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Comment by blotter_paper | Hacker News Reader

I think you underestimate the human ability to ignore that which challenges our world views. I've known people who loved their dogs but still felt that their dogs didn't experience the world, only acting as if they did. Not just that the dogs lacked self-awareness or something, but that the dogs did not experience anything, because they don't have magical metaphysical souls like we obviously do. I've known these people, and discussed this topic with them at length. If somebody can have a loving relationship with a social animal and still feel this way, I have a hard time believing that spending three years with a significantly more intelligent non-human animal would necessarily change their mind.

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Well the obvious response is that those individuals are also soulless.

It could be argued that dogs have evolved to elicit more empathy from humans than would be objectively proportional to their cognitive capabilities.

I agree with this view of the effects of domestication, but that's a nuanced view of much dogs experience like we do; going from this to "dogs don't experience anything at all" (which I don't think you're doing, but correct me if I'm wrong) is more than a bit absurd, it actually undermines the whole sliding scale of experience that the original notion is based on.

Perhaps less about worldview and more about how some people just love their pets for the unqualified affection and nothing more. That is, not actually loving the pets, just loving _having_ a pet.

For these people, it’s just a shallow and transactional relationship masked with pretty words.

I really think it's the worldview, with the caveat that this particular worldview, "x doesn't feel," allows people to exploit x without remorse. If everybody suddenly believed that x experiences love and pain, factory farming would make a lot of them feel really bad. I say this as somebody who thinks x does feel, still hunts x, and still eats x even when it's factory farmed. If I felt like my individual actions affected the market place enough to prevent a single individual from species x from being factory farmed, I wouldn't buy x from the grocery store, but I would still hunt it in the wild. Having spent half a decade as a vegan before ever hunting x, I'm pretty certain of my convictions there. I've grappled with this conundrum, and come to terms with it. I know an avid hunter who also grapples with this conundrum, and hasn't come to terms with it; he doesn't eat factory farmed meat on principle, loves hunting animals, and gets simultaneously really happy and really sad when he successfully kills one. "I acquired this duck," he says with a smile, "but it had to die," he says with a frown.

Edit: I'll add this quote from Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

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