I 100% can believe this. Especially the insects that form colonies are capable of some sort of rudimentary communication based on body language, can form bonds, can be annoyed instead of just threatened, and can differentiate humans from objects. This from my experience rehabilitating (raising?) a hornet to flight.
Frans de Waal's book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? is also very good on the topic of scientific research not allowing empathy between animals as a prior in research, due to the decades-long stranglehold of behaviorism in research. He argues that it's more ridiculous to suggest that we start from a point of treating animals as if they don't have complex emotional lives than the other way around (although in that book he's talking primarily about mammals). He still thinks you should try to prove things scientifically, just that the starting point of treating them like input-output machines is a really weird one.
We are input-output machines though. Being so doesn't preclude us from having vivid internal emotional experiences, I don't know why it would. Both things are true
There's a difference between literally being cellular automata (all life, including you and me) and being treated like a robot. I imagine aliens putting babies in boiling water and explaining the unpleasant noise as air escaping the lungs as an example.
Pretty much any vertebrate meets the definition of sentience (can feel pain). And we still torture them because we assume their internal experience of pain is not as rich as our own
If we accept that dogs are pretty smart and deserve protections similar to that of a person (eg if you beat your dog to death you're going to jail) then pigs are even more emotionally complex, and our other "food sources" are in similar territory.
Right I agree, our view of non-human organisms (and even young humans) has been significantly flawed for a long time and we're barely improving with this realisation. Computers may even have some sort of sentience or awareness that we can't comprehend right now, but they get "treated like robots"
That would be bad news. There are one quadrillion ants. Unlike humans, most ants are born women. Only female ants work (aka slaves), while males are mating (raping?) with the queen (at least queens can mate only once in life) and then males die shortly after that. Males live for a week (but their sperm lives for years), workers (all female) live for about a year, a queen lives for decades.
Sometimes I see ants eating almost dead ants. Which means that while I write this, several billion women are being eaten alive and feeling all kinds of emotions. When there is no queen, the ant that eats the most protein becomes the queen.
And spiders with their webs... it's always such a horror to look at their captives.
And if souls exist and they possess the first available just born organism (FIFO queue) after we die, then that would mean it is a low chance to be born human again, at least for now. I was mentally prepared to become even a broiler chicken, but not an insect.
Or if there is suddenly a multiverse, but every universe can have only one consciousness which tries to live everyone's life one-by-one (also FIFO). That would mean we would have to live many quadrillion lives before becoming a human again. And also if we suddenly have to also live every possible route/branch within the many-worlds interpretation, that becomes too depressing.
I wouldn't overthink it too much. Normally it'd be rude so baldly to note how wildly off base you are about so much of how ant societies work, but in this case it's worth mentioning because what does that say about your chances of accurately apprehending the parts of this analysis that aren't tangible? You almost certainly do not need to fear living ten million lives as an ant before reincarnating as a human again.
(If you are going to reincarnate as a hymenopteran, go for Polistes, that's my advice. Social, but on a smaller scale and in a looser style than Vespula and hornets, and with size and brains enough to manage a degree of personality that ants in my experience don't seem to. Also, you'll be able to fly! That seems like a considerable benefit entirely in its own right.)
Emotions are a useful learning signal, that abstracts a range of sense experiences into a coherent or gestalt impression, so this is not surprising. But it's nice to see people care about insects, or at least provide a basis for doing so.
This synthesis, the emotional synthesis of experience, then aids decisions. And is a key component probably of the biological OODA learning loop.
Emotions may be necessary for AGI. Or at least help us get there.
We _should_ speak to the greater ethical obligations: animals feel a lot, including things like pain, discomfort, suffering, fear, anxiety, etc. Some more than others, certainly. This means that things we unnecessarily do to them which cause these feelings aren’t okay.
And since we don’t need to eat any animals to be happy and healthy, raising and killing them in any capacity falls under “unnecessary suffering”.
Don’t eat things that feel. You don’t need to and they don’t want to be consumed.
