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.
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”
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.
I think this isn’t too difficult to prove for animals that dream. Emotions aren’t something only humans experience. There are limits to how intelligent certain animals can be (ants and spiders are a whole different class compared to squids and dolphins) but there’s also far more to animals than the simple behaviourisms they exhibit. Even basic animals can have a personality, no matter how crude that may be compared to the personality of a human.
It’s as hard to prove that a mollusk has a rich inner life as it is to prove you have. For all I know, you’re an LLM, and for all you know, I am. Even if we are both people, who says you’re not an “NPC” merely pretending to be an intelligent person?
Proving consciousness all comes down to “I think therefore I am”.
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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First of all: please let us separate this. What one believes isn’t science. Science does not care for your (or a mollusc’s) feelings. It cars about what’s the provable truth (except when the science is psychology or behavioral biology, then it cares very much about your or the mollusc’s feelings). So if it can’t be proven, science will ignore it.
Secondly: there is something you need to take into account herey and that is cognitive abilities. It doesn’t matter how the behavioral response of an animal is, if said animal lacks the horsepower to interpret those feelings. Do you feel bad for a computer when it encounters an error? Of course not. Why would you? It lacks the cognitive ability to suffer from that error. Same goes for animals. Dies it feel compelled to be in a group? Maybe. But does that mean that inside the animal’s head it goes “oh, finally a group, I’m so safe now. I was really hurting being alone and all” or is there just a little mechanism that goes “Func_Search_Group exited with status code 0”?
We don’t know. All we know is that both exist. Dish forming swarms show more of the latter, while dogs display more of the first. if there is no psychological response to any given feeling, we can’t attribute emotions to it. Furthermore, all of this is only applicable if we assume that the way our mind works is the only way. Some animals might have a psyche that’s so far removed from ours that our metrics just don’t apply. We don’t know.Of course there are tons of animal behaviors we wrongly Attribute to instinct or reflex when they are actually emotionally driven. Yet we don’t know what those are, so we cannot just run around and play pretend because it makes us feel cozy.
We humans are actually a good example of that. At birth, we are just a bundle of cobbled together reflexes that get replaced by cognitive ability over time.
I’m holding my three weeks old toddler in my arms right now and since he is actually a human,. observing his behavior is relatable to menand easy to interpret since he’s hard wired to communicate everything bad by crying immediately.Yet, there is tons of behavior he shows that’s actually reflexes and his brain will not start the same reaction as a more developed human brain would.
Take shock as an example. He is literally impossible to upset by shock. If he feels like he’s falling or something else catches him by surprise, he’ll react by the so-called Moro reflex and try to grasp anything in his reach. It’s the same reflex we see in chimp babies. It’s meant to make the baby cling to it’s carrier’s fur. Yet, he himself doesn’t react at all. He looks midly irritated at best, if he doesn’t just continue sleeping and that’s all. His brain does not process this shock emotionally like we would, yet his body goes into full blown panic mode, desperately grasping around. No suffering, no anxiety, nothing in terms of emotions at all (and believe me, a baby will not hide those. He cries if his intestines are starting to digest the milk he just devoured)If this kind of disconnect between behavior and psyche is common in humans, it is likely to be common in other species as well, especially when those species lack the ridiculous large and energy hungry brain humans have decided was a good idea?
Is it actually the scientist neglecting the mind of an animal or is it you wishing for a mind to be where there is none? The answer is somewhere in the middle.
Oh and the cat example: that’s a result of the very mistake you made: people have somehow collectively decided that cats lack any social behavior and thus anything they do that looks like socializing must be something else, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Cats absolutely do socialize just with less to no empathy for their friends. That’s why we can only call true what’s observable.
Science does not care for your (or a mollusc’s) feelings. It cars about what’s the provable truth (except when the science is psychology or behavioral biology, then it cares very much about your or the mollusc’s feelings). So if it can’t be proven, science will ignore it.
Can you prove that you are sentient/sapient?
That’s one of those questions that’s all too often used for some cheap attempt at a trap. The question is what sort of proof is acceptable in which line of science. You can’t prove sentience in the absolute way physics can prove things. That’s just natural for scientific disciplines like psychology. Furthermore y you’d first have to define what constitutes sentience/sapience
I think that’s kind of the point though, we could meet space traveling aliens and deem them non sapient beings without emotions using the same logic we apply to animals because there’s no empirical way to prove that any creature isn’t just the sapience equivelent of a chinese room.
sapience equivelent of a chinese room
A p-zombie I think.
