Do humans have cognitive bias towards living things based on

>>8907281
I would shoot a chimp to save a doggo so no

>>8907281
Humans look down on animals and see them as inferior because we cannot verify that animals have any sense of intelligence since they have solved nothing?

>>8907281
it has to do with more than how close you are imo
if rats could talk, we'd love them and feel closer to them than to chimps
a human doesn't REALLY have a species radar, but we do pattern recognition

animals are similar - remember the guy that joined the wolf pack? it's about what you do, how you act

if aliens came and they could learn a human language and talk to us and have a similar civilization/lifestyle we'd feel very much closer to them than to our cousins the chimps

>>8907281
You would have to know what their ancestral environment was like to assume any biases. Right?

So without that- their motivations are alien.

Human consciousness is weak to the point where we can't even measure what exactly it does. There's plenty of room for something better to look down on us.

File: animal_empathy.webm (3MB, 640x360px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8907281
We developed empathy and maternal protective instincts as part of our social networking functions, and those instincts, largely as a result of some fuziness in the way we identify ourselves, causes us to extend that protectiveness to other species - especially small, big eyed, domesticable ones, prone to making baby noises.

This is probably a rather impressive behavioral genetic accident, not likely to repeat elsewhere, even though it is common among most social mammals here. Even if the aliens do have cross-species empathy, they'll probably have an entirely different set of cues as to what appeals to them, and it'd be blind luck if we fell into said categories.

It's just as likely, perhaps more so, that an alien species may not see anything other than itself as even alive.

On the other hand, they could be a species from a world where symbiosis was the rule of thumb in evolution - perhaps they therefore have already merged and work together with several species from their own world through various complex systems, and humans might seem like another arm of the collective of life we all share. Granted, such a species might be rather horrified at what we're doing to other species on our own planet.

Aliens be alien though, so it's all pure speculation.

A more interesting (and somewhat more answerable) question might be, what would it take for us to recognize another species as sapient, be it alien or terrestrial? The aliens presented in fiction are pretty much invariably parables for various aspects of humans, and even a lot of the "scientific" theories surrounding alien civilizations assumes they have a whole lotta human traits and tendencies that, odds are, they probably wouldn't have. Everything we see on this planet is related to every other thing on it, so how do you deal with something even more alien to you than insects or fungi, and determine the value of its life - assuming you can even identify it as life?

>>8907354
I would not let a doggo hang out with a dolphin.

>>8907281

How could we NOT be biased in this way? Absolutely retarded question, apply yourself OP, 3/10

>>8907360
This guy gets it>>8907360

File: 1478246377586.png (431KB, 640x478px) Image search: [Google]

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>>8907285

I would shoot a nigger to save a dog, too.

>>8908166
>Google image search this, wondering if it's a Doctor Who episode or something...
>Google returns "Asura's Wrath - Rule #34"
What the fuck Google?

I think the search algorithms have finally achieved sapience and are now trolling.

We dont even know if our own brain is complex enough to understand how complex our brain is >>8907286