Don't treat farm animals cruelly I'm fully on board with. But if you don't eat animals at all, farm animals won't exist in the first place. The choice is between the animal having a life that ends as food, or no life. If the life is a miserable factory farm one, I can see how no life would be superior, but I don't believe that's always the case.
By far the majority of all cows on farms have a miserable life. The female ones were made to give ridiculous amounts of milk, they get forcibly impregnated every year so they constantly produce milk, their offspring is taken away from them immediately after birth and will likely never see a single drop of milk or touch from their mom, after a few years those cows are put down because their bodies are exhausted for being pregnant and producing milk for most of their lifes.
Pigs and chicken have it probably even worse.
A world with our demand for milk, eggs and meat is not possible without ridiculous amounts of harm for all animals involved.
Weaning and raising a child with only vegan foods seems inhumane. How many beans, lentils and soy products do you need to make up for a serving of meat?
Why is raising a child with vegan foods inhumane? And you do realize that in order for you to get a serving of meat, we first had to feed animals many times more calories from plant based products? The majority of our soy is used to fed animals. Right now we produce ~350 million tons of soy each year, which means with 150-450kcal/100gr for soy beans that's enough energy to feed everyone on earth. Since we're also eating other stuff this means we could actually reduce our soy production if we stopped feeding it to animals but used it ourselves.
Your only makes sense if you equate the opposite of life as always being death, but in this case it isn’t. In this case you’re not killing something by inaction.
The distinction is important because otherwise condoms would be murder. (Which, in fairness, some cultures do believe. But they also believe that chanting at wine turns it into literal blood. So as open minded as I am, I have a hard job taking their view points seriously.)
That's fallacious. Cows, pigs, sheep, turkeys, all existed before being farmed. And still exist in the while. Probably not on the scale of the 60 billions land animals slaughtered each year, though.
Domesticated farm animals are far enough removed from their wild cousins to be their own species. They have been selectively bred over millenia for traits that make them easy to exploit for humans. Most of those traits work against them in the wild.
This is what I'm saying - those 60 billion won't exist. Yes, wild animals, so much as they exist now, will continue to do so, but that's not really relevant.
How is it not relevant. If we stopped breeding animals that doesn’t magically mean that we go back in time 60 billions years and kill every species of farm animal that had existed in that time.
It should be noted that animals won't stop suffering if we stop eating them. Animals in the wild usually live pretty desperate lives, and universally, always, 100% die horrible, horrible deaths that industrial processes would never inflict on them - their flesh tore open as they flee in a panic, or slowly starving to death as disease makes them unable to feed and insects burrow into their living bodies, or suffocating, or drowning or frostbite or or or.
I'm not claiming that farm lives (or worse, industry lives) are in any sense good, or even better, but it's important to remember that nature itself has no qualms in inflicting pain and suffering on animals.
Not to mention, we're only starting to learn how complex plants and fungi are, and that they have their own abilities to perceive the world, react to it, and communicate their reactions to other individuals. If (and this is a huge If, I fully admit that) it turns out plants and fungi are also capable of emotion or hurt, we really will need to re-examine some base assumptions of our morality.
Then I'll live my life so as to not cause unnecessary suffering. For what it's worth, that still means eating plants as I need to (thus its necessary) and it still reduces the total amount of plants being eaten when compared to diets with animal products.
But does anyone really believe plants are sentient? Nope! So we are likely able to completely avoid needing to worry about that.
Plenty of people do believe that plants are sentient. It is a part of plenty of spiritual belief systems that ascribe life, spirit, and sentience to all living things, and often many nonliving things.
Consider that they may have some self-restraint module you are unaware of, and you should start letting them bite you.
Edit: I do not see how anyone can find this (contentful) statement disagreeable, which I see as purely logical conclusion (in form of a joke) after a few really simple assumptions. I am starting to assume disagreement comes from masochist insects which are part of the poster's collection, as they probably cannot type.
