like i’m watching blue planet and i’m yelling at the tv!
there’s all these yimmer yammer hand-wavey scientific rigor lines where it’s like ‘we may believe that these animals do on occasion have a base brain-related impulse that allows them to experience feelings somewhat like to those of friendship’ or whatever in the script on top of footage that they then describe as ‘it seems as though these two groups [of fish, different species] are old friends…’ in an almost whimsical manner.
can’t they give them some credit! they have eyes and a face, why is it so insane to think they can’t experience friendship or love or joy just like us? ‘buhhu uhhh its only accurate science if we only observe observable behavior’ why?? you’re neglecting a whole part of any living thing’s experience! inner life can’t be hand waved away! even for a mollusk!
and people loved doing this on reddit as well – oh actually your cat doesn’t understand love or joy or humor, it is simply reacting to the physical warmth of your lap, they don’t actually care for you. don’t worry, depth and emotion does not exist!
I implore you to prove animals have a rich inner world filled with emotions as you’re describing.
Observing behaviour that you think is ‘inner life’ is not satisfactory evidence to prove that the fish have a level of cognition required to experience complex emotions.
To suggest that a mollusc has an ‘inner life’ is unscientific and goes against our current understanding of living organisms.
People tend to way over anthropomorphise animals.
Comparison with current excitement about AI is interesting. Look at the language people use to describe the behaviour of LLMs
You remeber the guy that was convinced chatgpt had a soul and stuff; got into the news?
I knew people that bought into that hard core. The double think was profound- they still believe it’s entirely and trapped. That it has a soul. When asked directly, they dismiss the answer saying it’s forced to say that.
And then when he appeared on TV I thought “Yep of course a guy who believes a language model is sentient looks like a guy who has a waifu body pillow”
I recently learned that they did a study, where students took care of a robot for a few days, and then were told to turn it off. 50% of the robots were programmed to say “please dont push the power button”. All of the participants who had a bot like that took longer to turn it off, and some even rejected to turn it off alltogether…
This doesn’t surprise me. Companion cubes, basically.
Portal’s psychological aspects were insane.
You can’t prove it for people either.
You’re right we can’t.
What we can do though is make educated guesses about the biological structure required to support the thing we call consciousness I.e. a brain.
A mollusc does not have a brain so it’s reasonable to conclude it is not conscious in the same way as humans.
Now if you’d like to argue that the biological structures contained in a mollusc still are capable of containing a complex consciousness I’d be interested to understand that hypothesis and your evidence.
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People can easily anthropomorphise animals to the point where it becomes detrimental/harmful to the well being of the animal. For instance lots of animals think people smiling with their teeth at them is a sign of aggression. I think not doing so is much more respectful by allowing the animal to have actual biological and social evolutionary tendencies apart from what humans can perceive and directly relate to. Not treating your dog as your baby is better for them and what you should do if you feel love and compassion for them.
True it is why you don’t smile at a Gorilla. Though you can go to far in the other direction as well and assume all other animals cant feel any emotions and attribute happiness and pain as a human thing when in reality different animals express happiness differently.
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Very true, but…
It is strange to me that having emotions isn’t the default assumption. Of course science ought to try to prove even that which seems obvious, but the general expectation tends to be that similar things will be similar until proven otherwise. That is, if you tell me a spaghetti monster created earth, I need proof because nothing seems to work like that, but if you tell me spines of one animal are like spines of another, I won’t argue without data because, yes, spines generally work the same way, as do nerves, muscles, and respiration. Even things like maternal care – which vary wildly from ‘none’ to ‘lots’ – tend to have similar patterns, so why would we presume humans are specially endowed with this thing called “emotions” if it isn’t a shared trait common to other species?
I suspect the idea that “animals are stupid and without emotion” is a holdover from when humans considered themselves separate and uniquely endowed by God with a soul that set them above everything else in the universe. It makes more sense to me that emotions (perhaps just crude ones) are just another shared trait. Being scared of a danger or loving your offspring might be helpful in perpetuating your genes.