Empathy has been evolved in animal communities who collectively care about the offsprings. It is an evolutionary strategy to make communities possible. It is protection for offsprings from being murdered and eaten as it happens among reptiles, fishes, etc. It is a weak bond though.
What they need a decade-long quest for, except funding?
And, obviously, higher animals do have at least some cross-species empathy toward pups. Any villagers who had cat and dog pups will tell you that.
The sexual attraction and parent-offspring bonds, including affection towards young, are the strongest evolutionary forces.
Could it be that all animals have empathy, but some have a much smaller and/or different set of feelings they experience? As an analogy, if I see you eating candy, I can understand that you're currently tasting sweet, but if a cat sees you, it has no concept of sweet, because its tongue doesn't have those receptors. You can also see this in people, the most egregious example being "Let them eat cake" oft mis-attributed to Marie Antoinette. If you have never felt something yourself, either due to your upbringing or because your species has no capacity to experience that feel, is it that you have no empathy towards someone having that experience or that you simply cannot so much as conceive of the feeling in question?
I don't think anyone who's had a dog could ever question whether animals can feel empathy, it's just so obvious. I am sure that the level varies from species to species and also within a species, as it does in humans. But a story like this https://www.thedodo.com/lost-dog-saves-trapped-friend-135355... is hard to read and not feel a little warmer.
I struggle with the telepathy argument. I think it's just a placeholder explanation for something a little less sci-fi. Such as scent, body language or just dumb coincidence.
However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle) explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)
Scientists are wrong all the time, often for their whole lives, and on the balance of things it is extremely likely Mr. Sheldrake is an example of this.
I have a dog, too and have to admit I sometimes use her as an "emotions detector" - much like a guide dog, because I'm actually not that good at recognizing people's emotions/moods. The angles at which she puts her ears and head are pretty reliable and easy to read indicators. :)
When she sees someone's upset or sad she'll walk over to them and cheer them up. Even random people in the street or on the subway. I mostly fail to even notice...
It comes down to "do animals feel emotions" which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It's easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don't? If there's no test to distinguish between "fake" emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question?
Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?
Well, people always find a way to doubt that animals have a sense of "self". Like in the test where they painted a dot on a chimps forehead and gave him a mirror - he wiped the dot off after looking at the mirror, which you know - would be a pretty good indication that he understood, in some way, that the creature in the mirror is him and not some other chimp. But obviously you have people who will say that the chimp might have thought that touching his own forehead made the other chimp touch their forehead, without realising that the image in the mirror is him and not another animal.
But every scientific experiment should withstand scrutiny, regardless of how malicious or creative in its criticism it may be. We currently do not have any machine that can measure "qualia" in animals let alone a formal way of quantifying and making sense out of it.
Agreed. I think the whole philosophical discussion of this question is mainly complexity introduced by humans; we invented the definition of word and now expect every animal to formally adhere to our definition of what "empathy" is, or be declared "without empathy".
I recently read the paper `Animal Minds, Animal Morality` where the author thinks it should come down to the ability to experience 'experiences'. Its an interesting read.
I would guess that just like any physical trait, some emotions will be conserved by evolution and some will be unique. For example, emotions from the primitive parts of our brain like fear may be conserve across much of the animal kingdom. Empathy, which I define as a shared emotional experience, may be uniquely primate (but the article seems to indicate otherwise?).
Personally I think it's similar to children. Below a certain age/maturity level they only know that they've done something wrong because they can read our emotional reaction...but they have no real idea why it's wrong. That understanding comes later for children but never happens w/ dogs.
Dogs are certainly not pretending in the way that a human actor is pretending. The question is whether or not dogs are really feeling an emotion. We know that humans can look as if they're feeling a particular emotion without actually feeling it because we know that they can pretend (convincingly) to feel it. So we know that in general, it is possible for someone or something to give the appearance of feeling an emotion without actually feeling it. So, we know that the fact that a dog looks sad is not particularly good evidence that it is actually feeling sad.
In, "Stumbling on Happiness" [0] Gilbert's explanation of conditioned actions we just perform without it registering in our "awareness" hit home with me and may provide a model for understanding how animals (humans included) can do something that looks like it requires this invented empathy, awareness, etc. but can in fact be done without any "awareness" of what you're doing. Exploring consciousness isn't the point of the book at all, but the one section where he touched on it seemed to speak to your question some.
I'm not some kind of crazy animal activist, but seriously what's wrong with people : researching empathy by dipping mice tails in hot water or injecting them with vinegar is seriously fucked-up.
Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?
That's all well and great, but should we let people die, because we don't want to hurt some animals? Animals that are bred for the sole purpose of studies and would otherwise had to be killed? Lab mice don't grow in wilds you know.
Where do you stop? Do you stop eating bread because there are bits of mice/crickets in it? Do you stop eating carrots, because a family of rabbits might depend on it? Do you stop eating bread because a strain of fungus (which aren't plants and are capable of moving on its own volition) might depend on it?
Sure, but it's more complex, than "Can't believe these scientist torture mice for empathy". For now, mice lab animals are our only reliable models.
