Alex the parrot

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“Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. He could describe a key as a key no matter what its size or color, and could determine how the key was different from others. Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned “grey” after being told “grey” six times. This made him the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked a question—and an existential question at that. (Apes who have been trained to use sign-language have so far failed to ever ask a single question.) Alex’s ability to ask questions (and to answer to Pepperberg’s questions with his own questions) is documented in numerous articles and interviews.

Alex was said to have understood the turn-taking of communication and sometimes the syntax used in language. He called an apple a “banerry” (pronounced as rhyming with some pronunciations of “canary”), which a linguist friend of Pepperberg’s thought to be a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits he was more familiar with.

Alex could add, to a limited extent, correctly giving the number of similar objects on a tray. Pepperberg said that if he could not count, the data could be interpreted as his being able to estimate quickly and accurately the number of something, better than humans can. When he was tired of being tested, he would say “Wanna go back”, meaning he wanted to go back to his cage, and in general, he would request where he wanted to be taken by saying “Wanna go…”, protest if he was taken to a different place, and sit quietly when taken to his preferred spot. He was not trained to say where he wanted to go, but picked it up from being asked where he would like to be taken.

If the researcher displayed irritation, Alex tried to defuse it with the phrase, “I’m sorry.” If he said “Wanna banana”, but was offered a nut instead, he stared in silence, asked for the banana again, or took the nut and threw it at the researcher or otherwise displayed annoyance, before requesting the item again. When asked questions in the context of research testing, he gave the correct answer approximately 80 percent of the time.”

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The case of Dax Cowart

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“I was burned so severely and in so much pain that I did not want to live even in the early moments following the explosion. A man who heard my shouts for help came running down the road, I asked him for a gun. He said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Can’t you see I am a dead man? I am going to die anyway. I need to put myself out of this misery.’ In a very kind and compassionate caring way, he said, ‘I can’t do that.'”

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“We might give more weight to the judgments of those who have already been tortured, since their evaluations of the experiences are presumably more accurate. Unfortunately, here too people may forget the severity of their past suffering. This empathy gap often happens to me when I think back on my own past experiences of intense suffering, unable to conjure up feelings of how awful I felt at the time.” (Brian Tomasik)

“Sometimes people who suffer enormously do look back and judge that their suffering wasn’t worth it. Consider the case of Dax Cowart, who suffered so badly that he wished he had been killed, even in retrospect.”

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On Kidney stones, by Andres Gomez Emilsson

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I’ve never had a kidney stone. Thank God. According to Quora responses to the question “How painful are kidney stones?” they are about as painful as it gets. They’re the most painful thing a person can experience naturally, leaving aside torture and violent body-dismembering events. Many say they often get to be “10/10 pain”. That’s clearly an ethical catastrophe given that 10% of people experience them at least once during their lifetime.

Someone described the experience of having a kidney stone as “indistinguishable from being stabbed with a white-hot-glowing knife that’s twisted into your insides non-stop for hours”.

I wonder whether from a compassionate (utilitarian/consequentialist) point of view, it would *really* pay off to have as a priority “adopt a life-style that minimizes the chances of kidney stones”.

It’s likely that the reason why we do not hear about this is because (1) trauma often leads to suppressed memories, (2) people don’t like sharing their most vulnerable moments, and (3) memory is state-dependent (you cannot easily recall the pain of kidney stones for the same reason you can’t recall the qualia of your LSD trip: you’ve lost a tether/handle/trigger for it, as it is an alien state-space on a wholly different scale of intensity than everyday life). If so, maybe that’s to our detriment. Perhaps it’s worth taking these reports *very* seriously, lest we become victims ourselves.

—Andres Gomez Emilsson

The neuroscience of pain

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In 2013, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, took the logical next step by creating an algorithm that could recognize pain’s distinctive patterns; today, it can pick out brains in pain with more than ninety-five-per-cent accuracy. When the algorithm is asked to sort activation maps by apparent intensity, its ranking matches participants’ subjective pain ratings. By analyzing neural activity, it can tell not just whether someone is in pain but also how intense the experience is. “What’s remarkable is that basic pain signals seem to look pretty much the same across a wide variety of people,” Wager said. “But, within that, different brain systems are more, or less, significant, depending on the individual.”

Among the brain’s many pain-producing patterns, however, there is only one region that is consistently active at a high level: the dorsal posterior region of the insula. Using a new imaging technique, Tracey and one of her postdoctoral fellows, Andrew Segerdahl, recently discovered that the intensity of a prolonged painful experience corresponds precisely with variations in the blood flow to this particular area of the brain. In other words, activity in this area provides, at last, a biological benchmark for agony. Tracey described the insula, an elongated ridge nestled deep within the Sylvian fissure, with affection. “It’s just this lovely island of cortex hidden in the middle, deep in your brain,” she said. “And it’s got all these amazing different functions. When you say, ‘Actually, I feel a bit cold, I need to put a sweater on,’ what’s driving you to do that? Probably this bit.”

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Fish slaughtered (Newsletter from Open Philanthropy Project)

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There has historically been almost no effort made to reduce the inhumaneness of fish slaughter. The majority of fish are killed without stunning, by asphyxiation either in the air or on the ice. One study found that it takes common species of fish 55-250 minutes to die via asphyxiation. Fish that aren’t asphyxiated often die by being live gutted; the same study found that live gutting can take up to 25-65 minutes to kill the fish. Fish who are stunned are typically struck on the head (percussive stunning), stunned electrically, or stunned using gas. Pre-slaughter stunning is more common in wealthier nations (like the UK, Northern Europe, Chile, Canada, and Australia) and for high-value species (like salmon and trout).

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Dimensions of suicide: perceptions of lethality, time, and agony

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Two hundred ninety-one lay persons and 10 forensic pathologists rated the lethality, time, and agony for 28 methods of suicide for 4117 cases of completed suicide in Los Angeles County in the period 1988-1991. Whereas pathologists provided consistent ratings, lay persons demonstrated extreme variability and a tendency to inflate ratings of all three dimensions. Significant gender differences emerged, with females rating frequently used suicide methods more similarly to pathologists than the males did. Males who suicided used the most lethal and quickest methods whereas females selected methods varying in lethality, duration, and agony. African Americans were overrepresented in the use of the most lethal and quickest methods.

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