[eksemplar]

I’m completely out of my field, but I never understood why it was so hard for us to imagine that other animals were capable of having rich inner lives or even being self-aware.

To me it seem obvious that other animals would also possess various degrees of cognitive ability, I mean, we do.

[castle-bravo]

I suspect that it's cultural and derives from our economic relationship to animals. I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer; attributing intelligence and identity to the deer would predispose a hunter to pay close attention to the animal's behaviour and give him an edge in hunting it. In cultures with domestcated animals bred for compliance with human will, it is less advantageous to view the animal as another mind. Instead, we see them as tools to be used and discarded. To do otherwise would compromise our ability to extract maximum economic advantage from use of the animal.

[SubiculumCode]

The issue (today) is not whether animals have cognition, but the extent and nature of that cognition.

In the present case, the research question is whether animals have a conception of self. This is necessarily a fuzzy concept.

The test that has been used many times and with many variations basically involves providing a mirror and a condition that is only noticeable as applying to oneself by relating the image in the mirror as representing one's own body.

However, the test probe is merely an instrument used to measure an underlying construct. That is, there is an assumption that to solve the test particular cognitive processes are invoked.

But a test probe may be solved using processes or strategies other than those for which the probe was designed to measure.

Cleaner Wrasse fish have many instincts that reflect school behaviors, especially in young fish. School like behavior: One fish turns, then it turns, suggest strong control over behavior by the sight of other fish..including those seen in a mirror.

I suspect this mirroring system is having an influence on the fish's behavior here. It sees another fish with a skin condition (a mark), which may have activated cleaning behavior in itself.

[wincy]

I’m not so sure that’s the case though, as for example Talmudic law prohibits castrating animals. A gelded oxen is much calmer and easier to work with than a bull. I think it certainly varies from society to society, but ancient agrarian traditions also respect animals in ways you might not expect.

[dTal]

What is interesting is that Talmudic law goes to the trouble. There's no point prohibiting something that people wouldn't do anyway. There must have been considerable pressure to castrate animals, and some corresponding spiritual dismay at the lack of respect for them this entailed. So I wonder if it doesn't confirm the premise, rather than refute it - the Talmudic authorities may have been trying to preserve earlier value systems against a changing society.

[colordrops]

Humans aren't perfect economic machines. A single example doesn't necessarily refute the claim. And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.

[an_opabinia]

> And even then there might be some other advantage to not castrating oxen that isn't being considered.

I supposed you could come up with one. Your OP basically gave you a really knowledgeable counterexample, rooted in a rich field of study in anthropology (treatment of animals), in societies that long predated capitalism.

This is actually a pretty common pattern in HN.

When the HNers hear something like: "According to this book that the recipient of the information (the HNers) didn't read, here's an illustrative example of how rich the study is."

They respond: "But capitalism."

You've adopted a world-explaining model (capitalism) that works most of the time (that "single examples don't necessarily refute") not because it's powerful, but because it requires extremely little knowledge. That's really why derivatives of this line of thinking (think LessWrong/singularity/Paul Graham worship) are so widely adopted. Not because the ideas are right. It's that the ideas work for people who don't read, or are just really god damned rich, or who don't really know anything, or think they 'know enough,' like true hacks would say.

The downside is that when someone tells you this fascinating tidbit of Talmudic law, instead of typing in "anthropology of the treatment of animals in historic societies," the reaction is, "Well fuck this guy's knowledge."

One name for this phenomenon is "first principles." A great, positive spin on knowing nothing! This forum's discourse has declined exactly because of first principles, and others have observed the same (characterizing their criticism as a criticism of "first principles thinking.")

[perl4ever]

How is it you equate the assertion that "Humans aren't perfect economic machines" with "But capitalism."?

The usual criticism of acolytes of capitalism is that they do (unjustifiably) think humans are "perfect economic machines". You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it.

[fao_]

If I understand it right (it's 4:30am so my ability to phrase this might also be shoddy):

You removed the context from the thread. The context was that humans have an capitalist-economic focus (as in, distinguished from other economic systems like gift economies, marxist economies, etc.) on animals-as-use, and thus this influences your ability to reason about them as animals. The viewpoint is inherently capitalistic because it assumes that animals have become a good to be sold, and that it was more advantageous for humans to see it as such. Your (or whomevers') assertion "humans aren't perfect economic machines" was inherently an argument for the arguments for the capitalist viewpoint, which the person you were responding to was calling unfounded.

