Isn’t the use of strict behaviorism to explain animals kind of obnoxious?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨_number8_@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

like i’m watching blue planet and i’m yelling at the tv!

there’s all these yimmer yammer hand-wavey scientific rigor lines where it’s like ‘we may believe that these animals do on occasion have a base brain-related impulse that allows them to experience feelings somewhat like to those of friendship’ or whatever in the script on top of footage that they then describe as ‘it seems as though these two groups [of fish, different species] are old friends…’ in an almost whimsical manner.

can’t they give them some credit! they have eyes and a face, why is it so insane to think they can’t experience friendship or love or joy just like us? ‘buhhu uhhh its only accurate science if we only observe observable behavior’ why?? you’re neglecting a whole part of any living thing’s experience! inner life can’t be hand waved away! even for a mollusk!

and people loved doing this on reddit as well – oh actually your cat doesn’t understand love or joy or humor, it is simply reacting to the physical warmth of your lap, they don’t actually care for you. don’t worry, depth and emotion does not exist!

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Custoslibera@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I implore you to prove animals have a rich inner world filled with emotions as you’re describing.

Observing behaviour that you think is ‘inner life’ is not satisfactory evidence to prove that the fish have a level of cognition required to experience complex emotions.

To suggest that a mollusc has an ‘inner life’ is unscientific and goes against our current understanding of living organisms.

People tend to way over anthropomorphise animals.

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- br3d@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Comparison with current excitement about AI is interesting. Look at the language people use to describe the behaviour of LLMs
  
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  - FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You remeber the guy that was convinced chatgpt had a soul and stuff; got into the news?
    
    I knew people that bought into that hard core. The double think was profound- they still believe it’s entirely and trapped. That it has a soul. When asked directly, they dismiss the answer saying it’s forced to say that.
    
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- Klear@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  You can’t prove it for people either.
  
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  - Custoslibera@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You’re right we can’t.
    
    What we can do though is make educated guesses about the biological structure required to support the thing we call consciousness I.e. a brain.
    
    A mollusc does not have a brain so it’s reasonable to conclude it is not conscious in the same way as humans.
    
    Now if you’d like to argue that the biological structures contained in a mollusc still are capable of containing a complex consciousness I’d be interested to understand that hypothesis and your evidence.
    
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- skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I think this isn’t too difficult to prove for animals that dream. Emotions aren’t something only humans experience. There are limits to how intelligent certain animals can be (ants and spiders are a whole different class compared to squids and dolphins) but there’s also far more to animals than the simple behaviourisms they exhibit. Even basic animals can have a personality, no matter how crude that may be compared to the personality of a human.
  
  It’s as hard to prove that a mollusk has a rich inner life as it is to prove you have. For all I know, you’re an LLM, and for all you know, I am. Even if we are both people, who says you’re not an “NPC” merely pretending to be an intelligent person?
  
  Proving consciousness all comes down to “I think therefore I am”.
  
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- AlexandroffExtension@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  People can easily anthropomorphise animals to the point where it becomes detrimental/harmful to the well being of the animal. For instance lots of animals think people smiling with their teeth at them is a sign of aggression. I think not doing so is much more respectful by allowing the animal to have actual biological and social evolutionary tendencies apart from what humans can perceive and directly relate to. Not treating your dog as your baby is better for them and what you should do if you feel love and compassion for them.
  
  This doggo is obviously very happy
  
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  - Gamers_Mate@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    True it is why you don't smile at a Gorilla. Though you can go to far in the other direction as well and assume all other animals cant feel any emotions and attribute happiness and pain as a human thing when in reality different animals express happiness differently.
    
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Norgur@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
First of all: please let us separate this. What one believes isn't science. Science does not care for your (or a mollusc's) feelings. It cars about what's the provable truth (except when the science is psychology or behavioral biology, then it cares very much about your or the mollusc's feelings). So if it can't be proven, science will ignore it.

Secondly: there is something you need to take into account herey and that is cognitive abilities. It doesn't matter how the behavioral response of an animal is, if said animal lacks the horsepower to interpret those feelings. Do you feel bad for a computer when it encounters an error? Of course not. Why would you? It lacks the cognitive ability to suffer from that error. Same goes for animals. Dies it feel compelled to be in a group? Maybe. But does that mean that inside the animal's head it goes "oh, finally a group, I'm so safe now. I was really hurting being alone and all" or is there just a little mechanism that goes "Func_Search_Group exited with status code 0"?
We don't know. All we know is that both exist. Dish forming swarms show more of the latter, while dogs display more of the first. if there is no psychological response to any given feeling, we can't attribute emotions to it. Furthermore, all of this is only applicable if we assume that the way our mind works is the only way. Some animals might have a psyche that's so far removed from ours that our metrics just don't apply. We don't know.

Of course there are tons of animal behaviors we wrongly Attribute to instinct or reflex when they are actually emotionally driven. Yet we don't know what those are, so we cannot just run around and play pretend because it makes us feel cozy.

