The only feelings we can feel are our own. When it comes to the feelings of others, we can only infer them, based on their behavior — unless they tell us. This is the “other-minds problem.” Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem arises only for states in which people cannot speak (infancy, aphasia, sleep, anaesthesia, coma). Our species also has a uniquely powerful empathic or “mind-reading” capacity: We can (sometimes) perceive from the behavior of others when they are in states like our own. Our inferences have also been systematized and operationalized in biobehavioral science and supplemented by cognitive neuroimagery. Together, these make the other-minds problem within our own species a relatively minor one. But we cohabit the planet with other species, most of them very different from our own, and none of them able to talk. Inferring whether and what they feel is important not only for scientific but also for ethical reasons, because where feelings are felt, they can also be hurt. As animals are at long last beginning to be accorded legal status and protection as sentient beings, our new journal Animal Sentience, will be devoted to exploring in depth what, how and why organisms feel. Individual “target articles” (and sometimes précis of books) addressing different species’ sentient and cognitive capacities will each be accorded “open peer commentary,” consisting of multiple shorter articles, both invited and freely submitted ones, by specialists from many disciplines, each elaborating, applying, supplementing or criticizing the content of the target article, along with responses from the target author(s). The members of the nonhuman species under discussion will not be able to join in the conversation, but their spokesmen and advocates, the specialists who know them best, will. The inaugural issue launches with the all-important question (for fish) of whether fish can feel pain.
Harnad asserts that one way that we can be more certain that humans feel over any other species is the fact that humans have language, and that language enables us to communicate to each other that we feel. However, it may be still possible for other species to communicate to us their feelings using words but not language.
ReplyDeleteHow? Consider Bunny's mono-word sentences "ouch" (see Ting in section 8a). This is far from the propositions we know - there is no subject, there is no predicate. However, there it is undoubtable that Bunny is expressing to us a feeling. Bunny probably could not make a proposition about the state of the world like "the apple is red" that we could empirically verify to be true or false. However, Bunny did *ask*, and we can infer that the asking came from an internal state by empirically verifying what prompted the asking - in Bunny's case, a cut in her nostril.
Some will undoubtedly say that asking is just mindless behavior, a product of cause (I press the button) and effect (mom checks me for cuts). However, this is unlikely for the same reasons it's unlikely that humans don't feel - it makes more sense to say that Bunny was expressing an internal state. Firstly, there was a cause for that internal state, but more importantly, if we had the same buttons Bunny had, we would have done the same.
So, we have good reason to believe that despite Bunny not having language, Bunny can use words to communicate internal states. And that's worth pursuing in animal sentience, because if we can trust animals’ expressions of their emotions, we have a shortcut into figuring out when and what animals feel.
Yes, Bunny expresses, with the button, that something hurts, and she wants help.
DeleteBut nonhuman animals can also express that in other ways too, by their behavior, and their vocalization.
With mammals (and also birds), we can understand when they are in pain as well as we can with human babies.
The question of mind-reading problem becomes more challenging with other feelings, and with other species that are less obviously like us.
Skeptics of animal sentience accuse sentience researchers of biasing their observations with anthropomorphism. They accuse researchers of projecting onto animals our feelings, and seeing what isn't there.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think this accusation demonstrates how skeptics may be begging the question as to whether animals feel. Why? Consider the innocent prisoner's dilemma:
A panel asks an innocent prisoner whether or not he is guilty. If the prisoner answers "no," the panel will say "that's exactly what a guilty person would say." If the prisoner answers "yes," the panel write them off as having confessed. It is impossible for the prisoner to say he’s innocent if he’s trusted half the time.
Likewise, if an animal were to exhibit behavior that we observe as being an indicator of sentience, skeptics would condemn researchers of anthropomorphizing. If the animal didn't exhibit any such behavior, then the skeptics would write the animal off as having no sentience. It’s impossible for an animal to show that they’re sentient if their behavior is trusted half the time.
How to solve the problem? Two words: agnosticism and trust. To uncover truths, researchers need to be open to both the possibility that their intuitions are right or that they are wrong. Second, researchers need to trust the data and follow their leads.
The skeptic shouldn't dismiss behavioral cues of sentience just because it's a sentient researcher and the data shows sentience. Of course the opposite holds true; the sentient researcher shouldn't dismiss behavioral cues that an animal lacks sentience on similar grounds.
That's why, as Harnad does, it's critical to follow the data's lead, and ask not what they feel, but first whether they feel, allowing for both possibilities.
Another option: anthropomorphism (using our human -- and mammalian -- mind-reading ability (and it really is an ability, lot a liability). It evolved mostly to help us take care of our babies. But it works with all mammals -- and birds, fish and invertebrates too.
DeleteHi Harnad,
DeleteI get the sense that using anthropomorphism to answer any question is… well, hard.
Anthropomorphism allows us to gather feeling-information (how certain things make us feel), whereas the scientific method provides us with doing-information (how certain things make other things act/react). However, unlike doing-information, it’s impossible to know whether our feeling-information is in fact reducing the uncertainty highlighted by our questions.
With doing-information, we can know if we’re using our information reduces uncertainty by finding causal mechanisms. These mechanisms turn our doing-information into explanations – they answer how or why our information reduces our uncertainty. When we can’t find that causal mechanism for our doing-information, we take that as a sign that we’re on the wrong path.
Without a feeling-mechanism, it’s impossible to know whether our feeling-information is in fact helping us answer our questions (reducing uncertainty). When it comes to finding that mechanism, well, that’s the hard problem. As such, the same way that it’s easy for us to know how or why we can know if our doing-information reduces uncertainty (the easy problem), it’s hard to know how or why we can know whether feeling-information will reduce uncertainty at all.
Anthropomorphism is inferring what other species do and feel based on what we do and feel. Because it is inference rather than direct observation, it can sometimes be wrong. What makes an inference "scientific" is if it can be, and is, testable, and tested. That's how you find out whether it has reduced your uncertainty.
DeleteAnthropomorphic inferences are testable, and tested. Hence informative, when they are right.
There is no formula for how to come up with correct scientific hypotheses. They come from your head -- sometimes, in the easy cases, they just come from observation (data), rather like unsupervised learning. But more often they take some active brainwork and then testing to see whether they are right (e.g., by checking the precession of the perihelion of Mercury -- or the success of T3 -- or the response of fish to analgesic).
We're much better at coming up with correct inferences about others (human and nonhuman) thanks to the mind-reading capacities conferred on us by lazy evolution...
I would like to expand upon my “flower conjecture” from the previous week’s skywritings because I think it could be related to this article as well. To summarize, there is a difference between my aversion to pick flowers for fear that those flowers feel pain, and my aversion to sticking my hand near a fire because I would feel pain. I would like to better understand this difference and also understand how evolution fits into this picture.
ReplyDeleteA quote from this week’s article is “The third and perhaps most palpable reason we believe other people have minds is that our acute mind-reading powers (sometimes) make us feel as if other people feel.” (Harnad, 2016, p. 5)
From this I would answer that feeling is important because part of our mind-reading abilities comes from feeling. In the case of the flower I would say this would be a form of mind reading. Footnote 5 states the importance of blinking as a signal of a mind and plants certainly don’t blink, and they don’t have a nervous system either (at least not one like ours), so I operate under the assumption that they don’t feel pain. As far as putting my hand near a fire, I don’t need to do any mind-reading because it is my own mind so I just feel. Why might have evolution favoured mind-reading? It makes sense to me that evolution would have been “lazy” and just selected for a general mechanism of mind-reading as opposed to one specific for other humans. The paper also mentions how mind-reading could be selectively advantageous for caring for young (e.g. being able to mind-read and realize they feel hungry).
Yes, the difference between feeling one's own pain and feeling the pain of another sentient organism is a legacy of lazy evolution.
DeleteAs with the sweet tooth, whose distal cause (simplified) is the adaptive benefit of energy to escape predators but whose proximal cause is the felt taste of sweet things, so one of the important distal causes of the mind-reading capacity of altricial species is the adaptive benefit of nurturing their own genes in their progeny. It is important to detect and attend to their needs, otherwise they don't survive, and the parents' genes do not get passed on.
Two things to note:
(1) This is in no way an explanation of why the proximal stimulus is felt, rather than just detected, and acted upon, zombily. So the hard problem is not solved here either. But the correlation is there; hence the mind-reading capacity.
(2) Lazy evolution (the "Blind Watchmaker") is itself a zombie; and it is not a mind-reading zombie. But it is lazy. So in selecting for the genetic traits that allow altricial and social species to detect and respond to the internal needs of their progeny based on their external behavioral correlates (and perhaps biochemical signals too), lazy evolution inadvertently implanted the capacity to detect and respond to the same or similar correlates in members of other species.
And that's why a lioness will (sometimes) adopt and protect a baby antelope (until hunger gets the better of her).
And why people become vegan.
In the omnivorous past of our species the need to hunt meat to survive got the better of us. But today it's just a taste, like the sweet tooth, no longer necessary for either our survival or our health. The hope (of our victims -- and of my inner pig) is that our altricial empathy, evolution's lazy legacy, will now get the better of us.
I would like to say that this is not only an unexpected way to end the course, professor Harnad's editorial has also unexpectedly moved me. In a way, my previous "so what?" attitude has been soothed by this article, seeing how cognitive scientists and philosophers are encouraged to use their strengths not only for human kind, but also for other species.
