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Attributing feelings to animals can be appropriate, depending on the animal and the circumstances. I find it a little worrisome that you equate individual bees (which by all measures are little more than automatons) with a complex and intelligent animal such as a whale. (Recognizable) emotions are not something humans have a monopoly on, quite the contrary.

Most whales are social animals, and they're also pretty advanced mammals, so it's not unreasonable to assume that an individual might experience feelings of loneliness and abandonment given the fact that it's apparently the only one of its kind out there.

I wonder how far whales can be from one another to still feel like they are socially interacting? Humans need fairly close environments to feel like we're being social. This probably has practical limits on the size of groups and how we live.

Whales on the other hand can communicate and sense group presence for miles and miles. And in the dark of the ocean being able to see each other with visible light probably isn't as important as being able to hear each other. I wonder what implications that has on the geographic distributed size of whale society?

My main criterion of putting bees and whales in the same category was mainly the use of signals for communication, whereas humans use signs. I'm not very well read in this area but just brought this up because it's an interesting way to look at communication.

I guess the main point was whether we can assume animals are capable of having recognizable emotions or if we're simply engaging in an act of anthropomorphization, right? The problem was not deciding whether or not the song of this specific individual is intended to communicate loneliness (because that's impossible to know), it was about whether we can assume he/she is actually feeling lonely or not independent of whatever data is transmitted. And I contend that we can.

But we can just as well talk about language itself; it's a completely different discussion to have, though. Everybody and everything uses signals, and they are in a way always symbols for something. Bacteria do this in very much the same way bees do. Whales and humans do it as well. The difference here is that animals with higher cognitive abilities tend to do more powerful things with signals. Bees and bacteria use a genetically prescribed protocol to communicate according to completely hard-coded behavior. Towards the other end of the spectrum, as animals get more powerful at cognition, both internal state and communication protocols become more dynamic with humans being the apex as the ones who are most capable of formulating abstract concepts. But it's also worth noting that humans laugh and cry, these are examples of very simple signals still emitted by very complex minds.

So is whale song more like an advanced mammalian language, or is it more like a human laughing? We don't know (yet). But we can make certain assumptions about this single individual's mental state without understanding its language. Imagine the last human on earth, wandering around. We can assume he's lonely, whether he's actually crying or not.

There are cases of feral children that have shown, rather nearly confirmed, presence of feelings and thorough bred communication between two animals of the same specie, or inter-specie as well. Fire warning, presence of tiger etc.

Remember, 90% of what we talk ain't coming out of our mouth. Similarly in case of animals, body language has a major role.

For example, a woman named Oksana Malaya was raised by a pack of dogs, so she is said to have grown up as a dog. She is said to easily communicate and behave with/like dogs and communicate in a rather native way - a phenomena they call 'Mowgli Syndrome'.

Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxana_Malaya and a couple of other cases too. Very fascinating subject, indeed.

I think what the OP was saying (along the lines of the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis) that since their language is relatively (significantly? I don't know much about whale communication) limited that this limitation in the ability to express such things as lonliness in their "language" limits their ability to conceptualize abstract concepts like loneliness.

I agree that comparing bees to whales is... probably not too useful. I guess (again, if you buy Sapir-Wharf) if they have some way to verbalizing / internally verbalizing feelings like loneliness, it's quite possible that they have the cognitive / emotional bandwidth to "feel" it.

I suspect it feels a kind of loneliness similar to what we feel.

Dogs certainly experience and express a definite sense of loneliness, so I can only imagine that this giant mammal does as well.

Or could. We don't actually know if it's alone. We just know that it can communicate on a frequency that other whales can't. We don't know if it can communicate on usual whale frequencies as well. Maybe it can. We also don't know if it's traveling in a pod of other whales or not. Maybe it is.

Found one article which may be relevant. It's titled Animal Subjectivity: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Arguably feelings are just genetic programming in the first place. After-all, the fact that billions of men like breasts has little to do with culture.

Yes, but what we are debating here is the experience of those feelings (which may or may not get influenced by language).

Scientifically, ALL mental processes are also physical events. In the same way that a single transistor in a CPU going from one state to another is a physical event. However, that transistor is only meaningful in the context of that CPU and the history of design and programming that got that event to take place. In much the same way every experience of every brain unique as the physical structure of that brain is altered over time which changes the context of that event.

Given that context, we have abstracted what actually happens subjectively into emotions like Love, Fear, Hate and what have you. Still, no two people experience Fear in the same way, and each time each person experiences fear it's also slightly different. But as the shared underlying physical process that corresponds to the term Fear is fairly universal. Adults, Children, Infants all have similar chemical cascades corresponding to structures created by specific parts of all these different DNA strands, but that same basic cascade is also shared by most Mammals.

PS: Philosophy loves to define terms, but without context or a basis in physical reality it's somewhat meaningless.

It is often said that computer programs, of the IS type, do not think, they are only simulating or modeling thought. Let's look at this as follows: We have no problems saying that birds fly. Likewise, we say that airplanes and even model airplanes fly.

"a wandering bee doesn't give a damn to humans dancing"

You cannot judge them by that. Humans didn't give a damn about bees dancing for centuries, either (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Frisch)

Also, I think we can almost equally well judge whether a whale is lonely as we can whether a human is. With almost any emotion, we cannot do much better than "if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck"