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.
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PSYC 538 Syllabus
Categorization, Communication and Consciousness 2021 Time : FRIDAYS 11:35-2:25 Place : ZOOM Instructors : Stevan Harnad & Fernanda Pere...
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Categorization, Communication and Consciousness 2021 Time : FRIDAYS 11:35-2:25 Place : ZOOM Instructors : Stevan Harnad & Fernanda Pere...
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Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence . Mind 49 433-460 I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?...
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Searle, John. R. (1980) Minds, brains, and programs . Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417-457 This article can be viewed as an atte...
“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 behaviour — 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, anesthesia, coma).”
ReplyDeleteThis is a digression from Harnad’s article on animal sentience, but I think that I disagree with this sentiment to some degree. Even when we are able to communicate with one another, through language, there are times when we still can only infer the feelings of others based on their behaviour. In fact, so much of human decency and societal functioning depends on this. Most individuals are not able to communicate their feelings wholly to one another. If we were only able to understand one another when people linguistically explained themselves, I think the world would be an even crueller place than it already is. Much of human compassion and empathy comes from our “mind-reading” abilities to understand one another. We read each other’s faces and body language and we make assumptions about one another based on what we know of each other’s experiences. Conversely, even when we are able to use language effectively, there are many experiences that we will never understand. For example, I can never understand the experience of growing up in a place where women are not allowed to go to school. I can make inferences about how I would feel if I was not able to go to school, but this is not the same thing as understanding. There is a rich cultural context to every person’s experience, and if I operate under the assumption that I can understand what it is to be another person based on what they tell me, I will almost certainly project my own culture’s beliefs and norms onto their experience.
I definitely agree with you, Bronwen. It’s so hard sometimes to know for sure how other people are feeling and how to behave around them. It’s still challenging to figure out a person’s feelings only by basing ourselves on what they say. I don’t know if other sentient beings are like this as well, but humans have a very frustrating knack of not always truly saying what they want, even though language has evolved, I believe, at least partly for this very purpose. I remember as a kid always wanting to be able to read other people’s thoughts whenever I was asked what superpower I would have liked to have, for life would have been so much easier (or maybe harder?) to navigate that way.
DeleteGood points. But distinguish between the question what another being is feeling or thinking from the question of whether another being is feeling or thinking. For social relations of course the what is what's important (and yes, thank goodness we do have pretty good -- but far from perfect -- nonverbal capacities for mind-reading one another's feelings and thoughts).
DeleteBut for other species what matters the most is that humans should recognize whether they feel, especially when humans treat them as if they don't. (See Key's paper.)
Maybe this is a bit far out, but I think there are situations where we question whether another human feels, or at least question the universality of subjective experiences. When we think of sociopathic behaviors in which a person lacks empathy, emotion, and conscience, guilt, and other features that we often think to be fundamental to our conscious human experience. Obviously, not having emotions doesn't mean that someone doesn't have a subjective experience of the world, but I think it serves as an interesting case study for talking about human feeling as may be not so ubiquitous as we often refer to it here. The other minds problem becomes even more interesting when we consider that there are people with antisocial behaviors that are just really good at pretending to have the same thoughts and feelings as other people.
DeleteLeah, I agree, and I was actually thinking of antisocial personality disorders, especially psychopathy and sociopathy, when reading the comments above. Within our species, I agree with Bronwen that even with language, we cannot know what (and whether) others feel. Speaking and expressing our feelings doesn’t automatically give us a guarantee that others feel. I’m not sure if it’s possible for a person to not have emotions at all (and not as a result of brain damage, but rather as a result of an antisocial personality disorder such as severe psychopathy, or something of the sort that also involves deception), but let’s assume that it is — this individual could talk to me, make me think that they feel just like I do, when in reality they are just extremely talented at deceiving others through language, actions and behaviours. I think the whether of feeling isn’t as obvious within a species as we say it is. Even though, as Prof Harnad says, the other-minds problem is a very small problem within the human species, it still can’t entirely be overcome, and we still have to make inferences, even with language. Our mind reading abilities are very strong, but even then, some people’s ability to pretend to feel may be even stronger.
