Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
phys.org
phys.org
Applies to all living organisms
(Not doubting the chicken nuggets, just wondering about the lower/simpler end of the scale.)
While plants may not fear in the manner that we do, they can chemically signal when one becomes damaged or stressed and cause physiological changes in plants that are not sharing the same conditions.
Certain species go the other way probably and become more like a super organism but mammals seem quite individualized compared to ants for example.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Most animals are different from most others, we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special.
We’re similar to other globally-consequential species. The oxygen-generating organisms that promoted the GOE, for example. What makes us unique is we can be self aware about that power. Refusing to see that isn’t humility, it’s nihilism.
That's probably a similarity we share with other species, and I'd expect to a similar degree. We own pets, but sometimes we see cross-species adoption (and friendship*) in the wild, too.
* or at least "alliance", given we can't in general read minds yet, just a few special cases with fMRI machines etc.
They wrote "we're just different enough to feel that we're somehow special".
I think in that sentence "special" is bound to "feel", it's not separable into an "is" statement-of-fact, and religion is absolutely about feelings.
i read 'somehow' in the first post as sarcastic, and think they are intentionally mocking religion in the second.
If they are claiming we're not special, I'm asking what they think would qualify, it they think it is even possible to be special.
I think many people use snark as a cheap rhetorical trick to be critical without advancing an alternative position.
The obvious thing to point to is that we’ve acquired more complex language, which enabled us to do various neat things. To which I say ok but a zip file of floats and an algorithm has that too.
Eukaryogenesis was probably a more significant / special historical moment than language or writing.
I think this is all driven by people’s fear of their own insignificance. Is the pig that I ate last week really that much different than me? When I too die and turn into dirt or ash is that really it? It’s all over? Just like that?
So what would qualify as being special? I haven’t seen a compelling argument as to why we are.
You introduced the word "special".
I’m going to have challenge you to get out your thesaurus and dictionary on this one.
You have no goal post so what's the point.
Well I haven't seen a reason to continue, so I will not check or respond again.
One of the mods (Animalia maybe?) obliges you to do this properly. Find a male and a female, enclose them and make sure they're well fed so that they'll breed, wait a while for the female to give birth, steal the calf, and then you can collect her milk. I would bet far more players in games with that mod go vegan because it was a lot of hassle to make these arrangements compared to making soy milk.
It's crazy to hear the various bizzare ways people use to try to justify and cope with their habits.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.
Genetically is seems it's very unlikely there is a single gene spot that explains human language but a confluence of different factors feeding back into one another in linage we do not have genetic access to at this time. We've done a bit of gene testing around this now, and single gene flips aren't near enough. I think the best analogy would be like playing a video game where you have to flip a number of switched to the correct position to get the system to work together.
People really do flagrantly misrepresent his claims.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Yes, there's a good chance that whatever combination of metrics gets accepted to draw the consciousness/moral weight boundary in the future, it'll have some overlaps like in that infamous quip about "smartest bears" and "dumbest tourists". Applied to a spot measurement, it'll likely put some subset of people - drunk, cognitively impaired, sleeping, children under N months, etc. - below the "conscious/sentient" threshold, and below some animals.
Which is why such criteria only make sense at population lifetime level, not individual level. That's both aggregate and temporal ranges. Temporal, because children grow up, drunk people sober, impaired people may get better and may have been better in the past. Aggregate, because once you go down to individual level, you invite most horrible crimes ever committed.
That a drunk person shouldn't make critical decisions and nor should a toddler is different than equating a baby's experience to someone asleep or in a coma.
My 2yo had memories from over a year prior. She would bring up things that surprised us. She later forgot that stuff, but she always had a larger window of experience to pull from than we expected.
Treating kids like coma patients ignores that experience and window of memories. You bet your ass you could traumatize / condition a baby to fear. You cant do that to someone in a coma. I doubt you can condition someone purely in their sleep too fwiw.
We should assume a rich experience until proven otherwise.
(In contrast, every bacteria and every amoeba will clock below threshold of any reasonable metric 100% of the time.)
Sleep and hypnotic conditioning are a thing.
My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.
... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.
The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.
"such care, or lack thereof" is heavily loaded; about the only objectively-sounding statements in the last paragraph are that Jeffrey wasn't able to tolerate anesthetics, and that "babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock", both of which add up to possibility of care where alternative was to leave the child to die.
It's right there at the start:
During the almost two months of his life [...]
If people didn't want to get ate why did they make themselves taste so good?
Also knowing that nothing on my plate was tortured for its entire existence on a factory farm is important to me. I still eat meat but it’s either meat I harvested personally or from a local farm where I can verify the living standards. As a consequence I eat significantly less meat. It’s entirely possible to opt out of the industrial factory farming method that abuses animals the entire time
Or you just didn't read the comment you replied to and made an assumption?
B12 is generally the biggest concern. Vegans need to take vitamin supplements to get it. The B12 in those supplements is produced in factories doing bacterial fermentation
True herbivores have stomachs that can ferment B12 from the plants they eat. We do not
It may have been a survival mechanism from when people actually felt the pain these animals felt but also felt like they had to feed themselves. The cattle cutting rituals of muslims (and guessing a similar philosophy that underpins kosher) makes me think this way.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.
*Squashed to death in Salem, 1692
Yea, this is where the argument has the biggest problems. If your heart explodes or you tear vessels in your eyeballs, or you have long term stress related tissue damage the fact you don't remember at all doesn't matter much.
The problem with memory is it exists in a lot of different places. Screw around too much and you can mess up organs or even your gene expressions. Nothing to do with your brain at all.
Scary stuff.
What's the practical difference other than timelike distance between you rather than spacelike distance?
https://oyc.yale.edu/philosophy/phil-176/lecture-12
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long. The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.
Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.
Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.
It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.
I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.
I had a very gruesome femur break decades ago. I can remember begging to be knocked out because of the pain but there's no memory of the pain itself.
That probably is the better prior for muggles these days, yeah.
Of course, scientifically speaking, you still shouldn't anthropomorphize upfront, or you might actually miss a lot! Different creatures aren't entirely exactly the same as us. They can <see> and <do> things we can't , and vice versa. So even just from that their lived reality will diverge from ours, and that's where all the interesting science is hiding.
That said, while you shouldn't necessarily anthropomorphize upfront; if there's later proven to be a behavioral overlap, then proven is proven, and you don't get to reject it afterwards. (People often get this one wrong.)
I've also seen my parents' previous dog pretend he's closed in the enclosure with the doghouse when neighbors cat approached even when he wasn't. Then when the cat came to their backyard the dog would run after the cat.
It's so obvious, it's baffling to me how science could ever miss it.
A dog knows that the cat will run when the dog charges. Is that theory of mind?
I call that theory of mind, because the dog needs to distinguish what it knows and what the cat knows.
Showing yourself on purpose to change what you think the other animal thinks your capabilities are is more complicated and harder to evolve as a hardcoded reflex IMO.
Dogs weren't evolving in backyards with periodically opening see-through enclosures.
But yes, I'd assume most stealth predators with sophisticated brains (for example mammals) have some kind of theory of mind. It's just too useful not to have it. Same goes for animals living in complex social groups.
— Daniel Dennett
https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_...
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
Lots of evidence that whales, dolphins (plenty of other animals), are collectively doing a better job at collective satisfaction within their society and culture.
Your “explosive” culture argument is…uncompelling.
Whales and dolphins have nuanced language that conveys more meaning than we can capture, though we’ve begun.
Thank you for perfectly capturing human arrogance.
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
I think that makes us really quite special.
I know this did not end up being applicable in the video game world (which I'm continually glad for). With LLMs, it feels more likely it would be.
I’m concerned about campaigns by misguided people to “protect” the bots. Seeing the response to the Unitree bots on AGT and their behavior’s effect on my own emotional response, I wonder how far off we are from calls for robot rights. We are more than tool-using apes, but for those that think that’s all we are, what’s the difference between that and tool using bots that emote, mimic distress, and otherwise act autonomously.
For example, do video games not cause violence because of something like being on the wrong side of the uncanny valley. We know it's fake therefore its fake.
Do does this break down when it gets "too real".
For example lets imagine a future VR video game that the inside game doesn't feel much different from the world we live in? Lets also imagine an interesting unique constraint in this video game. If you die in it you cannot play it any more. You play it for years safely and make romantic connections in it. One day someone kills your partner violently in front of you. You'd be pretty willing to take up violence against said person, right? How much of that violence would carry out of the game?
I don't want to make proclamations like the video game violence people did that were not correct, but I also don't want to assume as we make our simulacra more like us that it won't affect us somehow. Situations like this are rarely binary, and it's best to keep an eye on it.
Lastly, because LLMs can and do effect the real world with their actions, it's likely a good idea to error to the side of caution and at least be polite.
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
When your afraid you can choose to ignore the fear, but you are still afraid and it has physical effects that can be measured. There is at least a trinary state of possible outcomes and as the situation space becomes more complex and solutions drift apart on all 3.
Lmao.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
The definition of the word “simulation” is:
> A simulation is the artificial imitation of a real-world process, system, or event using a model
As we know, “all models are wrong; some models are useful”.
A “perfect simulation” is, then, an oxymoron.
i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.
it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.
people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.
...literally on this article.
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
Not to mention the lack of continuity of existence kind of precludes any deeper and more meaningful interactions with the self.
I am not saying that they are unable to feel, but at the current structure and ephemeral existance they are unable to do so, they lack the minimum prerequisites.
Is there any ordered state changes occurring in books?
>they lack the minimum prerequisites.
And these minimum prerequisites are? There are a number of scientists that would love your empirical evidence.
>lack of continuity of existence
Eh, the lengths of timelines that LLMs can execute for, and this is in singular execution and agentic evolution is ever increasing. There isn't any time based requirements either. For example I can give you all kinds of drugs that turn off and on your conscious awareness and this doesn't stop self interaction when you're awake.
Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence.
So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
Here's an article about orcas: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047
It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
No, they really don't. The article says
> indicated an inherent, strong maternal attachment to the calf
Yeah, that's not grieving.
These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-reside...
Yeah, that's not grieving.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas?
Why possibly days and not possibly weeks?
> but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed
Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down.
> it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty
But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
Keeping even a small boat at sea is not cheap - the default for pretty much every observation at sea, ever, is that the witnesses did not stick around to see anything beyond what they reported.
I distinctly recall playing these whalesongs in a record player at my paternal grandparents' house. They had a rec-room with acoustics more like a bathroom than a bedroom: the floor was tiled or linoleum and the furniture was not so plush and soft, so the whalesong from the speakers would reverberate while I played in front of my family.
And I believe that my mother enjoyed listening to that stuff, too. I mean, could we understand it? I can't say "no"; we got the message on some superficial level, but way out of context, to be sure. The disc's sounds were definitely a montage or a medley of different sessions, from different locations.
Now you know that all the kids today will have seen Finding Nemo and we love DOry when she speaks whale and saves the situation, but then she ends up misbehaving. But there is a practical use for "speaking whale" in modern times. When there is a poor connection such as VoIP, and I notice that "you're breaking up" and the sound is intermittent or the connection is slow, I begin "speaking whale" where I elongate the vowels and slow down the cadence, and this can help get the messages through a congested medium.