Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39633984

Points: 13

# Comments: 5

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39351195

Points: 209

# Comments: 279

To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.

Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.

Are we not conscious?

I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.

Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.

As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.

An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.

An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.

I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.

Honestly curious about this one, do you have a source?

The worry isn't that global warming will be bad for animals, you're right, there will be winners and losers, likely in comparable amounts. The worry is that it will be bad for biodiversity, a resource that is extremely slow to replenish (even taking into account these new opportunities). On the edges of the curve, some animals will be huge winners, and some will be huge losers. 10xing the populations of some species while others go extinct is only a net null on the very surface, it's still a huge loss diversity wise.

Location just gets those in power what they want: higher personal comp and lower employee salaries.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25909509

Points: 4

# Comments: 1