Perhaps it's the other way around from how you put it. All animals by default share the conceit you describe. It is not unique to humanity, and does not deserve the label of "human". The bear does not lament its catch, the whale does not wonder at the inner life of a fish it accidentally swallows. The uniquely human conceit that we engage in is the one we are both engaging in right now. The exercise of putting oneself in another's shoes.
By the definition of the word, doesn't that make our species special?
Neither do humans, of course. Do you stop and grieve for the chicken you just grilled and ate?
Obviously animals are capable of recognizing that other creatures have emotions, too--any dog or cat owner can tell you that. But clearly, like us, they don't always choose empathy.
Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.
Occam's razor says that most wild animals exhibit preference of what species they'll eat based on taste and availability of food, not because of ethics. I said most because I'm not a wildlife biologist and there always seems to be strange outliers, but I have a hard time believing an omnivore/carnivore, such as a bear, would willingly choose vegetation 100% of the time because of ethics when there's plenty of game of its preference to eat.
>Consider a dog which has been raised around cats, which might hunt a rabbit but not another cat.
Most domesticated dogs that were raised alongside cats won't eat them because they've learned that they're not allowed to. The ones that do attack children and other pets are frequently euthanized.
That's an absurd statement. While tempers of dogs vary from one to the next just like humans, I vehemently disagree to the extent that I'm hesitant to believe you've ever raised a puppy, or even have been exposed to many dogs for that matter. Plenty of pet dogs behave more like their wolf ancestors than others.
That's a separate issue from the one I raised, namely that animals display species-oriented preference in their dietary range, and that for some animals this preference can be emotionally/socially based.
If there is any species-oriented preferences outside of taste and availability, it's purely out of a symbiotic relationship that they benefit from. Wolves aren't going to stop hunting deer unless the deer somehow provide additional sources of food that the wolves realize only exists because of the deer's help.
The source is in Russian from a zoologist who studied wolves: https://sovet.blocknote.info/articles/443/serdtse-volka-semy...
Some behaviors are instinctive, some are taught, some are the result of emotional conditioning (hence people taming and domesticating animals).
You agree with me.
And not just dogs. I have trained cats to become friendly to individual rats (I think instinct is too strong), and I have seen some species express either preference or disdain for other species. My personal analysis is that this has more to do with social and emotional conditioning, a true recognition of another animal as "friendly" despite not offering a symbiotic relationship, rather than directly as a result of behavioral conditioning with positive/negative stimulus.
I think a better indicator of the difference between us and pets is that we keep pets, and further, that we sometimes keep pets purely for emotional benefits. Incidences of non-humans keeping other animals as pets is extremely rare and seemingly limited to primates. [0] I think that says a lot about our psychology. But it's a little pointless to debate about whether other mammals experience meaningful emotions. They do. Meaningful emotions are actionable. That's why our emotions seem meaningful.
[0] https://bioone.org/journals/Neotropical-Primates/volume-13/i...
Isn’t that how humans operate as well? People keep pets that they get satisfaction from but we don’t eat our pets.
Then you have the debate of whether true altruism exists or whether people do even our most selfless acts because of the endorphin rush we get from helping others.
Your pet would eat you, if you had a stroke in your flat- lying helpless on the floor. All the nice moments, are just a function of the surpulus, that is provided by humanity via ecocide.
Not eating another human has nothing to do with the fact that we share a species and everything to do with the conscious psychological decision to have respect for the life of all highly cognitive beings which can live complex lives, and not arrogantly place my own need for survival higher than theirs...
But nuances aside, fundamentally I don't differ from the deer, birds, or squirrels in that I'm wired to do almost anything necessary to satisfy my hunger impulse. So I'm not sure how what you're saying makes any difference.
I did cry the first time I butchered a chicken.
You're doing that. Not paying 18 people away to do it for you.
And the chicken probably had a better life.