> You seem to be inverting the normal attack and I can't make sense of it

Capitalism doesn't assume that humans are perfect economic machines, indeed, it relies on them not being that. Otherwise, accumulation of capital would probably either be impossible for any single person to do, or it would be much more evenly distributed than it currently is. Indeed, the entire industry of stock-trading assumes that you can 'beat the average', which under the axioms laid out, is not what a logical, perfectly rational machine would do.

[booleandilemma]

I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer

I’m guessing it was The Last Of The Mohicans?

[nradov]

And then James Cameron copied it in Avatar.

[netten]

i remember such a scene from "the gods must be crazy".

[hirundo]

It's hard for humans to understand that people not in their tribe have rich inner lives or can be self-aware, let alone animals. We're wired to believe almost anything if our interest depends on it. We have an interest in pillaging other tribes and eating other animals, so it's easy to convince ourselves that they are non-player characters. It makes doing those things more pleasant.

[wincy]

Perhaps too off topic, but I’ve often wondered how the descendants of Vikings, once considered the most terrifying raiders of the sea, are now some of the most egalitarian and nonviolent nation states.

[zaq_xsw]

I'm no historian, but my best guess it that it's just correlation and that the main underlying cause of "civility" is wealth. When your citizens are struggling to survive, they (at least in their own minds) don't have time to think about women's rights, racial prejudice, etc. The progressive countries of the world just happen to be a few decades ahead on the technology timeline. There are obviously other factors, but I think that's the big one.

[visarga]

Wealth is probably the immediate cause, but in time, it seeps into the mentality of a people. The result is a society where trust in other people is low, everyone treats everyone else like they are out to cheat you, have little civic spirit and don't want to spend energy for the betterment of the whole. They would vote with whomever gives them bigger short term gains, damn with the future and consequences, other people will inherit them. It's hard to turn a mentality around, you just have to wait for older people to die and be replaced.

[jacobush]

Womens rights were fairly decent for the times in Viking society.

[hirundo]

Maybe because their more aggressive ancestors went viking, conquered, and settled abroad, those remaining were more placid.

[dboreham]

This however doesn't explain North Dakota.

[User23]

The Russians are a good example.

[pavel_lishin]

How so?

[blawson]

Scandinavians (the Rus' people) are thought to have had a part in the founding of a lot of 'modern' eastern Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people

[KozmoNau7]

I think it's because the vikings were also prolific explorers and traders, with great curiosity for the cultures they visited and traded with.

[brobdingnagians]

An interesting side note on this, the descendants of the Vikings were also the Norman's, that later invaded England, and even sailed around to Southern Italy and conquered a place down there as well (I think it was somewhere roundabout Sicily?). They developed the state of the art castle building techniques, sailing techniques, extensive trade networks, and even some interesting governing techniques (women had land-owning rights) that enabled them to conquer and hold much of Europe over time. It might be that they were "the most terrifying raiders of the sea" because they had cultural values that prized technological advancement and decently good governance, and then spread out to nicer climates (good motivation to try something new...). Interaction and adoption of values from other cultures probably helped bring down the violence after a certain point. And like someone else pointed out, when you get wealthy and own the kingdom, you typically want to develop a culture of preservation rather than raiding.

[lurquer]

The attributes you reference are a function of culture and not DNA.

The Viking culture was replaced with a Christian culture.

[roywiggins]

For the first half of the 20th century, scientists didn't believe that human babies felt pain. What's obvious isn't universal.

http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html

[perl4ever]

Setting circumcision aside, AFAIK anesthesia is not possible when doing surgery on infants, so with serious conditions, it's either operate without it or nothing.

Therefore, believing they don't feel pain is a matter of expediency allowing doctors to save lives.

[tait]

We routinely anesthetize infants with either local or general anesthesia. Here is a 2015 discussion from the American Society for Anesthesiology comparing regional with general: “General anesthesia safe for infants, does not impair neurological development, study finds” - https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2015/...

[perl4ever]

I didn't think it was a matter of "impairing neurological development" but of getting the right dosage.

Also, if there is a 2015 study saying it's safe, that would seem to imply general anesthesia is not so routine.