First they weren't "torturing mice for empathy", they were studying them for examining pain receptors.
Second the study was used to determine if something has empathy or not. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that large rocks posses sentience, would you not want to determine that rocks have sentience, even if you have been milling them into concrete.
> Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
Imagine you are mouse breeder. Your only source of revenue is gone. Are you going to:
A) Release them into general mice populace causing potential short term damage by having too many breedable mice, while their genes are potential long term damage to mice population (mice used to test cancer get cancer really quickly)?
B) Feed them and chemically castrate them and or keep them in isolation (solitary confinement, yay!). Costs money, not sure if departments have that much free dough lying around
C) Kill them painlessly and efficiently?
D) Sell them at a loss as pets, even though they aren't suitable as pets (some of the strains die really really quickly, because they are bred for that).
I never passed judgement on this specific study (I only used the worst interpretation of it as an example), I was arguing against your absurd statement that since eating bread can kill some mice, doing any kind of research on mice is fine.
Secondly, are you seriously suggesting that we should keep breeding and killing lab mice because otherwise we might have to kill them? I can't even understand how can this make any sense. And nobody here is arguing for stopping all the animal research tomorrow. If demand drops, breeders will simply breed less of them. How is this a difficult concept?
No, I'm saying we should keep breeding mice until we have a better model of how human body works.
> I was arguing against your absurd statement that since eating bread can kill some mice, doing any kind of research on mice is fine.
I was arguing against notion that somehow removing lab mice will make stuff better, for anyone. Humans won't get data needed to design various drugs, mice overall will continue to suffer, since I believe that lab mice make a small set of all living mice.
I'm sorry, but to me that seems like it's along the same lines as saying slavery should be legal if the children are bred for it.
And in my opinion, yes, we should let some people die. My thought had always been that for the people on death row, when the day of their lethal injection comes, they should have the option to either be put to death or to donate their body to science for testing. If they should choose testing, they can also opt out at any, in which case they would be given the lethal injection the following day.
Well no. First rats aren't same as humans. They share certain qualities but not all. Second we don't have a good replacement (and for a while we did allow children to work).
The models aren't there yet, but once we develop those, we could try phasing out lab studies.
The article is clear that the purpose of the research was not empathy study, but pain study.
"Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance."
There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I wonder why vinegar was used here.
The hot water test is actually one of the nicer tests.
120 F isn't that hot, it only hurts after a while, and the mouse can take its tail out at any time. That's how they were able to detect the effect; the mice that saw the other mice do the test took their tails out faster because they knew it'd eventually hurt based on the prior mouse's reaction.
Perhaps the thing we call empathy is just a strange side effect of the negative subconscious feedback a member of group-oriented species gets when their friend is, or is going to be harmed, physically or otherwise.
The choice between gaining/saving an ally or gaining a treat can certainly be a selfish one, and in my opinion most likely is.
Yes, because humans are animals. Ignoring humans, while we are different to other animals, we are not really that different, particularly to other social mammals. So the answer remains yes.
Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other beings.
This is not at all self-evident, and your logic is flawed: you're saying that X (humans) is a subset of Y (animals), all X have property P (empathy), therefore all Y have property P.
The point was that, while you can raise the query from a western scientific reductionist perspective and put ethics completely on hold, we're ridiculously similar genetically and behaviorally, such that the certainty is very high without the need for torture.
To put this another way, all science is probability-based. To take your philosophical bent to its logical conclusion, you never know that all animals of a similar species have similar abilities for empathy so you should torture them all!
They're not, actually. The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals.
You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait.
Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.
>The former statement uses rodents and humans, the latter humans and animals.
One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in (as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that.
Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum".
We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale that animals can participate too.
(So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not as "like an actual human person" -- as it doesn't concern other human attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).
To say that animals can't be empathic because they have selfish motives is bizarre - empathy is selfish, as it's a social survival and ingratiation tool, whether you care to admit such or not. both sides falling into an anthropomorphic trap.
I am a dog owner and I am completely in the belief that my dog can feel empathy. I see it from time to time. I have a really hard time understanding why some would even make the suggestion that animals generally don't feel empathy? If every animal does it, however, is a different question.
I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking.
This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.
Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot.
* When we came the parrot said hello to everyone.
* One of my friends aggravated the parrot by
standing on the far side of the cage and making funny
faces.
* When we left the parrot said bye to everyone but him.
* When we came back a couple of weeks later and he had
forgotten about the parrot and came too close to the
cage it tried to bite him.
Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.
53 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadMy dog has such a huge range of emotions, it's no doubt in my mind he feels in many ways like we do.
He even has dreams and nightmares.
There is also a very interesting Google-talks video of Sheldrake explaining the experiments.
[1] http://www.sheldrake.org/research/telepathy
However I do like the "Falling Skies" (a Sci-Fi drama starring Noah Wyle) explanation for telepathy; which was communication over the electromagnetic spectrum in a frequency that humans wouldn't normally detect (long waves IIRC)
Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn't have empathy?
