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Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal. Sure, we've got t

• card_zero 6d ago
  Do LLMs grieve?
  • georgemcbay 6d ago
    Nope. They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
    • card_zero 6d ago
      Do whales grieve?
      • georgemcbay 6d ago
        > Do whales grieve? Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence. So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
        • nexie 6d ago
          I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
          • georgemcbay 6d ago
            > I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well! Thanks, stranger. I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life. Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place. Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
          • the_af 6d ago
            "That isn't me" in the above comment means "I know I can grieve, but I can only tell indirectly other people can do so as well." It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".
      • stackghost 6d ago
        They exhibit behaviours that seem to defy alternative explanations, though I doubt anyone could say for certain whether they do or don’t
        • card_zero 6d ago
          You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive. Here's an article about orcas: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047 It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
          • pastel8739 6d ago
            You might also argue that although there may be a non-emotional argument for why grieving could be beneficial, it’s possible or even likely that evolution encoded this instinct in something like emotions. Just how evolution encoded the tendency to care for one’s family and community in emotions for humans.
            • card_zero 6d ago
              Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.
        • jibal 6d ago
          > They exhibit behaviours that seem to defy alternative explanations No, they really don't. The article says > indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calf Yeah, that's not grieving.
    • Ma8ee 6d ago
      How do you know that they don’t? And conversely, how do you know any other human than yourself do?
      • RealityVoid 6d ago
        Do books grieve? I ascribe the same kind of interaction to llm's. They work on a different substrate than us and their perception of reality, if there is any, will be wholly different than our perception because of the constraints of the substrate itself. Not to mention the lack of continuity of existence kind of precludes any deeper and more meaningful interactions with the self. I am not saying that they are unable to feel, but at the current structure and ephemeral existance they are unable to do so, they lack the minimum prerequisites.
        • pixl97 6d ago
          >Do books grieve? Is there any ordered state changes occurring in books? >they lack the minimum prerequisites. And these minimum prerequisites are? There are a number of scientists that would love your empirical evidence. >lack of continuity of existence Eh, the lengths of timelines that LLMs can execute for, and this is in singular execution and agentic evolution is ever increasing. There isn't any time based requirements either. For example I can give you all kinds of drugs that turn off and on your conscious awareness and this doesn't stop self interaction when you're awake.
  • sssilver 6d ago
    Insofar as grieving is an inherently, fundamentally a very particular chemical process, the answer is a resounding “no”.
    • Ma8ee 6d ago
      If you simulate that chemical process in a computer, if necessary a quantum computer?
      • fennecbutt 6d ago
        You don't even need quantum imo. On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable. From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
        • throwaway173738 6d ago
          This is too mechanistic. You also choose which emotions to pay attention to.
          • pixl97 6d ago
            This is too simple in itself. When your afraid you can choose to ignore the fear, but you are still afraid and it has physical effects that can be measured. There is at least a trinary state of possible outcomes and as the situation space becomes more complex and solutions drift apart on all 3.
      • sssilver 6d ago
        Then, logically speaking, you get a simulation of griefing.
        • Ma8ee 5d ago
          And in what lies the difference?
  • moomoo11 6d ago
    do humans? or is it only because we're the ones doing the research and so we say we do? i think most people are automatons and can be programmed. it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them. people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.
    • JumpCrisscross 6d ago
      > do humans? or is it only because we're the ones doing the research and so we say we do? ...literally on this article.
  • plaguuuuuu 6d ago
    You can give them emotional signals, but I feel like it's cruel to do so and would recommend against it.
