> the standards that you are using is incapable of inferring presence of emotion in animals I'm not talking about emotions in and of themselves, I'm talking ab

> the standards that you are using is incapable of inferring presence of emotion in animals I'm not talking about emotions in and of themselves, I'm talking about the conscious experience of emotions. In humans, we perhaps conflate the two, as we can have no concept of anger or joy without the ability to self-reflect on our experience, comparing our thought patterns and physiological sensations to past and possible future, and reasoning about why we're experiencing an emotion. Now, what is it like to experience an emotion without being able to self-reflect and consciously know that we are experiencing an emotion? The external manifestations do not go away. We can still infer the presence of emotion, we just have no way to know what the conscious experience is like. It's not a question that can as yet be answered by science, so any conclusion one way or another cannot be scientific. Just as we can infer emotional states in animals by their behavior, we can infer their lack of self-reflection by their lack of behavior we would deem "intelligent", at least compared to humans. And so we do not hold animals to the same intellectual standards. I am only suggesting that this lack of self-reflection and ability to reason would have profound effects on the conscious experience of emotions, even when external manifestations derived from them are similar. (Perhaps a can-of-worms digression, but this is also related to animals having Free Will and moral culpability for their actions. We generally do not infer the presence of evil in animals, for instance, regardless of their behavior, nor discipline them beyond Pavlovian classical conditioning. It's not a scientific matter; all we can do at the moment is guess.)