Reactions to the “Reprogramming Predators” Piece Monday, Dec 21 2009
animal rights 5:09 pm
A few weeks ago Paul Raven at Futurismic picked up my link to David Pearce’s essay “Reprogramming Predators”, which throws out some ideas for preventing things like, oh, I don’t know, hyenas eating off the face and trunk of a living baby elephant stuck in a mud pond. I thought a couple comments on Futurismic were funny.
Chad said:
I couldn’t disagree with this guy more. In fact, I think it is rather ludicrous we could make a change this large and not see disastrous effects on every aspect these creatures lives and ours.
James said:
I couldn’t agree with this guy more. In fact, I think it ludicrous we don’t immediately start working for this change so that we can prevent the disastrous effects the status quo has on these creatures lives and ours.
Funny! The fact of the matter is that wildlife documentaries have brainwashed most of the planet into admiring the powerful grace of predators that Darwinian selection made into ruthless serial killers and torturers. Besides those documentaries, many humans identify with predators because a lot of history has been a zero-sum game where your loss is my gain, and predators are the archetypical example of a winner of a zero-sum game.
As we begin to enter into a positive-sum world (hopefully!), zero sum games will become old. At the risk of being cliche, I will invoke Paul 13:11:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Our species is childish. We laugh at suffering. But given increased intelligence and compassion, this will not endure forever. If someone is poor and hungry, their morals may be lax, but the well-fed may have enough additional resources to contribute to others. As our economic productivity improves with the assistance of machines, our society will have such great wealth and health that we will begin turning our attention to the “fringe concerns” of today, such as the ongoing slaughter of prey animals by predators. In vitro meat will eliminate the need for the mass murder of animals for food, and genetic reprogramming and advanced robotics will help us transition predators away from consuming sentient beings. Perhaps they can be directed to consume artificially engineered non-conscious meat-animals that are periodically airdropped across large areas of the Canadian Arctic and Amazon Rainforest. Perhaps we can engineer meat-plants that protect their tasty insides from bacteria but can be torn open by tigers.
I agree Michael.
I am not sure why it would even matter. Why undo thousands of years of evolution likely with disastrous consequences?
What is so special about animals or humans anyway? By the time you could reprogram them you could just as well make 1000 copies. Why does it matter if a few die painfully? Would it not be more reasonable to remove the pain centers of their brains even if it decreased their chance for survival?
Stop being such a hippie, no you are not a unique and special flower.
If you’re going to radically change animals in order to prevent their suffering, why not sterilize them and prevent all possibility of suffering? If the goal is to prevent suffering, then we could let all species die out and run simulations of them in safe computer environments. Of course this would put an absolute end to their evolution and I would argue that this is a form of destruction.
What happens when we reach another planet with life? Do we immediately remove pain, suffering, and death from all it’s inhabitants? If an alien intelligence came to Earth 100,000 years ago and decided that early humans were too violent would you want them to stop human history from happening?
Pain is a cognitive illusion that has evolved to help animals survive. We have no clue what effect removing it would have. I would personally prefer a world with less pain and suffering, but collectively we do not have the tools or knowledge to re-engineer our entire ecosystem. The consequences could be horrific.
One caveat: if you are talking about making this transition with the help of a super-intelligent machine I concede it as a possibility, but I maintain that we shouldn’t do it on our own.
Humans *mostly* just exterminate other predators.
Funnily enough, the “poor” (in materialistic terms) humans tend to have the most compassion and intelligence.
I’ll also note that humans have been predators, and worse – predators kill for food, humans kill for all kinds of “reasons”.
And, humans do not need meat. There are millions of perfectly healthy (if not healthier) vegetarians and vegans. I’m not quite a veggie myself, but frankly I don’t see the point of “in vitro meat” – if we want to not eat me, we can (and many do) choose so.
Please let us deal with the above factors first, before we (once again!) go all righteous about other life and their habits. Right now, frankly, I don’t think we have any particular right to talk. If other animals on earth were not only sentient but could speak with us, they’d have something to say about our attitude, for sure. But they don’t really have to, do they? We really know already.
your weakest post yet.
are you suggesting we reprogramme the entire food chain? ludicrous. let’s start by solving our own problems and adjusting ourselves to better appreciate our environment. the planet will certainly take care of itself.
“…such as the ongoing slaughter of prey animals by predators.”
Of course, if natural predators don’t kill prey animals, we’ll need to instigate some sort of sterilization/population control, before these animals breed, overpopulate, and destroy the delicate balance nature has spent so long obtaining. Monitoring and sterilizing every animal species could prove to be a rather unproductive use of our time and resources, especially if a meteor or one of the other thousand ways for earth to be annihilated finally happens. Eliminating pain and suffering will have some disastrous consequences, unless every facet of our lives is completely controlled by a super-intelligence (no pain = no remorse = no reason not to commit heinous, brutal actions). I’m not sure I’d enjoy existence so much without the delusion that I have a free will, unless of course we were programmed not to want one somehow.
“Funnily enough, the “poor” (in materialistic terms) humans tend to have the most compassion and intelligence.”
It’s been a while since you’ve been to a third-world country or city, hasn’t it. People on every level are just as brutal, and the lower one is on Maslow’s hierarchy, the more coercive force (brutality, usually) it takes to preserve oneself. Watch a few zombie or post-apocalyptic movies to catch my meaning.
