[Basic] Disadvantage of the week: Bestial

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

So it's not at all about concept of property? It's about concept of complex bartering systems and trade? That's not at all obvious from the write up.

Doesn't have to be complex. It's bartering at all. Usually bestial is simple. It's the difference between a wild animal and a severely mentally handicapped person. It only gets weird when you have a highly intelligent creature, able to communicate that is nonetheless bestial. My go to example for that is my mental image of the western dragon. It can talk. It collects stuff that it likes. It takes whatever it wants and attacks anyone who takes what it has. The only that will stop it from taking another beings stuff is awareness that the other being poses a credible threat. But if it actually likes another being it may give it stuff...particularly if it regards the other being as a potential mate. But you can't convince it to give up a thing it has claimed by offering it other stuff even if the other stuff is "worth" more or is more useful.

[Flyndaran]

Many animals will trade food, or nest materials for sex, so it can't be literally any bartering.
I suppose this is one of those humans are special, because we say so, and Bestial is whatever you mean when you say not "up to" human level of thinking. "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
I have loads of trouble with those even when it seems obvious to most others.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Many animals will trade food, or nest materials for sex, so it can't be literally any bartering.

I don't think it's "trade." The paradigm of "trade" is that I have x, and you have y, and I propose to you that if you give me y, I will give you x, and you give me y, and I then carry through and give you x, where x and y are things. That can be applied to sex, in the form, "A offers B money for sex, and B provides the sex, and A then hands over the money." But it's not the same as A bringing something edible to B, and B accepting the edible thing, and eating it, and then having a favorable emotional reaction that makes B receptive to A sexually. The acts may be similar but the mens rea is different; there's not the same multilevel intentionality.

Or as S.M. Stirling puts it, a human being may pretend to love you to get you to feed them, but an animal really does love you because you feed it.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Many animals will trade food, or nest materials for sex, so it can't be literally any bartering.
I suppose this is one of those humans are special, because we say so, and Bestial is whatever you mean when you say not "up to" human level of thinking. "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it."
I have loads of trouble with those even when it seems obvious to most others.

And, for that matter, corvids not only can not only trade tokens to human experimenters for rewards, but also claim and save those tokens in anticipation of a later opportunity to trade.

[Phil Masters]

I think that the concept of "property" here also links to the also-mentioned concept of "morality". A dog may consider this its bone, and growl at you for threatening to take it, but if it finds a bone lying around, it'll pick it up without any concern that any other dog might have a "claim" to it -- because the idea of anyone having an abstract claim to anything, rather than "I am holding this, grr", is beyond its conception. And if it drops the bone for some reason, it won't blame you if you pick it up (though it might try to snatch it back, because tasty bone). To that dog, there's no abstract claims or moral issues in play.

Which raises the question of whether a high-IQ Bestial creature is really possible, though I do like the Western Dragon idea. Because an IQ 10 dog, like an IQ 10 human psychopath, could surely be trained to comprehend the idea of claims and moral issues in theory, even if it could never really respect them. Though I guess, like a human raised by apes in the jungle, it might simply never have had that training.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Many animals will trade food, or nest materials for sex, so it can't be literally any bartering.

No. They won't. What they are doing is not trading. There's no agreement to exchange this commodity for that service. Giving someone a gift in the hopes they'll "like" or "do" you is not a trade.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

No. They won't. What they are doing is not trading. There's no agreement to exchange this commodity for that service. Giving someone a gift in the hopes they'll "like" or "do" you is not a trade.

What does happen is

• trying to distract someone with food to get what you want, e.g. sex. "While your front end is eating that, I'll just do my business in the back here, ok? ok." You see this in arachnids for instance. If the female isn't sufficiently distracted, she may just eat the mate instead.
• surrendering food as an act of submission to prevent violence or to distract an aggressor while you escape to a safer distance and begin a display of submission
• using sex to try to shut down aggression, which when it works temporarily short-circuits food-guarding behavior and lets the female steal some meat (baboon females are notorious for this)
• Bonobos of all sexes use sex on all sexes to shut down just about any hostility - they're not trading sex for anything, it's just hard to keep arguing when you're having sex.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

And, for that matter, corvids not only can not only trade tokens to human experimenters for rewards, but also claim and save those tokens in anticipation of a later opportunity to trade.

Corvids probably aren't Bestial.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Corvids probably aren't Bestial.

Maybe...it should be noted, after all, that Bestial is not a species trait in quite a lot of cases. It's on the Wild Animal metatrait but not the Domestic Animal metatrait.

So really it seems like it means not knowing how to fit into human society - even a pet or livestock.

EDIT: And thus while a wild corvid probably would be Bestial, a lab-dwelling corvid could easily have that trait partly or entirely compromised.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Maybe...it should be noted, after all, that Bestial is not a species trait in quite a lot of cases. It's on the Wild Animal metatrait but not the Domestic Animal metatrait.

So really it seems like it means not knowing how to fit into human society - even a pet or livestock.

In society, not necessarily human society. Ravens can communicate abstract concepts like displacement, and lie to each other,so they appear to get along in their own society in ways that aren't exactly non-sapient.