous explosion in "cultural" products then. Before then, we don't see figurative art, and after we see all sorts of crazy things.
That's a pretty thin reed. Chomsky does a fair bit of argument by assertion and displays of confidence. And he's committed to this idea that language emerged in one massive mutation and thus functional analyses of language are pointless. This is a weird stance for a scientist to take.
I don't understand why you are hostile to me explaining the idea. In any case, you can read their book to see the arguments they use (which are not just assertions, anti-chomskyans just ignore or strawman everything he says). For example, it's not a massive mutation, but specifically a very very small one: the theories called "minimalism" for a reason.
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
— Daniel Dennett
https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
We are not different. Whales exhibit culture too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_...
That obviously doesn't mean that we're not different--we obviously are, and it's not intellectually honest to deny it. There are SO many examples of things that have some common trait but are obviously different--skyscrapers and huts are both buildings, but they are different. Cheetahs and Usain Bolt both run fast, but they are different. Bacteria and oak trees are both alive, but they are different. "alike" and "different" are both words, but they are different. And so on ad infinitum.
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.
These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
The show Pluribus explores this idea. I can't wait for more episodes
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
So by your logic we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals?
Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
Holy category error Batman!
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
Category error started at "we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals".
Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals.
Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
A baby's brain is in super-sponge mode. They lack experience and control. Just because they don't yet speak doesn't mean they would not have something to say.
That a drunk person shouldn't make critical decisions and nor should a toddler is different than equating a baby's experience to someone asleep or in a coma.
My 2yo had memories from over a year prior. She would bring up things that surprised us. She later forgot that stuff, but she always had a larger window of experience to pull from than we expected.
Treating kids like coma patients ignores that experience and window of memories. You bet your ass you could traumatize / condition a baby to fear. You cant do that to someone in a coma. I doubt you can condition someone purely in their sleep too fwiw.
We should assume a rich experience until proven otherwise.
I 100% agree. My point is that approximately all humans will go through these phases/episodes, and spend some small fraction of their lives below "conscious/sentient/sapient" threshold of whatever metric one could propose - and we should not classify individuals by where they happen to be on that scale at the current point in time.
(In contrast, every bacteria and every amoeba will clock below threshold of any reasonable metric 100% of the time.)
Expand this to 1-minute before birth, 1-month, 4-months, keep going. Fetal brain development is mature enough by 6 weeks that reflex and movement start.
Sleep and hypnotic conditioning are a thing.
That's a very selective interpretation of what GP said, in fact I don't see how you even got to that conclusion.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
I'll take "jumping to conclusions" for 500, Alex!
In what context? If I need my appendix out, I'd really prefer a surgeon who got passing grades in med school.
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
Someone is aware this is necessary because they are carrying it out.
I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
Man, I remember carrying a veal calf in a wheelbarrow away from it's grieving mother (who ended up distressed for days) when I was 16 doing some Summer farm work. It messed me up for weeks, and I still somehow went back to drinking dairy. Thankfully I've sworn off all animal products now, but the knowing cruelty of it I suppressed for a long time.
I've heard several people say fish don't feel pain. Makes hobby fishing seem less cruel I guess.
Ordinarily in Minecraft if you click a cow with a bucket it fills with milk, a simplistic model of how this works that reflects probably the level of thought most people have about where cow milk comes from.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
I’m hoping that at some point we’d be able to have free range cows that are only hormonally forced to make milk. And no calves need to be born (or killed).
I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
You know, if there was a hypnotic drug such that I could be sure I'd remember nothing (and many, many similar caveats), I'd volunteer to be caused all kinds of pain, because I don't see why I should care. The only moral angle I can see is the question of who would want it and why. Research maybe? In of itself, it doesn't seem bad.
Isn't that the same as submitting your clone to fear and torment because you will not have a lasting memory of surviving all that?
What's the practical difference other than timelike distance between you rather than spacelike distance?
There's a great free Yale lecture series called Death that goes into this.
https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176/lecture-12
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long. The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.
Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.
Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.
