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Dolphins probably have a multi-tiered approach to dealing with humans. When they can get free food without trying, they don’t bother performing high cost activi

• jonny_eh 6y ago
  > Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food People say that about pets too, but those people usually don't own pets. Why can't animals have similar social instincts to humans? Maybe they just want to hang out too.
• strogonoff 6y ago
  The same logic can be applied to humans. “I don’t believe parents actually love their children and vice-versa. Parents are merely delivery vehicles of food for children. Children are delivery vehicles of future care for parents. Humans are probably projecting their fantasies about themselves being fundamentally better than they are in reality.” We don’t directly perceive that dolphins project their fantasies about humans, but like with our fellow humans, it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing that.
  • cephaslr 6y ago
    Being merely a delivery vehicle for my children's food would explain some of their behavior...
  • number6 6y ago
    You clearly don't have children. No amount of fantasy projection makes up for the trouble you go through. You have to be spiked with oxytocin to cope with it.
    • tprice7 6y ago
      I think that was the point. They are trying to show how that sort of logic is flawed.
      • number6 6y ago
        You are right.. sleep deprivation is a bitch
        • smichel17 6y ago
          I appreciate that HN is a place where people are willing to admit mistakes like this / change their mind, etc. Thank you :)
  • pmiller2 6y ago
    I was going to downvote out of disagreement, but, on second thought, this makes good sense. We probably wouldn't hesitate to say "I don't believe $NONHUMAN_ANIMAL parents love their children, and vice-versa...." about most animals. There might be hesitation when it comes to apes, monkeys, and maybe dogs, but I can imagine people would say it about, say, hyenas, and it would seem plausible.
    • ComputerGuru 6y ago
      I don’t know about “love” because it has a lot of connotations but try to take a baby from a litter from any animal and watch how crazy mama animal gets. Swans, cats, birds, dogs, bears, whales, whatever.
    • Sharlin 6y ago
      It's easy to anthropomorphize animals, but it's also easy to go overboard in the other direction. In general, as our understanding of animal cognition has increased, we have moved away from human exceptionalism, finding that traits once thought to be unique to humans are anything but. Certainly we've come far from the Cartesian viewpoint of non-human animals as mindless automata. "Love" in particular, of course, is both a highly loaded and acutely ill-defined concept, so "can a <non-human animal> feel love" is probably a wrong question [1]. By the way, it's rather appropriate that you mentioned hyenas given how misunderstood they are by laypeople, in no small part due to their presentation in a certain Disney film. [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-questions https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-ques...
      • pmiller2 6y ago
        Yeah, I agree. It's a difficult enough philosophical problem to understand the mental states of even another human, much less an animal with a completely different brain structure. There has been some work purring dogs in fMRI machines that shows that their brains respond to humans in ways that indicate they like us, but that's pretty far from conclusive. After all, I know my dog likes dinner, so she'd probably display activity in the pleasure center when presented with a bowl of her food. In any case, what matters is that I love her, and she is doing nothing to disabuse me of the notion. ;) Oh, and, yes, I did choose hyenas specifically because they're a misunderstood species. Glad you picked up on that.
  • roosterdawn 6y ago
    I don't think this logic applied to humans actually is inaccurate. For much of human history, extended family cohabitation was the norm, and the standard American nuclear was a radical, almost unimaginable idea. Most animals operate on a biological impulse to further their offspring; do most animals operate this way to pursue immortality and evade death? I don't see anything inaccurate with this base level analysis, although it obviously elides most of the finer elements of human existence that exist a bit higher up on Maslow's hierarchy.
  • em-bee 6y ago
    this can be seen in some cultures where the eldest son and his family are held in high esteem because he is the one responsible for taking care of the parentd while daugthers are a burden, since they will be with their husband supporting the husbands parents.
  • amelius 6y ago
    It seems we are getting in philosophical territory here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_love
• rozab 6y ago
  I don't think this is a fair conclusion at all. Dolphin behaviour has been well studied and it's clear that they seek out mental stimulation for its own sake.