DeleteI think these are really interesting points and I have actually also been thinking about sociopathic individuals in this context! However, as Leah mentions, "not having emotions doesn't mean that someone doesn't have a subjective experience of the world". It seems like there are different levels (or maybe kinds is a better word) of feeling, emotions and subjective experiences are not one in the same. Thinking phenomenologically, an individual pretending to experience the same emotions as others is still experiencing the feeling of pretending to feel. Furthermore, someone who is incapable of feeling remorse may actually have access to a feeling unavailable to me and (most likely) other members of this class, the feeling of the absence of remorse.
DeleteI agree with both of you and I think this reinforces the hardness of the hard problem. Even if we made a T4 robot that had an artificial brain that worked in all the ways it was supposed to, can this one brain account for all the variety and facets of human consciousness? Or is the T4 robot itself an individual and not meant to represent all human functioning? We believe that everyone has a subjective experience internal to them, but the extent that this subjective experience is universal is unknown. How similar are our subjective experiences? From a biological standpoint, our brains are not entirely uniform across our species. This is sort of a weird example, but Alex Honnold is a rock climber who has accomplished insane feats that very few others have, like climbing huge rock faces without any harnesses or support. Neuroscientists analyzed his brain activity and saw that he has markedly less amygdala activation than normal people, which they hypothesized might explain why he had less fear in doing extremely dangerous tasks. With this, his subjective experience and his brain are both quite different from the average person. How are these differences accounted for in our attempt to solve the hard problem?
DeleteLeah, sociopaths can feel, they just don’t care (about the feelings of other sentients). The defect (if it’s a defect) seems to be in feeling empathy (maybe yet another “mirror-neuron” function). I think (hope), though, that sociopaths, like billionaires, are made, not born:
Delete”I think it's more a matter of culture than of creed or calculation: It is easy to cultivate psychopathy in our children: We need only tell them the lie that eating meat is necessary for their survival and health, that since animals also do it without remorse, it is the Law of Nature, and that in any case animals are raised and slaughtered in a "humane" way (you just have to avoid viewing Google images on slaughterhouses). In fact, by exactly the same cultural means we could (again) instill in our young the taste and the justification for rape, torture, slavery, and genocide:
“Or the distaste. Why am I not a carnivore? Because I'm not a psychopath -- I have neither the taste nor the heart for it, and so I choose not to act as if I were one. Is the remaining 99% of the planet really that different - or have they just not yet asked themselves the question?”
Juliette and Lucie, feeling is not just emotion. It feels like something to see blue, hear an oboe, understand “the cat is on the mat.” Besides, psychopaths do feel emotions (e.g., anger); it’s just the compassionate feelings they lack (or ignore), and feign in order to manipulate people. (And "subjective experience" is just two more weasel-words for "felt" and "feeling."
But feelings differ, both between species and between individuals -- and within individuals, from day to day, moment to moment. And they change. And they can be changed. We can't, like a bat, feel sonar; but we can feel sorry.
I was also thinking about what Leah said about sociopaths, so I was glad to see a response about it already. However, I'm still confused about the explanation you just gave. Doesn't empathy count as a feeling? If so, and sociopaths don't feel empathy, then they can not feel all things everyone else (non-sociopaths) can feel. This reminds me of Dennett’s article from 10a, where something is missing, but no one has a word for it. It is “feeling” but as Harnad said sociopaths, can feel, but it depends on what the definition of feeling is.
DeleteI think that professor Harnad makes an incredible point in his response about how when I also believe or rather hope that psychopaths are made rather than born in such a manner. In the reading, professor Harnad makes a great point with the following statement:
Delete“But even with mammals and birds, the dictates of our mind-reading abilities are easily dismissed as “anthropomorphic” illusions when there is a financial, personal or even a scientific interest in being able to do whatever we like with them, hence in seeing and treating them more like feelingless machines than as sentient organisms”
As humans, we have the ability to use our so called “mind-reading” abilities to great extents. However, even when we are able to use them to acknowledge that other species demonstrate that they feel, we chose to ignore them out of selfish and “beneficial” excuses. I believe that this type of behaviour, just like psychopathic behaviour, is thought by the society that we live in which makes us ignore the fact that other species may in fact feel and are suffering/tortured at our expense. Not only do they make us ignore that they feel and are suffering the consequences of our ignorance, but we are taught to believe that it is necessary to our existence when this is absolutely untrue.