ReplyDeleteI would like to comment on Kiley-Worthington's reply to professor Harnad's article. She writes that humans rely on context-independent skills for mind-reading (aka language), whereas non-human species use context-dependent cues. The author argues that this does not mean non-human species are less capable than humans: on the other hand, there are countless example of how animals can be better mind-readers than us. Harnad's response to that is due to the nuclear power of language, we can "read" exactly what other humans have in their minds. I don't agree that this is a relevant argument, for it further divides the "us" versus "them" division between humans and non-human species. I agree that language helps us tremendously, but I agree with K-W here that context-dependent mind-reading skills also help other species tremendously in their environments. Placing us as the more-powerful species due to our language capacity is unfair. Also, I think attributing our abominations to context-independent skills is a bit of a stretch. I can't mind-read other animals, so I can't tell (and predict) if they would also be as destructive as humans.
Marthe Kiley-Worthington is an elephant-whisperer, and no one could admire her skills (and those of elephants) more than I do. But we are, alas, the most powerful species, and largely because of our linguistic capacities, which are only in our lifetimes proving how monstrously destructive we have been to other species since we evolved. And, yes, it is our collective observing and explaining skills, transmitted as science, through language, that have made us the most successful mind-readers of all.
ReplyDeleteWould other species be as destructive as us, if they had language? Hard to imagine herbivores being that way (though some can be pretty aggressive when it comes to competing for mates, or even food and territory, or defending their young and themselves from predators).
We're not carnivores, though; we're omnivores.
Let's hope we'll make the right choice now.
Even though we are the most successful mind readers, it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the fact that we ignore our own mind-reading so much in our everyday consumption. Even to develop the covid vaccine, researchers have to test extensively on rodents and primates, effectively ignoring the pain being caused. We can feel empathy for other being, and even truly believe that they can feel like us (and therefore have consciousness like us), but it’s the fact that we can choose to ignore this feeling, and most do, which is the most alarming reality of all.
DeleteLife-or-Death Necessity
DeleteAylish, I can't give you an adequate answer to this one. All I can do is emphasize a few important distinctions:
(1) Matthieu Ricard's criterion is vital(i.e., life-or-death) necessity: "Do I need to do this for my survival and health?"
(2) The answer is that in the prosperous parts of the earth today humans do not need to consume meat, dish, dairy or eggs, either for survival or health. (In our evolutionary past we did have to hunt and fish to survive, and in the few remaining subsistence cultures we still do, but not in most of North America and Europe, or much of the rest of the earth.)
(3) A lot of biomedical research (like most scientific research) is not done to save lives but out of scientific curiosity or for the sake of career and funding. But some research really saves lives. And some of it hurts many animals.
(4) This is a tragic Darwinian fact. But while we are hurting far more animals completely unnecessarily, just for taste, territory, fashion or fun, it is not yet the time to ask people to renounce life-saving research. Only vegans can be asked to do that, and not while most people are not yet vegan.
So covid research should not be conflated with choosing to ignorethis.
Towards the end of the paper when professor Harnad writes about giving other species the “benefit of the doubt”, it really reminded of the “precautionary principle” that is used in the field of public health and government. The “precautionary principle” is an approach that is used in public health by health authorities and governments to put up preventative measures, even when there are still uncertainties about the consequences of a disease. A perfect example would be COVID-19, when back in March/April, different countries were implementing different regulations to “play it safe”, even though the effects of COVID were unclear.
ReplyDeleteSo if we’re willing to extend the benefit of doubt to ourselves and our own species, I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to extend it to other species (which counters with Key was saying, where he opposes extending the benefit of doubt to other species).
Birch, J. (2017). Animal sentience and the precautionary principle. Animal Sentience 16(1)
Delete“Picking the more likely option is partly the answer; but in the case of feelings, there is something far more important at stake than just the truth, namely, the consequences of being wrong: There is incomparably more at stake for others if we assume that they don’t feel, yet they do, than if we assume that they do feel, yet they don’t”
ReplyDeleteI think this quote provides a decent foil for the claims made by Key’s article, in which he claims that fish do not have the neural capacity to feel pain; they only experience nociception, which is the reaction to harmful material. I’ve already pointed out the incoherence in his argument, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Key’s thesis is completely correct. There are some behaviour that suggest that fish may think. Yes, this is not 100% guaranteed, but neither do we have this absolute certainty to whether other people or not (though we are more sure). Even if this sentenice is not guaranteed, maiming an animal or killing it, even it doesn’t experience any pain, is still potentially harming a thinking being, which is anathema to so many rules that we have constructed in human society. Why is there an arbitrary standard but certain animals that are less similar to us can’t? Even if they don’t think (which I think is implausible), the potential good is still outweighted by the looking possibility of hurting a cognising being.
This relates to Key’s point that assuming fish have pain or other emotions detracts from economic opportunity and certain group’s rights to fish for sustenance reasons. Even if they don’t feel pain, they still might be thinking. To grant pain this prominence over other forms of thinking states seems pointless and arbitrary.