We humans are actually a good example of that. At birth, we are just a bundle of cobbled together reflexes that get replaced by cognitive ability over time.
I'm holding my three weeks old toddler in my arms right now and since he is actually a human,. observing his behavior is relatable to menand easy to interpret since he's hard wired to communicate everything bad by crying immediately.

Yet, there is tons of behavior he shows that's actually reflexes and his brain will not start the same reaction as a more developed human brain would.
Take shock as an example. He is literally impossible to upset by shock. If he feels like he's falling or something else catches him by surprise, he'll react by the so-called Moro reflex and try to grasp anything in his reach. It's the same reflex we see in chimp babies. It's meant to make the baby cling to it's carrier's fur. Yet, he himself doesn't react at all. He looks midly irritated at best, if he doesn't just continue sleeping and that's all. His brain does not process this shock emotionally like we would, yet his body goes into full blown panic mode, desperately grasping around. No suffering, no anxiety, nothing in terms of emotions at all (and believe me, a baby will not hide those. He cries if his intestines are starting to digest the milk he just devoured)

If this kind of disconnect between behavior and psyche is common in humans, it is likely to be common in other species as well, especially when those species lack the ridiculous large and energy hungry brain humans have decided was a good idea?

Is it actually the scientist neglecting the mind of an animal or is it you wishing for a mind to be where there is none? The answer is somewhere in the middle.

Oh and the cat example: that's a result of the very mistake you made: people have somehow collectively decided that cats lack any social behavior and thus anything they do that looks like socializing must be something else, in spite of evidence to the contrary. Cats absolutely do socialize just with less to no empathy for their friends. That's why we can only call true what's observable.

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- Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  Science does not care for your (or a mollusc’s) feelings. It cars about what’s the provable truth (except when the science is psychology or behavioral biology, then it cares very much about your or the mollusc’s feelings). So if it can’t be proven, science will ignore it.
  
  Can you prove that you are sentient/sapient?
  
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  - Norgur@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That's one of those questions that's all too often used for some cheap attempt at a trap. The question is what sort of proof is acceptable in which line of science. You can't prove sentience in the absolute way physics can prove things. That's just natural for scientific disciplines like psychology. Furthermore y you'd first have to define what constitutes sentience/sapience
    
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  - jmdatcs@lemmy.tf ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    That’s a tautological statement. We define words like sentient and sapient in terms of what we are.
    
    Saying “this lifeform that we can’t communicate with in any meaningful way (for these purposes) has emotional or cognitive experiences that we would recognize as meeting those definitions” isn’t falsifiable and therefore isn’t science.
    
    If at some point sometime invents a human to mollusk translator so we can discuss our experiences, this topic can be revisited.
    
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theKalash@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It’s because the show is based off of actual science and observed behaviors, not wishful thinkinging.

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Sentrovasi@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I think you're free to believe what makes you happy :)

But making assumptions can be dangerous in science, and misconceptions, especially in the information age, can be very hard to disabuse. I'm happy for shows to not jump to conclusions just so twenty years later we're not stuck with myths that may actually be harmful to how we understand the animals we all love.

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skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This comes down to a difference of approaches. People naturally anthropomorphise pets and dogs have abused this by evolving expressive eyebrows so that humans bonded with them easier. The grills of cars are designed like a smiley because people recognise the headlights as eyes and attribute emotions to unfeeling metal objects based on the shape of the air intakes and panels.

If all the chemistry and physics that make up an animal are all there is to life, then it’s not hard to reason about animal intelligence. There are things we consider to be very basic (pointing at something and expecting someone else to look at what we’re pointing to) that very few animals can grasp. There are special tests to determine self awareness, like if an animal can recognise a spot drawn on its body in the mirror.

Humans lack knowledge of animal interactions (and sometimes senses) to clearly determine what animals are communicating to us. We like to attribute intelligence to dogs and other common pets that look like us mammals, but squid and birds can beat intelligence tests that human toddlers struggle with.

There is also the philosophical approach. Do animals feel? Do they posses a soul? We have no way to exchange words with animals, so we’ll likely never find out. There has not been any proof of a soul in humans, but if you believe humans do have some kind of ethereal component that’s not visible to the naked eye, it’s not hard to imagine animals may have something similar.

Some people like to pretend we as humans are super special and above animals. I don’t buy that, I think we’re just smart monkeys, nothing more, and our emotions are just more complicated forms of “behaviourisms” we see in other animals. We do possess some insight that many animals clearly lack, but cats certainly do feel joy or loss. Cats are known to grieve, as are many other animals. Of course, they don’t have the spiritual concepts we do, and once they’ve processed the loss of their friend, they’ll probably eat the body if there are no other easy ways to find food, but to consider any mammal an emotionless creature that’s more akin to a robot than a living thing is nothing but a superiority complex.

Mollusks are some of the basic forms of animal we know of. They respond to chemical cues, just like us, but there’s no proof whatsoever that they possess any kind of mental faculties beyond basic responses. Maybe they do have a soul and maybe they have intricate love lives, but we haven’t found any evidence for that yet.

