What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals experience death

Re:What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals ... by emodendroket on Monday August 27, 2018 @05:52AM (#17850437)

Well in linguistics they usually postulate a sort of "universal language," where every human being has certain linguistic capabilities that are reflected in universal traits of every human language. The machinery is there but not hooked up, so to speak. (There are also various oddities like twins inventing their own languages) So merely observing that pre-verbal humans are capable of introspection is not, in my view, sufficient to suggest that language and introspection can be separated.

I suppose "introspection" is a pretty woolly term, though, and we could disagree about what the bounds of it are. The abstract about "metacognition" in rats is interesting but I think a little broader than what I had in mind.

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Re:What the grieving mother orca tells us about how animals ... by EliRivers on Monday August 27, 2018 @06:00AM (#17850467)

Is that the Noam Chomsky style built-in, universal grammar theory? I thought (but I really don't know) that had been discredited in recent times. But this is your field of study; not mine.

As an aside on the general conversation at hand, I suspect that the experience of humans is so much based on being a human that we struggle even to think about not being human; that we have so many assumptions we carry about what thinking is and what language is and so on. My favoured example of this is an experiment showing that humans have a special ability for recognising faces, based on giving other primates tests of face recognition. Go humans!

When the test was repeated, some time later, using faces from their own species instead of human faces, it turned out that they were actually also pretty good at it. The original experiment had used human faces to test with, because those were obviously much more distinctive. I suspect, but cannot prove, that we're trying to reason about non-humans from within a prison of human thought and experience and assumption that affects everything.

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