    • slfnflctd 6d ago
      One of the important overlooked aspects of this is how maltreatment of something that appears to be human-like in many ways by an actual human affects the person doing it. I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
      • cindyllm 6d ago
        [dead]
      • jonhohle 6d ago
        We’ve had 30 years of people killing digital people, often controlled by actual people without any obvious impact on violent tendencies. I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
        • pixl97 6d ago
          This is one of those things that really does need checked up on occasionally. For example, do video games not cause violence because of something like being on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. We know it's fake therefore its fake. Do does this break down when it gets "too real". For example lets imagine a future VR video game that the inside game doesn't feel much different from the world we live in? Lets also imagine an interesting unique constraint in this video game. If you die in it you cannot play it any more. You play it for years safely and make romantic connections in it. One day someone kills your partner violently in front of you. You'd be pretty willing to take up violence against said person, right? How much of that violence would carry out of the game? I don't want to make proclamations like the video game violence people did that were not correct, but I also don't want to assume as we make our simulacra more like us that it won't affect us somehow. Situations like this are rarely binary, and it's best to keep an eye on it. Lastly, because LLMs can and do effect the real world with their actions, it's likely a good idea to error to the side of caution and at least be polite.
  • krupan 6d ago
    Do androids dream of electric sheep?
• ggsp 6d ago
  I know the point you’re making is half facetious—do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?
  • georgemcbay 6d ago
    > do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning? When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time. And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
    • bot403 6d ago
      I'll write the dissenting opinion that the models still aren't very good at planning rather it's the agentic harness and prompts thereof that are giving us better planning ability on long and larger tasks.
      • tenuousemphasis 6d ago
        So they're good at planning but only when used certain ways.
        • krupan 6d ago
          No, only when use in conjunction with not-LLM software
      • phoghed 6d ago
        If the model is bad at planning but the system created with the model at its core is, eventually, good at planning, what's the functional difference?
• parasti 6d ago
  It's like that time when they "discovered" that babies can feel pain.
  • deleted 6d ago
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  • ignoramous 6d ago
    I can barely read Jill Lawson's letter: My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed. ... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all. The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer. From: https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/pediatric-pain-history-when-doctors-didnt-give-infants-anesthesia https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/pediatric-pain-history... / https://archive.vn/5hTuT https://archive.vn/5hTuT
    • srean 6d ago
      There's Descartes dog too.
    • TeMPOraL 6d ago
      Can we unbury the lede here? Did Jeffrey survive? "such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
• jbotz 6d ago
  Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape. Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Made_Us_Human https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
  • sethammons 6d ago
    Other animals use fire, while we continue to seem unique in creating it. Fire hawks take burning sticks and alight brush to flush prey. https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-prey/ https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6d ago
      There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
  • dotancohen 6d ago
    Humans had completely mastered fire by about 200,000 years ago - after 800,000 years of experimentation. Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.
    • DFHippie 6d ago
      How can we date the origin of speech?
• jibal 6d ago
  "People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture." — Daniel Dennett https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves "One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language. It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much." "Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too." "A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture." “I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
  • nextaccountic 6d ago
    We are not different. Whales exhibit culture too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_species_other_than_humans_have_culture/ https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_...
• JumpCrisscross 6d ago
  > Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
  • phoghed 6d ago
    > We are different from other animals Most animals are different from most others, we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special.
    • JumpCrisscross 6d ago
      > we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special We’re similar to other globally-consequential species. The oxygen-generating organisms that promoted the GOE, for example. What makes us unique is we can be self aware about that power. Refusing to see that isn’t humility, it’s nihilism.
    • s1artibartfast 6d ago
      What do you think 'special' means in that sentence? What differences would make something special?
      • phoghed 6d ago
        Obviously God made us in his image and gave us all this to rule over, no way we arose from the same primordial soup as the bugs and rats. We’ve got souls, they don’t.
        • deleted 6d ago
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        • s1artibartfast 5d ago
• warumdarum 6d ago
  Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult. These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
  • 9dev 6d ago
    Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”. There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
    • deleted 6d ago
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    • warumdarum 6d ago
      So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
    • tekne 6d ago
      Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor. This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
    • 6d ago
• vor_ 6d ago
  > Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal. But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
  • alpineman 6d ago
    So by your logic we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals?
    • card_zero 6d ago
      Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
      • sethammons 6d ago
        Holy category error Batman! Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep? It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
        • card_zero 6d ago
          Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
        • TeMPOraL 6d ago
          Category error started at "we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals". Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals. Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
• alpineman 6d ago
  Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
  • atoozy 6d ago
    [dead]
  • WhyIsItAlwaysHN 6d ago
    Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
    • DangitBobby 6d ago
      Someone is aware this is necessary because they are carrying it out.
