Could Cats and Dogs Feel the Same Emotions We Do?
nautil.us
nautil.us
(FWIW I don't personally believe that people are p-zombies, but I believe that purely on faith, and because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.)
The only thing you need to take on faith is that your perception of the world is not simulated. Assuming that your experiences are real, every comparison of yourself to other people is evidence that you work the same. You can compare behavior, MRIs, xrays, whatever.
I know nobody here actually believes in p-zombies, I'm just making a point in response to the original comment that it's totally reasonable to be sure that other humans are conscious, and not sure that animals are. Those positions are consistent if you're operating with a usable definition of evidence and truth. It's philosophically possible that other people are zombies, but it's practically possible that some animals are zombies.
Rather than downmod, why not show how it doesn't?
Anxious is describing the behavior itself, not the cause of it. You would be correct if it had said the behavior was due to being anxious, because that's describing the mind state of who's performing the behavior and the cause of it.
Why is twitching labeled anxious? Perhaps it is part of a workout routine, in which case it would be more accurate to label the same observed behavior as exercise.
But in fields like behaviorology, and psychology you can regularly see people talking about "X behavior" as generalization for "short ticks, flinching, quicker speech, pacing, etc." which will be given a fuller treatment elsewhere.
It makes sense to talk about not knowing the mind of a cat or dog in a way that it does not make sense to say the same of a person, even if you grant that "you never really know someone else," and even if you grant the technical possibility that everyone else is just a sophisticated automaton (though it's unclear what that would even mean, or how that would change anything).
How is this any more of an evidence?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affect_(psychology)
It's only lay persons who think there's any difference.
I can't disagree more strongly with this. Sure, we can never know "for sure". But it's the same with other humans. Language, despite what is said here, doesn't solve that, even if it feels that way.
In other words a human saying "I feel happy" is not actual evidence that they are having a subjective experience like our own feeling of happiness. Or rather, it is evidence, but no stronger than smiling. Which, in turn, is the same type of evidence as a dog wagging its tail and showing other signs of happiness.
We can attribute mental states to both humans and animals to the same extent. Of course, they might be different - we may never know what it is like to experience the world through sonar, and animals may not feel some specific human emotions. But anyone that has loved a pet knows the pet can feel things, just as well as they can know that other humans feel things.
There is discussion of emotions that members and packs experience that humans find foreign. Belonging to a pack being one of them; a lone Tine member that can't merge into a new pack is considered a tragic case.
Anyway, probably worth a read just for those novel ideas about other lifeforms.
Further, humans have evolved at least one emotion that appears to have virtually no analog anywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust If you don't think that's an "emotion", read that page and follow some of the references; I have found it to be a very interesting topic. If humans have this one, it would seem to defy imagination that there aren't other lines that have other emotions that we don't. In fact I've seen it suggested that it's actually amazing how much similarity there is in the entire mammal line between emotional states and the expressions of those states. To a certain extent, mammals are capable of very basic emotional communication across the entire line. We take it for granted, but compare with, for instance, reptiles.
I assume they evolved (what I'm suggesting is) the disgust behavior because it makes them easy for other animals to smell, which makes it hard for them to hunt, and easier for larger animals to hunt them.
In fact, the Wikipedia article you linked to has a section about an acquired disgust response in mice. I agree that there's a difference between acquired disgust and innate disgust, but it's an indication that animals are capable of feeling something akin to disgust.
One thing I do think about a lot is what mental capacity other animals have that we do not. An elephant's brain is way bigger than ours. Considering that other large animals have proportionately smaller brains, it must be that size for a reason. I wonder what mental things are easy for an elephant but hard for a human?
Controlling an articulated trunk with tens of thousands of muscles for one.
Due to their body size, elephants need to move around a lot for forraging and, in the African Savahna at least, find water. The survival of the pack often depends on the matriarch ability to navigate through land they have not visited in many years, and finding all the scarse watersprings without the benefit of navigation instruments.
It had nothing to do with socialization or training. The Pekingese was simply more aggressive and was never listening to our command, when outdoors at least. And at some point we simply have up on trying to educate him, because that was a losing battle. The Rottweiler on the other hand knew what we wanted at all times. She even knew when we wanted her to become aggressive without any special words spoken. Obviously she was never aggressive towards the Pekingese or she would have killed him. A hard thing to do, since this kindness wasn't returned by the Pekingese.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved both. But the Rottweiler was clearly much smarter and more adapted to live as part of a family ;-)
PS: Broke my heart when she died, hence why I'll never adopt a dog again. They live much shorter lives, hence you get to be a parent of sorts, then watch them die, sometimes horribly.
It is not unusual to see ill-tempered small dogs at all.
Without a proper control, I put it down to environment and how they're treated. Many small dogs are "purse dogs" that are treated like accessories instead of dogs, and I hypothesize that has something to do with it. I mean, people get a small dog because it fits a certain lifestyle, and that lifestyle may not include treating your pet such that he gains confidence in all situations. But that's just me talking out my butt, I have nothing that isn't anecdote or SWAG to prove my point.
> When I thought about Lucas as anxious, I also began to think about his needs more than I had before. I played with him more often and gave him more, smaller meals.
This really makes me wonder what the specialist's suggestions were, because "more play and attention, like he is accustomed to" seems like the simplest #1 solution.
beside being just a religious dogma of "only humans have soul" in disguise, answering "No" would mean that the one can suggest a specific plausible place in a continuous chain of living organisms from any human back to first cell (or just to say first mammals) where the "soul" ("mental states") supposedly magically appeared. I mean did Neanderthals had soul? Did Australopithecus? Did the apes 2M years ago?
Not sure of the colloquial meaning of "barmy" (and the Mac OS dictionary is no help), but if it's a negative term, I'd argue that observation says it can help in some situations.
Let me tell you, they definitely have feelings.
Some cats are overjoyed to see me, they even come running down the road, purring and chirping at me. It's not because of the food because many of them don't even eat it right when I put it down, they must eat later in the day. They are just genuinely happy to get some attention, to "talk" to you and to be talked to.
What people should be asking is if all those chickens, cows and bulls that are slaughtered every year had feelings and if it is right to raise them only to kill them.
(and yes I know the irony is the cat food is made of chickens, cows, etc. - I don't know how to resolve that conflict)
After refusing to eat meat since I was a teenager (we're talking decades) I recently "gave in" and started eating tuna because my protein intake was so low it was doing damage. Still feel guilty as hell about it. Beans and milk just don't cut it though and greek yogurt is way way too expensive to eat regularly.
Here's a steer that was let outside after being cooped up for the winter, tell me it's not happy:
https://imgur.com/gallery/r1picTv
cows do that too - I've seen all sorts of scenes with cows that clearly show them expressing emotions, with music, with dogs, etc.
and pigs are VERY smart, smarter than dogs in many cases, makes completely sense to me if they have emotions, would be strange if they did not while dogs do
this is why artificial meat would be so important to our civilization - probably the most important thing to happen in the near future. It would finally allow to unblock the idea in human minds that the animals are sentient beings.
The livestock industry is sure going to push some nasty ads to fight artificial.
While I get the whole anthropomorphizing trend that pet owners have, raw emotional responses like anger, anxiety, envy, and affection are pretty easy to read. What is also clear is that the animals response to those emotions may be much different than human response.