Parrots using currency

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❝ The birds’ generosity has animal scientists intrigued. It’s one thing to pass a partner a piece of grub; it’s another to give them the currency to purchase it. Such acts of charity have long been thought to be restricted to primates like humans, orangutans and bonobos. Few, if any, other mammals were thought capable of it, let alone a creature with a bird brain.

But big-brained African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) may be the first avian known to engage in this helpful behavior, Brucks’ team reports today in the journal Current Biology. Parrots, it seems, don’t just have the ability to comprehend metal rings as currency for food, but they also “understand the consequences their actions can have on another individual,” says Christina Riehl, an expert in bird behavior at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s pretty sophisticated reasoning.” ❞
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/parrots-share-currency-help-their-pals-purchase-food-180973917/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR2dcTMcb4AhTWYMUjU6N8ZiAAZ5Zt-g1uTgF5Z2JXkdnehTXf913RNbxI8

The HHHHHMM (H5M2) Quality of Life Scale

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“The HHHHHMM (H5M2) Quality of Life Scale provides guidelines for the assessment of a pet so that pet owners can maintain a rewarding relationship that nurtures the human–animal bond, while being confident that the pet is well enough to justify prolonging life. This Quality of Life Scale will relieve guilt feelings and engender the support of the veterinary team to actively help in the care and decision making for Pawspice patients. I feel that it is ethical to prolong a life worth living. On the other hand, I feel that it is not ethical to prolong death for our patients.”

A biomaterial that arrange itself

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“Using DASH, the Cornell engineers created a biomaterial that can autonomously emerge from its nanoscale building blocks and arrange itself – first into polymers and eventually mesoscale shapes. Starting from a 55-nucleotide base seed sequence, the DNA molecules were multiplied hundreds of thousands times, creating chains of repeating DNA a few millimeters in size. The reaction solution was then injected in a microfluidic device that provided a liquid flow of energy and the necessary building blocks for biosynthesis.”

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What are the different types of elements that constitute reality in its most essential aspect?

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“If we want to develop a sentience simulation project, that admits as many hypotheses and theories about sentience as possible, we will find that obviously in such an environment it will not be enough to represent the sentience alone, but surely we will have to include other types of substances that may be related to it. To give a very simple example, if we consider that sentience emerges from a wet biological animal material brain, and we want to represent a living frog that feels in our system, the simulation environment must support the representation, in one way or another, of at least two types of objects or concepts: material objects (such as the frog’s brain or whole body and the physical environment where it lives) and sentient objects (such as the frog’s experiences).

Because of this, when simulating sentience, elements that are not purely sentience should generally also be simulated; and if we want to have an environment that admits all possible hypotheses and theories about sentience, then to be very sure of leaving nothing out, it would be very interesting to be able to include as types of simulation objects all kinds of possible components of reality according to all kinds of paradigms, theories and beliefs.”

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God or consciousness?

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A quote from Max Planck:

“All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1328821-all-matter-originates-and-exists-only-by-virtue-of-a

What is Max Planck talking about? Consciousness? Sentience? Panpsychism? God?

Opportunities for an astronomical reduction of suffering

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This is a list of situations, projects or initiatives in which there could be an “astronomical” (huge) reduction in the amount of suffering compared to what currently exists or is expected. Many of these situations (but not necessarily all of them) involve a high risk in the sense that they are difficult projects whose probability of success is very low. In some cases, this may happen because they are projects that assume as certain some hypotheses for which there is little evidence, so we can consider them unlikely, although not impossible.

I insist that the only criterion to appear on this list is that the project or idea supposes an astronomical reduction of the suffering that we believe exists or will exist. The list can include both remote possibilities and speculative approaches as well as conventional and highly probable scenarios.

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The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment

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Privileged beings (students) of the privileged species (human) at privileged time (XXI c.) and privileged space (Germany) ranked only 30% of the recent experiences as “worth living”.

