Intelligence, Consciousness and Soul, oh my; Sy Montgomery's "The Soul of an Octopus"

[The Grand Nudger]

Pile up all of our compassion and reluctance to kill..which is already here and present within us to a greater degree than anything else we're capable of assessing...and we're still knee deep in rivers of blood in which we must drink or die. We didn't start being who we are once we came to dominate, that's -how- we came to dominate, and it's how we maintain our existence (nevermind our dominance). We didn't come up, then slash down the rainforest...we've been doing that, that was how we pulled ourselves up and kept ourselves from starving, insomuch as we could, and it still is, insomuch as we do.....while we wait for utopia to arrive, I guess. There is no place or thing on earth that could sustain us without exploitation. There is no such thing as human civilization and life without cost.

No free lunch. Heterotrophism combined with a hefty nutrient and natural resource requirement means that human beings can only afford to be -so- nice before the music stops. I think it's misguided to suggest that we should overcome hard limitations which we had no part in nor are we capable of altering..... or in failing to do that be deemed lacking....and ofc it seems like a moot point to begin with, because despite those hard limitations we -are- engaging in activities where we accept some cost on ourselves for the benefit of other species. We very literally decide that we can soak up a little death and misery ourselves if it helps the pacific tern (or whatever) plug along for a few more generations before the inevitability of extinction spreads it's "love" all over the species. We do this in more mundane, unappreciated ways with livestock all day long. Obviously keeping our food in fetid enclosures expending as little effort and resource as possible, nut to butt, is an effective way to exploit them, but we pass laws against this and lay costs on the producers which we are all too happy to pay ourselves at the checkout line. Compassion is a multi-billion dollar industry when it comes to food. All of those extra dollars, howevever, are precisely why that food never reaches the starving masses.

Set all of that aside, though, consciousness and neurological substrates aren't enough to stop me from killing another human being, it's sure as hell not going to make me blink in the case of an octopus.

(we "learned" cooperative exploitation, in your description above. We didn't learn not to kos each other -we still do that-...we simply learned that two people can kos a hell of alot more shit than one person can. It doesn't sound all that noble when it's referred to that way though, does it? lol).