This entire year, I have been coming across instances of animals displaying signs of much richer inner lives than I had given them credit for. It is tempting to anthropomorphize, but it is just as tempting do dismiss displays of intelligence or emotion and see animals as mindless automata.
One observation that never ceases to amaze me is watching crows interact with common buzzards. It looks as if the crows are harassing the buzzards until they retreat. AFAIK, these birds do not compete for the same food, nor do buzzards eat crows. I don't think it likely, but I would not be surprised to learn the crows do this just for fun, or as a kind of "team building exercise".
And I still wonder if dogs think it is weird when humans pick up their poop.
I was reading Reddit comments the other day from people who keep pet jumping spiders. They report them to have personalities and a degree of intelligence.
If you find that interesting, then I recommend the book Children of Time. It is a sci fi novel spanning the demise of humans and the rise of another species.
People so often jump to claims of anthropomorphism when discussing the faculties of other animals, and it’s so weird. This happens constantly when trying to get people to understand that animals suffer very, very deeply. Claims that suffering is somehow reserved for only homo sapiens seem to be founded in nothing other than the discomfort of needing to take other living things into consideration. This is true not only of suffering but really any sort of feeling.
We will look back on our current understanding of animals feelings one day like we look back on Descarte, who vivisected dogs because he was convinced they had no feeling whatsoever.
For a good overview of the history of, and philosophy of, discussing animals capacity to feel I suggest “A Plea for Animals” as continued reading.
This whole physical existence is suffering without end. It is literally the core of any being. Buddhism has a core imperative to either lessen the suffering (by not inflicting more of it), or to eradicate it altogether by means of final death in nirvana (escape from samsara). However, as any novice of buddhism knows, dogs simultaneously both possess buddha-nature and are unaware of it. In that sense, is actually knowing that to be is to suffer better or worse?
And as far as the fetish for anthropocentrism is concerned, it is a western religious thing deeply rooted in psychopatic (as opposed to empathic) abrahamic tradition, which proved to be a superior memeplex here.
I don’t know what any of that has to do with what I said, but if it boils down to “I agree, animals are sensitive and should be taken into consideration”, then I agree.
Why is it any less plausible for them to have personalities than to not have personalities? Patronizing dismissals such as yours without any reasoning and facts are extremely frustrating.
Because they we have a hundred billion neurons and they have a few thousand. Also, because humans are known to anthropomorphize an awful lot. One common example is thinking that dogs feel guilty when you scold them for naughty behavior. Instead, they are reacting to the scolding.
Your numbers are off, for a start. Neuron count is in the order of hundreds of thousands to millions for the more socially complex species, including the Asian giant hornet. These are known to have cognitive abilities that might surprise you, including in many species the ability to recognize familiar conspecifics by sight. And in any case, why shouldn't that size of brain be enough to sustain a personality? They aren't clones, after all, except in rare cases, and even then you have to take mutation, epigenetics, and developmental effects into account.
But hey, I'm not the one implicitly advancing the claim that anything not clever enough to be human is a meat robot. You're the one doing that, and so far you've done nothing but assert it. Why don't you source it and actually defend it, instead? Until then I don't see why anyone should take it all that seriously.
Not just a conspecific, a nestmate, and to be entirely clear that's known in polistid wasps [0] but not, so far as I'm yet aware, in vespids, which are understood primarily to use scent cues instead. That said, with regard to V. mandarinia it's not easy to be familiar with current research unless you read Japanese, which I don't; probably in a decade or so there will be a great deal more in the way of English literature, given the rate at which I expect they will establish across at least the western half of the continent. Maybe a decade after that we'll have a reasonable depth of English-language papers that have to do with something other than unsuccessful extirpation strategies; I expect it depends first on how quickly they find a way across the Rockies, and second on whether anyone actually cares to fund entomology departments for something other than bee husbandry and "pest" management.
In any case, if you're attempting to make an argument here, its thesis could stand considerable clarification. I'm not even sure whether you're intending to agree or not with my own argument, so would you like to elucidate a bit on what point you're trying to make and how you support it?