The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment, by Thomas Metzinger:

“At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, we began a first series of small pilot studies with a group of advanced philosophy students. We chose a signal-contingent, externally cued form of experience sampling. One tech-savvy student programmed an SMS server in such a way that, for seven days, it sent ten signals a day at random points in time to the participants, whose cell phones would then briefly vibrate. The participants’ task was to decide whether the last moment before the conscious experience of the vibration was a moment they would take with them into life after death. For many, the result was surprising: the number of positive conscious moments per week varied between 0 and 36, with an average of 11.8 or almost 31 per cent of the phenomenological samples, while at 69 per cent a little more than two thirds of the moments were spontaneously ranked as not worth reliving. If you are cued externally, it seems, less than a third of such experiential samples would have a chance of entering your very own “eternal playlist”.
[…]
in a second study we dropped the afterlife assumption and the “eternity condition”, replacing them with the following question: “Would you like to relive the very last conscious moment in this life?” Interestingly, under this condition only a little over 28 per cent of life moments were ranked as positive, while just below 72 per cent were considered not worth reliving

Source:
https://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_Suffering_2017.pdf

The Sad Truth About Happiness Scales: Empirical Results

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“We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one’s beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.”

Source: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24853

Are suffering and enjoyment measurable?

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In Simon Knutsson‘s words:

That happiness and suffering are measurable, in principle, to the extent that is required to talk about the net balance among several individuals is highly controversial and widely rejected. That is, it is controversial that they are (in principle) measurable to the required degree in an objective, non-arbitrary, scientific way that does not involve value judgements on the part of the person doing the measurement. One could say “I assign number –10 to Ann’s suffering and +5 to Ben’s happiness, and then I add them together. These numbers are intertwined with my values, and others might assign different numbers depending on their values.” Although that might be the best we can do, it does not count as measurement in the objective sense that we are concerned with […].

Economist Yew-Kwang Ng says that the following statement is representative of the typical economics textbook view: “Today, no one really believes that we can actually measure utils.” He continues that the probably most widely used textbook says that “economists today generally reject the notion of a cardinal, measurable, utility.” For the kinds of claims discussed above, we would need utilities to be measurable on a strong kind of interpersonal cardinal scale (an interpersonally additive ratio scale), which is widely rejected by economists.
Ng adds that this skepticism about measurability is also “very common” among “sociologists and psychologists who study happiness.”

Some history is interesting here. The early utilitarians of the 19th century, such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, did not seem worried by interpersonal comparisons of utility. But as Bergström points out, “in the 20th century, things have changed a great deal. Now the dominant view — at least among economists — seems to be that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible or necessarily subjective and unscientific.”

Of course, there is not complete consensus on the matter; some believe that happiness and suffering (or utility) can be measured to the extent required to talk about the net balance or amounts among several individuals. Philosophers generally seem to be somewhat more optimistic than economists.

Source: https://foundational-research.org/measuring-happiness-and-suffering/

A compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”

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“If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.” —Professor Daniel Gilbert. Department of Psychology, Harvard University

“Many millions of people in the contemporary world have a compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”. They are always unhappy and discontented. They endure chronic pain and/or depression. Some victims of severe anhedonia can’t even imagine what it’s like to be happy. A minor blessing is that not all of their days are quite as terrible as others. So in one sense, their emotional compass can point North as well as South: a motivational system of sorts still functions. But the whole of their lives is spent in an Antarctic wasteland of misery and despair.

At the other extreme, a small minority of people are blessed with a compass that seems perpetually “stuck on North”. In pathological cases, they may be manic. But sometimes they are in varying degrees just “hyperthymic” i.e. the hedonic set-point around which their lives oscillate is unusually high compared to the Darwinian norm. Hyperthymic well-being is chronic; yet it’s not uniform. Thus some days of hyperthymic life are even more wonderful than others; pursuing their favourite activities makes hyperthymics even happier than otherwise. So again, the hyperthymic emotional compass is bidirectional: its scale is different, but it works. The relevant contrast here lies in the way hyperthymics are animated by information-signalling gradients of well-being, whereas dysthymics, depressives and victims of chronic pain spend their lives struggling to minimise ill-being. Either way, affective gradients rule.” —David Pearce

Source: https://www.gradients.com/