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The war with Japan was going to be bloody and the US wanted to force the leadership to see just how many Japanese could die.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-hist ... g-of-tokyo

On this day, U.S. warplanes launch a new bombing offensive against Japan, dropping 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs on Tokyo over the course of the next 48 hours. Almost 16 square miles in and around the Japanese capital were incinerated, and between 80,000 and 130,000 Japanese civilians were killed in the worst single firestorm in recorded history

http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/op ... wnfall.htm

General Marshall, in conference with President Truman, estimated 31,000 in 30 days after landing in Kyushu. Admiral Leahy estimated that the invasion would cost 268,000 casualties. Personnel at the Navy Department estimated that the total losses to America would be between 1.7 and 4 million with 400,000 to 800,000 deaths. The same department estimated that there would be up to 10 million Japanese casualties. The ‘Los Angeles Times’ estimated that America would suffer up to 1 million casualties.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

Sentient is having a nervous system, which is not the definition of the term before the attempt at redefinition by the AR movement. It is a perception of stimuli, but NOT a sentient perception. Sentient beings act on a higher level of perception than just stimuli and instinct. It is possible to have a brain dead person react to stimuli.

Please, tell me what's this higher level of perception that doesn't involve the nervous system.
A brain dead person react to stimuli because some parts of the brain are still alive. Otherwise the body could not works and the person would be died.
The brain is composed by differend parts ruling different functions.


There is no science basis for rights so the AR movement would die off without the philosophical support.
So what are they doing if not showing that animal rights are a scientific evidence?
http://www.equivita.it/index.php/en/
http://www.rspca.org.uk/sciencegroup/re ... ndtheworld
http://www.freewebs.com/scientific_anti_vivisectionism/
http://animalresearch.thehastingscenter.org/
http://animalrights.about.com/od/vivise ... ingach.htm
http://www.afma-curedisease.org/
http://antidote-europe.org/en/
http://www.mrmcmed.org/Critical_Look.pdf
http://www.safermedicines.org/faqs/faq15.shtml

They show how the disrespectful human behaviour with animals always damages humans too.
There are health topics and Ecological topics.

To show you that AR moviments works very good also without philosophical support from now I will avoid all philosophical topics, and I will speak only about science, ecology, biology, physiology, economy, politics, etc.


There is (scientific controversy concerning sentience) when you use a real definitinion of sentience rather than whether it has a nervous system or not.
Again, please tell me your mysterious definition of sentience that is other than use the nervous system.


So how can you provide evidence they "speak" of such abstract concepts without resorting to basic make believe and assumptions? Unless the communication can be translated you have no idea of what is or is not being communicated.

The translation of the hieroglyphics was very hard to discover but it was already known that they means something and they weren't only nice drawings.
Lots of scientist discovered the language of animals. In the BBC links I posted before there are the explanations about complex animal languages.
Anyway if you take an handbook about the rearing of cats or dogs there are the explanations of their behaviour and their communication with humans and with other animals.
That's obvious.
You can learn to be empathic with their needs, and understand what they say to you. You can learn this also without a book. Simply having a cat and looking at him. By the experience you will learn their language.
If you will not learn their language by reading a book that some expert wrote, neither by experience, that means that you are not for this subject, like you could not be able to learn a human language.
That doesn't make the language useless or ugly or stupid etc.
And, what's more important, that doesn't make the language a conjecture created by other than the speakers.


It is not an abstract? Can you tell me where I can go to hold a right in my hand? Where is there a picture or a recording of a physical right? Not only are you confused on sentience and rights, but also reality it seems.

I don't know why I am not able to post pictures in this forum. You can show the rights showing what happens when they are not respected and when they are.


But a brain and spinal column by themselves do not create sentience, which is what you are saying at this point.

No, there are also the nerves and all the components of the neurological system, including the ears, language, nose, eyes, touch.
If you have not all the senses: ears, language, nose, eyes, touch, you will probably die if someone doesn't take care of you.
If you have some damages in the brain you can loose the use of some senses or the use of a part of the body.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/myster ... o_brain-0/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -life.html

What do you think creates sentience more than that?



