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Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question?

Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?

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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

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.

But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of quantifying and making sense out of it.

We don't have a machine that can measure qualia in humans for that matter!

> 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?

We know that there is a difference in humans at least, because there's such a thing as acting.

Are dogs really sorry when they eat the sofa? Or pretending?

Personally I think it's similar to children. Below a certain age/maturity level they only know that they've done something wrong because they can read our emotional reaction...but they have no real idea why it's wrong. That understanding comes later for children but never happens w/ dogs.

Dogs are certainly not pretending in the way that a human actor is pretending. The question is whether or not dogs are really feeling an emotion. We know that humans can look as if they're feeling a particular emotion without actually feeling it because we know that they can pretend (convincingly) to feel it. So we know that in general, it is possible for someone or something to give the appearance of feeling an emotion without actually feeling it. So, we know that the fact that a dog looks sad is not particularly good evidence that it is actually feeling sad.

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 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?).

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.

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