Wait... we’re really wondering why someone who was sentenced to 5 years for stealing $120 would be afraid of standing trial for armed robbery?

Does not matter. The court wouldn’t accept the plea and then got a result it didn’t like from a jury. That should be the end of it. He should walk out of the court a free man. Instead, the judge threw a legal hissy fit and revoked his probation because the judge thought he deserved to be in jail for something.

To avoid a trial in which he could be found guilty of armed robbery.

There’s also the matter of shooting a deer with a wholly inappropriate weapon just to shoot a deer. Not that many people I know, hunters or non-hunters, would find that “funny”.

I don’t think most people are horrified at the idea of hunting a deer so much as the idea that drowning a wounded deer in a creek is “hilarious” to Mark Brunnel (and presumably to Farve - I assume he told it as a ‘funny’ story). I eat animals and it would be more than a little hypocritical of me to have a problem with…

It’s not really about the deer so much as the attitude of “ha ha ha Brett tortured an animal to death for fun and it was *hilarious*”

Should I be slightly depressed that I really can't see how this applies? I think I'm good at the things I'm successful at, and assume I'm awful at basically everything else.

I actually think that statements like this go a long way toward that definition of consciousness that you're looking for. I'm frankly sick of this question coming up and people saying "well we don't know what consciousness is so we can't say what's up with animals." Now, at last, we have scientists saying, "Yes, we…

Looking through the comments I'm noticing some confusion or misconceptions about consciousness and its relation to such things as intelligence. I think it's fair to suggest that consciousness — the ability to subjectively process an environment in realtime based according to incoming sensory stimulai — is a binary…

You'd think it was obvious, but much of science has denied it for centuries, claiming that only humans have this kind of special awareness.

I somewhat agree. While I think the presence of conscious awareness is a binary attribute (either you have it or you don't), it's probably safe to say that the *strength* of conscious awareness follows along a spectrum — one that is dependant on other factors that feed into self-awareness, such as sensory stimulati,…

I'm not going to sit here and advocate that all animals exist simply for H. sapiens to act out all their sadist fantasies on, but I think these guys are overplaying their hand.