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Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is also very good on the topic of scientific research not allowing empathy between anima

Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is also very good on the topic of scientific research not allowing empathy between animals as a prior in research, due to the decades-long stranglehold of behaviorism in research. He argues that it's more ridiculous to suggest that we start from a point of treating animals as if they don't have complex emotional lives than the other way around (although in that book he's talking primarily about mammals). He still thinks you should try to prove things scientifically, just that the starting point of treating them like input-output machines is a really weird one.

netizen-936824 5y ago
We are input-output machines though. Being so doesn't preclude us from having vivid internal emotional experiences, I don't know why it would. Both things are true
- drekk 5y ago
  There's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies in boiling water and explaining the unpleasant noise as air escaping the lungs as an example. Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Right I agree, our view of non-human organisms (and even young humans) has been significantly flawed for a long time and we're barely improving with this realisation. Computers may even have some sort of sentience or awareness that we can't comprehend right now, but they get "treated like robots"

netizen-936824 5y ago

We are input-output machines though. Being so doesn't preclude us from having vivid internal emotional experiences, I don't know why it would. Both things are true

drekk 5y ago
There's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies in boiling water and explaining the unpleasant noise as air escaping the lungs as an example. Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Right I agree, our view of non-human organisms (and even young humans) has been significantly flawed for a long time and we're barely improving with this realisation. Computers may even have some sort of sentience or awareness that we can't comprehend right now, but they get "treated like robots"