I'm a little lost with your points about "thinking" and "cognizing."
DeleteQuestions about pain and suffering are about feeling.
Despite the hard problem, feeling is part of cognizing ( = thinking).
Hypothetical "Zombies" are insentient entities: They do not feel. Examples are rocks, rockets, (toy) robots and rhododendrons; also protons and planets. And computers.
Searle pointed out that even a T2 computer would not understand (think) because it would not feel.
So none of the weasel words help...
Hi Professor, I just wanted to clarify that my original intention in the use of 'weasel words' was only to reduce the redundancy of my text, where 'cognising' and 'thinking' beings are prahphrases of 'feeling' beings. I now realise that this results in some ambuiguity. What I wanted to say is that even if fish don't feel what we consider pain (which is questionable as has been pointed out by yourself and other peers in the classroom), it is not unequivocal that they don't 'feel' generally. As such, the risk of assuming that they don't feel and harming feeling beings is much less prominent than assuming they do feel when in reality, they don't.
DeleteHi William, thanks, now I understand.
DeleteI would like to comment on Timothy Racine’s response to Prof. Harnad’s article. From what I can surmise, Racine would agree that we can give other humans the benefit of the doubt regarding the Other Minds Problem because we can observe behavior and verbal reports. However, it seems he wishes to also extend that benefit of the doubt to other animals because of certain behaviors that correlate to feeling. Another important point he seems to make about Prof. Harnad’s stance on ‘distributed cognition’ is a similar one to critiques of; there is a problem with forcing a human understanding onto other species. Racine means that we should explore other ways of investigating mental states of other animals that do not involve using our human folk psychological terms.
ReplyDeleteA sentence seems to cut off: "critiques of;"
DeleteThe other-minds problem has been presented in this course as the problem of determining whether and what other organisms feel. The only means we have are correlates of feeling: (1) behavior (including language), (2) anatomy, and (3) physiological (including neural) correlates -- plus the mind-reading capacities we inherit thanks to lazy evolution, including parental empathy and the capacity to learn (biological) science (ethology).
"Human folk psychological terms" are topics much-discussed in courses on philosophy of mind, but they have not even been mentioned in this course.
What has been discussed here is "mind-reading" -- the capacity to feel (or feel as if you feel or know) what another organism is feeling ("mirror neurons"). It has also been suggested that "mental state" is one of many weasel words, and that it really just means "felt state."
Could you say a little more for kid-sib about what is meant by "there is a problem with forcing a human understanding onto other species. Racine means that we should explore other ways of investigating mental states of other animals that do not involve using our human folk psychological terms"?
Perhaps explain this in the context of Key's paper on whether fish feel pain?
“the goal is to further enhance our species’ already powerful mind-reading abilities, across species”
ReplyDeleteI don’t think I ever doubted the idea that animals feel pain, but I still had it reaffirmed the hard way. As someone who worked in animal research in the past (and came to the conclusion that I don’t have the stomach for it) every part of me believes animals feel pain. I was working at a lab that studied differences in vulnerability to depression in mice. To do that, we had to induce depression in mice and we used a social defeat model. I don’t think I’ll describe what that is on here but I’m sure most of you have heard of it (and if you haven’t you can google it if you’d like). Up until that point, I had only read about the social defeat model in textbooks or heard of it in classes, but my supervisor insisted that I be there to watch it, at least one time. I didn’t think I’d be phased by it. I was so wrong. I was straight up watching torture for I don’t know how long. I stood silently in the corner and wiped my tears every so often and decided I never wanted to do animal research again.
I wish we could all just be content with assuming that animals feel pain. I do wonder though, wouldn’t research into animal sentience be causing them more pain? (genuinely curious as to how this can be done without inflicting pain on animals)
For vertebrates and most invertebrates it's almost as obvious that they feel as that people do. So the OMP is invoked only out of cognitive dissonance.
DeleteAnd by far the best and richest research on what other animals feel (and can do) is observational, not invasive or manipulative.
This article by Harnad sets up the purpose of the journal of Animal Sentience: to support research that investigates what non-human animals feel. The guiding principles of the journal are very relevant to what we've learned in the course.
ReplyDeleteThe OMP is how to know what and if another organism feels; this problem only exists because the minds of others, unlike physical phenomena, cannot be directly observed (and in the case of animals, they cannot communicate to us directly using language like other humans can). And so for non-human animals our mercy towards them relies entirely on whether we believe they feel (and whether we care enough about that feeling even if we believe it exists). The easy problem is to find a causal explanation of how and why organisms can do everything they can do and the hard problem is to find a causal explanation for how and why we have minds (feel what we feel). If an organism is assumed to not have a mind, then the only thing to be concerned about is the easy problem but what if you’re unsure? This brings us to the precautionary principle, the idea that for decisions of great consequence we should err on the side of caution in the face of uncertainty. Harnad asks us to consider our options: 1) we assume animals do not have minds because we can’t ‘prove it’ for sure or 2) since we cannot be certain give them the benefit of the doubt to minimize as much suffering as possible, because this isn’t our problem it’s theirs.