The butchering can certainly be more emotional that the killing... it might 10 seconds to grab an axe and swing and then at least 30 minutes to cut the skin and pull it off of the body, to cut the body cavity open and to slice out the internal organs. It feels different than say preforming an autopsy in biology lab... you might have this moment as I have where you realize that the story you tell yourself, that you're a killer with a higher purpose, is just that -- a story. It doesn't make the animal you murdered feel any better about the fate it met at your hand. I would guess it is a significantly different feeling in cultures where a large portion of the population kill what they eat. Even here where I live, in rural Pennsylvania, people will often look at you like you're a sociopath if you tell them you killed and skinned and ate any animal other than a deer, and yet, the first day of hunting season there were often many empty chairs in school because dad wanted to take his kid out to celebrate a time honored tradition. Those kids don't often cry when they kill their deer, they often feel an overwhelming sense of pride. And then they pay a processor $50 so that they don't have to do the hard dirty work themselves.
We're certainly capable of it. It remains unclear whether other animals are capable.
It's possible to show empathy and respect without grief.
I keep engaging in morbid thought experiments to figure out how certain people feel when they commit certain acts and whether I would be able to do the same provided the circumstances are hard enough. A few examples:
if I could blink my eye and all the valuables and money of everyone in this room/house etc would suddenly be mine, how much would that be, and would I do it?
if I could blink my eye and everyone in that room/building would vanish from the earth would I do it?
if I could blink my eye and 2/3 of the earths human population would be wiped out by x/y/z would I do it?
if I would be forced to work in a concentration camp being tasked with horrid acts against humans ... maybe with the alternative of being killed myself or having my family etc (spin that further what if I didn't have a family and just my dog that would be sacrificed if I were to refuse) ...
...
the answers always terrify me.
We talk about it all the time. We have industries built around it. We write books about it. Maybe bears could read our books? Whoops! They can't read! Or tie their shoes, or set the dinner table. Maybe we're special after all ...
There are plenty of other examples of this, I’m sure; these two came to mind first because they were caught on video. What drives that behavior if not empathy?
Animals mostly follow their instinct, and it is absurd/dangerous to anthropomorphise their behavior.
[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/world/michal-prasek-czech-man-kille...
Humans mostly follow their instinct, and it is absurd/dangerous not to zoomorphise their behavior.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/mother-accused-killing-14-year-dau...
Maybe he was just hungry... many big herbivores like cows and deer eat small animals gladly when available.
Maybe the leopard taking care of the gazella's calf after eating their mum is thinking "I'll save this tasty snack for later" and protects it from other predators for selfish reasons.
Our interpretation of what are thinking the animals can be wrong.
I would bet this bear actually would have eaten the crow, had that been its intention.
I'd think the leopard taking care of a calf is more likely to think it looks "cute" for similar biological reasons we do, and take care of it for that reason. I would guess that a leopard in particular, if it wanted to store food, would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.
I also think "instincts" manifest themselves through emotion / emotion is how we experience instinct. We feel fear, love, etc depending on the situation, and then it's these emotions that drive us to act in the manner we do.
Our actions are moderated by language-enhanced reflection, which is were we're really ahead of other animals.
Other possibility would be that the bear was just annoyed by the crowing sound so maybe it was not totally an altruistic conduct. Not easy to evaluate because we lack the first and last part of the scene. How the crow ended in the pool? Maybe was trow there by the bear. We don't know.
> leopard ... would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.
That would be the best way to attract the maximum of flies and predators. Cats are know to play with their preys when satiated keeping them alive as long as possible. It seems that they have a lot of fun with it.
When they do, it doesn't look like what the leopard was doing with the calf. They don't "play" in that sense, they just incapacitate the prey so it can't escape and "play" with it until it's dead. Definitely not what the leopard was doing.
Of course it can, but by resorting to this sort of interpretative relativism, you're bringing the debate no further. Of course we can never tell whether animals feel anything such as emotion, but at this level, so you can't of other humans. In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.
I could think in some exceptions to this rule, but lets ignore the "never" and assume that this is true for now.
> B) but at this level, so you can't of other humans.
False. Even if I can't communicate with a slug, I can communicate fairly well with other humans, feel empathy and understand their feelings.
> C) In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.
Causal phallacy. A is true, so B is true [in fact is false], so C is equally valid for A and B.