Even if you want to argue that beings that are slaughtered for the human benefit, one can simply outweigh the consequences of being wrong in that believe and use some common sense as to what is the worst-case scenario. If animals were not to feel, then one could argue that there is no harm being done to animals and that we are doing what is necessary to have a good economic system and more resources to exploit. But if one was to be wrong, the consequences of having that belief are horrific. Not only are we making animals experience pain but we are taking away any sense of life that they may experience by suffocating and making them suffer their entire lifetime, but we are also making the human species be the most cruel, selfish and arrogant species there is. I think any individual that really questions their believes and actions will easily see how acknowledging that other species feel is the obvious moral, ethical and right decision to make because I don’t think anyone truly is okay with putting another being through the torture that animals endure.
Some thoughts surrounding “consciousness” or feeling came up during this reading. Specifically a connection between verbalizing “Cogito” the comatose state and a research paper by Dr. Adrian Owen. Descartes’s Cogito introduced the idea of feeling like something to be thinking. That there is an internal state that is a felt state. Our species communicates the felt state through language. But in thinking about a state in which we cannot speak, the comatose state is interesting to think about. Comatose patients are unable to communicate their feelings, and broadly, there has been questions surrounding whether or not comatose patients are “conscious” or feeling. However, this reminded me of Dr. Adrian Owen’s research which used fMRI to reveal that some comatose patients who were in a “minimally conscious state” showed evidence of preserved speech processing. If non-human sentient beings feel, in ways that are similar enough or even if not, perhaps they have a separate way of feeling which is another problem for another post, and they simply fail to verbalize those feelings, it’s extremely cruel of humans to treat them any less than we would our comatose patients.
DeleteMelody, I think we all know what it means to feel something (anything: what it feels like to hear something, what it feels like to see something, what it feels like to smell something, what it feels like to touch something, what it feels like to be afraid, angry, tired; what it feels like to understand something, to believe something, to mean something, to want something). Also, what it feels like to feel sorry for someone. Sociopaths apparently don’t feel the latter (though it’s not clear whether they never feel it at all, or only rarely, or only faintly). We’ve all failed to feel sorry, or not sorry enough, for another; it least I have. But for most of us this is rare, and we feel remorse for it afterward, and try to do otherwise (if it was a failure to help).
DeleteMelissa, it feels like something to think; and speaking is one way to express and communicate (felt) thoughts. But feeling itself is feeling anything (whether thoughts, sensations, or moods). It is any state that it feels like something to be in.
Mariana, I agree, of course, with everything you said. That is what Week 11 was meant to be about.
You make a really interesting point, and I think I would agree. The other-minds problem, in this sense seems to be a superficial view of our feelings, which reminds me of the (potential) problem with T2 - that a pen pal lacks the sensorimotor capacity to ground things and be able to truly interact with us forever. I think this shows just how complex an undertaking it would be to successfully reverse engineer a robot that is just like us. It makes me feel like there is always going to be another hurdle to jump over and makes me question how possible it is to ever achieve what we've set out to.
ReplyDeleteI hope this week's readings also make you feel a little more whose problem the "other-minds problem" really is. (Hint: it's not the cogsci theorist's.) Whose problem is the other-minds problem?
DeleteThe other-minds problem is a problem for other species as we are skeptical whether they feel pain whereas for people and to some degree mammals/birds, we infer from their behavior/words that they do feel.
DeleteWhat reduces our uncertainty about other human minds is behavioral (and neural) similarity, with the help of our nonverbal mind-reading capacity (mirror neurons) and of course language. We manage to mind-read babies without language, and we do the same with other species (starting with our family animals) that are similar to us behaviorally and neurally, again with the help of our mirror neurons (as well as evidence and reasoning). The similarity diminishes the more distant and different the species are from our own, but is it really that small with mice or lizards or fish or even grasshoppers, if we look? Don't you think that some of our skepticism might come from cognitive dissonance (because we have reason to want to believe they are insentient, so we can do whatever we want with them) rather than because they are so dissimilar to us?
DeleteI agree that cognitive dissonance, rather than behavioural and neural similarity, is a primary cause of humans’ skepticism towards animal sentience. I do think, however, that a big factor contributing to our cognitive dissonance (and people’s unfortunate tendency to hierarchize animal species’ significance) is societal value and socialization. For instance, if we compare elephants to mice, people often associate elephants with longevity, grace, high intelligence and memory. Elephants are sacred in most societies. On the other hand, mice don’t seem to hold such high value in society — probably because of the flawed association between size and sentience (physiological and behavioural factors differentiating humans from small rodents), and the fact that when we interact with mice and rats, it is often in somewhat negative situations, such as unwanted mice in our homes, etc. This then informs the way people subconsciously view certain animals. Despite knowing that all animals with nervous systems are sentient, there seems to be much more of a societal push to eradicate, for example, the horrifying tusk trading industry, than to stop animal testing and unnecessary laboratory experiments using rodents. Can anyone else think of factors that amplify cognitive dissonance?