There is, though. The easiest one being that a sentient creature will react differently to it’s outside world, most importantly in an unpredictable manner. Think about a fish reacting to it’s surroundings and then picture a cat. One will very likely do the same thing given the same circumstances. The other won’t.
So would a fish that’s eaten a device that administers a small electric shock at random intervals and with random intensities. I don’t think that eating such a device made the fish suddenly sentient, but it would suddenly change the outcome of your test.
The only trap here is that my point was that it’s not ignored by science. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Just because we have no way of proving a theory, doesn’t mean we don’t try and find ways to do so. We still make hypotheses and theories even if we have no proven way, or understanding of how we might prove them. That’s still science.
That’s a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.
Saying “this lifeform that we can’t communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions” isn’t falsifiable and therefore isn’t science.
If at some point someone invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.
Until then words like “may” and “possible” should be used.
It’s because the show is based off of actual science and observed behaviors, not wishful thinking.
I think you’re free to believe what makes you happy :)
But making assumptions can be dangerous in science, and misconceptions, especially in the information age, can be very hard to disabuse. I’m happy for shows to not jump to conclusions just so twenty years later we’re not stuck with myths that may actually be harmful to how we understand the animals we all love.
This comes down to a difference of approaches. People naturally anthropomorphise pets and dogs have abused this by evolving expressive eyebrows so that humans bonded with them easier. The grills of cars are designed like a smiley because people recognise the headlights as eyes and attribute emotions to unfeeling metal objects based on the shape of the air intakes and panels.
If all the chemistry and physics that make up an animal are all there is to life, then it’s not hard to reason about animal intelligence. There are things we consider to be very basic (pointing at something and expecting someone else to look at what we’re pointing to) that very few animals can grasp. There are special tests to determine self awareness, like if an animal can recognise a spot drawn on its body in the mirror.
Humans lack knowledge of animal interactions (and sometimes senses) to clearly determine what animals are communicating to us. We like to attribute intelligence to dogs and other common pets that look like us mammals, but squid and birds can beat intelligence tests that human toddlers struggle with.
There is also the philosophical approach. Do animals feel? Do they posses a soul? We have no way to exchange words with animals, so we’ll likely never find out. There has not been any proof of a soul in humans, but if you believe humans do have some kind of ethereal component that’s not visible to the naked eye, it’s not hard to imagine animals may have something similar.
Some people like to pretend we as humans are super special and above animals. I don’t buy that, I think we’re just smart monkeys, nothing more, and our emotions are just more complicated forms of “behaviourisms” we see in other animals. We do possess some insight that many animals clearly lack, but cats certainly do feel joy or loss. Cats are known to grieve, as are many other animals. Of course, they don’t have the spiritual concepts we do, and once they’ve processed the loss of their friend, they’ll probably eat the body if there are no other easy ways to find food, but to consider any mammal an emotionless creature that’s more akin to a robot than a living thing is nothing but a superiority complex.
Mollusks are some of the basic forms of animal we know of. They respond to chemical cues, just like us, but there’s no proof whatsoever that they possess any kind of mental faculties beyond basic responses. Maybe they do have a soul and maybe they have intricate love lives, but we haven’t found any evidence for that yet.
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 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.
You have to remember that this is a documentary made for humans, and the narrator is trying to create an emotional hook for the human.
In reality, the social interactions of other animals are so different from what humans know that it does warrant some sort of explanation for the uninitiated. Humans just don’t know what they’re seeing.
That’s not to say that, for example, your cat doesn’t love you, it probably does. But it will feel it and display it it in accordance to the norms of a cat, which sometimes include bringing in dead mice as an offering, something that will annoy first time cat owners.
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.
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.
ITT we discover OP is dumb and also a gay fish.
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.
As italian band 883 said: “Chi é deserto non vuole che qualcosa fiorisca in te” (He who is a desert does not want something to bloom in you)
I have noticed this to. I think this article is a good example of them not giving animals enough credit.
Animals are idiots.
Yourself included?
Absolutely. Possibly moreso.
Don’t know about them, but I’m not arrogant enough to believe I’m not very, very much included.
I mean, I know I’m not the smartest person in the room, so to speak; but I’m far from the dumbest, too,
Also, sometimes the dumbass dog makes me look dumb.
Yes, it is obnoxious.
