> Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
That's a very selective interpretation of what GP said, in fact I don't see how you even got to that conclusion.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
Category error started at "we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals".
Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals.
Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
A baby's brain is in super-sponge mode. They lack experience and control. Just because they don't yet speak doesn't mean they would not have something to say.
That a drunk person shouldn't make critical decisions and nor should a toddler is different than equating a baby's experience to someone asleep or in a coma.
My 2yo had memories from over a year prior. She would bring up things that surprised us. She later forgot that stuff, but she always had a larger window of experience to pull from than we expected.
Treating kids like coma patients ignores that experience and window of memories. You bet your ass you could traumatize / condition a baby to fear. You cant do that to someone in a coma. I doubt you can condition someone purely in their sleep too fwiw.
We should assume a rich experience until proven otherwise.
I 100% agree. My point is that approximately all humans will go through these phases/episodes, and spend some small fraction of their lives below "conscious/sentient/sapient" threshold of whatever metric one could propose - and we should not classify individuals by where they happen to be on that scale at the current point in time.
(In contrast, every bacteria and every amoeba will clock below threshold of any reasonable metric 100% of the time.)
Expand this to 1-minute before birth, 1-month, 4-months, keep going. Fetal brain development is mature enough by 6 weeks that reflex and movement start.
I think cross-platform Swift is likely to always be a niche like it was with Objective-C. Apple has too much control over the language and too much of a vested interest in retaining that control and modifying the language for its own needs. E.g., the stuff that got shoved in to support SwiftUI with none of the typical review processes until AFTER Apple had already built a shipping framework on it. It was around that time IBM announced it was abandoning server-side Swift as well.
The number of keywords in Swift is not an uncommon criticism . Even Chris Lattner is critical of the direction Swift went in after its inception. I'm not sure what you're referring to with "order matters," but SwiftUI's issues go far beyond the order of the modifiers used.
It's been over a decade since Swift came out, and cross-platform Swift remains extremely niche. I think that ship has sailed and that Swift is in the same situation Objective-C was, perceived as being an Apple language for Apple platforms, controlled by Apple.
I think a lot of the cross-platform interest from other companies diminished after features like result builders were quietly dropped in to support SwiftUI, with the usual community review process happening after it was already revealed at WWDC and shipping in Xcode (!). It's clear that Apple runs the show, and like Objective-C, it seems destined to be primarily an Apple language for Apple platforms and tools.
Check out MacPorts. It was the original package manager, still going strong, and it supports Macs going all the way back to the Leopard era. It also always used /opt instead of taking over /usr/bin like Homebrew.
I always found it much slower when compared to brew and sometimes would just hang and get stuck when installing something. Plus the lack of casks does make it less of a direct replacement.
Years, honestly. After all, Intel Macs just received a major macOS release from Apple only 12 months ago. MacPorts manages to support all the way back to Leopard!
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
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