• bitwize 6y ago
  I've heard this said about cats, that cats view humans strictly as food dispensers. But I've personally seen cats develop separation anxiety when they thought their humans weren't around -- and then settle right down as soon as a familiar human come into view. To a cat, humans provide some manner of physical and emotional security as well, to say nothing of affection. It's the same with any healthy human relationship. Can you imagine how sad it would be to make extraordinary efforts for a person who did absolutely nothing for you? We reward those who provide us something of value -- security, affection, a sympathetic ear -- with our sacrifices.
  • timthorn 6y ago
    > settle right down as soon as a familiar human come into view After a period of sulking first, of course.
    • chris_va 6y ago
      It must be frustrating as a cat. Imagine going through the effort to domesticate and entire species to provide fire, food, shelter, etc. and then have them wander off somewhere without asking. At least they still upload those funny worship videos to the internet.
  • wondringaloud 6y ago
    I don't see how your anecdote differentiates between these two scenarios: 1. Human leaves, cat gets separation anxiety due to feeling less emotionally secure 2. Human leaves, cat gets separation anxiety because their primary source of food is missing
    • wl 6y ago
      I've seen cats bond with people who don't feed them. Some cats are food motivated. Others are affection motivated. Some are both.
      • jschwartzi 6y ago
• NineStarPoint 6y ago
  They say in the article that “In all likelihood, they probably don’t miss humans per se. They probably miss a free meal and the routine.” and “When it’s not happening, maybe it’s just out of boredom.” Which actually seems more plausible to me than food motivation. Dolphins are one of the most intelligent, social, and oftentimes pointlessly cruel animals we know of. All this points to an animal with a cognitive level capable of having been interested in humans and now being bored due to their absence. And in that boredom, having not much better to do with their time than go looking for “gifts”. It’s also possible they’re just motivated by the food of course, but ultimately I feel like a Dolphin’s mental complexity is high enough that it’s hard for us to say exactly what motivates them in complex situations.
  • kitotik 6y ago
    As in humans, it’s also possible that they don’t all share the exact same motivation at the exact same time.
  • supernova87a 6y ago
    Vacationing Woman Thinks Cats Miss Her https://www.theonion.com/vacationing-woman-thinks-cats-miss-her-1819565888 https://www.theonion.com/vacationing-woman-thinks-cats-miss-...
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      The Onion is on point as ever, but dolphins are a lot more social than cats.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • ris 6y ago
      If there were one onion link posted in these comments I would have expected it to be https://local.theonion.com/dolphin-spends-amazing-vacation-swimming-with-stockbrok-1819575361 https://local.theonion.com/dolphin-spends-amazing-vacation-s...
    • 6y ago
• asdf21 6y ago
  >I don’t believe they actually miss the tourists themselves. Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food. Sharing food between mammals generally leads to bonding. Like, all mammals.
  • kitotik 6y ago
    Hmm, I’ve bonded with birds via food too. At least I like to think I did ;)
    • keenmaster 6y ago
      Birds are brutal. Watch this black stork kill her weakest baby while its siblings wait for the meal. https://youtu.be/4QkzwXMPDnI https://youtu.be/4QkzwXMPDnI
      • kitotik 6y ago
        Ha! Fair point. I didn’t mention that I’ve also had fingers pierced to the bone by birds.
• jgwil2 6y ago
  But surely this multi-tiered approach is not articulated logically or linguistically by the dolphins themselves. They can't be cynical if they don't reason. So the instinct or memory that makes them associate humans and food must manifest as some kind of feeling, right?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• AbrahamParangi 6y ago
  If you can’t tell the difference, does it really matter?
• majormajor 6y ago
  How would this involve being "better" than humans? The projection here would solely be: "people are social animals and we miss seeing the dolphins; dolphins are social animals and they could miss us too" That's a much smaller leap than you're suggesting people are making. The other way also seems to risk erring on the "people are special and unique compared to animals" side.
  • keenmaster 6y ago
    To clarify, I meant some people not all. I’ve observed an uptick in Malthusian sentiment. It’s not uncommon for people to say things like this: “Honestly is it wrong that I’m happier that the dog survived the car crash than its owner?” or “it would be better if we all just die off and let Mother Nature heal.”
