NineBerry wrote:Uh. What is so special about "living things". In a few decades, hopefully, we will have real artificial intelligence. Killing an instance of such a system will then hopefully be considered unethical, even though it is not "a living thing".

Bacteria are "living things", too. I am sure you don't feel any scruples about brushing your teeth, though.

If it preys on me or parasitizes me or feeds on me, then killing it is rational and reasonable.

I will leave paper nest wasps alone, even when they are where I could easily accidentally set them off, v v v seldom do I get stung. They are useful, though. I can't for the life of me see how an insect can 'feel' pain, it is just way too low a level of processing. I too will feel hesitant about killing even an ant, they too are useful and seldom bother, accidental killings will leave a pang, but is that sensible, or just typical human response, anthropomorphizing? An ant can be argued more a cell than an individual organism. The bacteria comment is apropos, where do you draw the line? Surely there is some level of complexity we can all agree deserves respect as a 'feeling' critter?

NineBerry wrote:Who gives me the right to pick a flower from a public field?

For what it's worth, I would feel guilty picking flowers that aren't threatening me.

I've seen a few scary looking tulips.

Gallstones wrote:

I'm probably a little OC too because I try not to step on ants when they are on the sidewalk. I rescue earthworms from being on the sidewalk by putting them back on the grass. When I lived in So Cal, I used to rescue as many snails as I could after the rain. Pitiful, I know.

I do that too, Gallstones, i.e. move both slugs and earthworms from the pavement onto the grass. I also 'escort' spiders, flies, wasps and bees out of my flat. Of course I don't have a phobia about spiders, so that makes a big difference I should think.

There is only one time I really went on an insect killing spree and that was when my flat got infested with moths and moth larvae.

Warren Dew wrote:

NineBerry wrote:Who gives me the right to pick a flower from a public field?

For what it's worth, I would feel guilty picking flowers that aren't threatening me.

That was so cute.

crank wrote:

Ironclad wrote:I thought the spider disgust was a primordial survival thingumyboby.. what's the word.? Same for snakes.
No?

No, small children do not have the fear, but it seems to have a prewired component making it easy to trigger. I may be full of shit on this, but read something to this effect a few years ago, couldn't say where, but it was a reliable source. Maybe like a partial Baldwin effect or something???

I used to just hate spiders, gave me the creeps, not really afraid of them. As I got to learn how wonderful and useful they were, that feeling went away, I love spiders now and never kill them purposefully. Flies and mosquitoes--no mercy, why care? Scorpions I will hunt and kill with glee. The worst of the bugs, like Jehovah's Witnesses, I just shoo them away.

Correct. You're probably thinking of Martin Seligman's concept of "preparedness" (which would be a specific subset of the Baldwin effect, as all learning technically is):

In psychology, preparedness is a concept developed[1] to explain why certain associations are learned more readily than others. For example, phobias related to survival, such as snakes, spiders, and heights, are much more common and much easier to induce in the laboratory than other kinds of fears. According to Seligman, this is result of our evolutionary history. The theory states that organisms which learned to fear environmental threats faster had a survival and reproductive advantage. Consequently, the innate predisposition to fear these threats became an adaptive human trait (Ohman & Mineka, 2001).

The concept of preparedness has also been used to explain why taste aversions are learned so quickly and efficiently compared to other kinds of classical conditioning.

There are issues with his idea, so I wouldn't take it as a 'fact of the world' or anything, but in this context it is correct enough.

(And sorry for my brief reply in the hip hop thread where I just linked to wikipedia without any other comments. It was getting late so it was just a lazy copy and paste job, but looking back on it earlier I realised it seemed like a rather rude response. So sorry about that )

Gallstones wrote:If it preys on me or parasitizes me or feeds on me, then killing it is rational and reasonable.

That about sums my feelings on insect killing (or bacterocide or whatever) from me too. Of course houseflies and such that might infect me with something are also on my hitlist.

That said, I occasionally kill insects (wasps mostly, maybe a bee or a bumblebee once in a great while) that might harm me or my dogs because taking them outside is too complex compared to just taking them out. I don't feel very good about doing it tho.

As disgusting as most, if not all, of them are, insects have their place in nature, the food-chain, the cycle and balance of life. They have their use, unlike other beings, who I, personally, often refer to as "insect"...with respect to actual ones, who as I've said, very much have their use.

Wiðercora wrote:If a wasp or bee landed on me I'd be too terrified to move, let alone kill the stripey bastard.

I once fished a drowning wasp out of a fountain. Put it on the edge of the fountain to dry. However it seemed really bothered by something so I took a closer look. One of it's antennae had got twisted round backwards and it was trying desperately to fix it. I found a very small twig and had a go and managed to click it into the right position and few seconds later the wasp flew off.

Of course now my eyesight is such that I wouldn't be able to do that, but that little bit of insect rescue gave me enormous satisfaction.

Nora_Leonard wrote:

Wiðercora wrote:If a wasp or bee landed on me I'd be too terrified to move, let alone kill the stripey bastard.

I once fished a drowning wasp out of a fountain. Put it on the edge of the fountain to dry. However it seemed really bothered by something so I took a closer look. One of it's antennae had got twisted round backwards and it was trying desperately to fix it. I found a very small twig and had a go and managed to click it into the right position and few seconds later the wasp flew off.

Of course now my eyesight is such that I wouldn't be able to do that, but that little bit of insect rescue gave me enormous satisfaction.

Tree huggers....

