Queen bans fox hunting!

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Lazarus and the Gimp
So are the vast majority of the countryside expanses where there's no hunting overrun with foxes? Nope. You see, there's a very large and efficient predator that controls their numbers nicely. It's called "the car".

More than effective here as well. I see more dead fox than live ones.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by General Ludd
As does a fox.

I'm still waiting for you to explain the differences.

The difference is that a fox doesn't.

Electrons don't "feel" being pushed by electric charges. A robot doesn't "feel" a touch sensor being triggered. They are not sentient. Neither are foxes.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lightblue
You seem to be going by the viewpoint that humans were designed to be more special than the rest of your creation. For us that do not follow the consequences of intelligent design and therefore do not truly differentiate at a base level between humans and other animals your entire argument relies on an anthrocentric fallacy right at the starting point, which makes it pretty impossible to argue with you.

I'm an atheist and don't believe in intelligent design. I don't believe I've used the word in the entire thread. If I have, it was in the sense of evolution designing something to do X, which is much easier to say than "natural selection with random mutation resulted in the predominance of this trait because it performs function X that is good for reproduction and survival".

My argument is that only humans are sentient, and this is a simple empirical claim; we really have no evidence that there are any other sentient life forms. Intelligent, maybe, but no evidence of sentience.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Spiffor
This argument was actuallly held by a mainstream French philosopher (René Descartes) ~300 years ago, who compared animals to elaborate watches IIRC. The argument was exactly the same, the animals are to react mechanically to stimuli, but they don't feel pain...

I have never seen someone with this philosophy explain why cows, before entering the slaughterhouse, crap themselves or even sometimes die of heart-attack before anything had been done to them.

Because that has NOTHING to do with sentience. I could build a robot that does exactly what you say, but you wouldn't suggest that it was sentient or worthy of rights.

[Wezil]

* Wezil adds Kuciwalker to the 'Prohibited from Farming' list *

Do you own a pet Kuciwalker?

[Kuciwalker]

No. Trying to make an appeal to emotion?

btw, if we accept animals as sentient, we have no real basis not to afford them any other rights we give humans, such as protection from other animals...

[Az]

Since I am soo fed up with animals' rights' advocates discussions, I would like just to say to Kuciwalker: push the protection against other animals point. They never come up with an answer, at least not one that I've seen.

[lightblue]

Well they can sue us for it I did know you were an atheist, which is why i was surprised to see you propone this rather theist few ("god created animals to server us" etc etc). If you want to pull it fully through then you should argue that humans are jsut machines as well as the only way to prove sentience is by assuming sentience exists in humans, and that it not a predetermined response of chemicals to external inputs.

I think a lot of mammals are aware of themselves as individuals, which could be argued as a basic form of sentience imo.

[Kuciwalker]

Also, should we have the DP for animals that murder other animals, or just incarceration for life?

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by lightblue
Well they can sue us for it I did know you were an atheist, which is why i was surprised to see you propone this rather theist few ("god created animals to server us" etc etc). If you want to pull it fully through then you should argue that humans are jsut machines as well as the only way to prove sentience is by assuming sentience exists in humans, and that it not a predetermined response of chemicals to external inputs.

We are machines. We, however, for reasons completely unknown, happen to be sentient machines. IMO sentience is an emergent property of matter - actually, an emergent property of simple calculation - but we can't really know right now. I think that if we simulated the motions of every particle in the human body in a computer, it would act exactly the same as an actual human body (i.e. there is no dualism or "external" soul that attaches itself to the body) and that the simulation would necessarily be sentient itself.

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
No. Trying to make an appeal to emotion?

Nope. Just wondering if there were any animals to be concerned about.

btw, if we accept animals as sentient, we have no real basis not to afford them any other rights we give humans, such as protection from other animals...

It's one thing to engage in a BS philosophical argument about sentience and quite another to extrapolate it into the real world as you apparently do. Now you've even gone so far as to imply we need wilderness cops to police the freaking predators if one thinks an animal truly feels pain. You are silly and I won't go there with you.

Sounds like you desperately need to get the **** out of school ASAP and take a peek at the real world out there.

[Az]

Humans ARE just machines, btw! Doesn't mean we shouldn't take care of ourselves, and ourselves only. Don't want to? fine, YOUR problem.

[Kuciwalker]

It's one thing to engage in a BS philosophical argument about sentience and quite another to extrapolate it into the real world as you apparently do. Now you've even gone so far as to imply we need wilderness cops to police the freaking predators if one thinks an animal truly feels pain. You are silly and I won't go there with you.

Why do we need cops for people, but we don't have the same obligation to animals? Don't they have the rights not to be tortured, killed just like people? Why do we only punish people who do it to animals, but not animals that do it to animals?

[Wezil]

Told you, I won't go there with you.

The gist of the thread is the humane treatment of animals. Apparently it is a concept of little use to you.

Do you exhibit any other symptoms of sociopathy?

[Kuciwalker]

No. I have complete respect for the rights of people. Animals are not people.

Are you pro-choice? Are you a sociopath?