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This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human beh

This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented. As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor. An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it. An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone. I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.

anshumankmr 5y ago
They are like us, but they aren't us. This is an example of the former.
gman83 5y ago
It's been pretty well demonstrated, for example in pigs: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c
alecst 5y ago
How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it? Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty. It’s harder to buy an argument that we are just projecting our human notion of guilt onto her, rather than she simply feels guilt. To put it another way, your position implies that all of these things were experience — laughter, grief, guilt, shame, deception — might have begun with humans. For me, that’s a position you need a lot of evidence for.
- omginternets 5y ago
  >How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way. More concretely, the argument is as follows: just because a dog feels guilt doesn't mean (a) it's felt in an equivalent way to humans, nor (b) that the overall experience of a dog is equivalent to that of a human.
  - alecst 5y ago
    It’s not clear how (b) is relevant to the conversation. Regarding (a) I would have the exact same reply. Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. My experience of guilt may not even be equivalent to yours strictly speaking, and we belong to the same species, I assume ;-).
    - omginternets 5y ago
      (b) is relevant if you think that the qualia of consciousness has a bearing on the ethics of eating meat. >Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. To be clear: I haven't actually stated my position in this debate. More to your point: this entire debate is an ethical one, so it's in the philosophical realm, so one should disabuse oneself of the notion that anything is going to be "disproven". The best we can aim for is a consistent ethical system, and conversely, the pointing out of inconsistencies. This having been said, there's a contradiction of terms if you simultaneously hold the belief -- as you seem to do -- that eating animals is wrong because they are in some sense "like us" while at the same time rejecting any notion of (non)equivalence. You exactly appeal to equivalence when you say, "Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language". So you are being inconsistent. Therefore, if this is indeed your position, you're going to have to grapple with the issue of threshold. How much similarity is too much? Holistically, is the experience of being $ANIMAL equivalent to (or within some bounds of) the experience of being human? If there are differences, which ones matter and which ones don't ... and in what amount? Those are the questions the GP was asking, and they are directly relevant to the argument.
glenstein 5y ago
I completely agree, and I think it's gotten out of control. Lately it has become vogue to attribute human intelligence to slime molds because they do complex things like solve mazes. Then that behavior gets put side by side with, say, mice trying to solve mazes. Perhaps the most egregious, in my opinion, is the way people unreflectively attribute terms to plants. I hate being a nerd about definitions, but sometimes playing and joking around with definitions serves to embed fundamental misunderstandings about the natural world. Here at hn and elsewhere, I've seen people insist that plants can "feel", that they "communicate" and are "conscious", very intentionally attempting to insist that it's same in the deepest sense as what humans do.
naasking 5y ago
> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't really exist. The mental states you attribute to suffering are merely a proxy for the behaviour you see from both humans and paramecia.
- jrlocke 5y ago
  Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?
  - naasking 5y ago
    What evidence would motivate such a distinction that doesn't ultimately reduce to special pleading?

anshumankmr 5y ago

They are like us, but they aren't us. This is an example of the former.

gman83 5y ago

It's been pretty well demonstrated, for example in pigs: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c

alecst 5y ago

How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it? Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty. It’s harder to buy an argument that we are just projecting our human notion of guilt onto her, rather than she simply feels guilt. To put it another way, your position implies that all of these things were experience — laughter, grief, guilt, shame, deception — might have begun with humans. For me, that’s a position you need a lot of evidence for.

omginternets 5y ago
>How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it? That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way. More concretely, the argument is as follows: just because a dog feels guilt doesn't mean (a) it's felt in an equivalent way to humans, nor (b) that the overall experience of a dog is equivalent to that of a human.
- alecst 5y ago
  It’s not clear how (b) is relevant to the conversation. Regarding (a) I would have the exact same reply. Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. My experience of guilt may not even be equivalent to yours strictly speaking, and we belong to the same species, I assume ;-).
  - omginternets 5y ago
    (b) is relevant if you think that the qualia of consciousness has a bearing on the ethics of eating meat. >Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. To be clear: I haven't actually stated my position in this debate. More to your point: this entire debate is an ethical one, so it's in the philosophical realm, so one should disabuse oneself of the notion that anything is going to be "disproven". The best we can aim for is a consistent ethical system, and conversely, the pointing out of inconsistencies. This having been said, there's a contradiction of terms if you simultaneously hold the belief -- as you seem to do -- that eating animals is wrong because they are in some sense "like us" while at the same time rejecting any notion of (non)equivalence. You exactly appeal to equivalence when you say, "Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language". So you are being inconsistent. Therefore, if this is indeed your position, you're going to have to grapple with the issue of threshold. How much similarity is too much? Holistically, is the experience of being $ANIMAL equivalent to (or within some bounds of) the experience of being human? If there are differences, which ones matter and which ones don't ... and in what amount? Those are the questions the GP was asking, and they are directly relevant to the argument.

glenstein 5y ago

I completely agree, and I think it's gotten out of control. Lately it has become vogue to attribute human intelligence to slime molds because they do complex things like solve mazes. Then that behavior gets put side by side with, say, mice trying to solve mazes. Perhaps the most egregious, in my opinion, is the way people unreflectively attribute terms to plants. I hate being a nerd about definitions, but sometimes playing and joking around with definitions serves to embed fundamental misunderstandings about the natural world. Here at hn and elsewhere, I've seen people insist that plants can "feel", that they "communicate" and are "conscious", very intentionally attempting to insist that it's same in the deepest sense as what humans do.

naasking 5y ago

> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't really exist. The mental states you attribute to suffering are merely a proxy for the behaviour you see from both humans and paramecia.

jrlocke 5y ago
Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?
- naasking 5y ago
  What evidence would motivate such a distinction that doesn't ultimately reduce to special pleading?