Do animals feel empathy? the decades-long quest for an answer

Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self". Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know - would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the image in the mirror is him and not another animal.

Agreed. I think the whole philosophical discussion of this question is mainly complexity introduced by humans; we invented the definition of word and now expect every animal to formally adhere to our definition of what "empathy" is, or be declared "without empathy".

Especially when there are plenty documented examples of animals disregarding their own security to help another animal in distress (including humans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE

I recently read the paper `Animal Minds, Animal Morality` where the author thinks it should come down to the ability to experience 'experiences'. Its an interesting read.

I would guess that just like any physical trait, some emotions will be conserved by evolution and some will be unique. For example, emotions from the primitive parts of our brain like fear may be conserve across much of the animal kingdom. Empathy, which I define as a shared emotional experience, may be uniquely primate (but the article seems to indicate otherwise?).

> If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question?

You can take it one step further and ask if there is even a difference?

In, "Stumbling on Happiness" [0] Gilbert's explanation of conditioned actions we just perform without it registering in our "awareness" hit home with me and may provide a model for understanding how animals (humans included) can do something that looks like it requires this invented empathy, awareness, etc. but can in fact be done without any "awareness" of what you're doing. Exploring consciousness isn't the point of the book at all, but the one section where he touched on it seemed to speak to your question some.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...

I was gonna post the same sentiment.

My dog has such a huge range of emotions, it's no doubt in my mind he feels in many ways like we do.

He even has dreams and nightmares.

Slightly OT: according to actual scientific research ([1]) done by Rupert Sheldrake, dogs are even telepathic.

There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining the experiments.

[1] http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy

exactly. i remember my doge trying to cheer me up whenever i felt sad

I have a dog, too and have to admit I sometimes use her as an "emotions detector" - much like a guide dog, because I'm actually not that good at recognizing people's emotions/moods. The angles at which she puts her ears and head are pretty reliable and easy to read indicators. :) When she sees someone's upset or sad she'll walk over to them and cheer them up. Even random people in the street or on the subway. I mostly fail to even notice...

Science is a hard work, and sometimes, you need to have some fun too.

yeah, my thoughts exactly... scientists looking for empathy in animals are exposing their own lack of empathy for those very same animals...

The article is clear that the purpose of the research was not empathy study, but pain study.

"Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance."

There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I wonder why vinegar was used here.

The hot water test is actually one of the nicer tests.

120 F isn't that hot, it only hurts after a while, and the mouse can take its tail out at any time. That's how they were able to detect the effect; the mice that saw the other mice do the test took their tails out faster because they knew it'd eventually hurt based on the prior mouse's reaction.

Tell me about it...

I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking.

This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.

Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being "Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as conceive of the feeling in question?

This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy), therefore all Y have property P.

By this logic, self-evidently other animals also discuss this on their version of Hacker News.

They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals.

You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait.

Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.