DeleteHere's some: eating them; wearing them; hunting them... and not wanting to feel that this is wrong and should be stopped.
DeleteI 100% agree cognitive dissonance is at play here in our ability to ignore and downplay the evidence of sentience in animals. Humans have used cognitive dissonance to justify countless atrocities against other humans. "Race" as a concept was built on the cognitive dissonance of white people to assert their perceived “supremacy”. And entire fields of so-called "science" like phrenology, ethnography, anthropology, were basically created and institutionalized to justify racist ideology. For centuries, this was considered valid science because the people deciding what science was in France, England, US, etc. were white. Science is gatekept by those in power and it is often manipulated and exerted as a power for biased reasons.
DeleteThis is not at all to equate anyones experiences, but rather just exemplify how far humans go to try to prove something that is fundamentally based in falsity and is just an exertion of supremacy, not an objective truth. Our society is built on cognitive dissonance, so I think it is clearer to see how we apply similar tactics of cognitive dissonance in our scientific practices and personally held beliefs about animal rights.
Professor, to answer your question, I believe that what we’d agreed on in class was that the Other Minds Problem is the problem of the feeler if we (humans) claim that they do not feel.
DeleteTo tie Grace and Leah’s points together — it really often does feel like there’s always going to be another hurdle we have to jump over or another hill we have to climb in order to get to some sort of solution. Additionally, many fields of “science” are in effect based on racist, sexist (all the -ists, really) ideals, and people in power will continue to reinforce these false ideals as long as they are in power. So, if the whole system itself is biased and “based in falsity” like Leah says, are we even sure that there IS a solution to begin with? Is there an objective truth to anything at all? Juliette writes that a lot of the cognitive dissonance has to do with “societal value and socialization,” which I agree with. The values were set up under frameworks designed to benefit the privileged, and they continue to do so. Building our society on cognitive dissonance allowed all the people in power to live lavish, affluent lives while the underprivileged suffer and bear the consequences. But why do I use past tense? So much of everything we see around us continues to reinforce the ideals that we should be working to dismantle, which once again makes everything feel like an uphill battle.
I think the solution is possible, but it will come down to a complete paradigm shift of our values, needs, and the push of scientific research that contradicts our tightly held beliefs about animal sentience. I think this paradigm shift will likely coincide with changing climate conditions as eating meat becomes less and less stable and our livelihoods (even for the rich) become more at risk. Science is constantly undergoing slow but steady paradigm shifts. Today, there are many scientific practices like phrenology that we, in our modern paradigm, take to be false because it doesn't align with what we hold to be correct scientific practice today (observable, replicable evidence, etc.) I think, as with most advancements in science, there is a point of reckoning and I think the impending scarcity of resources due to the climate crisis may help push that reckoning to occur in the near future.
DeleteTo the point of cognitive dissonance playing the key role in our endangerment of virtually all other species that are not moderately close to humans or more broadly mammals, seemingly the solution to mitigating endangerment of those species is to resolve our dissonance. This can be done in one of three ways: (1) changing existing beliefs, (b) adding new beliefs or (3) reducing the importance of the beliefs. I agree with Leah that science undergoes paradigm shifts, and that perhaps we will shift into one whose consequences benefit other sentient beings. However, science is one thing, and human belief systems are another. To instill belief in amongst a large enough population even with scientific evidence/proof/promotion has proven to be difficult as seen be the stark stances on COVID vaccines. On that note, I’m hopeful but unsure whether a scientific paradigm shift will incur the evidence necessary to change, add or reduce current beliefs to the degree of resolving cognitive dissonance and mitigating harm to other sentient beings.
DeleteLeah, every atrocity that humans have committed against nonhuman animals they have also committed against other humans (murder, torture, rape, slavery). But we have eventually come around to outlawing the atrocities against humans (though the laws are not always enforced) and most of us have never, and would never, commit or support committing them.) But with animals, the atrocities are legal and most of us support them, even though they are not necessary for our survival and health, and even though their scale is monstrous and growing.
