Philosophical Vegan Forum

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 15, 2023 11:13 am How does it suggest that? If anything, it suggests the opposite of that.

how so old bean

Red wrote: ↑Tue Aug 15, 2023 11:18 am

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 15, 2023 11:13 am How does it suggest that? If anything, it suggests the opposite of that.

how so old bean

If many people on the Internet are asking "How can I get my rabbit to like me?" and "My rabbit doesn't like me at all.", that strongly suggests rabbits can't love humans, doesn't it?

teo123 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 15, 2023 12:16 pm If many people on the Internet are asking "How can I get my rabbit to like me?" and "My rabbit doesn't like me at all.", that strongly suggests rabbits can't love humans, doesn't it?

How?

Also if you follow the links on the Subreddit's FAQ it gives details on how to bond more with your rabbit, so...

Why am I even arguing this with you? I said I wouldn't, yet here we are. You're really good at that Teo, you should be proud that you're able to say so much dumb shit people can't help but respond. I will be willing to continue if you answer the question I asked earlier:

Forget the rabbits Teo, why do you feel as though you can't fell love, hm? It could be because of your alienating personality that you need to overcome. You should try going out and meeting people, since at this rate you're gonna become another incel online blaming the whole world for your problems.

Red wrote:you're gonna become another incel online blaming the whole world for your problems.

I don't think that what is happening to me in life is my responsibility. I don't think that my mother ending up in jail is my responsibility. Or that me getting a psychotic disorder preventing me from finishing the university on time is my responsibility. Maybe those things wouldn't happen to me had I made some decisions differently. But maybe they would anyway. It's hard to tell even in retrospect.
And I think the Croatian education system is partly responsible as to why I cannot get a job as a programmer after having studied programming for 11 years. Those programming competitions encourage people to study useless or even harmful things. They encourage people to superficially know as many algorithms and data structures as possible, which is useless and sometimes even harmful. When programming my AEC-to-WebAssembly compiler, I tried to use the LCS algorithm, which I learned about preparing for those competitions, to provide suggestions for misspelled variable names. Which, of course, didn't give me good results, as I should have used the Levenshtein Distance algorithm. But those programming competitions encourage people to study algorithms superficially, so I didn't study LCS enough to realize it is not appropriate for solving that problem. Programming competitions also encourage writing short variable names and other things that help you to write a small program solving the task quickly, but which are horrible for writing large programs. Before being able to successfully write large programs, you need to unlearn all those skills you've learned at programming competitions. And programmers should study less data structures and algorithms, and more frameworks and libraries. But programming competitions encourage people to study data structures and algorithms and to neglect frameworks and libraries.

teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 01, 2019 1:40 pm I don't really understand how owning cats can be considered vegan. Veganism is based on the idea that owning animals, even if we think consequences will be good, is wrong, right?

Interesting topic!

In the Turkish documentary film Kedi, that shows the life of cats in the city Istanbul, it is seen that cats are a natural part of the life in the city and cats in that city choose their own owner. Cats are respected and are welcomed to join the human in their lives at their chosen moment in time, and the cats are left free to leave again whenever they want. That shows that domestication of cats might not be a wholly human thing and cats themselves play a role in their relationship with the human as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKq7UqplcL8
https://www.kedifilm.com/ (you can find the movie for free via Google, e.g. here)

The concept 'ownership' is sometimes related to the securing of care for an animal within the context of human society while the animal is otherwise given a healthy life.

I personally believe that some animals might be very interested in human love (meaningful experience) and would be capable of giving up their basic interests for it. Like a dog who would fight a Grizzly bear to defend his owner, but also in the wild such things are possible based solely on meaningful relations between animals and humans.

A bond between an animal and a human might be something precious. The concept 'ownership' might in some cases be a means to facilitate a human-animal relation within human society.

teo123 wrote: ↑Mon Aug 14, 2023 10:30 am

Red wrote: ↑Tue Aug 01, 2023 8:12 am can bond with their owners...

I don't accept that some non-human animal can feel love...

What is love? Have you ever felt it? I haven't, and I have a hard time imagining that some non-human animal can feel such a complicated emotion. Especially that a stupid prey animal such as a rabbit can somehow love its natural predator that a human being is.

In my opinion, even plants are capable of love and even the love of a human.

Philosopher Monica Gagliano, an Italian plant researcher, has reported having experiences of spiritually communicating with plants. She has written a memoir titled "Thus Spoke the Plant," (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche) in which she recounts a series of prophetic dreams and experiential perception of the spirit of plants. In her memoir, she describes experiences of "talking" with plants.

Can plants talk with humans?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/26/styl ... -talk.html

It is seen that humans can bond with both Hyenas and Grizzly bears. A man joined a pack of wild Hyenas and lived with them as part of the pack, as shown in the following video. The Hyenas show love to the man the same as they do to other Hyenas. Why would the Hyenas accept the human in their pack? It cannot be just about food for them.

Man and Hyenas at 42:54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYJAJWCS8eM

The story of Grizzly man is similar although it ended fatally for him. He would sing to the Grizzly bears, socialize with them, roll around on the ground with their cubs and touch the mother in the wild. It went OK from him and his friends for 13 years. The attack was at night in the dark while he was sleeping in his tent, which was at the time that the bears just exited their hibernation period, which he was specifically warned against since the bears will then urgently seek food.

