Animal Minds: The new anthropomorphism
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
It's such a basic component of what it is to be aware of the world, and yet it's complex enough it seems a uniquely human faculty. Chimpanzees can sort objects by color, size, or shape, but not weight! how similar to humans can their internal experience be? (Or, of course, what aspects of the world are we missing that would be obvious to a slightly more complex intelligence?)
Not necessarily trying to debunk your point, but it's just interesting to realize that things we take as "simple" can actually be quite complex -- like that we (at least partially) use visual information to judge the weight of an object. Often perceptual priors are very unintuitive. What is "natural" or "often seen in nature" heavily biases our perception of the world in order to resolve conflicting sensory information -- "light comes from above", "things that look the same have the same density", "the ground is perpendicular to gravity", etc. (This last one leads to the "magnetic hill" illusion which is very cool to experience! [2])
It's not surprising that animals can have trouble with these things, since we do too! Highly recommend looking up videos of people showing magic tricks to dogs ;)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Size%E2%80%93weight_illusion
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnetic_Hill_(Canada)
... or, for a more HN-friendly example, astronauts on the space station would not experience any difference in space to being on earth - objects in orbit have no weight, but do have density.
Pedantically, that's really pressure, not weight or density. (Though weight is a more direct contributor to pressure than density is.)
Yes, but the "handles cutting into your fingers" is pressure not force.
My thought is that, just as accounts of past decades have tended to place too much emphasis on avoiding anthropomorphism (i.e., imbuing animals with human traits), they have also erred, and probably continue to err, in the converse, thinking that human behavior is much more "rational" and "consciously controllable" than it actually is. In other words, animals are more like us than scientists thought forty or fifty years ago, and we also are more like them than previously thought (i.e., we are not as rational as we think).
Specifically, a larger object with the same actual density but the same visual appearance will feel "lighter" when compared. And it's a very strong illusion, in the sense that it works even if you know what's happening.. it's very hard to shake the feeling that the larger object is lighter even though they actually weigh the same.
Also, there are surely aspects of the world we miss which are probably clear to chimps or even insects.
But certainly, there are no doubt emotions, habits, moral concepts, and even "thoughts" that are thoroughly foreign to humans. Not impossible, just foreign.
There's also a huge variation between humans, in what ways we seem to perceive and reason about the world, which seems to get swept under the rug with "5 out of 7 people did X" type studies.
In humans, each of these emotion terms refers to the cognition that a situation is of a certain sort, and calls for a certain type of response. So for instance "fear" refers to the cognition that a situation is such that there is a fairly high probability that something highly contrary to one's vital interests will occur, and calls increased vigilance and possibly action to prevent the feared event.
Animals make many or all of the same situational differentiations, with much the same behavioral responses, and so it seems appropriate to say they have the same emotions as humans, , or at least a good part of them.
By the way, I think that the idea that animals are mere mechanisms without minds comes from philosophies such as cartesian dualism, and also some religious doctrines, and so is not scientific.