DeleteEmma, cognitive dissonance is based (not “built”) on wanting something even though we know it’s not right. How we resolve it depends on whether what triumphs is getting what we want or doing what is right. Underlying these are Darwinian evolutionary traits and Baldwinian (lazy) evolutionary options (learning, language, culture). It’s not a conspiracy of the “isms” vs. the “isn’ts,” or even the “haves” against the “have-nots.” Poor people, if they become rich, do not become saints or philanthropists: they become, and become like, the “haves.” Cognitive dissonance, if it is to be resolved in favor of others’ rights rather than my wants, requires personal commitment and social consensus. One step that everyone (except those still living in substance hunter/gatherer environment) can take is to stop sustaining the animal horrors by going vegan, today. Ignore the “What About?” siren-call of cognitive dissonance (“isms”) and just do it. Then inspire other to do the same. All isms and atrocities are disarmed in a humane world.
(Waiting for Climate Change and “paradigm shifts” is still the siren-call of cognitive dissonance. Do it now.)
I found the section “sensitizing to sentience” (pg.7), which describes the goal of Animal Sentience, to bring up the interesting point that there may be valuable understanding that comes from studying organisms all the way down the scale of complexity. It seems improbably that something as significant as feeling suddenly appeared out of nowhere in vertebrates. To explain such as significant aspect of life as an accidental emergent property that happened to pop out somewhere around us in the phylogeny of living things is not too satisfying - there must be significant precursors that will add meaningful information to the picture of how and why we feel. And recognizing feeling as something that might exist in degrees, and exist in many more organisms than us and the few vertebrates we’ve decided to be decent to, could help us move towards a place where we treat all beings with greater respect, appreciating the complexity and beauty in experiences other than our own rather than thinking of everything in the world as existing solely for our own instrumental use.
ReplyDeleteYes, that something as important as feeling. something that matters so much -- in fact the only thing that matters -- just popped out of the blue by chance is extremely improbable, and implausible. And, yes, evolution might provide some clues to when and why feeling might have evolved (although an evolutionary explanation would still face the hard problem of causality and degrees of freedom: explaining behavior and behavioral capacities causally is part of the easy problem, but it leaves feeling itself looking causally superfluous once we solve the easy problem of doing – which is always a behavioral and neural solution and does not give a clue as to why the easy solution would need to be felt rather than just done).
DeleteWhat we can feel definitely differs in quality and intensity and duration: some people are color-blind; some species can detect very faint odors; and when we are in delta sleep we are not feeling anything at all. But the fact that we can feel (anything at all) when we are feeling is not a matter of degree. In that sense, the capacity to feel is all-or-none: we have it, and rocks don’t. What would it mean to look for something in between (other than just differences in quality, intensity and duration)?
(But I would say that what other species would ask for from us is not respect, or appreciation of their beauty. They would ask for mercy: that we should stop hurting and killing them. Respect is of no use to a cadaver.)
I doubt whether organisms that can't feel will actually do things the way they do as when they can feel. Wouldn't feelings enhance or help produce better solutions to a problem than just an adaptive solution? Or feeling may be the cause of most of our ancestors's actions? Because evolution is lazy, the feelingless creatures will started as mindless robots performing only reflexes, and reflexes were only activated when there were inputs. They are just like the computer programs that are only executed when they receive inputs. And when they receive the wrong inputs, they could well be killed, just like a program that can be killed by a bug. However, feelings enabled our ancestors to actively avoid the wrong inputs and seek the right inputs, and I think this is why we have feelings.
DeleteGood try at solving the HP, Zilong, but it is circular. You have taken for granted what you set out to explain! ((Can you see how?)
DeleteThis article raises a good point about the other-minds problem actually being a problem for other species rather than us. We are all decent enough to assume that other humans and potentially mammals/birds are capable or feeling pain. However, we don't afford the same decency to all animals such as worms or fish as we cannot mind-read them as accurately as we can with people/mammals. We are skeptical of other species' ability to feel pain whereas we assume humans and mammals/birds feel pain.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the difference (to the victim), if we are sceptical about whether it feels pain (like a fish or a lobster) or we "assume" it does feel pain (like a chicken or a pig) if we kill and eat it (needlessly) either way? And what is "decent" about that?
DeleteSee the end of the reply to Caroline above. (It is not addressed to subsistence-environment hunters or fishers who have no other way to survive and be healthy, like our ancestors: It is addressed to us.
