Hello everybody. I thought I'd share my mantis eating a goldfish video. Some of you might not want to watch an insect eat a fish, so be warned!
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No kidding. I tried to ship an ooth to Europe using FedEx but they didn't allow me to. What should I do? Should I pack it first and say it is a vase? My friend recieved a mantid in a package that stated it was a vase. Should I do the same for the sake of mantids? Do they open up an check the package? Do they send it throught an X-ray?
I also should have mentioned this is a contingency plan in case a time comes when mealworms are unavailable. I like to keep things as simple and clean as possible.
not necessarily, if consiousness needs a critical amount of machine complexity. Just saying 'its alive therefore its conscious' is blatantly untrue as some life functions perfectly well without it - ie are bacteria, protozoa, plants or fungi consious ? Thats 4 kingdoms that in all probability we can conclude 'feel' nothing and need not. Life is simply long sequences of biochemical reactions that 'work'. Consiousness is not a requirement of life, but *sometimes* life has found it useful. Most living things do respond to stimuli, true but it is obviously not a necessity that they 'feel' anything to respond -any more than computer programs. If we can conclude bacteria dont need to be consious of anything it is reasonable to conclude more complex forms dont HAVE too, esp if they don't appear to, up to a critical 'tipping point' of necesary complexity, ie one that is tied to aiding the machines survival in that they can 'consider' appropriate actions, instead of mere stereotypical instincts.
It’s all in good fun. By the way,to bring it all back, I feel that there is nothing wrong with an invertebrate eating a vertebrate. It happens all the time. But the animal rights types can be seriously motivated and vocal, and once something gets regulated or made illegal it is hard to get it back.
An invalid assumption/starting point will just lead to more problems. You would have to argue for consiousness in bacteria and pre bacteria. A Self aware virus? What about the building blocks of life like proteins, carbohydrates or DNA? I don't think so. Put non consious chemical machines together into a slightly more complex machine and i dont see why consiousness need spring into being automatically at that level.
These were two different arguments. Arguing that life may be more than the sum of its parts (I said no more than this) doesn't imply that insects aren't a subject of ethical concern. It is just that we know more about verts and this should be sufficient to not cause any unnecessary pain to other verts - particularly as they are not usual diet for mantids and any natural occurrence has still to be regarded as rare. We can only badly assess what "pain" means for an insect. I do not argue that they can't feel pain - we simply don't know it. But as usual part of mantid diets I have to accept that they are eaten this way. If not, I couldn't keep mantids. The difference is that as a human, one shouldn't do similar things to insects either, as it simply is not necessary.
Of course selection has no precognition. Preadaptation simply means a trait that evolved as a consequence of some other trait without having an immediate evolutive value. It can become important though if evolution takes another direction. I won't go into human evolution here, as this is too exhaustive. One point should be sufficient in this regard: we (say H. sapiens) don't have the very largest human brains. Some population of H. neanderthalensis had larger ones. Despite this, they were not able to deal with a changing environment as well as with the newly arriving H. sapiens. Nor did they (as far as it is known) have any kind of art. Thus, brain size isn't in every single case a good indicator of intelligence or evolutive success. Of course noone would compare a human with a fish brain.
No, I don't have to. It is of no importance if a nematode is sophisticated or not. I just pointed out that as an organism, it exhibits traits that are not exhibited by simple organs or organelles of it under lab conditions. Maybe we will some day find out every single aspects of life. However, knowing all the stuff doesn't mean we can reproduce it de novo. As long as we don't succeed in creating life de novo we should be careful with generalizations. And by no means should we imply that we can define life. We can't (yet). We can just define partial aspects of it.
I am arguing that bacteria and archea have some level of consciousness. They reproduce, exchange genetic material among individuals, compete for resources, and protect themselves when environmental conditions are not favorable. I never said they were self aware. Self awareness is something different from consciousness. I’m was not using the words interchangeably in my earlier post. I don’t claim to have some rock solid explaination that will change your beliefs. Viruses and prions are strange things, but they don’t actually carry on any biochemical processes on their own, if you need my hypothetical line in the sand.
Machines can be programmed to do all kinds of seemingly intelligent things, but they cannot program themselves; at least not yet, and even then we would still have to program them to do that. That’s the point, there has to be input from somewhere outside the system. You can’t just take C, O, H, P, and N and shake them together and have DNA. Even bacteria is something more than just some sort of perpetual motion machine. It is keeping itself alive against the universal law of entropy.
I did say they we are the same. I really have no idea what you mean about the catastrophic and universal destruction they had on the environment. It would be cool to see wooly mammoths and sabre tooth tigers, but compared to the rate of extinction now? When the Europeans came to North America they did not find a charred landscape littered by carcasses with spears and arrows sticking out of them, they found a land of “inexhaustible” resources. I agree that the limitations of stone age technology prevented massive exploitation, but if that was their cultural aim they certainly could have developed more efficient ways to subdue the environment and one another like the more ‘civilized’ cultures did. Perhaps you could point me to some of the sources for your information.
We have mapped the human genome as well. So there it is, we know everything now? Having a map of a worm’s genome it not adequate proof against a life force, it really doesn’t have anything to do with it. We still can’t put it all together and have it start up. Something still has to put gas in the tank. From my point of view parsimony is in my corner; you have demonstrable facts, but in the end it is just a stack of papers on a desk. Neither of us can prove anything, but I’m not really trying to either, and I’m not just talking out of my @$$. Science never proves anything beyond a doubt, that is the nature of scientific rigor. If you stand six inches infront of Monet’s Waterlilies and study that spot of blue inexhaustibly, what have you learned about the picture?
Im also against that noble savage myth. Humans caused mass extinctions in almost every continent they arrived except Africa. There is a theory that Africa retained most of its megafauna because it co-evolved with man and was able to deal with those strange bipedals using weapons. Most other megafauna vanished after humans did their first step on the respective island or continent. They overexploited most meat sources until the larger species went extinct. The ones that left were able to deal better with hunting or fire. The reason that savage cultures seem to live in harmony with their landscape is not because the willingly wanted it but because they have to (after having brought to an end the easier way of life). At the arrival of Europeans most natural landscapes except boreal and innertropical ones only carried those species that survived earlier human settlement. Man was and still is a catastrophe for biodiversity on this planet.
