Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

There's proof and proof. No one has managed to prove other humans experience emotions, or even exist. Given a hypothetical model of a continually manipulated memory and consciousness you could even argue that you can't prove that you yourself have emotions (you might merely have the mistaken belief that you experience them).

To take a more pragmatic approach to proof (good enough but not absolute) Humans and some animals experience emotions. At the very least most Mammals. Probably not all animals. A trickier proposition would be whether all vertebrates do, that's a different level of debate entirely.

If you can't take things like the Monkey fairness tests as a sign of emotions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg&feature=player_d...

then you have a standard of proof that a lot of humans wouldn't meet.

View on HN

I'd highly recommend the Blackfish documentary about killer whales regarding mammal emotions (trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OEjYquyjcg).

Especially this part where a mother is separated from its baby, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWFo6kf21Hw ; it gives pretty good insight about whether animals can experience emotions.

Yep, I absolutely agree. Even if mammal emotions have not been scientifically "proven", I think there's a lot of strong evidence that they do experience most or all basic emotions.

It's not like it's very shocking that they would, either, considering humans aren't that distantly related from them.

As someone who has two cats, and has had a dog and a cat previously, I'm always amazed when I come across people who categorically state that animals don't have emotions. Spend a small amount of time with a cat or a dog, and it becomes pretty clear that they have moods and emotional states, albeit simpler ones that humans. I realise that domestication will have changed animals and their environmental responses, but I find it very hard to believe that dogs or cats would have developed emotions from scratch in the ~10,000 years since they were domesticated.

In my experience, those who claim animals don't have emotions are usually justifying some kind of behaviour; in one case, it was a hunter, and another, someone who was generally unpleasant and cruel to animals. The former was otherwise a nice guy, though I found his hobby extremely distasteful; the latter was an irredeemable arsehole.

Spend a small amount of time with a cat or a dog, and it becomes pretty clear that they have moods and emotional states

Completely agree. Anecdotal I know, but I've experienced a few cases that make me certain that cats (and therefore other animals) do, indeed, have moods and emotions.

The first time I was away from my cat for more than a day (I was away for three), she sat in my front window the entire time and wouldn't leave. I had a friend feed her and she barely left to eat, wouldn't play or otherwise interact. When I got home, she saw me through the window and started meowing and pawing at the window. When I came in the door, she flopped on her back on the ground in front of me and started purring.

A friend of mine has a cat that she had to bottle feed. He (the cat) is now ultra-protective of her and gets extremely jealous when she pets her other cats - occasionally going so far as to attack the other cats for it, or not letting her pet him afterwards.

That's only two of many examples. The stories that I've heard from dog-owner friends make a good case for dogs having emotions and moods too.

We have a cat like that. He was taken from his mother too young, so over attached some. He gets upset if my wife pets any of our cats in front of him, and will sit approximately six feet away, facing away, and ignoring us if we call him over (generally you just have to look his direction). His ears twitch, so you know he heard you, he's just too stubborn to give in.

> In my experience, those who claim animals don't have emotions are usually justifying some kind of behaviour

I agree. Similar things were said historically to justify slavery.

This poses an interesting ethical question.

If a subject is not known to have emotions or not. Should the party that would be inflicting emotional pain on the subject have the burden of proof (that the subject does not in fact have emotions)? Or the party that would not inflict it?

If there's a plausible chance of the entity being able to experience emotion, then the burden of proof needs to be on the inflicter. "Plausible" because inanimate objects like rocks obviously cannot ever have emotions.

Things get a little more complicated with plants, such as trees and flowers, but even there I would say it's pretty implausible that they experience emotion.

I live with two cats, and try pretty hard to keep them happy. However (even though I don't feel I'm a terrible person... ;) ) I don't think that the two cats I live with are people. I think you can make a distinction between "cats have emotions" and "cats are people who have emotions", and I think that the latter is what people must mean by "cats don't have emotions".

I don't quite get what you are implying here. "cats are people" is a patently bogus claim whereas their possession of emotion is hardly worth debating.

> "cats are people" is a patently bogus claim

There's a pervasive idea or feeling in a lot of people, I think, that animals are not just machinery, but actually very limited people, akin to mentally disabled humans, and should be treated as such (animal rights protesters, at least some vegetarians, etc). I don't think that this is patently bogus, but I do think it's not very likely.

I think when people start talking about animals feeling pain and having emotions, they don't mean that those animals have the sensory and neural hardware which produces and consumes pain signals and emotions (which is "hardly worth debating"), but that there is someone experiencing that pain or those emotions. If that's not what they mean, then the mere fact of pain or emotions wouldn't carry any impact higher than rerunning a horror film.

The whale is also pretty good. It's a documentary about a killer whale that was stuck in an inlet in Canada for years. It does a job at pulling strings, but it sold me on the animals have emotions bit. http://www.thewhalemovie.com/

This realy impressed me: Koko the Gorilla watching a sad movie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWxCM6llL60

Pug watches Homeward Bound https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cnstd0ASQHg

Human are animals too in the end. We are just a bit more evolved than the other animals, emotion wise. So, I think emotions just evolve with the species. Maybe the mice are starting to get emotions for liking running in a wheel. The slug is just coincidence I would say.

Russell Stannard can explain it very nicely: http://fixyt.com/watch?v=IF54xqYhIGA

>We are just a bit more evolved than the other animals, emotion wise

his point is that we don't have a scientific way to measure emotions.

In my opinion if we have emotions we should demonstrate that other animals don't not the opposite.

Why do you assume that we are more evolved? The only evidence we have is that we are better at building and using tools. "More evolved" can be defined in a lot of different ways (why are we more evolved than a wasp?) I think the idea that humans are more evolved it's just a anthropocentric assumptions.

I actually made a similar argument in a graduate psychology class at an ivy league as things got a bit heated over whether animals could suffer. I might have said something like, "If you get hit in the face in such a way you can't use words, how can I know you're actually suffering?"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com