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Comment by strogonoff | Hacker News Reader

The same logic can be applied to humans.

“I don’t believe parents actually love their children and vice-versa. Parents are merely delivery vehicles of food for children. Children are delivery vehicles of future care for parents. Humans are probably projecting their fantasies about themselves being fundamentally better than they are in reality.”

We don’t directly perceive that dolphins project their fantasies about humans, but like with our fellow humans, it doesn’t mean they aren’t doing that.

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Being merely a delivery vehicle for my children's food would explain some of their behavior...

I was going to downvote out of disagreement, but, on second thought, this makes good sense. We probably wouldn't hesitate to say "I don't believe $NONHUMAN_ANIMAL parents love their children, and vice-versa...." about most animals. There might be hesitation when it comes to apes, monkeys, and maybe dogs, but I can imagine people would say it about, say, hyenas, and it would seem plausible.

It's easy to anthropomorphize animals, but it's also easy to go overboard in the other direction. In general, as our understanding of animal cognition has increased, we have moved away from human exceptionalism, finding that traits once thought to be unique to humans are anything but. Certainly we've come far from the Cartesian viewpoint of non-human animals as mindless automata.

"Love" in particular, of course, is both a highly loaded and acutely ill-defined concept, so "can a <non-human animal> feel love" is probably a wrong question [1].

By the way, it's rather appropriate that you mentioned hyenas given how misunderstood they are by laypeople, in no small part due to their presentation in a certain Disney film.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XzrqkhfwtiSDgKoAF/wrong-ques...

Yeah, I agree. It's a difficult enough philosophical problem to understand the mental states of even another human, much less an animal with a completely different brain structure. There has been some work purring dogs in fMRI machines that shows that their brains respond to humans in ways that indicate they like us, but that's pretty far from conclusive. After all, I know my dog likes dinner, so she'd probably display activity in the pleasure center when presented with a bowl of her food. In any case, what matters is that I love her, and she is doing nothing to disabuse me of the notion. ;)

Oh, and, yes, I did choose hyenas specifically because they're a misunderstood species. Glad you picked up on that.

Ugh. s/purring/putting/g

I don’t know about “love” because it has a lot of connotations but try to take a baby from a litter from any animal and watch how crazy mama animal gets. Swans, cats, birds, dogs, bears, whales, whatever.

You clearly don't have children. No amount of fantasy projection makes up for the trouble you go through. You have to be spiked with oxytocin to cope with it.

I think that was the point. They are trying to show how that sort of logic is flawed.

You are right.. sleep deprivation is a bitch

I appreciate that HN is a place where people are willing to admit mistakes like this / change their mind, etc. Thank you :)

It seems we are getting in philosophical territory here.

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

this can be seen in some cultures where the eldest son and his family are held in high esteem because he is the one responsible for taking care of the parentd while daugthers are a burden, since they will be with their husband supporting the husbands parents.

I don't think this logic applied to humans actually is inaccurate. For much of human history, extended family cohabitation was the norm, and the standard American nuclear was a radical, almost unimaginable idea. Most animals operate on a biological impulse to further their offspring; do most animals operate this way to pursue immortality and evade death?

I don't see anything inaccurate with this base level analysis, although it obviously elides most of the finer elements of human existence that exist a bit higher up on Maslow's hierarchy.

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