“I don’t see the point of “in vitro meat””
… because a future without steak sounds pretty bleak to me, and plenty of others, unless we’re all programmed by the super-intelligence not to want it. Not to mention that every animal is going to die, so we may as well eat them. And if they don’t die?… well, then we have to chop their testicles off to make sure they don’t reproduce and halt their evolution to a better species. How would they feel about that?
Sean your post makes me wonder if you have ever been to a 3d world city. You sound like an arrogant spoiled brat. Humans are programmed to protect their off spring and those who will help them do this their clan etc are watched out for. Even cave men watched out for their own.
Humans are only brutal to outsiders. After the singularity, everything will be cheap including life. After all an AI is not one of us. Everyone will be an outsider. You do not need to be an expert in game theory to understand why.
And people on the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy group together into clans.
We are a very social species the worst thing is to lose ones family and clan. People are willing to die for this. Look at the military people are willing to die.
Hi Michael,
I’m glad you appreciated my attempt at humor! I was trying to show that people often do not argue rationally about this topic, and resort to stating their opinions without any facts or solid ethical framework to justify their beliefs.
I’d like to ask what defines a “heinous, brutal action” in Sean’s equation above, “no pain = no remorse = no reason not to commit heinous, brutal actions”. Generally brutal actions are defined as such because they inflict pain and suffering on others. In a world without pain, how can anything be brutal? Our common sense morality equates actions which cause suffering with the suffering itself. However, in an era where conscious experience can be engineered, these two ideas must be analyzed individually if they are to be understood.
I like Karl’s point because it can be tested: “We have no clue what effect removing it would have.” The question of whether sentients can be motivated by gradients of bliss is an empirical one. Let’s find out the answer sooner rather than later.
According to a plaque at the US National Zoo, the average lion rules a pride for 2 years before dying horribly under the claws of another challenger. Those who never get to rule a pride in the first place are invariably snuffed out by other lions who drive their fathers out, die fighting to take over a pride, or are driven into the wild by competitors (who killed their fathers but didn’t kill them). The best life a lion can look forward to is two rough years of mating and brutal fighting to keep its position at the top of the food chain.
Do we next talk about a cat playing with her food, spiders poisoning their trashing victims, or maybe about fungi that burrows into the back of ants while they are alive? What about a human example: the guinea worm? That’s a twisted gift of nature we humans can have burrowing in us! (Removing without twisting it out slowly with a stick is generally fatal too.)
Are humans the only cruel species? I think the fallacy is that because we are able to talk instead of killing each other for mates and land, we say we are cruel when we kill instead of talk. When lions kill for land and mates, suddenly there’s no cruelty, no pointless “war”, because they /have/ to. It’s nature, so it’s alright.
Well, isn’t this post that maybe, just maybe, one day in the future a lion won’t have to? And if they don’t have too, should they?
Rearranging the food chain is pretty stupid sounding… but if you buy the Singularity arguments (I don’t by the way), then maybe it won’t be so stupid one day.
One thing is for sure, nature is not pretty; it’s pretty much full of suffering and death.
“Humans are programmed to protect their off spring and those who will help them do this their clan etc are watched out for. Even cave men watched out for their own.”
… and protection usually escalates into violence, which usually involves someone suffering. Such was my point. I don’t see many upper-class ‘clans’ gunning each other down to survive, but it certainly happens in the ghetto a few miles from me. Not to say that there are no poor, compassionate people, merely to say that economic or materialistic status doesn’t necessarily correlate to compassion in the way presented.
“I’d like to ask what defines a “heinous, brutal action” in Sean’s equation above, “no pain = no remorse = no reason not to commit heinous, brutal actions”.”
Well, suppose I found it amusing to watch a dog twitch after I clubbed him – not because its suffering brings me pleasure, just because. Without the ‘pain’ it brings my mind, or no concept of what pain is and no empathy, I probably wouldn’t have a problem with shooting every puppy if it gave me that psychological reward. There would be no empathy. I understood the idea presented not to be that the pain ‘sensor’ in our and every other creature’s brain would be removed, but that we would prevent actions occurring that would cause other sentient beings’ suffering.
A lot of the violence in ghettos (hoods) is really about who controls the territory. The perpetrators are trying to create a group leader. Problem is these places can never create a stable government. The leaders are sent to jail and the normal government does not care about the poor enough to really create stability.
Russian Bear said: “Why undo thousands of years of evolution likely with disastrous consequences?”
North America used to have a hefty population of mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, miniature bears that could run like racehorses, lions larger than African ones, and cheetahs! Humans killed them all off about 13,000 years ago in what was one of the greatest times of extinction in Earth’s history. Relegating those large mammals to museum fossils allowed humans to become what they have today. I can’t necessarily say that I wish America were still populated with these animals, since that would mean I wouldn’t be here and neither would anyone I know. Humans have been “undoing” evolution without any thought to the consequences for a long, long time. Most large predators are going extinct quickly with human help anyway, so I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to wonder what can be done to make all animals’ lives better in the few managed places where “nature” as most people think of it still exists.
Wow, didn’t realize you could get this on the web now, saved me a trip to the student center – Need more blogs like this here