Can I just say, and I'm just being honest...

[Catholic_Lady]

Eh, it's not the first time I've seen someone try to use that as some sort of "gotcha!" against prolifers.

[Losty]

I would eat a fertilized chicken egg if it tasted good.

[Edwardo Piet]

I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?

I don't think science addresses consciousness much. Unless I'm missing something. Science talks about neurophysiology and brains but no one knows for sure where to draw the line between how much a brain needs to be developed before something is conscious. The question "How advanced does an animal's brain need to be neurophysiologically before we can consider it to actually have a consciousness rather than merely behave like it does from the perspective of people who anthropomorphize it?" I think such questions are more philosophical than scientific. Science can study brains and find real data about how advanced a brain is and what the brain is capable of, but whether that brain is actually advanced enough to have its own first person perspective seems more of a question for philosophy than science because despite the fact that scientists know that consciousness must reside somewhere in the brain, no scientist has ever been able to locate it. We only know consciousness from our own perspective, and we understandably rationally infer that others similar to us must have their own perspectives, but how far back down the evolutionary line you have to go back before you get to a creature that isn't conscious... no one really knows that. Anyway, that's my take on it.

[Edwardo Piet]

Sorry to break it to you, but the egg is basically the chicken's period, not her unhatched offspring. IOW, it hasn't been fertilized and no baby chick has been conceived.

Nice! Makes them tastier.

The idea of periods makes eggs tastier or the tastiness of eggs makes periods tastier?

---

To quote from this article:

http://www.academia.edu/411597/The_self_..._Explained

from a philosopher who explains my view here, for example:

It may seem obvious that vision, say, has survival value. But a creature could enjoy all the benefits of vision without having any actual, conscious visual experience. It could
have light-sensitive organs that enabled it to register information about its environment without having any visual experience (machines that do this can be easily constructed). The same can be said about pain. Experience of pain seems obviously useful because it motivates one to avoid sources of damage. But the tendency to avoid sources of damage could evolve without involving pain. Damage-recognition mechanisms could trigger damage-source-avoidance behaviour without there having to be any actual feeling of pain, or any other sort of experience. Perhaps some actual organisms on earth are like this.

[Joods]

Why do you think pain is a quality of being sentient? You and I are on different pages.

Well pain itself isn't but any experience requires sentience so the experience of actually feeling pain and it actually being painful, and not to just be a bodily reaction that looks like pain from the outside, requires sentience. Any pain that is actually painful to an organism requires sentience.

---

No... the discussion was about whether or not a CHICKEN can feel pain. Not a plant.

So why did you bring up plants? Lol.

You're intelligent. Go back and read. I'm not getting into a text war word salad with you.

---

I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?

Yes. You're missing the fact that some people don't like being told they could be wrong, let alone the fact that they are wrong. 

Personally, this entire discussion about whether or not chickens can feel anything, is just absurd. But I like how my example of breaking a chicken's wing to see if it would feel pain, went on completely ignored. Not by you, of course. 

Anyway, I'm moving on from this discussion. It's grown stale and I have a life to live.

[Catholic_Lady]

I would eat a fertilized chicken egg if it tasted good.

Same here. I generally don't like the idea that we eat animals because I feel sorry for them, but I'm too much of a foodie to be a vegetarian. Cooking and eating are one of my passions/hobbies. I try to buy organic because I figure they are treated better that way.

---

I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?

I don't think science addresses consciousness much. Unless I'm missing something. Science talks about neurophysiology and brains but no one knows for sure where to draw the line between how much a brain needs to be developed before something is conscious.  The question "How advanced does an animal's brain need to be neurophysiologically before we can consider it to actually have a consciousness rather than merely behave like it does from the perspective of people who anthropomorphize it?" I think such questions are more philosophical than scientific. Science can study brains and find real data about how advanced a brain is and what the brain is capable of, but whether that brain is actually advanced enough to have its own first person perspective seems more of a question for philosophy than science because despite the fact that scientists know that consciousness must reside somewhere in the brain, no scientist has ever been able to locate it. We only know consciousness from our own perspective, and we understandably rationally infer that others similar to us must have their own perspectives, but how far back down the evolutionary line you have to go back before you get to a creature that isn't conscious... no one really knows that. Anyway, that's my take on it.

Sentience isn't always an an on/off thing. It's on a sliding scale. We are more sentient than chickens, and chickens are more sentient than earth worms, who are more sentient than bacteria.

[robvalue]

I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?

Me neither, I have no idea how someone can think otherwise.

[Edwardo Piet]

It doesn't seem to me that you've spent much time around them if you aren't aware that birds exhibit behaviors consistent with feeling pain.

Pain is not a behavior. That's my exact point. You can react to stimuli and have all the bodily sensations of pain without having the consciousness to actually feel it.

Show me where I ever suggested any such thing, and you might have a point.

Well then what's your problem with my position if we hold the same position? The only real difference seems to be that you can't differtinate between "has the sentience required to actually feel pain" and "reacts the same way but without the sentience".