In fact neither A (of course we can't interpretate emotions of animals), nor B (we can't interpretate emotions in humans) justify C (therefore the interpretation of emotions is valid in both animals and humans).
You're right to be cautious about interpreting animal behavior, but you're inadvertently making the same mistake from a different direction.
You say also that I dislike something so this explains X. As you don't know me, you are not in the position to base your arguments on such claims. Ad-hominem fallacy
Am I "invoking" delayed gratification? where?
> Do you really think an animal is going to spend 20 minutes trying to get a tasty snack out of a barrel because it's hungry - and then set it aside for later once it has hold of the snack?
It depends on the context. If we can see the video we could discusse it properly.
Wild animals stopping what they are doing and running away when they realize there is an human around with a camera? I can see it. Yes. Definitely a very common behaviour.
put oneself in another's shoes is basically a definition of empathy...
As for empathy, it might be an inherent quality but I'm inclined to think that it's like most other things, you can cultivate it with practice and it manifests different ways in different people.
Of course, we can't know this.
It seems reasonable to speculate that other animals don't subvocalise in human languages,[1] though that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't capable of thought.[2]
1. It also seems reasonable to me to believe that dogs (some dogs?) might be capable of understanding some human language beyond simple commands. I typically have more luck with my two 2yo Border Collie cross if I explain to them why we're doing a new thing. More research is needed. Please deposit funds in my offshore bank account.
2. We could debate what is meant by thought, I believe that would be a distraction
Tell me your secret to understanding the inner minds of animals.
Seriously, any pet owner will tell you animals seemingly have feelings. They do things that don't make much sense outside of them showing love, hate, annoyance, etc. It's not scientific, but why would humans be so different from animals when we all came down a similar evolutionary line? You don't see great leaps in physical trait happening, usually, it's a gradual process, so I would assume that feelings gradually developed into what humans have now.
If my cats were human, they would both be in jail
One of my cats is pure breed, has never lived outside of a house, loves eating plastic, olives and chips but shows no care for fresh meat
The other one was a stray cat, she still hides food that she doesn't eat, because that's what she's been doing for the initial part of her life
In a way she adapted to live in a house, but she never learned that she's not been living in the streets for the biggest part of her life
So yes, they have their personalities, very different from each other They get bored, they enjoy snuggles (until they do not and scratch you for no reason), but can they process their feelings beyond reaction?
I'm not really sure they do in a very complex way
Of course animals have no such conception of deeper emotions, at least in the same way that we think about them, but that doesn't mean that animals do (or don't) experience them. It just means our method of boxing up experiences into communicable terms probably doesn't match their own.
how can you possibly claim that?
I'm not saying they don't have these emotions, just that they probably don't have the same concepts surrounding them as we do. I could very well be wrong, but I'd have to find a non-human animal willing to discuss the topic with me.
i am sorry, but that doesn’t make any sense. a concept has meaning beyond its human definition. it isn’t like emotions didn’t exist until humans “defined” them.
i am sure there are animals willing to discuss it with you, it’s just that you (us) can’t understand them.
it is very possible that animals feel deeper emotional connections than we do. orcas showcase some very deep emotional states.
For example many languages define colors differently (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMqZR3pqMjg), but this doesn't mean that the different wavelengths don't exist. Cultures categorized them for the purpose of communication and it's only within the context of that categorization that you can understand the meaning.
Earlier I referenced "finger pointing at the moon" and this is exactly it. The word is the finger and the meaning is the moon, and we shouldn't mistake the finger for the moon.
> i am sure there are animals willing to discuss it with you, it’s just that you (us) can’t understand them.
I was half-joking, there are already animals that we can understand and communicate with. It's just a matter of finding them :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GorgFtCqPEs
> it is very possible that animals feel deeper emotional connections than we do. orcas showcase some very deep emotional states.
No doubt. Even visiting an animal shelter exposes some of the deep emotional state that dogs and cats can be in, and I'm sure that barely scratches the surface when considering all of the different species and circumstances.
I don't necessarily hold that belief, who knows what the birds and dolphins are jabbering on about.
We can clearly see or hear when most mammals are experiencing fear, joy, sadness, anger, etc.
