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The caution about attributing "human concepts" to other animals, like emotions, empathy, language and self-awareness, comes from the religious idea that humans

The caution about attributing "human concepts" to other animals, like emotions, empathy, language and self-awareness, comes from the religious idea that humans are "above" all the other creatures. If God created humans as some special case, then it makes sense. Not long ago, it was believed that animals (and human babies) couldn't feel pain. Nowadays it's a ridiculous notion, but it was born of the idea that a certain animal was "exceptional" among all those others and has all these special properties, granted by God, that no other animals possess. That's not a belief that should be the "scientific" default anymore.

circlemaker 4y ago
Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying anything? Is "saying" something that more than humans can do, or when we refer to the word "say" do we only apply it to humans expressing human concepts? We don't even know if the concepts we use to describe minds are even valid, or if they are just products of introspection. This, along with the fact that other abstract aspects of the human condition are also on shaky ground when you change the underlying substrate those aspects emerge from, means that it's not clear that animals have those same exact aspects in their species-specific condition, and if they do have some similar aspects, those aspects can be quite different than what we'd find in humans, with completely different sets of states. TL;DR We hardly know if you and I see the same red, let alone if a tiger and a human feel the same joy.
- calibas 4y ago
  > Is bird song language? What are they saying? Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language". They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby. There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".

circlemaker 4y ago

Not at all. The caution about attributing human concepts to other animals is that they can have an arbitrarily different brain organization in such a way that stretches those notions beyond what we usually take them to mean. Does a tiger experience joy? If it does, what does joy feel like to a tiger? Is bird song language? What are they saying? That last question is obviously begging the question, are they saying anything? Is "saying" something that more than humans can do, or when we refer to the word "say" do we only apply it to humans expressing human concepts? We don't even know if the concepts we use to describe minds are even valid, or if they are just products of introspection. This, along with the fact that other abstract aspects of the human condition are also on shaky ground when you change the underlying substrate those aspects emerge from, means that it's not clear that animals have those same exact aspects in their species-specific condition, and if they do have some similar aspects, those aspects can be quite different than what we'd find in humans, with completely different sets of states. TL;DR We hardly know if you and I see the same red, let alone if a tiger and a human feel the same joy.

calibas 4y ago
> Is bird song language? What are they saying? Depends on what you mean by language. If you mean "a structured system of communication", then it absolutely is. The only modern scientific rejection of birds songs as language is based around the definition of the word "language". They're saying many different things such as "I'm ready to mate", "I'm hungry", "Stay away", "Come here", and "Predator nearby". Not only that, but birds are able to specify which kind of predator is nearby. There's a resistance to these ideas that goes beyond objective science, and it's because we were previously basing our understandings on faulty assumptions. There's even a term for it, "human exceptionalism".