Again, not sure -- especially about fish, reptiles, and salamanders. I err on the side of assuming they might be. 

So how are you judging that fish and reptiles might be but birds are? And how is it absurd for me to put birds on par with reptiles?

Are they? Tell me more about what I think on this subject we've never previously discussed. 

They're arbitary enough that you aren't differentiating between the difference between an organism reacting to stimuli in a way that appears like they're in pain, and an organism actually having the sentience able to experience pain.

I agree that sentience must be tied to a certain degree of nervous development. I also think you draw the line incorrectly in the case of birds.

And I think you draw the line incorrectly in the case of birds. So where did the "Why on earth do you think that?" come from, and where did your comments about them behaving like they're in pain come from. A robot could be programmed to behave like they're in pain, just as natural selection does the same thing to organisms, behavior is not an indication of sentience. It's even possible to not behave like you're in pain but nevertheless experience it, of course. What's required is a brain complex enough to give rise to the sentience required to experience pain... regardless of what the behavior is like.

Sounds to me like someone is straining for a rhetorical point. I assume so, since that sentence has fuck all to do with thinking.

The point is that you're the one who isn't doing enough thinking. Hence why you haven't differentated between "feels like" and "behaves like it feels like" and you agree with me that fish and reptiles probably don't feel pain, but apparently it's absurd for me to think that birds don't either and you haven't done anything to justify your own position. And you don't have to. I haven't justified mine, but you are pretending like the fat birds behave a certain way is the same thing as what they actually feel and I am focusing on pointing out a distinction that you have failed to recognize.

First, my apologies. I didn't realize -- lowly pleb that I am -- that I was in the presence of nobility. Second, before you start in about how I'm an unthinking nutjob, you might want to learn the most basic fucking thing about domains.

Anyway, I'm glad you like animals -- even the bacterial 'kind'.

Sarcastic and irrelevant and yet still missing the actual point! 3 out of 3, bravo!

Again, to quote from this article again: https://www.academia.edu/411597/The_self..._Explained

It may seem obvious that vision, say, has survival value. But a creature could enjoy all the benefits of vision without having any actual, conscious visual experience. It could
have light-sensitive organs that enabled it to register information about its environment without having any visual experience (machines that do this can be easily constructed). The same can be said about pain. Experience of pain seems obviously useful because it motivates one to avoid sources of damage. But the tendency to avoid sources of damage could evolve without involving pain. Damage-recognition mechanisms could trigger damage-source-avoidance behaviour without there having to be any actual feeling of pain, or any other sort of experience. Perhaps some actual organisms on earth are like this.

^ Makes the exact distinction I'm taking about.

[Catholic_Lady]

Hammy, here's some more evidence that chickens are sentient:

When I was a kid I had a friend who lived kind of out in the country and they had a chicken coup. We'd think it was funny back then to get into the coup and chase them around. They'd freak out and squeal and run all over the place trying to get away from us. (cruel, I know. I'm not proud of it, trust me.)

Anyway, my friend's mom used to get pissed at us because doing that would stress out the chickens and they wouldn't lay as many eggs.

So, there you have it. Chickens get stressed out and it effects them enough to have a biological effect.

[Edwardo Piet]

I don’t understand why it’s up for debate. It seems like a commonly accepted scientific fact that poultry are sentient vertebrates....am I missing something?

Me neither, I have no idea how someone can think otherwise.

By thinking about it

---

Hammy, here's some more evidence that chickens are sentient:

When I was a kid I had a friend who lived kind of out in the country and they had a chicken coup. We'd think it was funny back then to get into the coup and chase them around. They'd freak out and squeal and run all over the place trying to get away from us. (cruel, I know. I'm not proud of it, trust me.)

Anyway, my friend's mom used to get pissed at us because doing that would stress out the chickens and they wouldn't lay as many eggs.

So, there you have it. Chickens get stressed out and it effects them enough to have a biological effect.

An insentient robot could do that.

I don't think any of that is evidence of sentience.

But their brains may be developed enough for sentience, which is why I think cruelty to birds is wrong: I could be wrong.

I certainly think that cruelty to mammals is worse though. Even if birds are sentient it's not going to be on the same level as mammals and mammals aren't going to be on the same level as primates.

---

To quote an even shorter part of Galen Strawson's article here:-- http://www.academia.edu/411597/The_self_..._Explained

--to anyone here that is still missing my point:

Experience of pain seems obviously useful because it motivates one to avoid sources of damage. But the tendency to avoid sources of damage could evolve without involving pain. Damage-recognition mechanisms could trigger damage-source-avoidance behaviour without there having to be any actual feeling of pain, or any other sort of experience. Perhaps some actual organisms on earth are like this.

---

I think they are. It's pretty evident. Why do you disagree, Hammy? What qualifies as sentience in your book?

By the way, I'd just like to re-quote this to thank you for posing the same sort of question to me that Crossless did, but in a much more civil and respectable manner than "Why on EARTH do you think that?" as if my position is absurd by default, when perhaps he actually needs to think things through a little more than he has.

So, thanks again