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The fact is women, children, and the elderly all assisted in various war efforts in all countries.

Kill civilians is always wrong because there are unconscious children or people disapproving the war. And not only for this. The will of the people during the wars is always manipulated by the state. There is the propaganda. They never know what really happens.
And their brain is always washed and filled, like it happened in particular with Nazi and Italians.

Lots of the soldiers were sadistics. But their behaviour was built at table. They were educate and grow up in such way. Their way of thinking was automatic. There was a low level of conscience in some of the people doing the atrocities.
Sure they should be punished. But the punishment should be re-educate them.
Not kill them.
Maybe they were crazy, with mental disease or with a past of abuse.


There was no invasion as the Japanese had surrendered. The Japanese connection to rape and sex slavery was well documented in the areas of occupation. Korea would give a good idea of the impact if you want.

No, Japan was invaded after he surrended. The occupation was from 1945 to 1948. And there happened everything including rape and sex slavery. There are documents about that.


No, only a small portion of the Marshall Plan involved loans. The majority of the plan was in the form of grants, whcih did not have to be repaid.

That's right, but there was a clear interests in the grants.
An economic interest: with the aid European could rebuilt and became a good market for USA product.
A political interest: because Europe had became part of the American sphere of influence against the growing power of URSS.


And.... that was supposed to tell us what about the US not being the primary force against the Japanese?

That’s the reason why USA thrown the bombs: revenge and desire of power.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

The sentient definition was of being self aware, which is not just sensory input but of the higher cognitive functions of thought. As the paper I quoted indicated, it is far more than just having a nervous system.
No, sentient doesn’t mean being self aware. This is a definition you create right now to support your ideas. People with arteriosclerosis and newborn are not self aware but are sentient. To be sentient you don’t need an high QI. You indicated a PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER, speaking about the phenomenology of the perception.

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They are giving ETHICAL positions based mostly on misrepresentations of science just as you have done.
No, they use SCIENTIFIC positions to sustains the FAILURE of animal experimentation as a PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC METHOD. There’s nothing related to science in animal experimentation.


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The definition of vivisection was changed to give a much broader application that was not what the prior understanding was. How are you going to speak on of science when a large portion of your position is based on ethics, which are not science based?
Someone prefers the use of the word vivisection for practical reasons, to include everything. It’s all suffering.
My positions are based on science and scientific discoveries. I don’t use philosophy. I use medicine, biology, physiology, ecology, nature laws etc. And Darwinism is not a theory, is a scientific discovery.


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Sentience is the ability to feel or perceive subjectively, not the sensory feeling, but the higher cognitive feeling. It is not quite what would be called sapience, but close. A sentient being could be removed from physical sensory input from the spinal column but still have the higher functions of feeling and perception. Dr. Hawkings would come close to this example.
The SENSORY FEELING is always perceived subjectively. I can see the blue where you can see the red but for social agreement we call the blue with the same name. But you can’t know if you see the same thing that I see.
Higher cognitive feeling: it happens in the brain. Sapience too and it’s the ability to acquire knowledge, a thing that everyone can do, animals and human included.
And being self aware means to be able to recognise himself as an individual, separated from the others, a group etc. And being self aware means to be conscious of being alive and having to maintain the life as better as we can.
Self aware is the instinct of survive as an individual and not only a species. It means to be informed conscious of one’s own individual ability, capability.
A horse jumping an obstacle is self aware to be trained, exercized to jump ostacles. So he decide to jump. Otherwise he was afraid to jump.
A boss cat is aware to be powerful and stronger than the other cats in the area. So he wants maintain his social position. He has no problems in fighting with the other cats. Probably he looks for cats to fight with because he wants became more powerful.
If he was weak and had bad experience of fighting in the past he was afraid of fighting with other cats.
That means he is self aware of his individual skills.


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You danced all around the fact you cannot provide anything other than an assumption to support your claims.
No, animals language is scientifically understood, decoded. Otherwise there were not the scientific documentary to explain animal life, communication among them, relation with humans.
For exemple in general people having a cat is able to understand what the cat wants, thinks, do etc.