Nonhuman animals can communicate, they just can't talk. And mammals and birds (at least), can communicate that they are hurt. Do you really think anyone believes it does not hurt a dog if you kick it, just because they can't talk? What is true is that we cannot literally feel someone else's pain -- so that makes it easier to ignore it, or even to persuade oneself they're not in pain. Nothing unique to the way some of us treat nonhuman animals here. There's nothing we do to them that some of us have not done to humans too. The only difference is that we have outlawed it with humans...
DeleteIn class and his article, Professor Harnad discusses Descartes and his error regarding animal sentience. Descartes used his method of doubt to ask himself which beliefs are certain and uncertain. For example, we believe that gravity exists because apples fall down and not up from trees. But we cannot be 100% sure because everything we see could all be a hallucination. However, there are two things we can be sure of:
ReplyDelete- If we accept the axioms of arithmetic, mathematics is true (i.e., 2+2=4).
- Cogito (I think therefore I am) and sentio (I feel therefore feeling is being felt) are true. For example, if I feel like I am having a headache when it turns out it is a migraine, I can not be wrong about what it feels like because I am observing the feeling directly rather than inferring it.
Despite that, even the beliefs one can not confirm might be true. Descartes believed that all non-human animals are just reflex machines or insentient zombies. When inflicting pain, their cries and screams are simply reflexes and indicative of nothing else. It is not a matter of what is right and what is wrong in this situation. The precautionary principle states that we should avoid causing negative consequences when we are not sure if an action is right or wrong or if the repercussions of that action being wrong are much worse than the repercussions of it being right. Not only do we have plenty of evidence for animal sentience, but we are also the most successful mind-readers of all. We should be able to observe when other creatures are in mental (felt) states, such as suffering, and show empathy.
In our modern-day society, the issue is no longer about need and the basic necessities of life. It is instead about luxury, convenience, taste and "how things have always been done." If we have enough for ourselves, we should give a voice to the voiceless. That is the true meaning of life. And as many students have already pointed out, it is unfortunate how lazy evolution allows us to get used to or get over reckless abuse and cruelty so fast.
Ting, you're understanding this course pretty well, for a T3! I doubt that anyone in the class would doubt that you really understand, so I doubt they would kick you either.
DeleteIn Animal sentience: The other-minds problem, Prof Harnad writes, "So it turns out that the other-minds problem is not our problem: It’s the problem of other species, if they do have minds — if they do indeed feel, yet have the misfortune that our species does not know they feel, or does not believe it."
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting point as it highlights the notion that some humans perhaps do not know or believe that other animals feel (Descartes famously (notoriously?) thought this, saying that animals were simply automata), and this serves as a justification for the pain we inflict on them for our own perceived benefit. As Harnad notes, we often give birds and mammals the benefit of the doubt with respect to feeling, as they behave more like we do when in pain, but it is much harder to do this when it comes to organisms such as fish, as they do not express the same kind of pain behaviour. I think that while the other minds problem, as Harnad describes it, is an important factor in why we inflict the kind of pain we do on animals, another important consideration, which is in fact more nefarious, is that we do believe animals feel, but we just don't care. Harnad has described this as a kind of psychopathy––not caring (or deciding not to care) that another being is hurting––and I think this is absolutely accurate. When it comes to the torture of animals, most people agree that at least some animals feel (we see this in the way people care about their pets), but they turn a blind eye to the structural and systemic torture of animals for the unnecessary purposes of food, clothing, and (more debatable but still often unnecessary) science––this is a kind of cultural psychopathy. I find it interesting that cultural psychopathy of this sort is not at all new to the human race––it reared its ugly head during slavery, the Holocaust, and countless other events in human history. One factor that has allowed us to overcome some of this cultural psychopathy, I would argue, is that those who suffer can tell us they suffer. While our mind-reading skills do apply to other organisms apart from humans, the fact that those organisms cannot describe to us in words the hurt they feel makes it easier for us to live in a state of dissonance, pretending that they do not feel, than it is to pretend that speaking humans do not feel. Hence, despite the other minds problem, we still have very robust behavioural evidence that non-human animals feel; it is just that this evidence does not include speaking behaviour. Therefore, it is easier for us to pretend that animals do not feel, making the cultural psychopathy that gives rise to systemic animal cruelty harder to overcome than other forms of cultural psychopathy.
Do you really think it’s much harder to tell that a fish is in pain when it’s hurt? I think it only starts to get less obvious when you go down to the simplest invertebrates — and even then a lot of observation (unsupervised learning) makes you better able to perceive what they are feeling. That’s how ethologists (and naturalists, like Darwin) become so good at mind reading.