They might not understand it intellectually, but I think we'd be hard pressed to argue that they don't feel it or understand that their emotion is in response to an event they experienced.
Occasionally, we can overcome the conceitedness. I think that makes us special.
Thanks for the clarification.
How do you know that certain animals do not do that. It is not like we can read their brains.
Here are a few I know of:
1- Several bird species maintain life-long bonds with their partners.
2- Some bird species have funerals for deceased birds.
3- Several animals (like Dolphins) can recognize themselves in the mirror.
4- My dog recognize when I'm angry.
You see the pattern. Humans are just more capable of sophisticated patterns than animals we compare to.
How about other creatures? I mean, if you want to claim supremacy, what would be your definition of supremacy? Number of humans? Mass?
> "It has been estimated by E. O. Wilson that the total number of individual ants alive in the world at any one time is between one and ten quadrillion (short scale). According to this estimate, the total biomass of all the ants in the world is approximately equal to the total biomass of the entire human race."
Ants beats us on the number scale but we are equal on the biomass front.
Obviously animals have simpler lives than we do but they have personalities, maybe equivalent to that of a 2- or 3-year old. One of my dogs is getting old and can't always find a ball that I throw for him. The younger one will sometimes find it and then bring it to him if she sees him looking; she'll drop her own ball, fetch the 'lost' one and drop it for him, then get her own and bring it back to me to me.
I didn't set out to teach that behavior, though the younger dog may well be imitating mine.
This unsupported statement has been made about so many things that we later found out many animals DO engage in.
Which is the point of the article. You cannot make that claim. You do not know what all the other animals are thinking.
Maybe the elephant is thinking, "You have everything you need. Why do you want to kill me for my tusks?"
Occam's Razor is not truth generating, it only says that you shouldn't make things more complex than is necessary, it doesn't say what is necessary; crucially the World, and humans in particular, are not logical or especially confined by necessities.
But that assumes facts not in evidence. Here's a fun example. One day I cooked too much food, ate some and set the other aside intending to put it in the refrigerator. Something distracted me while I was eating and I left the house, forgetting all about the leftover food.
I returned a little later and instead of my dog greeting me at the door with his tail wagging I walked in and dog is giving me his sad look. I have no idea why until I go into the kitchen and see the now-empty plate that had the leftover food on it.
Now I doubt this is guilt in the sense of moral remorse, it's likely just my dog worrying about getting caught taking my food. But he was definitely conscious of having taken something that was not given. The difference from his normal behavior when I open the door was an empirical fact, even though I can only draw inferences about what was going on in his head.
For this to be true we would first have to invent philosophy and philosophers, psychology and psychologists.
So, I'm convinced it constitutes a simpler explanation.
Take dogs, for example, we share something like 84% same DNA. Great apes 98.8% or so.
This starts to slide in to this idea I have about how people say "everyone is different". No, no we are not. We are way more alike than the cumulative sum of our differences.
It would be way simpler, in my opinion, to assume other animals, at least some of them anyway, are capable of most of the same emotions we are. Then we can work out to what extent we care.
They're are genetically very similar to us.
> There is no threshold at which we become greater than the sum of our parts; no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. We humans like to fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet, we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do—rarely questioning our choices—content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.
The idea that consciousness doesn't exist is very interesting, and I'm not poo-pooing it, however the argument that it doesn't exist because you can't identify an inflection point is an example of the grains of sand fallacy.
The Grains of Sand fallacy basically claims you can't say "there's no way adding one piece of sand would render a pile of sand un-liftable." This isn't true as I can lift a bag with one grain of sand and can't lift a bag with a billion grains of sand, therefore there has to be a point where I can lift the bag with N grains of sand, and can't lift the bag with N+1 grains.
I agree it's hard to identify an inflection point; but that doesn't prove that consciousness isn't real. If we define consciousness as something dead people don't have and an alive person has (or at least SOMEONE once has had), then there has to be an inflection point as people die.
What I take out of this is not that consciousness doesn't exist, but that generally when people use the word "consciousness", the thing they think they're referring to doesn't exist in nearly as substantial a way as they think it does.