[ars]

That's today. Anesthesia was considerably more risky in the past. (For everyone not just babies.)

[JauntyHatAngle]

I don't follow you.

People have been imagining animals have complex inner lives for thousands of years. It's a natural thing for us to do in our want to relate to things.

People disagree with each other, sure, but I think that's fair that people disagree on a contentious topic. There is hardly an answer to whether fish have complex inner worlds yet.

Are you talking about scientific thought about it?

>possess various degrees of cognitive ability

I can't say I agree with this. I agree with you that perhaps people failed to recognise and test for variances within the species. (Im not in this field either so I can't say for sure...) but again, the majority of people would know that different animals of the same type don't have different quirks and differing intelligence. Anyone who has had some pet fish has recognised some as being more shy or more aggressive than the other. Cow farmers know some of their cows are dumber and smarter than the other.

To take that thought and say "well therefore some fish have rich inner lives and others dont" is a bit of a stretch to me. I would suppose that there is a limit to their capacity and variance.

Sure, Chimps, Dolphins, Elephants - very easy to convince people they do and I'd believe it easily.

Convince me that a trout does? I'm not so sure, and would need to be convinced in some way. I can imagine it, but I won't believe something just because of my want to anthropomorphise.

While I can understand that many people are too dismissive of animals as being basic or unfeeling, that doesn't invalidate the idea that animals have a more limited mental capacity for what we perceive to be conciousness, and that includes sense of self at least somewhere along the line of complexity.

[EliRivers]

There is a poster here somewhere who maintains that because animals don't have a language, they cannot think; presumably extrapolating from noticing that they themselves think in words (edit: found it - "Animals don't think, because thinking requires language...").

From what I can tell in the animal research game, it's like AI; every so often someone posits some qualitative property that only humans do as the difference twixt animals and humans, and then an observer sees that qualitative behaviour in an animal (or sometime has seen it years or decades before).

Frans de Waal's books on this are very readable. The big ones of previous years - empathy, planning, tool-using and so on - all fall pretty easily.

[rsynnott]

That’s... a weird argument. Humans can think without words (and indeed without words or images).

[PyroLagus]

How do you think without words, or rather sounds, or images? How do you keep track of a concept without a label you can attach to it?

[prutschman]

It's difficult to describe the "how".

I've had the experience of talking with a friend and having a conversation along the lines of "Do you remember the guy that was in that movie?". If there's enough shared context, I might "know" exactly who they are talking about, but not the name of the movie or the name of the actor. I'm internally apprehending some kind of abstract "node" to which properties are attached, but not immediately available for recall.

I'm not thinking about the phrase 'that guy in that movie'. I'm not thinking about the name, because I don't (yet) recall it. I apprehend a connection between a person-node and perhaps as well a recent-experience node, the latter being an unsymbolized apprehension of the recollection of having shared an experience.

If I focus on the apprehension, I can begin to recall its properties.

To abuse a computer science analogy, it's as though there's some kind of abstract associative cache between nodes, linking them to other nodes but referring only to their object-ids. To further abuse the analogy, raw object-ids are a private type that have very few public methods. Mostly: - more_or_less_the_same_thing_as(oid1, oid2) - randomly_select_a_few_related_oids(oid) returns set<oid> - recall_concrete_properties(oid, timeout) returns maybe<propertyset>

These apprehensions don't have an appearance or a sound, but they have a... brain feel? They have connections between them, and they have rough quasi-shapes, and can "fit" or "not fit" into certain other apprehended "structures".

Depending on what mode my brain is running in, I can generally render these apprehensions into words. Sometimes I can't seem to get them to cross the idea->word barrier.

[EliRivers]

The half-remembered movie is a great example. I see an actor whose name I don't recall. I remember that I've previously seen him doing something in some other movie. I do not at any point think the words "he played that FBI agent who was a reformed alcoholic chasing down a serial killer who leaves little whiskey bottles at the scenes of his murders" but all that is suddenly right there in my mind. I didn't think of any of those words, but all that is right there in my head.

Is recalling memories thinking? If not, if I then act on those memories, is that thinking?

[hirundo]

Not everyone thinks so. See the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

[User23]

While semiotic has become something of a joke, it has been seriously investigated[1]. We don't really think in language or even in symbols, it's rather a lot more complex than that.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/

[dltnhic]

It is not contradictory to maintain both.