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No, if a right is not abstract there has to be a physical example of a right not the effect of a right not being respected.
That’s your opinion.


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A brain which can develop abstract concepts and express them would be more sentient.
No, I don’t think that philosophers are more sentient than scientists or shop assistants. Maybe they are more out of the society, reality.



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Which still does not refute the concept of civilian damage being necessary to stop the war effort.
The civilian damage could be avoided to stop the war. USA was showing his power, to have the most advanced military system. The Cold War was already began.

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Rape and sex slavery was strongly evidenced prior to 1945.
Yes, before and after.

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So why did you claim there were only loans which had to be repaid?
There were also grants for the economic, political and cultural benefit of USA too. There was the Cold War.


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That’s the reason why USA thrown the bombs: revenge and desire of power.

Or the lack of understanding on your part.
USA thrown the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to show having arms of mass destruction able to conquer the world.
That’s why the war was called Cold War. Because it was an exhibition of arms and power. The main 2 world powers were showing each other what they can do. Cold because they didn’t arrive to the point of militarily attach each other’s country.
The war was done in other countries, used as international chessboard. I conquer this country to limit your power, the possibility that this country became part of your (political, economical and cultural) sphere of influence.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... ness-arise

When Does Consciousness Arise in Human Babies?
Does sentience appear in the womb, at birth or during early childhood?

Mothers will want to crucify me for this seemingly cruel question, but it needs to be posed: How do we know that a newly born and healthy infant is conscious? There is no question that the baby is awake. Its eyes are wide open, it wriggles and grimaces, and, most important, it cries. But all that is not the same as being conscious, of experiencing pain, seeing red or smelling Mom’s milk.

It is well recognized that infants have no awareness of their own state, emotions and motivations. Even older children who can speak have very limited insight into their own actions. Anybody who has raised a boy is familiar with the blank look on your teenager’s face when you ask him why he did something particularly rash. A shrug and “I dunno—it seemed like a good idea at the time” is the most you’ll hear.

Although a newborn lacks self-awareness, the baby processes complex visual stimuli and attends to sounds and sights in its world, preferentially looking at faces. The infant’s visual acuity permits it to see only blobs, but the basic thalamo-cortical circuitry necessary to support simple visual and other conscious percepts is in place. And linguistic capacities in babies are shaped by the environment they grow up in. Exposure to maternal speech sounds in the muffled confines of the womb enables the fetus to pick up statistical regularities so that the newborn can distinguish its mother’s voice and even her language from others. A more complex behavior is imitation: if Dad sticks out his tongue and waggles it, the infant mimics his gesture by combining visual information with proprioceptive feedback from its own movements. It is therefore likely that the baby has some basic level of unreflective, present-oriented consciousness.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

http://www.d.umn.edu/~dcole/sense5.html

SENSE5 8/18/90; rev. 1-19-98. (original 1983)
copyright David Cole
University of Minnesota, Duluth

Sense and Sentience
Surely one of the most interesting problems in the study of mind concerns the nature of sentience. How is it that there are sensations, rather than merely sensings? What is it like to be a bat -- or why is it like anything at all? Why aren't we automata or responding but unfeeling Zombies? How does neural activity give rise to subjective experience? As Leibniz put the problem (Monadology section 17):

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

http://www.neoscience.org/P71.html

Sentient life: It is also understood that all of creation is in a process of fluctuation, change and eventual transformation. This self-evident reality necessitates that our definitions of sentient and non-sentient life at the very least are process oriented and at a higher level carry an ever-increasing number of possibilities unto infinity.

Sentient life is life that is self-aware, having the capacity to view and see past present and future, as well as reaching onto levels which transcend these concepts in the course of its development as an entity with consciousness. Sentient life forms exhibit a capacity for increasing self-determination and self-emancipation. This is necessarily an object/ process definition which is applicable over a large range of conscious entities. It is not limited to observer/observed levels of consciousness, resident self-referencing, relativistic and perceptual frames but transcends these levels of consciousness as well. It is well understood that the line between one level of existence and another is demarcated by the degree of capacity to exercise volitional choice, and in so doing exercises the emancipation of the entity's, 'self ' from one level to the next.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein