Why do Veeky Forums think it's ok to eat veal?

I meant sapient. There are literally sentient computers, it just means you have senses.

Fetuses don't know or care if you kill them, user.

neither do veal

The veal crates thing some countries practice is kind of fucked, but no moreso than battery hens. People who bleat about the poor cute widdle calves but don't give a shit about chickens need to fuck off.

I've produced and eaten cattle under a year old, which is what is considered veal in my country. I don't see any ethical issues with it, the animals lived good lives and had quick deaths, and it's the only real use for male calves.

they're not comparable.
at least we can argue that veal MIGHT have some low level of consciousness, while chicken DEFINITELY don't have any.

Have you ever been around a calf, user? It's an animal, it walks around, sleeps, plays, eats, is curious about changes to its environment, avoids discomfort etc. They particularly don't like being taken to the slaughterhouse so it's generally accepted to be more humane to kill them in the field and butcher them yourself (which is also a lot more feasible than doing this to an adult cow, which yields far too much meat at once).

A fetus does none of these things, whether it's an animal one or a human.

bbc.com/earth/story/20170110-despite-what-you-might-think-chickens-are-not-stupid
dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2344198/Chickens-smarter-human-toddlers-Studies-suggest-animals-master-numeracy-basic-engineering.html
scientificamerican.com/article/the-startling-intelligence-of-the-common-chicken1/
youtube.com/watch?v=25RcDO2RdZQ
Many scientists whose job it is to study animals largely disagree. While the animals aren't anywhere near as intelligent as a dog or pig, the animals display basic intelligence and survival mechanisms. Some studies on farm animal intelligence can be traced back to vegans with an agenda, but plenty of them are peer-reviewed by people who eat meat and are simply recording what they see.
Unless you're the slightest bit educated on the subject (using proper capitalization, and calling calves 'calves' would be a good start) you don't really have much business saying something is 'DEFINITELY' what you want to believe.

yes I have lived on a small farm with about 20 cattle. none of this proves a consciousness
Claiming a fetus is conscious is equally absurd, agreed.
none of this proves it either. Computers are better than toddlers at math, what is the point they're trying to make? And if using capitalization is some necessity to be taken seriously by you, too bad, I'm not going to proofread my posts on a hungarian juggling forum.

You clearly weren't paying much attention (or didn't want to pay attention), then. And 20 cattle is a hobby-farm at best.

And again - scientists, whose job it is to record what they see, have noted a bunch of complexities about animals and have recorded them. It might make you uncomfortable and hurt your feelings, but it's what they do. And I'm afraid I don't quite understand this obsession you have with computers being able to have mathematics encoded into them somehow debunking toddler/animal intelligence, either.

>And 20 cattle is a hobby-farm at best.
it was a hobby farm, what exactly does that matter?
Computers are a good analogy, because we can encode all these things in them, but no one reasonable would claim that this would then qualify them as conscious.

Explaining the difference between a computer and a living being, and how the achievements and possibilities of one do not impact or invalidate the other is not something I or anyone else should have to do on a board about cooking.

Your 'logic' is essentially you writing down a bunch of words on a piece of paper, and then declaring that the piece of paper is more intelligent than a parrot, which can only lean a few words. While loudly disregarding ornithologists whose job it is to study birds that might disagree with you.

Why does Veeky Forums think its okay to eat Reigndeer? Don't you know Santa needs them to deliver us presents?

>it just means you have senses
no it doesn't you utter moron

yes it does. that's the difference between sapience and sentience, a lot of people just use sentient wrong

Yes it does. They even have the same etymology, retard. They both come from the Latin word "sentire," which means "feel."

>Reigndeer

I'm the one arguing with that retard but he's right on that account, 'sentient' means 'able to perceive or feel things.'

It's commonly misused to mean 'sapient', which basically means human-like intelligence.

No you fucking moron neither sentience nor sapience mean 'to have senses'

Sentience means to be able to experience, to have a consciousness. Sapience means to be able to think and reason.

Sentience is notoriously hard to describe, and impossible to test in anyone but yourself. You can be assured of your own sentience, but you can't REALLY know if everyone around you is anymore sentient than a computer, you don't know if they truly experience things, if there is a true perception therein.