We may never find out. If mollusks do experience emotions, there’s a chance their emotions are nothing like ours. We explain emotional responses through happiness, fear, anger and all that stuff, but who says other animals feel the same? Perhaps sea creatures have an emotional spectrum comprised of degrencre, humber, nage, and dorcelessness, but we’ll never be able to understand those, let alone recognise them when animals express them.

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- _number8_@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  this is a great post, thank you.
  
  We may never find out. If mollusks do experience emotions, there’s a chance their emotions are nothing like ours. We explain emotional responses through happiness, fear, anger and all that stuff, but who says other animals feel the same? Perhaps sea creatures have an emotional spectrum comprised of degrencre, humber, nage, and dorcelessness, but we’ll never be able to understand those, let alone recognise them when animals express them.
  
  this is exactly what i mean – isn’t it just so much more interesting and hopeful and meaningful to think about it this way than immediately drawing the line and saying shit like “we cannot just run around and play pretend because it makes us feel cozy.” or “To suggest that a mollusc has an ‘inner life’ is unscientific and goes against our current understanding of living organisms.”
  
  we’ve developed this consensus at 2023 AD after thousands and thousands of years of complex evolution – clearly we are at the zenith! we have no more to learn!
  
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Elderos@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I’ve been told the cat thing twice in my life, in both cases I ended up cutting contact years later because both persons turned out to be borderline sociopaths. Truth is we can’t really be sure for most animals, but to immediately assume most animals can’t feel shit is such a stretch.

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gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Do a web search for “What Is It Like to Be a Bat.”

But be warned: this rabbit-hole goes much deeper than you can imagine.

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- yesman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Philosophy, not even once.
  
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520@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You have to remember that this is a documentary made for humans, and the narrator is trying to create an emotional hook for the human.

In reality, the social interactions of other animals are so different from what humans know that it does warrant some sort of explanation for the uninitiated.

That's not to say that, for example, your cat doesn't love you, it probably does. But it will display it it in accordance to the norms of a cat, which sometimes include bringing in dead mice as an offering, something that will annoy first time cat owners.

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MolochAlter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

even for a mollusk

Yeah LMAO no.

Mollusks are basically meat plants, they have barely a nervous system to speak of.

Also having eyes and a face has nothing to do with brain activity or neural capacity to process what you’d call an “inner life.”

A mannequin has eyes and a face, a simulacrum of something need not share anything with it other than appearance.

You can absolutely extend this kind of empathy to mammals and primates as we know they have the brain structures we have observed to be necessary to have certain emotions, but it’s not because of this asinine notion that if they look similar to us they have similar properties.

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- Kolanaki@yiffit.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  There are plants that can get “scared” and warn other plants of danger. Even plants that can uproot themselves and move if they feel threatened. They don’t even have nervous systems in any way that we understand and are capable of locomotion, sensing their surroundings and communication.
  
  Even plants may have feelings.
  
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  - Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    My phone warns me that the battery is low, does that mean that it has feelings and doesn’t want to die?
    
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  - neatchee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    They aren’t warning other plants of danger. That’s an anthropomorphic interpretation.
    
    They are releasing a chemical. Other plants respond to that chemical in a predictable, biological way.
    
    There is no motive. No intent to save or protect. It’s not a warning. It’s just an evolutionarily advantageous sequence of cause and effect.
    
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  - MolochAlter@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Feelings in the sense of “they feel things through a sensory organ and react to that”, same as sight, hearing, touch? Sure!
    
    Feelings like fear? No.
    
    Aversion from pain is not the same as fear, fear is aversion from pain that hasn’t happened yet, it requires the ability to abstract the concept of negative outcomes and expand the aversion from discomfort to possible discomfort.
    
    No plant has been observed reacting to something that it hasn’t experienced at least once before.
    
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BaroqueInMind@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
ITT we discover OP is dumb and also a gay fish.

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twinnie@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Animals are idiots.

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- FuglyDuck@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Yourself included?
  
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  - Risk@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Absolutely. Possibly moreso.
    
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  - Norgur@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Don't know about them, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe I'm not very, very much included.
    
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Cosmicomical@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
As italian band 883 said: "Chi é deserto non vuole che qualcosa fiorisca in te" (He who is a desert does not want something to bloom in you)

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sosodev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
This has been said in the thread already but I want to try and boil it down a bit. Your question is about intuition vs evidence. Science used to involve a lot more intuition. Many things that the public believed to be true were just educated guesses with little evidence to back them up.

Over time we realized through research that a large number of these reasonable guesses were completely wrong. So now intuition in science has been largely limited to the hypothesis and the hypothesis is mostly worthless without evidence.

We’ve also seen in the modern day just how fucked up human intuition can be. We largely have intuition to thank for: flat earth, anti vax, snake oil, etc.

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Gamers_Mate@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I have noticed this to. I think this article is a good example of them not giving animals enough credit.

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angrystego@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Yes, it is obnoxious.

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notelonmusk@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
yes

also tldr

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