DeleteBut we already have a test case in our own species: preverbal infants. Their needs are probably what induced lazy evolution to make us such good mind-readers (but not just for our babies).
“Within our own species, thanks to language, this problem [the other minds problem] arises only for states in which people cannot speak”. I would like to push back against the notion that this is “only for states in which people cannot speak”, as I think the other minds problem occurs in a variety of other circumstances, as well. For example, when someone who has experienced a severe suicidal episode is attempting to communicate this to someone who has enjoyed perfect psychological health. Even with words, there will still be a disconnect between these two people, because one has no experiences to draw on, with which to relate to the other. Harnad echoes this thought… “We can (sometimes) perceive from the behaviour of others when they are in states like our own”. If we are interacting with someone who is not in a state we have ever experienced, the other minds problem becomes salient once more. I also think it is relevant when people have difficulties mustering the courage to communicate with others. In this case as well, there is a disconnect between human inference of what another feels and what they actually feel. One may be completely aware the person beside them is feeling anything out of the ordinary, at all! Harnad mentions that “the other-minds problem within our own species is a relatively minor one” which I agree with — it is definitely of a smaller magnitude than that which occurs when we consider animals. However, I figured I would mention these examples that came to mind.
ReplyDeleteAll good points. The OMP is not just about whether another organism feels, but about what it feels. And, as you say, even language is not enough -- especially if the name or description of the feeling is grounded for one party and not the other. (And even shared feelings are only approximations, not identical.)
Delete“What is the added causal role and adaptive value of having a mind, over and above the causal role and adaptive value of just having the behavioural capacities themselves, to do whatever needs doing in order to survive and reproduce?” I’ve been thinking about this question a lot and a recurring theme is the social nature of species which have minds and how this plays into survival and reproduction. Animals would need minds to protect their young, which would ensure the continued survival of the species, for example. Plants on the other hand, do not have this same social element which may be why they’re not sentient. However, Peter Wohlleben might disagree with this (author of the inner life of trees). He argues that “trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated -and even intelligent- than we thought”. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/. How might this impact our discussion of the other minds problem? He claims that “forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony”. Trees share water and nutrients through their root network, which also allows them to communicate. Is this enough to argue that trees feel? Wohlleben shares that he once came across a beech stump that was felled 500 years ago. When he scraped away the surface with his penknife, he found that the stump was green with chlorophyll. “The surrounding beeches were keeping it alive, by pumping sugar to it through the network. When beeches do this, they remind me of elephants. They are reluctant to abandon their dead, especially when it’s a big, old, revered matriarch”. Do trees perhaps feel more than we had initially thought?
ReplyDeleteI fervently hope that plants don't feel. And I think the likelihood is very small. I think PW might be over-interpreting chemical signalling systems: they're happening in our bodies too, in our vegetative processes, as in our immune system, and in homeostasis, like thermoregulation. But even if plants and trees don't feel I think (and feel) it's still wrong to harm them needlessly. (Is it just the anthropomorphism that lazy evolution has implanted in me?)
DeleteIn this article, Harnad restates the hard problem as explaining how and why survival/reproduction machines like humans would have evolved minds. “What is the added causal role and adaptive value of having a mind? Over and above the causal role and adaptive value of just having the behavioral capacities themselves”. Professor goes on to reformulate the Cogito as the Sentio which is basically that “it feels like something to be thinking” instead of “I think therefore I am”. The other minds problem in humans is a relatively minor problem according to Harnad since we have language and since we are experts at mind-reading. Whether animals have mind is a question of whether they can feel. Harnad points out that for the question of feeling, there is far more at stake than the status of truth mainly, there are consequences to being wrong about the fact that other people or animals don’t feel. The gist of this idea: “the other-minds problem is a catastrophe for any sentient species that we are hurting because we are sceptical about whether they feel pain.”
ReplyDeleteThis article's line of reasoning is very similar to the one in 10b where Prof. Harnad was showcasing how the authors were missing the point of what they were actually arguing. Here he simply states that the other-minds problem (OMP) is about the issue of feeling. With a decent amount of certainty, we can be sure that humans, other than ourselves feel. We cannot feel what they feel, but we can relate to it if they share what they are feeling to us. Thus, with a great amount of certainty, we can be confident that others feel. Prof then states that, through this same principle (minus the communication of feeling through language), we can have a similar degree of certainty that animals feel. The principles would be observing their behaviour and inferring what they feel based off of those behaviours. We might not be able to know for certain what exactly they feel, but we know that 1) they can feel and that 2) our assumptions will not be wildly off because we do not what exact electrical signaling is taking place under their cranium.
