= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CarlShulman comments on Arguments Against Speciesism - LessWrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (474)
Note that by this measure, ants are six times more important than humans.
But to address your question: "specieism" is not a label that's slapped on people who disagree with you. It's merely a shorthand way of saying "many people have a cognitive bias that humans are more 'special' than they actually are, and this bias prevents them from updating their beliefs in light of new evidence."
Brain-to-body quotient is one type of evidence we should consider, but it's not a great one. The encephalization quotient improves on it slightly by considering the non-linearity of body size, but there are many other metrics which are probably more relevant.
You linked to a page comparing brain-to-body-weight ratios, rather than any absolute features of the brain, and referring not to ants in general but to unusually miniaturized ants in which the rest of the body is shrunken. That seems pretty irrelevant.
I was using total brain mass and neuron count, not brain-to-body-mass.
I agree these are relevant evidence about quality of experience, and whether to attribute experience at all. But I would say that quality and quantity of experience are distinguishable (although the absence of experience implies quantity 0).