Especially when there are plenty documented examples of animals disregarding their own security to help another animal in distress (including humans): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AkANQls234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn9SC61Bd7I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_daN5_pUlnE
You can take it one step further and ask if there is even a difference?
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...
Should we search for empathy the hard way in these scientists too ?
Where do you stop? Do you stop eating bread because there are bits of mice/crickets in it? Do you stop eating carrots, because a family of rabbits might depend on it? Do you stop eating bread because a strain of fungus (which aren't plants and are capable of moving on its own volition) might depend on it?
Killing lab mice to develop life saving medicine is fine with me in most cases. Torturing mice to study empathy probably isn't.
Either way, besides killing all the lab mice, we can also just stop breeding them, you know.
First they weren't "torturing mice for empathy", they were studying them for examining pain receptors.
Second the study was used to determine if something has empathy or not. Imagine if tomorrow we discovered that large rocks posses sentience, would you not want to determine that rocks have sentience, even if you have been milling them into concrete.
Imagine you are mouse breeder. Your only source of revenue is gone. Are you going to:A) Release them into general mice populace causing potential short term damage by having too many breedable mice, while their genes are potential long term damage to mice population (mice used to test cancer get cancer really quickly)?
B) Feed them and chemically castrate them and or keep them in isolation (solitary confinement, yay!). Costs money, not sure if departments have that much free dough lying around
C) Kill them painlessly and efficiently?
D) Sell them at a loss as pets, even though they aren't suitable as pets (some of the strains die really really quickly, because they are bred for that).
Secondly, are you seriously suggesting that we should keep breeding and killing lab mice because otherwise we might have to kill them? I can't even understand how can this make any sense. And nobody here is arguing for stopping all the animal research tomorrow. If demand drops, breeders will simply breed less of them. How is this a difficult concept?
> I was arguing against your absurd statement that since eating bread can kill some mice, doing any kind of research on mice is fine.
I was arguing against notion that somehow removing lab mice will make stuff better, for anyone. Humans won't get data needed to design various drugs, mice overall will continue to suffer, since I believe that lab mice make a small set of all living mice.
And in my opinion, yes, we should let some people die. My thought had always been that for the people on death row, when the day of their lethal injection comes, they should have the option to either be put to death or to donate their body to science for testing. If they should choose testing, they can also opt out at any, in which case they would be given the lethal injection the following day.
The models aren't there yet, but once we develop those, we could try phasing out lab studies.
"Though he hurts mice for a living, Mogil says it's not for a lack of his own empathy. He research is about understanding why two people may experience pain in different ways, with the hope of developing better pharmaceuticals for managing it. "My sympathy is mostly reserved for chronic pain patients," Mogil tells me. For decades, Mogil and his team have conducted experiments testing the pain threshold of mice in order to see what role genetics play in pain tolerance."
There are human studies on pain reception where people are exposed to cold water, where extreme cold water is reported to use similar pain receptors as heated water but cause less damage to the skin. Researchers also injects subjects with capsaicin (Mythbusters did this on camera in one episode), and I wonder why vinegar was used here.
Same as: "My sympathy is mostly reserved for black child slaves than for the white child slaves."
There is no difference! These who fails to see that can be said to have a degree of lack of empathy.
120 F isn't that hot, it only hurts after a while, and the mouse can take its tail out at any time. That's how they were able to detect the effect; the mice that saw the other mice do the test took their tails out faster because they knew it'd eventually hurt based on the prior mouse's reaction.
Note that this answer is self-evident and did not require torturing other beings.
And yet those two statements are totally analogous -- except for the irrational fear of anthropomorphizing...
You can see that there's a set of traits that are common among all animals, a smaller set common among mammals, an even small set common amongst primates, etc. And then each species has its own set of unique trait.
Rodents aren't like humans and humans aren't like rodents, rodents and human share traits that are likely common among many mammals.
One just uses "animals" as the universal (generic) thing we all participate in (as a continuum), while the other uses "humans" (or "humanity") for that.
Sure, we're animals too, but not "just another animal", but (what we know of as the) pinnacle of the thinking/empathy/etc spectrum".
We can think of being human-like in this sense as the top degree in that scale that animals can participate too.
(So, "human-like is used a stand-in for "empathetic/thinking/conscious", not as "like an actual human person" -- as it doesn't concern other human attributes -- physiology, looks, etc, only emotional and cognitive ones).
I took my sister's dog to my brother-in-law's dad's funeral. The poor mutt does not speak English, has not seen a priest before, has never been to a funeral before, yet the dog was behaving most unusually, not at all able to hold it together, shaking.
This was a small family gathering - it was not as if the dog was scared of some huge crowd - plus it was delightfully sunny without the slightest breeze. There were no other reasons I could see for what was going on inside the walnut-sized brain of this dog other than the events going on around her. Most strange.
Me and some friends visited another friend that had a parrot.
Would hardly have believed it if I hadn't been there on both occasions.Once saw a cat rush a squirrel in the back yard. I yelled at it and it ran away but apparently the poor thing died in fright.
What was amazed me was seeing another squirrel come over and actually hug the other one, trying to get it to stand up.