Timothy Treadwell touched the bears he lived with in Alaska. He would play with bear cubs while the mother watched. He would also touch the adult bears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grizzly_Man

I would argue that the potential of domestication, of an animal becoming tame, might be an indication that there is an interest for animals to bond with humans that goes beyond their food interest. That interest would be about love.

Theory to explain it

My view is that the binding force in nature (the binding problem in neuro-philosophy) is a priori to the world (creates the world) and that in the friendship between an animal and a human, the animal and the human would become one like two biological cells would become one, to serve a purpose that lays beyond the animal and the human combined.

Most interestingly is that the source of that 'more' is a priori to the world, thus does not originate from either one of its parts, being either the human or the animal. In a sense, a higher consciousness would take over between the human and the animal.

Some quotes that confirm the idea:

"The whole is not only more than the sum of its parts, but is also something different from the sum of its parts." - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." - Aristotle

"The whole is not a mere heap, but a system of parts whose interactions produce a new phenomenon." - Thomas Aquinas

"The whole is not comprehended by the sum of its parts." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In business science it is a well-established concept that a team is more than the sum of its parts.

The cooperation between biological cells lays at the root of human conscious experience so it is plainly obvious from a subjective experiential sense, that those tiny cells combined are capable of a whole lot 'more'.

What could explain 'more than the sum of two conscious beings'?

In my view: a higher consciousness, and the origin of that higher consciousness is necessarily a priori to the world, which implies that it is not wholly causal and not contained in either the human or the animal. And that 'more' is what love would be about.

Evidence

Astronauts have been reporting an extreme transcendental experience of 'interconnected euphoria' that profoundly changes their lives and makes them want to protect nature.

The astronauts have been trying to make a case for Planetary Awareness (planet spirit or planet consciousness) for decades, without success, but nonetheless is their decades long perseverance and persistent attempt evidence that the idea of 'more' is applicable when it concerns the friendship between an animal and a human.

(2022) The Case for Planetary Awareness
First we should understand why we don't already know of this profound experience, despite decades of astronaut reports.

Widely known in the space community as the Overview Effect, it is little known by the general public and poorly understood even by many space advocates. Phrases like "strange dreamlike experience", "reality was like a hallucination", and feeling like they had "come back from the future", occur time and again. Finally, many astronauts have emphasized that space images do not come close to the direct experience, and may even give us a false impression of the real nature of the Earth and space. "It is virtually impossible to describe... You can take people to see [IMAX's] The Dream Is Alive, but spectacular as it is, it's not the same as being there." - Astronaut and Senator Jake Garn.
http://overview-effect.earth

(2022) The Overview Institute
There's more to the pale blue dot than we know.
http://overviewinstitute.org

Within that 'more' beyond the animal and human combined, the animal and human can become equal as parts of a higher consciousness.

It is even possible with a plant.

I would say rescuing a cat, or even cats, is compatible with being vegan, but not purchasing a cat that would be from breeders. Even so, feeding it, or letting it out to catch things, with such being the way ecosystems to which they are not in natural are being devastated, even now, is not consistent practice with veganism. Instead of accepting that cats can only be fed meat from animals because they need it, with being vegan there is obligation to find out if tuere are fortified alternatives for cat food that would really be healthy for them. Look up healthy vegan cats, there is information for it.

FredVegrox wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2024 10:07 amInstead of accepting that cats can only be fed meat from animals because they need it, with being vegan there is obligation to find out if tuere are fortified alternatives for cat food that would really be healthy for them. Look up healthy vegan cats, there is information for it.

I agree, but the trouble is that it seems to depend a lot on the individual cat. There's a lot of variability in tolerance of different diets, and some cats are just so picky they won't eat, and unlike us and most animals a few days of not eating for a cat can result in death for many cats because their bodies are just absurd and they'll experience liver failure because their bodies can't metabolize their own fat stores properly.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Lip ... _251234668

brimstoneSalad wrote: ↑Fri Aug 09, 2024 12:45 pm

FredVegrox wrote: ↑Thu Aug 08, 2024 10:07 amInstead of accepting that cats can only be fed meat from animals because they need it, with being vegan there is obligation to find out if tuere are fortified alternatives for cat food that would really be healthy for them. Look up healthy vegan cats, there is information for it.

I agree, but the trouble is that it seems to depend a lot on the individual cat. There's a lot of variability in tolerance of different diets, and some cats are just so picky they won't eat, and unlike us and most animals a few days of not eating for a cat can result in death for many cats because their bodies are just absurd and they'll experience liver failure because their bodies can't metabolize their own fat stores properly.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Lip ... _251234668

Even with that being the case, which is an issue to be wary of, cats may take to the alternatives and if those are good for the nutrients they need, it meets obligation there is with being vegan to find what alternatives there are that the cat one is caring for would eat, and thrive with. There are indeed such alternatives, that is the point. If there is the worst case that a cat will only eat meat that is animal flesh, it is better still if lab meat is available, use of that diminishes (not eliminates) contribution to animal suffering and animal slaughtering.

We don't want to ruin environments with caring for one animal or any more, just as it should not contribute to what is at the expense of other living animals. Caring by adopting a homeless animal like a cat is good still but there are obligations with that in any case, seeing how to feed them without contributing to more harm is one, and just one, of those.