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.
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.
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It’s because the show is based off of actual science and observed behaviors, not wishful thinking.
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this is a great post, thank you.
We may never find out. If mollusks do experience emotions, there’s a chance their emotions are nothing like ours. We explain emotional responses through happiness, fear, anger and all that stuff, but who says other animals feel the same? Perhaps sea creatures have an emotional spectrum comprised of degrencre, humber, nage, and dorcelessness, but we’ll never be able to understand those, let alone recognise them when animals express them.
this is exactly what i mean – isn’t it just so much more interesting and hopeful and meaningful to think about it this way than immediately drawing the line and saying shit like “we cannot just run around and play pretend because it makes us feel cozy.” or “To suggest that a mollusc has an ‘inner life’ is unscientific and goes against our current understanding of living organisms.”
we’ve developed this consensus at 2023 AD after thousands and thousands of years of complex evolution – clearly we are at the zenith! we have no more to learn!
Do a web search for “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.”
But be warned: this rabbit-hole goes much deeper than you can imagine.
Philosophy, not even once.
I’ve been told the cat thing twice in my life, in both cases I ended up cutting contact years later because both persons turned out to be borderline sociopaths. Truth is we can’t really be sure for most animals, but to immediately assume most animals can’t feel shit is such a stretch.
even for a mollusk
Yeah LMAO no.
Mollusks are basically meat plants, they have barely a nervous system to speak of.
Also having eyes and a face has nothing to do with brain activity or neural capacity to process what you’d call an “inner life.”
A mannequin has eyes and a face, a simulacrum of something need not share anything with it other than appearance.
You can absolutely extend this kind of empathy to mammals and primates as we know they have the brain structures we have observed to be necessary to have certain emotions, but it’s not because of this asinine notion that if they look similar to us they have similar properties.
There are plants that can get “scared” and warn other plants of danger. Even plants that can uproot themselves and move if they feel threatened. They don’t even have nervous systems or muscles in any way that we understand and are capable of locomotion, sensing their surroundings and communication.
Even plants may have feelings.
My phone warns me that the battery is low, does that mean that it has feelings and doesn’t want to die?
It may. Can you prove it either way?
They aren’t warning other plants of danger. That’s an anthropomorphic interpretation.
They are releasing a chemical. Other plants respond to that chemical in a predictable, biological way.
There is no motive. No intent to save or protect. It’s not a warning. It’s just an evolutionarily advantageous sequence of cause and effect.
Just because object A’s behavior helps object B’s survival doesn’t mean it has feelings. Complex cause and effect can be emergent phenomena without specific intent
While I don’t think plants or certain animals actually experience life similarly, aren’t our own emotions basically a product of chemicals being released in our brain as a result of certain stimuli?
“Emotions” is a very nebulous term. But we know that abstractions like guilt require certain types of brain function that is only found in humans, dolphins, etc
So yes, human emotion is indeed a sufficiently complex series of cause and effect. But that complexity is really important. And certain structures in the brain are necessary for things like self-awareness, abstraction, empathy, etc
For the record I believe that dolphins are non-human-persons. So I’m not a “humans are completely unique” kind of guy. But I also don’t anthropomorphize lower order animals :D
Feelings in the sense of “they feel things through a sensory organ and react to that”, same as sight, hearing, touch? Sure!
Feelings like fear? No.
Aversion from pain is not the same as fear, fear is aversion from pain that hasn’t happened yet, it requires the ability to abstract the concept of negative outcomes and expand the aversion from discomfort to possible discomfort.
No plant has been observed reacting to something that it hasn’t experienced at least once before.
Your bias is showing. The fact that we have not observed something is not evidence that it doesn’t exist.
Ok, have you accepted the lord Jesus Christ as your lord and saviour?
Black holes were thought to be only theoretical until we fucking observed one.
Theoretical is not the same as “made the fuck up”
Something being theoretical is as good as it gets short of being observed in science, it means the most evidence points to it being real which is why we spent insane amounts of money to find evidence of it.
If you were to postulate black holes without evidence they would exist but they would still made the fuck up until proven otherwise, not “theoretical”.
Again, have you accepted the lord Jesus Christ?
I give him the same level of acceptance as Allah, Vishnu, Odin, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. There’s a nonzero possibility that they’re real, after all. I try to keep an open mind.
Sure, I give a sentient mollusk the same credence, i.e. a token amount that does not change my behaviour at all.
Right, because that token credence is completely in line with your previous assertive dismissal of your earlier comments. How very open minded.
This has been said in the thread already but I want to try and boil it down a bit. Your question is about intuition vs evidence. Science used to involve a lot more intuition. Many things that the public believed to be true were just educated guesses with little evidence to back them up.
Over time we realized through research that a large number of these reasonable guesses were completely wrong. So now intuition in science has been largely limited to the hypothesis and the hypothesis is mostly worthless without evidence.
We’ve also seen in the modern day just how fucked up human intuition can be. We largely have intuition to thank for: flat earth, anti vax, snake oil, etc.
Animals are idiots.
Yourself included?
Absolutely. Possibly moreso.
Yes, it is obnoxious.
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yes
also tldr