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• MichailP 6y ago
  If several possible motivations describe the same behavior, why go for the most cynical one? It is not a sign of intellectual rigor. There is a wide array of emotions, and not every action is driven on fear and selfishness, in fact the best things most certainly aren't.
  • toiletfuneral 6y ago
    I think there's a strong desire to maintain the victorian view that animals are simply moving plants with just more complex senses & reactions because acknowledging a deeper emotional & intellectual model inside of animals might require meaningfully changing our highly profitable food supply chain as well as social and legal frameworks regarding property
• major505 6y ago
  There are cases of dolphins bonding with humans, but they are formed after long periods of time. There's that famous fued stoty of the douphin that commit suicide and inspired the ECCO games.
• jmull 6y ago
  Both people and dolphins are highly social. Of course the food is an important part of the interaction, but it seems likely they view humans socially and get more out of the interaction than, say, if they were pressing a lever to get food. (BTW, food is an important part of human social interactions as well — probably the easiest way to get someone to like you is to feed them.) I don’t know that, of course, but I’m only assuming dolphin social tendencies can bridge the species gap in a similar way that human social tendencies do (and for cats, and dogs, and horses, and lions, etc.)
• undershirt 6y ago
  > I don’t believe they actually miss the tourists themselves. Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food. I’ve recently taken to the idea that intellectual stances and embodied experiences are not derivable from one another. Each toolkit is separate, and weird things happen when you try to extend one into the other. For example, I felt it emotively when reading your comment, that the intellect is extraordinarily good at reducing everything into nothing, because it is a core presupposition that we must view things mechanically, to have mechanical proficiency. Similarly, to have emotional proficiency, we must make our emotional presuppositions. This is not the obsolete definition of “myth” as stories we make up to make us feel good, because that’s again a framing of a reductionist intellect. What I’m trying to limn is not anti-intellectualism, but that there is no common framework to contain both of these separate modalities. Don’t let the stomach cannibalize the liver, we need both.
  • keenmaster 6y ago
    I hear you, and I think it’s valuable to delineate the intellectual from the emotional to some extent. With love being such a nebulous concept, I want to set out my narrow definition in the context of this conversation. Anthropomorphic love necessarily requires abstract cognition which is beyond the abilities of dolphins. Dolphins can love you, and love each other, but the love is entirely rooted in lower cognitive states which simply draw a connection between you and a few very tangible, primal things. There’s love, and then there’s love love.
    • undershirt 6y ago
      i agree, and thanks for your charitable reading (re-reading what i said, i actually hate the way i said it). > love is entirely rooted in lower cognitive states you likely already know this, but emergence adds a famous corollary to what “rooted in” means: > Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle: the behavior of the parts (down) is determined by the behavior of the whole (up), so determination moves downward instead of upward. The difference is that determination is not complete. It gets into an example that makes this sound less mystical. But applying that here, “love love” abstractly might be the higher signal abstraction for understanding “lower cognitive states”, because the lower stuff emerges higher stuff that constrains its behavior using higher complexity rules. [1]: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DOWNCAUS.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DOWNCAUS.html
• jungletime 6y ago
  "The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa-funded project that went wrong" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
• m463 6y ago
  They are like human teenagers and gather resources in the same way. It starts with the least costly (waiting), then higher cost (text nd $$ sn)... but dolphins don't text.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  > I don’t believe they actually miss the tourists themselves. Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food. People are probably projecting their fantasies about animals being fundamentally better than humans. I think your perspective is from a lack of personal experiences and relationships with non-human animals, or you would feel different. I've had many relationships with all kinds of animals, and while food is often the initial connect (just as it often is with human), there is also much recognition, affection, comfort, attachment, appreciation of each other's company. I've experienced this with cats, dogs a sparrow, a pigeon, and many other animals, so to think that dolphins, some of the smartest animals we know, would miss the company, play, etc. of humans does not seem that far-fetched to me, personally.