[crooked-v]

There are a lot of people who think that it's literally impossible for someone else to have a different inner experience than they do. As someone who's mostly aphantasic and only has an 'inner voice' when communicating or using it as a tool to focus, I quite like this article on the subject: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-exper...

[kyllo]

It's because it causes an uncomfortable degree of cognitive dissonance to imagine that animals have self-awareness and rich inner lives, and also justify killing and eating them.

I'm not a vegan, I eat a lot of meat--I just feel uncomfortable when I think about it this way.

[techiferous]

Because we view animals as resources to be used for our ends. Cognitive dissonance is at play.

[randyrand]

Throughout history humans have treated humans like dirt as well. There must be more to the answer.

[emj]

Some of us still do, it's easy to call people from groups unfamiliar to us useless or worse.

[uhtred]

Because it makes it easier for us to abuse, exploit and murder them.

[ozzmotik]

just a minor nitpick: the technical definition of murder is the unlawful killing of another. in most cases, the killing of animals is not unlawful and therefore can't really be called murder. also depending on the source of the definition, murder more specifically refers to the unlawful killing of a human, specifically. if you remove the need for it to be a human then there certainly can be cases of killing animals that count as murder, for instance killing endangered species, or hunting without a permit/hunting a species out of season, or the killing of an animal with clear malice (eg animal abuse). but still, for most intents and purposes, the killing of animals can't really be called murder because the majority of animal death is merely to provide food and as such is most certainly not unlawful.

[perfmode]

Lawyers are partially responsible for the dismissive attitude that makes certain humans feel superior and justified as treating others as instrumental. It is likely that present day legal concepts impede progress and deeper understanding and appreciation of the world.

Lawyers write laws that ensnare us in self-righteousness and complacency.

It is totally fine for me to determine that there are things which are legal which are unethical.

I will not wait for the law to catch up to the idea that people are not property. I will not wait for the law to classify for me which life forms are means to an end and which are ends in themselves. The American legal code has been used to justify countless injustices against indigenous peoples and does not deserve to own our language. It does not deserve the privilege to declare what is murder and not murder.

[visarga]

Lawyers, yes, but religion also plays a major part.

> "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

So righteous people felt entitled to exploit animals with no regard to their inner lives, and exploit nature with no concern about the ecological disasters they might cause.

Only now, after we 'multiplied and filled the earth', have come to a point where we can't just ignore ecology, there are limits and constraints we now understand. So we developed new ethics that would help humanity survive.

[ianai]

That’s a great explanation and sentiment about ethics. I wish more people adopted it.

[michaelmrose]

Very insightful. I can't up vote this enough.

[monocasa]

I'd call it murder when a antebellum plantation owner killed a slave, even though that was lawful.

[ozzmotik]

id probably consider that to be murder as well but there are two concessions that have to be made:

1.) we are making that evaluation within the context of modern society where the ownership of slaves is generally seen as inhumane and atrocious, and that people are not property. the context in antebellum society was extremely different and as such one could make the claim that during such times, that wouldn't have been considered murder by a majority of (slave owning) individuals.

2.) another element of the definition of murder is generally the existence of malicious intent. i would say that it's fair to see the taking of life of slaves as something that generally was done with malicious intent, that is to say as an authoritarian method of controlling the rest of the slaves by using the killed slaves to show them who is in control. of course, again, this is being framed within the context of modern society, but I think this argument could be much more easily applied in a manner that is independent of the general values of the time, because im pretty sure that malice as a concept has remained a lot more consistent that what is lawful, over time.

[Falling3]

Words have multiple meanings applicable in different contexts. Murder is not exclusively a legal term. Your parent comment clearly was not looking to make a legal argument. Was that not obvious?

[ozzmotik]

it was obvious, just as it's obvious that the first words i said were that it was just a minor nitpick based on what the technical definition of the word "murder" is. i wasn't per se trying to make a legal argument, more making the claim that murder itself is defined as an unlawful act. obviously it can be used in other contexts, but then again, so can basically any other word in any language if you're willing to warp semantics enough to suit your purposes.

[Falling3]

> obviously it can be used in other contexts, but then again, so can basically any other word in any language if you're willing to warp semantics enough to suit your purposes.