The first one makes a jump from quantity to quality. But, counting to three and counting to whatever is not a qualitative difference. A definition of "personality" is required to define where it starts, and it is easy to conceive interpretations which allow for broad labelling.
The second one is just a caveat. As John had to tell his wife as he surprised her in bed with Frank, and she went "Yes but you know you are jealous and a bit paranoid".
Human beings are also very good at hubris. For whatever reason, they seem to think they are fundamentally different from all other living beings on this planet although they share the same descent.
:-) Still, the "brains" in insects work more or less the same as ours. So the hypothesis here is that something akin to emotions are a basic feature of brains + bodies. The hypothesis is not that stones have feelings although there are people who would think otherwise.
Yes. Abductive reasoning is all fun and games, until one places believe in the "educated guesses": abductive reasoning is a technique to jump to ranked hypotheses, not to (theoretical, epistemic) conclusions - it would be fallacious to use it otherwise.
Sure, it is one key aspect of decision making, of the role of the bounded economic agent, of the analyst applying Bayes to give advice - of the gambler placing bets on a sheerly practical need.
Not only hypoteses of minor ranking can still be truthful and productive: sometimes criteria adopted for the computation can have largely accidental aspects ("- John won the lottery // - Pah, winning is so improbable // - Well he did"; "We selected a good candidate // - Mah, don't get me started about interviewers // - Well...").
Many people would suppose so, yes. Organisms of multiagent systems where agents can cry for distress.
(Sorry: this is irregardless of any context of biochemistry and «neurotransmitters», which some would just call a concretion, an implementational side.)
I have read in this page many instances of the idea of "anthropomorphize the idea of animals".
It seems to be not unnecessary to note, that some, in history (prominently, authoritatively), have clearly advanced the idea that the same (or similar) principle applies to humans. Such "humanity" as a goal, not as a given. And "dishumanity" an intrinsic risk.
When I was younger I had a couple of terantulas as pets, tho they were different species, and a lot of their behavior is usually ascribed to that, so I never could make any direct comparisons.
But at the conventions were breeders would sell them, and let people handle them for photos and such, they'd often explain how that particular spider was the more "laid back" one.
Part of that is probably just to calm people down, but I don't see why a spider shouldn't be able to have a bad day.
Mine certainly weren't 100% predictable but also had their more active/passive phases, would sometimes skip on food or sometimes be still aggressive even after being fed. Putting all that down to pure biological determinism feels a bit too simplistic.
These articles are getting tiresome. Anything thinking must have feelings to motivate their thoughts, otherwise the brain is useless. The basic assumption should be that anything with a brain has feelings.
In other words: the nervous system is there for action, hence specifically to take decisions, and decisions imply a notion of the peri-optimal and counteroptimal.
Your jump to "feelings" is not that short; but one could note that, as «brain» is above better replaced by "nervous system", the one directly apparent thing of the nervous system is the peripheral side of sensation (feeling - that of "action" being the clearly functional one).
I had this analogy not long ago, insects might be 8 bit while we're 3D vulkan compute shader in 4K, but we still have the same game dynamics at the core.
I dunno about that one. I mean, a few months ago this "3d Vulkan" whatever blundered into the middle of a late-season fig tree also hosting a couple hundred bald-faced yellowjackets, which you'd normally expect to end badly except that the "8-bit" wasps recognized I meant no harm and opted not to interrupt their boozing to deal with me. Considering that every fruit still on the tree was quite literally crawling with burly black-and-ivory wasps - which, despite a lively interest in such animals, I totally failed to notice in my single-minded quest for bindweed roots - I think they might actually have been smarter than me.
I do like wasps, and I have some skill and maybe a little talent at being very close to them without eliciting dismay, but even I would hesitate to wander into a yellowjacket bar! Even so, their own skill, which I have often observed, at telling whether or not a human means them harm, no doubt saved me any number of stings. I even later the same day got some handsome macro shots of one of them who'd had too much and ended up crashing on my front porch windowsill to sleep it off: https://aaron-m.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/img_8240.jpg
jokes aside, i was simply making a dumb model based on brain size, in the sense that we are supposed to have more neurons than insects but maybe the core structure is similar, they just have less room for fat and shallow details.