ReplyDeleteThe issue of feeling is important. It is not just important to us because it something that we as cognizers do, and presumably, animals as well. But because feeling is the root of sentience (that we currently know). Therefore, if we accept this proposition, then we can then extend the issue of the OMP to other animals, and recognize that acknowledging that they feel something is not simply a form of projection/anthropomorphizing, but actually a reality.
Or we can just trust the mirror neurons -- or sentience periscope -- that lazy evolution gave us to penetrate the OMP barrier...
Delete...for our progeny and kin. Too lazy to rule out overlaps like these.
DeleteWe have the remarkable capacity to mind-read other human’s emotions, and Harnad points out in this paper that we are able to extend this mind-reading capacity to other species. I do not think anyone would doubt that animals feel pain when hearing their screams of agony, but the thought of all the suffering we are causing likely makes people very uncomfortable with their own choices. But as we discussed in class, pain is really the only thing that matters - most people would choose to avoid pain rather than gain pleasure. The pain we cause animals cannot be justified with the temporary pleasure we gain. Most people do not need to eat meat to survive (or even enjoy food, lots of vegan food tastes pretty great) so it is better for us to avoid causing pain altogether and give up some small pleasures, than to likely cause a lot of suffering in other species. Humans have the choice to be better, and the benefits of a vegan diet clearly far outweigh the cons.
ReplyDelete...particularly the "benefits" to the victims....
DeleteI wrote in my post in 11c that I would elaborate on claims pertaining to nutrition in relation to veganism. I will do that here and try to link my thoughts to the article assigned for this discussion post.
ReplyDeleteNutrition and diet are hot topics in mainstream media and generally within the public. Claims regarding new diets come up all over the place every so often. In my experience discussing veganism, a common argument against (or for) veganism is about nutrition. Many fear that they will be protein deficient, vitamin B-12 deficient, etc. It is normal that a radical diet like veganism gives rise to concerns but most of these concerns, in my understanding, arise from misconceptions and misinformation regarding nutrition and diet at large. Many vegans (some high-level athletes) anecdotally report being healthy despite only getting protein from plant sources. Moreover, there is some interesting research suggesting that ancient metabolic pathways that exist in organisms all the way down to procaryotes are sensitive to protein intake in such a way that restricted protein intake has been associated with reduced cancer, diabetes, and overall mortality. Here is another study exploring the risks of high protein intake: Dietary proteins and protein sources and risk of death: the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study. There is more to say about the whole nutritional debate around veganism if you go down the rabbit hole as I did at some point and it is difficult to make up one’s mind as to whether veganism really is optimal for human health or not.
Now, if we consider again the arguments for veganism and more precisely, for not harming sentient beings unnecessarily, raising the nutritional argument is not viable. It is unclear to me whether veganism is the optimal human diet for longevity, cognitive function and overall health but it is clear that a radical decrease in animal product comsumption has important benefits for human health. But the argument for veganism is a moral argument. It is not vitally necessary to consume animal products (for the vast majority of people in developed countries). As Harnad points out in his article, we ought to give the benefit of the doubt to other organisms. Failing to do so in the likely case where the organisms we kill for their meat and derivatives are actually sentient results in unnecessary pain and suffering. The consequence in the case where they are not is just purposefully preventing oneself from consuming a product that is a luxury, not a necessity.
It's Pascal's Wager -- and the loser is not the wagerer but the victims.
DeleteWe have reached the conclusion that since we are not be certain that all animals feel (although we are pretty sure), assuming they don't could have devastating effects for trillions of animals. If animals do suffer, we are causing them a great deal of suffering, so why take that chance?
ReplyDeleteWhy is it that the consumption of animal products has only increased over the last decade? It's because someone is making money off the suffering of all these animals. The dairy industry lobbied the government to have milk in our food guides. Not even human milk; cow's milk! They convinced the government that humans require the milk of another species well past childhood. Isn't that crazy? And now the horrible farms which abuse animals for their secretions are making sure we can never speak out against them: "It is now illegal for concerned individuals to document the treatment of animals on farms including revealing cruelty or abuse of animals [in Ontario]". This law was passed this year. The meat industry will continue doing horrendous things to animals in order to keep lining its pockets.
Professor Harnad said that having 24/7 streams of what goes on in factory farms available to the public would greatly reduce our animal consumption. People just need to see the abuse they are paying for. The meat industry knows this, which is why it is trying to get ag gag laws like this one passed. I hope we can put an end to all this unecessary suffering.
https://www.worldanimalprotection.ca/news/ontarios-ag-gag-law-passed-now-what#:~:text=The%20Ontario%20government's%20Bill%2D156,the%20legal%20community%2C%20and%20journalists
https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch
It's not just more vegans that are needed, but more vegan activists, just as it was in combatting slavery, racism, and the gender inequality. (The Holocaust was humanity's greatest crime against humanity, but it was not humanity's greatest crime.)