No, there's a difference, in that my clone would get PTSD or some similar trauma as a result, which is a waste of a large part of that clone's life. In the version where I'm drugged into forgetfulness, I've only wasted a day, for science and profit.
PTSD and other results of trauma do not require a memory of the thing happening to you. In fact often people don't remember the thing that caused the trauma.
It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.
Oh yes, I daresay. I mean to include that sort of thing with "memories" anyway. The drug might not be physically possible in reality.
If you're only concerned about the memory of the pain itself then time to start volunteering!
I had a very gruesome femur break decades ago. I can remember begging to be knocked out because of the pain but there's no memory of the pain itself.
You’re showing a lack of empathy for the instance of yourself that is experiencing all that pain. Simply forgetting it doesn’t make it right to not have empathy for the version of yourself that went through all the pain and suffering.
Yes, I am! Why isn't that fine? Not "right", you say.
Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.
*Squashed to death in Salem, 1692
"the work is mysterious and important"
That's basically the premise of the show Severence, in case you didn't know. Give it a watch, it's very eye opening
I haven't seen it, but the premise is that you have a second self who is trapped at work and wants to escape. That's really not the same thing, and misses the point of my drug scenario, which is that pain and (simple) suffering outside of meaning don't have moral weight. In this TV show the inside-work-selves are leading meaningfully miserable lives, with the frustrated cognitive desire to escape. They have knowledge-forming thought processes that are being wasted.
I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.
That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.
Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.
That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)
Pretty sure the Abrahamic religions promote the idea that we are special and god gave us the nature for us to feed ourselves, rule the rest. All that talk of lord, kingdoms etc.
It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
I've heard scientists say dogs don't have theory of mind and making a big deal out of some animals that do have some traces of it, when any dog owner can confirm they do. I've seen my dog bury a bone in one place while the other dog watches, then rebury it in a different place when the other dog went home.
I've also seen my parents' previous dog pretend he's closed in the enclosure with the doghouse when neighbors cat approached even when he wasn't. Then when the cat came to their backyard the dog would run after the cat.
It's so obvious, it's baffling to me how science could ever miss it.
There is no survival for us without hurting some other living organism. Even a purely vegan diet (which does not provide the complete nutrition we need) hurts plants and other critters that also want to eat those same plants or use them for shelter or whatever. So, I agree that we probably shouldn't feel too superior or different from other living things, but we also don't need to beat ourselves up for hurting other living things. We can't eat rocks.
Source? It’s very possible today to adopt a plant-based diet and its typically superior in its health benefits to most other diets (especially the standard Western diet). https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/planning-a-plant-b...
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-ge...
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
True herbivores have stomachs that can ferment B12 from the plants they eat. We do not
Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
You want a source for the fact that a plant based diet requires killing plants?
Or you just didn't read the comment you replied to and made an assumption?
Yeah, that's not grieving.
Paper [0]
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9
Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
Applies to every living thing with a limbic system. So yes, that steak or chicken nuggets...
How? Did limbic system evolve as "fear of death" or "peer recognition and perception of shared fate" system?
(Not doubting the chicken nuggets, just wondering about the lower/simpler end of the scale.)
I mean, it wouldn’t surprise me if it is a strong selector for evolutionary fitness, which it probably is.
Certain species go the other way probably and become more like a super organism but mammals seem quite individualized compared to ants for example.
Ants don't walk in line over the stove. It may not be fear, but there is something hardwired that tells them not too, or they would be extinct long ago
Applies to all living organisms
Speaking of ants having a survival instinct, ant death spirals are a thing. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill
When I was a little boy, with XY chromosomes, I enjoyed vinyl records and record players. I came across a nice flex-disc, from a magazine such as National Geographic, and it was full of whalesong, recorded with underwater microphones from the deep. (I am sorry for posting this a day too late to Talk Like a Pirate...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc
I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family.
And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations.
Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.
Great idea. In going to start using whale speak during spotting connections
I come here to read about the impending AI apocalypse, not feel feelings.
That's two ethology stories on HN on one day. Interesting as news for nerds, but it is becoming relevant to more nerds than just me ;-) . (the other one is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49775579 "do birds have accents")