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Comment by sharp11 | Hacker News Reader

If you're interested in this topic, I heartily recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words. It presents compelling evidence for the thesis that the default in the animal kingdom is conscious & feeling.

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I can tell you with great certainty that the cat presently sitting in my lap has feelings. When she's angry, she turns into a total bitch and knows just how to press my wife's buttons :) Example - after getting upset about being put on a diet a while back, she relieved herself in my wife's shoes. My wife handles the feeding.

We have 4 cats, two horses, a goat, and a dog. All exhibit behavior that is inexplicable without emotion. I realize that all of these creatures are pretty close to one another in terms of classification, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if these behaviors existed in creatures more distantly related to our cadre of quadrupeds.

It would surprise me to learn that animals don't have emotions and consciousness.

I read once that we are not our thoughts - we are the agent that experiences and hears our thoughts. I think that this meta-congition is uniquely human (and consequently, the ability to think about meta-congnition is uniquely human).

Just took a glance at this, and it doesn't seem the book suggests that the whole of the animal kingdom has consciousness, right? Could we attribute this to a spider or a scorpion? Of course this depends on the definition of C, but we can agree there's a "higher" form of consciousness, which the book is mostly exemplifying by using elephants and wolves. These larger creatures seem obvious, but serve no evidence to whether or not the simpler lifeforms like insects, and even small fish have anything more than basic instincts.

I have a betta. It's pretty easy to tell when he's feeling something; if you've ever had or seen one, you know they're pretty expressive little guys. Granted, he mostly seems to be anticipating being fed (or the possibility of lady bettas wandering by the nests of bubbles he builds), or getting pissed off (which he displays by war-dancing -- just youtube it) at the snail living in his tank, but he's fully capable of interacting with humans at the level of most other sorts of pets. I'm not anthropomorphizing. If he could breathe air, he'd be doing his very best macho impersonation of a tomcat (or small yippy dog that thinks it's approximately the size of a great dane).

If we go one step up and think about the average high schooler, I still am having trouble differentiating what (the high schooler) he or she might feel from what the betta might -- hunger, sexual frustration, happiness, annoyance, loneliness... the betta probably can't do trigonometry, doesn't have opposable thumbs, and has a different set of instincts tailored to his environment. We've simply evolved to do different things; that doesn't mean humans cannot observe emotions analogous to our own in other creatures.

Spider-wise, I've never observed one for periods of time long enough to do much more than remove it from my house, but who knows.

The book is architected around three exceptionally rich (and well-studied) examples: wolves, elephants, and dolphins (esp., killer whales). But he spends a great deal of time on other species (birds, fish, and yes, insects) and you would be missing the point of the book to think he's only talking about "higher" species.

Read the book -- it really is mind-altering.

There are animals that don't have a central nervous system and even some that don't even have a nervous system at all (sponges). How are they supposed to feel?

Not 'feelings' exactly, but, 1mm long nematode worms (with only 1000 cells) can show signs of depression and become addicted to nicotine amongst many other surprisingly 'human' behaviours.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caenorhabditis_elegans

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?q=c+elegans+depression&...

You seem to be identifying consciousness with the physical structures that apparently support it. We read every day on this forum that correlation is not causation.

I'm currently reading it and I reiterate the suggestion. It is very compelling. Plus it is very well written, which makes reading it a very pleasant experience.

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