  • annex-winged-cr 6d ago
    I once heard someone claim that we've somehow completely "bred away" any maternal instincts from dairy cows. So it's perfectly okay to forcibly separate them from their calves. It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
    • Aromasin 6d ago
      Man, I remember carrying a veal calf in a wheelbarrow away from it's grieving mother (who ended up distressed for days) when I was 16 doing some Summer farm work. It messed me up for weeks, and I still somehow went back to drinking dairy. Thankfully I've sworn off all animal products now, but the knowing cruelty of it I suppressed for a long time.
    • 6d ago
• alex_smart 6d ago
  I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
• sethammons 6d ago
  We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise. Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain. Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else. Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/
  • david-gpu 6d ago
    > Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain. My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
    • card_zero 6d ago
      You know, if there was a hypnotic drug such that I could be sure I'd remember nothing (and many, many similar caveats), I'd volunteer to be caused all kinds of pain, because I don't see why I should care. The only moral angle I can see is the question of who would want it and why. Research maybe? In of itself, it doesn't seem bad.
      • thriftwy 6d ago
        Isn't that the same as submitting your clone to fear and torment because you will not have a lasting memory of surviving all that? What's the practical difference other than timelike distance between you rather than spacelike distance?
• ozozozd 6d ago
  Pretty sure the Abrahamic religions promote the idea that we are special and god gave us the nature for us to feed ourselves, rule the rest. All that talk of lord, kingdoms etc. It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
  • deleted 6d ago
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  • pixl97 6d ago
    Empathy is a liability when you're starving.
• ajuc 6d ago
  I've heard scientists say dogs don't have theory of mind and making a big deal out of some animals that do have some traces of it, when any dog owner can confirm they do. I've seen my dog bury a bone in one place while the other dog watches, then rebury it in a different place when the other dog went home. I've also seen my parents' previous dog pretend he's closed in the enclosure with the doghouse when neighbors cat approached even when he wasn't. Then when the cat came to their backyard the dog would run after the cat. It's so obvious, it's baffling to me how science could ever miss it.
  • s1artibartfast 5d ago
    Can you have theory of behavior without theory of mind? I think so, almost by definition. A dog knows that the cat will run when the dog charges. Is that theory of mind?
• krupan 6d ago
  There is no survival for us without hurting some other living organism. Even a purely vegan diet (which does not provide the complete nutrition we need) hurts plants and other critters that also want to eat those same plants or use them for shelter or whatever. So, I agree that we probably shouldn't feel too superior or different from other living things, but we also don't need to beat ourselves up for hurting other living things. We can't eat rocks.
  • SomaticPirate 6d ago
    Source? It’s very possible today to adopt a plant-based diet and its typically superior in its health benefits to most other diets (especially the standard Western diet). https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/planning-a-plant-based-diet https://www.health.harvard.edu/healthbeat/planning-a-plant-b... Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
    • krupan 6d ago
      https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-get-from-plants https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/7-nutrients-you-cant-ge... B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation True herbivores have stomachs that can ferment B12 from the plants they eat. We do not
      • setopt 6d ago
        Another one can be iron, depending on your genes. There’s plenty of iron-rich vegetarian options, but heme iron in animal sources typically is absorbed at rates of ~40% while non-heme iron in plant sources is absorbed at 1-10% depending on the specific source. Non-heme iron absorption is also blocked by calcium and magnesium that compete for the same receptors. It’s not impossible to get enough iron in a vegan diet without supplementation, but it requires some careful planning of what sources you eat and how you cook it, and if you’re genetically predisposed to anemia it can be risky without monitoring your bloodwork.
• TacticalCoder 6d ago
  You mean how special are we as a species that we managed to create machines that may become more intelligent than us? I think that makes us really quite special.
• Applejinx 6d ago
  No, language is communication. Those numbers just sit there unless someone tries to get them to do something. There's nobody in there and nothing to communicate, and you might fairly ask whether, if that sand WANTED anything, it wished to just be let alone without being made to jump through hoops for the pleasure of humans.