Most animals, or at least more complex and developed animals, are generally considered to be sentient, but not sapient. Their behavior certainly indicates that they are, and there's not really reason to think that they aren't.

perceive =/= feel. A thermometer has senses (well, one sense), a thermometer can 'feel' the temperature, but it can't 'perceive' the temperature. You need a mind and consciousness to be able to perceive, you don't need a consciousness to feel.

...

a thermometer IS sentient

This is using a stretch of the world feel, and an issue of semantics. I've objected to this before as it leads to confusion. But yes, feel CAN be used as a synonym for perceive, but carries broader connotation than perceive, whereas 'perceive' illustrates the concept more clearly.

A thermometer does not experience qualia.

Man, I really fucking hope thermometers don't have feelings because I've spent the last decade shoving them inside people's butts.
If there's a thermometer uprising my sort will be first against the wall.

Neither do chicken. That's the point, an animal can be perfectly capable of having a "reaction" without it implying a self-aware consciousness.

>Neither do chicken.
What reason do you have to believe that?

what reason do I have to believe they do?

>without it implying a self-aware consciousness.
You don't have to be self-aware to be conscious.

I would argue consciousness is defined by self-awareness. Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
Fine, fair enough, if this is where we are miscommunicating, I don't think someone without self-awareness experiences pain the same way.

It's a simple case of him not wanting to believe it - look at how he responded to multiple links to people whose job it is to study this.

I wouldn't bother arguing beyond this point, nothing you say would change his mind. It's not about the facts or the likelihood, and never was.

I don't deny the result of the studies, I deny the implications.

You're just proving what I already said - you aren't educated on the subject in the least, but it isn't going to stop you from declaring that what you want to believe is the objective truth in the face of people infinitely more educated than you forming a hypothesis that makes you uncomfortable.

I love veal its good

While you know that you yourself are conscious and experience qualia, you can't ever truly know that anyone else is, it's impossible, there's no way to test it. However, based on the fact that some people before you have described consciousness, and through people's behavior being consistent with being conscious, you can assume that you are not the only conscious being in the universe, that other people are conscious.

If other humans are conscious, why wouldn't other animals? Consciousness isn't directly tied to intelligence, children are conscious just like adults, as are mentally handicapped with a few possible rare exceptions. A chicken is nothing more than a distant relative, why do you believe consciousness developed with humans and not complex life? We have little to no idea what causes sentience, it's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness for a reason, but we assume it has something to do with us having functioning brains and minds. If that is the case, if a consciousness is a by-product of our brains operating, transmitting information and computing, then chickens would be conscious. They have brains, they make decisions, they perceive stimuli, seek new information, have a sense of self-preservation, have wants, have likes and dislikes, have personalities and think, all just on a level lower than us.

If differences in human intelligence show no difference in consciousness, what makes you believe that difference happens at the level of a chicken? How about primates, like chimpanzees or gorillas? Or other smart animals like dolphins or crows? How about Alex the Parrot, who was unquestionably highly self-aware, and one of the smartest non-human animals to ever be observed. It could easily be argued that he was even sapient. Or then how about Octopuses? They're highly intelligent, but their brains are built fundamentally very differently to ours.

I read that as 'chimpanzees or giraffes' for a second there and did a double-take. I thought I'd really fucked up my understanding of the evolutionary tree somewhere.

>I would argue consciousness is defined by self-awareness.
I mean, I guess, argue that if you want, but pretty much all study in philosophy of mind disagrees. This is all more or less impossible to really prove anyways.

But even moving beyond whether or not consciousness and self-awareness are the same thing or not, throwing out consciousness entirely, the impossible to prove bastard that it is, a lot of animals definitely ARE self-aware, and recent tests have been indicating that the number of self-aware animals are far greater than we previously understood. The mirror test has been the go-to test, and a lot of animals failed it, but recent studies have shown a great many failures stem from us testing a lot of non-visually oriented animals with an exclusively visual test. Other primates and birds do well because they're very visually oriented animals, where as animals like dogs routinely fail because they don't perceive the world in a visual manor, and dogs have been passing our smell-based attempts at replicating the mirror test, indicating promising signs for self-awareness in animals.