Sure. But this isn't about "warping semantics". The word predates our current legal definition. It's used frequently outside of legal discussions. The parent was trying to make an argument contingent on the legal definition so nitpicking about proper usage under that definition is pointless as best.

[Svettie]

You're right, but here the word is used intentionally for dramatic/emotional effect, akin to a metaphor.

[ozzmotik]

yes im aware. it's just that i think maybe that murder isn't the most effective terminology because of the simple fact that most of the taking of animal life in the context of providing food to the population isn't performed with any intentional malice, and even if murder isn't being used in a legal context, another important context within it is general malicious intent. i can see that maybe some people who are against the food industry could easily convince themselves that there is malicious intent and directed evil in the way that said industry works, but I'm almost 100% positive that in the overwhelming majority of cases that the only intent that exists is to provide food for the population, or arguably one of financial superiority. something something evil is banal something something

[swayvil]

Ignoring 99% of your reality frees up tons of attention for attention-demanding tasks like engineering and officework. Not to mention somewhat insulating you from the toxicity of urban life.

It's an attention-management-strategy that's popular and efficient for cultures like ours.

Of course it's evil as hell too. So we compensate with an appropriately self-serving "well they're just dumb animals" narrative.

[blhack]

Because they don't act as though they have rich inner lives (especially fish and birds).

If you're actually interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins.

[zaq_xsw]

I'm not so sure about that. Certain species pf crows and parrots have long been understood (even by non-scientists) to have general/abstract reasoning abilities. And people who actually study them seem to think that we often underestimate them [0] - probably because of widely held myths like the 5 second memory one.

I haven't read Hawkins' book yet, but he and the vicarious crew tend to conflate "neocortex" with "general intelligence" in their public talks. Birds and, it seems, the vast majority of animal species rely on predictive models of the world to navigate it - even if their "model-builder" doesn't look exactly like the mammalian one.[1] It makes complete sense to me - if a lizard loses a leg, it quickly learns how to walk with just 3 legs. If a finch is born with slightly larger wings than normal, and it also loses some of its tail feathers at some point, it quickly learns to adjust its motor patterns to suit the new conditions. You solve problems like these with sensory-motor models, not with hard-coded algorithms.

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528836-200-animals-...

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001151953.h...

[vbuwivbiu]

nor do most humans

[amanaplanacanal]

Birds are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. I think most people just have more experience dealing with mammals.

[nineteen999]

There is a massive segment of the movie market (primarily aimed at children) where the starring characters are anthropomorphised animals which live rich inner lives and are self-aware. This is almost Pixar/Disney and Dreamworks entire very successful business model.

So I don't think it is really so hard for most of us to imagine ...

[Falling3]

I think imagine is probably not the best word to convey what the parent is talking about. Maybe "take seriously". We also have plenty of movies involved anthropomorphized inanimate objects, but (almost) no one believes they have any kind of inner lives or self-awareness.

[Varcht]

Chicken or the egg? Definitely some feedback loop going on, not sure which is which.

[nineteen999]

Well even before animated movies, there were books, first that comes to mind was Charlotte's Web (1952). Winnie the Pooh (1926) has a talking owl.

I'm not particularly well read, I'm sure others could come up with better/earlier examples. If you go back in history, Eve was supposedly tempted by a talking snake.

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

[nobody271]

I too am outside of my very (very very very) narrow five things that I can do BUT I've had the same question as you so allow me to throw some of my thoughts your way.

It starts off with a rough guess about something hard to define and because it's so hard to define no one ever changes it but it's not as though the rough guess was ever correct. That's the part we forget. I think it's similar to the Turing test which to some people has become like a blindly dogmatic rule for machine intelligence. I don't think the Turing test was ever meant to be used how it's used today. I think it was just a rough guess. More like a "yeah, something like that" kind of thing than a definition.

[goatlover]

Part of it has involved controversies over language, culture and consciousness, and part of it has been not wanting to anthropomorphize animals as having human personalities, since being human has a lot to do with thinking in language derived from culture, and that we're apes with vision as our dominant sense instead of smell.

[zachguo]

Anthropomorphism is what you described. It's not a falsifiable scientific theory.

[luxuryballs]

I think it’s not hard to imagine at all and that’s exactly why they’re making time and effort to find some scientific proof.