[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.

[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?

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.