I kill things that bite me. That'll learn them!

Otherwise I'll step over bugs I notice as I walk.

I don't think that using our human consciousness, intelligent and emotional quotient means we should tolerate whatever would annoy/spoil our life but taking the proper measures in each case instead.

And, of course, better we should get some precautions before we arrive to last/hard resolutions.

We may have no bigger right to exist than any other being, regardless how tiny may be, but life is not ideal from several aspects anyway, and it seems it cannot be ever like that.

So, I don't believe in sensitivity or, say, a "universal" altruism as long as it seems like a dead end, otherwise let's permit to microorganisms and even viruses to kill us instead.

Finally, the kind of measures to be taken, kind of beings/animals involved or "pests" to be under control/to be killed may play even a big role in our moral and practical considerations.

NineBerry wrote:Tree huggers....

As I said, it gave me enormous satisfaction.

One bit of help I didn't do which I was kicking myself for afterwards was when I was walking down a street and I saw a dog sitting forlornly in front of a gate leading to a house. He gave me this pleading look and tilted his head towards it, like "please could you open this gate." But for some bizarre reason I said "You're not allowed to go in there," and walked on.

Afterwards I realised that how did I know that wasn't his house?

I also was once sitting on the top of a bus and we came to this zebra crossing and there was a dog sitting patiently waiting for someone to stop but the cars just carried on regardless. I thought at the time the dog was smart enough to cross at the crossing, instead of dashing out into the road and causing an accident, but nobody was smart enough to stop for the dog.

I guess I have also been known to literally hug a tree.

I often hug trees. Not for the reason of hugging them, specifically, but because I need to do so in order to remain standing while traversing the loverly Finnish forest landscape. Typically while involved in an effort to keep up with an unruly pack of short-legged, hairy-arsed barely domesticated small predators.

I try my best to kill nothing... well except for that pesky algae in my aquarium; I kill them totally and enjoyed it enormously.

Mr.Samsa wrote:

crank wrote:

Ironclad wrote:I thought the spider disgust was a primordial survival thingumyboby.. what's the word.? Same for snakes.
No?

No, small children do not have the fear, but it seems to have a prewired component making it easy to trigger. I may be full of shit on this, but read something to this effect a few years ago, couldn't say where, but it was a reliable source. Maybe like a partial Baldwin effect or something???

I used to just hate spiders, gave me the creeps, not really afraid of them. As I got to learn how wonderful and useful they were, that feeling went away, I love spiders now and never kill them purposefully. Flies and mosquitoes--no mercy, why care? Scorpions I will hunt and kill with glee. The worst of the bugs, like Jehovah's Witnesses, I just shoo them away.

Correct. You're probably thinking of Martin Seligman's concept of "preparedness" (which would be a specific subset of the Baldwin effect, as all learning technically is):

In psychology, preparedness is a concept developed[1] to explain why certain associations are learned more readily than others. For example, phobias related to survival, such as snakes, spiders, and heights, are much more common and much easier to induce in the laboratory than other kinds of fears. According to Seligman, this is result of our evolutionary history. The theory states that organisms which learned to fear environmental threats faster had a survival and reproductive advantage. Consequently, the innate predisposition to fear these threats became an adaptive human trait (Ohman & Mineka, 2001).

The concept of preparedness has also been used to explain why taste aversions are learned so quickly and efficiently compared to other kinds of classical conditioning.

There are issues with his idea, so I wouldn't take it as a 'fact of the world' or anything, but in this context it is correct enough.

(And sorry for my brief reply in the hip hop thread where I just linked to wikipedia without any other comments. It was getting late so it was just a lazy copy and paste job, but looking back on it earlier I realised it seemed like a rather rude response. So sorry about that )

Thanks Mr Samsa, great response, thanks.

Question though please:
If I am remembering the Baldwin effect correctly, it is like in order to learn something you have to match some kind of pattern, then physically the brain is prewired with a pattern that is close to what is needed for learning X, so that through evolution, a given organism doesn't need to change as much to get to X than another that isn't prewired as closely. Did I mangle that badly? So, how is all learning a subset? So much of what at least humans learn is abstract, say, or even remembering images, how do you fit the prewiring to this? Because we are prewired with areas that are designed for that kind of learning, is it as general as that?

As to the wiki link, I don't even remember, couldn't have bothered me, sometimes it seems a bit much to copy and paste so much stuff when the link is more than good enough, keeps page clutter down.

I go out of my way not to kill anything, as far as humanly possible. Ahimsa is one of the better ideas that religion has come up with, and as far as I'm concerned can be adhered to without any of the associated woo. Like Albert Schweitzer, I still pick up worms off the pavement and put them on the soil whenever I see them. In fact, I did that just yesterday morning.

Nora_Leonard wrote:

Wiðercora wrote:If a wasp or bee landed on me I'd be too terrified to move, let alone kill the stripey bastard.

I once fished a drowning wasp out of a fountain. Put it on the edge of the fountain to dry. However it seemed really bothered by something so I took a closer look. One of it's antennae had got twisted round backwards and it was trying desperately to fix it. I found a very small twig and had a go and managed to click it into the right position and few seconds later the wasp flew off.

Of course now my eyesight is such that I wouldn't be able to do that, but that little bit of insect rescue gave me enormous satisfaction.

There is something in the struggling that really tears at the heartstrings, have often found myself absorbed in the quotidian dramas of the tiny beings you will always and everywhere see if you but look.