Aspies For Freedom

Hmm... which view do I find more respectable?

#1

Or,

#2

Somehow, I have more respect for the woman who said #2.  (Astra Milberg, a woman with Down's syndrome, writing a letter to a baby whose mother threw her off a bridge.)

Five, I've held two-way conversations in grammatical and near-grammatical English with non-human animals.  (My name to a parrot who lives next door to me is "Bad lady, dammit, goodbye!"  His name for my cat is "Cat, ***!"  He was not taught to mimic, he knows these words and uses them appropriately.  If he wants to be picked up, he says "Mommy, come here, help me!" which are not words he's heard in that combination before.  He asks for things by name, uses emotion-related words, and manipulates people better than most humans can (parrots have better social skills than humans, and it shows).  Some parrots can read.)  Appropriately-used words are not the only measure of consciousness, but it's a pretty good indicator that something's going on in someone else's brain.  And they've studied parrots enough to know that yes they actually use words in context, they don't just mimic.  This is not projection.  His consciousness is different than mine, in fact (not a projected version of mine at all, I'm not as twisted as he is :-P ) but it's still a consciousness.

And it's very obvious to me that other animals think about things too.  They dream.  They have personalities.  They react to things around them in ways that are not the same day to day.  They communicate with humans and with each other in sophisticated ways.  One does not need to project one's consciousness onto them to say they have consciousness.  We used to have a cat who held up her paw in a very characteristic gesture (the reasons were a long story in themselves).  When the cat died, our dog came into the room, started whining, and raised her paw the same way the cat did (a way the dog never did).  That's more than just "feelings".

I just can't see consciousness in such a human-centric way.  Our brains are very similar to other animals.  And even some animals with brains very dissimilar to ours (such as some kinds of birds) have shown a capacity for abstraction that equals that of young humans (in a human estimation of course).  I have real trouble believing that magically we're the only species in the world with consciousness.

Five, parrots have been tested on this.  They can describe abstract qualities of objects (color, shape, number, etc) correctly without a human telling them which is which.  They know what they're talking about.  They are said to have the intellectual capacity of the average 5ish-year-old human child.

Another parrot story:

The same parrot swooped me, and swooped the cat, both of whom he didn't like at the time.  So his owner said offhandedly "Why don't you go and sweep the vacuum cleaner too if you're swooping everyone you don't like?"  He is terribly afraid of vacuum cleaners.  But he tried to swoop the vacuum cleaner, got a little closer than he liked, flew rapidly back to his cage, landed, and started laughing.  (Yes, he laughs appropriately too.  And cries when he is upset or wants to get sympathy, and it can be hard to tell the difference between those two with him because he's astute at manipulation.)

He asks for objects by name.  If you don't understand what he's saying, he'll go for the object.  You can ask him "Do you want ______?"  If he says something it means "No."  If he remains silent, it means "Yes."  (And he will not cooperate with you if you try to take him towards the thing he doesn't want, he squawks up a storm.  If you wait until he stays silent, though, he'll cooperate fully.)

He runs towards me and yells "Goodbye!" (or "bad lady dammit goodbye" if he's feeling loquacious) when he wants me to go home.  (And yes he cusses quite appropriately too.  He never yelled "Cat! ***!" unless he was flying at the cat, and for that matter he never said "cat" at all unless he was flying at the cat or standing above the cat on a bar and taunting her.  Which drove her nuts.)

He's very clear on what he does and doesn't want, and if you do something totally different than he's asking for, he'll let you know about it in no uncertain terms.  He has to understand what he's saying because if he didn't, then his pissed-off reactions to doing things other than what he's asking for would not follow any particular pattern.  They do.  (This is a problem when he asks for things like mildew, which he considers a delicacy and of course nobody will let him have it.)

Here's a true story about one of the parrots they were doing research on:

(From That Damn Bird)

Additionally, nobody is fully aware and a master of himself, totally free and responsible for what he does and doesn't do, anyone who believes that is deluding themselves (which humans are very good at doing).  A ton of the work of the brain goes on outside of the conscious level, and I'm not just talking basic biological functions here.  People who think they are in full control of themselves have another think coming eventually.  That doesn't mean self-control shouldn't be striven for, but it's not ever going to be a total reality.  And if you think animals don't have to learn self-control then you haven't observed them closely enough.

Agreed totally on how all animals are unique, and humans have some unique combinations of qualities, but so does any other animal you could pick out.