We talk about ourselves as special and animals as fancy pattern matchers because we can't intuitively accept that consciousness isn't a binary phenomenon. If we accept that it's an emergent phenomenon with no clear boundary, there are only two possible conclusions:
* Panpsychism or dual-aspect monism, where matter is imbued with proto-consciousness; or
* "Illusionism" is maybe the best descriptor? Where consciousness exists but not in the way we think it does.
It seems possible that a group of people who see animals as subhuman would be able to exploit them more completely and may have an evolutionary advantage.
Similar to how animals who believe they have their own consciousness separate from a global conscious would fight harder for survival, and therefore have a selective advantage.
Doesn't mean either of those things are true, but animals who think that way may breed more.
It's also possible that humans who see other groups of humans as subhuman have done better in war times, and have therefore proliferated.
I wish more people would consider that we might have ingrained beliefs that are both false and adaptive. I think knowledge is power generally, but lies can be power in specific cases.
In all seriousness though I think humans have always thought of themselves as a higher form of life because we assume we’re sentient. And only sentient beings can experience physical or emotional pain, right? Even before the idea of sentience, we threw around words like “reasoning”. At some point humans must have rationalized away the notion that animals experience suffering because to this day we still enjoy our hamburgers and continue to leave out pets out in the cold.
Today's environment is an abnormality in history (e.g. individuals wanting to be herbivores) created by the excess of food and technological advances we have. Maybe this is the way to go, maybe it isn't, maybe either options are irrelevant anyway.
You only need desensitization once you are massacring animals on an industrial scale.
Are people likely to be desensitized by not being part of the process of getting the animal to the table? Possibly, but that is an ad-don to the points I made.
How this is not true of our artificial cities, dwellings, and infrastructure? And what do you mean by "abnormality"? Do you foresee human manipulation of our environment receding toward some less-manipulated baseline? It seems to me that people claiming voluntary herbivorism is "unnatural" (not your word per se) should take a look at everything else around them and realize that human life today is pervasively and inextricably intertwined with the "unnatural", which doesn't seem to cause people to raise any red flags about it.
I don't think it's an "abnormality" so much as a development, just as human civilizations continue to develop.
P.S. I have no judgement or animosity towards those who eat meat. Humans evolved to eat meat and it's a personal choice. But if you choose to, please consider taking an active role in the hunting and harvesting process.
The crux of the human condition is that we are aware of our own mortality. That's a profound awareness which breeds all sorts of irrationalities and fears in humans not found in ducks. If those are just the motions, then I suppose we may have gotten the short end of the stick perhaps?
But in all fairness, I think you are most likely referring to the "fight or flight" response mechanism found in living creatures. This is simply an unconscious reaction to stressful stimuli and doesn't signal a higher state of consciousness.
If you were a member of an alien species briefly observing the Earth 50,000 years ago, you'd probably use a similar argument that humans aren't conscious. Sure, they hunt, they play, and they show fear of danger, but that isn't substantially different from other mammals.
like humans, you can read so much in the micro-movements of a dog's eyes, nose, lips and ears.
while she has anxiety issues at home (probably abused before), my dog is a social butterfly when we're out. she knows who might give her treats and who might be a threat, approaching the former happily and the latter cautiously. she can get shy/awkward dogs to play with her while keeping aggressive dogs from getting too amped up. i still have a lot to learn from her.
Logic (based in conceit or otherwise) is just one of our tools for conditioning our reality into something that we find palatable. Another is willful ignorance. Ignore a thing and it doesn't exist. Easy.
Willful ignorance is a basic building block of "reality".
It's really quite hard to prove things like whether a duck is sentient or not, without talking to one.
You can look at ducks and see a mother making sure all her little children are following her into the lake and are safe. Is it love? Why not? We call love a profound feeling but is it really? Isn't love a function that helps us take care of our young and survive as a species? An alien, who had never encountered our planet before and perhaps thinking they are the intelligent life while the beings on Earth are just 'responding to stimuli' wouldn't see the emotions humans feel. As ducks to humans, humans to these aliens. Ducks and humans alike would appear just to be going through the motions.