Delete"The assumption, of course, is that it is the nervous system that generates feeling. …some articles will also consider simpler animals, lacking neurons, all the way down to unicellular organisms, and even across the frontier of the animal kingdom to plants: not on the expectation that all living organisms are sentient, but in order to get a clearer idea of what sentience is and what it is not." (Harnad 2016, 7). Similar to discussion on article 10a, this describes how much of what we think we “know” about sentience and feeling is based on methods of inquiry that assume structure determines function in a very narrow, exclusively human interpretation. We assume it is only our kind of nervous system that can conjure the “true” or “real” feeling of pain we experience and observe in others’ behavioural patterns. If we don’t see or recognize behaviour akin to human behaviours, we quickly interpret it as evidence for the /absence/ of sentience.
ReplyDeleteWhile that is a problem that’s been discussed here regarding Key’s article, this quote from Harnad also ties the methods and language of studying sentience to what, so far, we feel that we understand about our own psychological learning processes. In studying organisms and cognition, we are attempting to define the category of sentience – what it is, what we are, /and/ what it is not, and we are not. We have to know what is within and without the category. It seems that not only are we still searching for what sentience IS, but we are also still searching for a solid example and understanding of what it is NOT. We have made claims throughout human history about who is sentient and what is not – and we have been wrong before – why are we still fundamentally dependent on the expectation that all living things are not in some way sentient? Why do we continue to assume an organism and her mechanisms have to appear and be structured the same as ours in order for us to believe she lives and experiences a feeling of being alive?
Not to disagree about you that the category "sentience" needs negative evidence just as much as "Laylek" does if we are to find what distinguishes sentience from non-sentience. But (setting aside the problem that the only feelings we can feel are our own), we do have negative examples (at least until someone builds a T3 or T4): Only living organisms are sentient; rocks are not. Yet it is unlikely that all living organisms are sentient (exceptions might be plants and microbes). So there's work to do...
DeleteMuch like the Turing piece of the previous week, this article provided another course refresher, this time on the topic of the ‘other minds problem’ and its relations to the easy/hard problems.
ReplyDeleteTouching on the other minds problem applied to nonverbal instances of humans feels to be more than enough to argue for at minimum the possibility of other animals having minds as well come to ‘mind read’ with them in the same fashion as we do with an infant.
Devils advocate could of course argue that we are incorrectly anthropomorphising other creatures in our ‘mind reading’ but this could easily be extended to other humans and argue that we cannot say that anyone else has a mind which is of course wrong.
The assigned article for this week made me think of a point that I had not considered before.
ReplyDeleteWe take for granted that other people feel as we feel, despite the other minds problem. As the article points out, language does a lot to bridge this divide. However, we also have “mind-reading” abilities that allows us to infer internal states from behaviour. It seems as though an important proportion of our knowledge of other people’s subjective states is based in non-verbal observation, especially in terms of very basic experiences such as physical pain.
So, language is the defining feature of our species that reduces the other-minds problem, but language only accounts for a portion of our knowledge of others’ feelings. This is exemplified by the fact that we never doubt that humans that cannot speak do not feel, and we are able to gather a lot about what it is that they feel through their behaviour. Yet, we do not grant the same credibility to information gathered from our mind-reading powers when they cross species boundaries.
There is of course the element of biological equivalency among humans that is at play. Nevertheless, there seems to be a line that is drawn between verbal and non-verbal communication, and between human beings’ and other animals’ biological constitution (at the minimum, other mammals’) that does not have a solid basis.
PS: the animal sentience journal is very interesting and exciting! It’s a field that I would be interested in being a part of one day :)
One of the things that popped out to me in this article is the role of anthropomorphism in both mind-reading and meat industries. As Harnad states, "our mind reading abilities are dismissed as 'anthropomorphic' illusions when there is a[n] interest in being able to do whatever we like with [animals]"; we choose to see them as just things when it is convenient for us.
ReplyDeleteIn reading this article, I began to think about the ways in which the industry both uses anthropomorphic images to market themselves, and reduce the anthropomorphability of animals through how they sell and process meat. Cute, happy anthropomorphized animals - often in cartoon form - are often used on food packaging. At the same time, in the last century meat has been sold looking less and less like meat - it is much easier to not think about a skinless boneless chicken breast as a once-living, feeling creature, than it is to have the same response to a whole bird. Many of the advances in those industries - especially in the United States have moved in this direction - producing and selling food in a way that it is easier to eat, in part because less skill is required to prepare it, but also because it looks less like us, perhaps not robotic but certainly thing-like. Ag-gag laws certainly also advance this process, by preventing the spread of images that would demonstrate not only animal suffering, but animal sentience in general.
In this context, I think journals like Animal Sentience can play an important role - alongside other forms of animal activism - in illuminating and maintaining our ability to treat animals as minded-beings which feel, think, and suffer.