No, I don't think that recognizing the way animals are, has to mean that demeaning comparisons of humans to animals (in ways that demean the animals) is okay, nor do I think it's appropriate to really talk about a human with the "intellectual functioning of a monkey".  Humans are humans, monkeys are monkeys, they are not the same thing.  That's like saying that I have the "flying functioning of a cat", the comparison doesn't even make sense.

As for your comments about brain-damaged people, it's horrible to say a person has to justify others paying for them.  That's not a justification thing that's a right, people do have a right to be alive to at least basic minimal living stuff but hopefully more than that.  And no it was not obvious, you made a blanket statement about brain-damaged people and I called you on it, just like I've called you on your assumptions about intellectual disabilities and people who have them.  And by the way I can't earn a living either.  (Not specifically because of brain damage, more because a combination of things.)  I suppose you think I have to justify my existence too.

Oh and, I don't think that promoting animal rights should be done by disrespecting humans.  That's not the way it works.  Respect the animals.  Don't demote some humans to a sub-person sort of status in your quest to respect animals though.  That's what Peter Singer does and it really doesn't work, it's the wrong way around.

I don't think that is to make the best of a situation. A situation based on who you are and your environments.

I don't like the word 'fault'. it sounds so much alike 'deserve', which is a bull**** word with a meaning that only helps the one who are priviliged enough within a group to use it.

That was definitely not perfect reaction to my post :p

I wrote because I wanted to stop a fight, I hate fights. Ok, but I'll be leaving you now cuz I'm travelling to my cottage at least for some days now cya!

BTW, no-one is perfect.

Well it was nice that the fight didn't go any longer here then, but after a quick look around in another thread I get the impression that BardWolf aint feeling welcome.

The truth is your intellectual capacity qualifies you as human or non-human, if non-animals had the same intellectual capacity as us as to speak and communicate with us, we wouldn't be able to so blindly wipe them out as we do now because we'd be able to know that they are sentient, on the level of human sentience.

The truth is most animals will never evolve beyond their current stage of development and now that we are here because  we've evolved faster, we are the rightful gods of this world because: No animal is going to be able to be smart enough to get into space when our sun collapses if we haven't figured out how to stop it by then.

That's the truth, all living animals today would have naturally been wiped out by nature when the sun blew up.  So in a way the are already dead.

In ancient cultures where resources were more scarce, they would have killed that child once they realized it was a burden on the tribe because it would effect their own survival.

The truth is today we have the LUXURY of caring for these people but even still they are a tremendous burden.  Not that I don't agree with you that they aren't people, it's just that NATURE IS EVIL, and we have to make touch decisions about how we allocate resources, that one child sucks up enormous resources that could have been spent on children with more potential.

I'm an non-believer myself, but I still disagree. Religion is first of all one of the things that supports people in the times they need it, but as you mention it is sometimes used to gain identity, which then sometimes can be used to create hate and war. It's not just religion that can have this kind of function.

And it's those who are considered lowly who end up doing things so that academics have time to sit around and think all day.  Not that there's no worth in academics, just that people in general need each other, and academics definitely in general wouldn't be as capable of making a visible mark on history if they had to do all the thankless work done by people Louise looks down upon.

Note that I do have some personal insight into this, and am not just talking out my posterior:  My father worked in a research facility (see this (PDF) for an example of the sort of things they did).  He was a technician, not a researcher, but he and the others with his job designed and built the electronics, dug the ditches, hauled the test equipment around, etc.  And everyone in that whole place was necessary to keep it running, from the people doing purely manual labor to the cafeteria workers to the people doing skilled electronics work to the physicists at the top of the hierarchy who got the credit when the Nobel prizes got handed out.  But it was everyone who made it work, and they couldn't have done it without each other, and everyone there was more aware of that than Louise seems to be.  Scientific discoveries are not made by heroic individualistic supermen sitting around in vacuums, they're generally made by teams of people, most of whom work for little to no credit but who are nonetheless indispensable.  Without the rest of the team, the physicists would be sitting around unable to discover much of anything, and without the physicists, the rest of the team wouldn't be preparing for the right jobs, etc, it's a genuine interdependent relationship, theoretical and practical people working together.  And you'll notice the "acknowledgements" section of that article I linked to is huge -- for a reason.  Seriously, read through those two pages of acknowledgements and you'll get an idea of a fraction of how many people's work go into things like that.

You assume that what society values is valuable to begin with.  What would be the most laughable is if all their striving to survive was vain from the beginning because of some future event in the universe that will come to pass despite their progresss.  

I guess all those people that just wanted to be happy will have the last laugh huh? lol.