That's fair, although it's also worth noting we share quite little in terms of neural architecture with even the smartest of insects, and our brains differ in neuron count by something like six orders of magnitude - I don't know of any insect with as many as one million neurons, most being around the 50-150k range, while human brains weigh in at around a hundred billion.
That said, to take this as prima facie evidence that insects are meat robots, the way behaviorists like to do, strikes me purely as motivated reasoning. There's no basis for it - no one yet has established an objective mapping between brain size or complexity and behavioral complexity, nor does this seem likely to happen soon. Ethologists, by contrast with behaviorists, spend most of their research time observing live, active animals in their own accustomed habitats - Jane Goodall, as opposed to that pervo freak Skinner - and it's no accident that all the really interesting results, from individual recognition by facial features in polistids to the likely range and spread of V. mandarinia in the Nearctic, are coming from biologists who take an ethological approach.
Well you know.. numbers. If you count lines of code on hard drive these days, it's also many order of magnitude more than old OSes. Some people made tiny lisp, tiny prolog that fits into a few kB while some use a full blown JVM class tree with god knows how many MB of code to achieve probably less.
Sorry but I don't understand. Does 'qualitative' stands here for 'something is missing, limiting what can be done with the device'? What can a FPU do which isn't doable using a CPU?
A CPU can do "anything" by definition (Turing Machine), but does it do it? :) You still need the function implementation to be present.
It is in terms of software, not on hardware - or, of hardware structures that perform functions. Sometimes, yes, «something is missing». Olfactory difference between man and bear could be possibly quantitative; control of the individual fingers is qualitative (a present or missing module).
One of the biggest obstacles in this kind of research is 1) the human tendency to anthropomorphize in our explanations, 2) to over interpret findings from a behavioral task that is based on analogies, but can be solved in multiple ways. The latter is very dangerous in the brain sciences:For example, inhibition can happen in a microcircuit of neurons to reduce neuron firing, or inhibition can be thought of as the cognitive capacity to refrain from a behavior you are predisposed to do using cognitive control. These are not the same things.
On the other hand, primatologist Frans de Waal argued that many behaviorologists go too much out of their way to _not_ antropomorphize and come up with all manner of (contrived) mechanical explanations.
I too eagerly await the spider symphony that shows up Mozart’s “Jupiter.” Obviously I’m not going to be unfair to the bugs and expect Bach or Schiller tier work.
Why would you expect even to recognize, much less be able to understand, the art of a spider? What arrogance gives you to imagine that our terms can suffice to capture their experience, or vice versa?
I can't speak to spider art, but I can somewhat to spider smarts. We hosted an orb weaver on our porch this year, and she found the best place to build her web for prey capture was right across the porch steps. Unfortunately, this also led to importunate apes occasionally blundering face-first into, and thus disarranging, her careful work - even when you're trying not to break anything, you can't help but snap a thread or two in disentangling yourself.
So, after a couple nights studying the problem, she started building her webs shorter but wider and higher up, maintaining roughly the same capture area but keeping the structure a good couple inches above human head height. (Or my and my boyfriend's height, anyway, we being both about 5'10".) She kept that up the rest of the season, and we got along just fine - I've had human houseguests who were less courteous and less skilled at finding a modus vivendi.
This idea comes from Mechanical Philosophy, and is represented in the writings of Descartes. According to his dualist view of the world, the soul and body are opposed, but only humans have a soul.
He wanted to show that animals are just automata, and believed that they are incapable of feeling pain.
Everyone that says animals, including insects, don't have a conscience is a complete moron in my book.
I realize how people are raised is an important part of it, and yet adults should not be 5his stupid by choice.
One time, I had my dentist proudly proclaim animals don't have consciousness because it has been proven by scientists that animals don't know about death. I am no longer a client of this otherwise hot lady