In this text, it is stated, about humans, that “Our rational, observational and empathic mind-reading skills in general are far more extensive and acute than those of any other species.” This does not come as any surprise, but I wanted to elaborate on it. Clearly, it is our capacity to “read minds” and understand other members of our species that has led to our success and social complexity. In the perspective of the other minds problem, although we may never be able to know if another person cognizes as we do, our entire history and recent evolution relies on this assumption. Could it be that our willingness to assume that other people feel the same way is what differentiated us initially from other species? How did feelings arise in the first place, and did human feelings become more socially-inclined as a result of different brain circuitry and natural selection? Another thing I would like to point out is that maybe other species do make use of similar “mind-reading”, but it takes on another very different shape. Inspired by Key’s article, perhaps other species have their very own ways of understanding the feelings (for example, fish “pain”, “anger” and, therefore, “consciousness”) of others that we cannot interpret and, therefore, not attribute a similar type of sentience to.
ReplyDeleteExplaining the adaptive advantage of feeling is the hard problem. But other species can also mind-read, and perhaps for stronger reasons even than adult social interactions: to rear their young!
DeleteThis comment as well as prof Harnad's response got me thinking about the adaptive advantage of feeling. From what I understand, simple non-sentient organisms are very deterministic in their behaviour. For example, lacking calories leads to feeding behaviours and activated nociceptors lead to automatic defensive behaviours and priorities are hard-coded in the organism's genes, so that hunger activates feeding behaviours only in the absence of activated nociceptors. For more complex organisms, it seems as though the same stilumus can lead to a much larger array of responses, which might allow for more flexible behaviour that is more adaptive to the current situation. In other words, being low on calories leads to "feeling hungry" instead of directly activating feeding behaviours, and damagin stimuli lead to "feeling pain" instead of activating defensive behaviours. These feelings allow time for decision making, of calculating priorities that factor in many elements of the current situation. Although feeling hungry should almost always encourage us to find food and feeling pain should strongly encourage us to avoid it, sometimes it would be more adaptive to go hungry (if it means feeding our young instead) or to tolerate pain (if avoiding a predator means putting kin in danger). From an inclusive fitness perspective, having feelings in response to stimuli instead of directly having automatic behavioural reactions seems to be more adaptive because it can direct an organism towards an evolutionarily adaptive behaviour (ex. eating when hungry) whilst also allowing more flexible behaviour that would be better aligned with other priorities that the survival of the organism (ex. only feeding your kin when both are hungry).
DeleteGood try, Isabelle: Flexibility, yes, but why felt flexibility? You are assuming that an easy solution would have to be felt, rather than just done: Why. AI and robotics are already showing how to get flexibility without feeling.
DeleteI think that it is an interesting juxtaposition to think of this question of animal sentience (which undoubtedly is a question for cognitive science) within the field of cognitive science. I'm sure that most cognitive scientists would love to believe that animals do not have feelings given the heavy dependency on animal models in cognitive neuroscience, in particular. It's somewhat ironic that the tests required to investigate animal sentience likely involve potentially harmful animal testing. Harnad says that this journal is controversial in nature, and I believe that this may be a large factor in why that may be the case. To relate to his comments on cognitive dissonance, cognitive scientists may be particularly biased (consciously or unconsciously) to deny animal sentience because it would impact one of the most most useful scientific tools at their disposable.
ReplyDeleteWhile I agree with you that animal sentience is a question of cognitive science, I believe Harnad poses a question in the paper that takes animal sentience outside the realm of cogsci. Harnad states that anyone who has had animals in the family knows that they feel, in the same way that they know human infants feel. With this statement he appears to be dissolving the other minds problem in other species by claiming that by mind-reading the animal (pets), we conclude that they have a mind and thus sentience. However, where I find a problem is with the following sentence: “But when it comes to the question of what it is that members of other species are feeling and thinking, the answer is not always so obvious”. If we have concluded that our pets have minds, what does it matter what they are feeling or thinking — is it not enough that we have decided that they are feeling beings? The hard problem of cognitive science is “how and why organisms have minds”, not what they are thinking and feeling, only if the in fact do feel or think. And although it would be an interesting endeavour to be able to tell what members of other species are feeling/thinking, it appears to be outside of the scope of cognitive science (at least how it was presented in this course).
DeleteLucie, by the numbers, most human-bred animal suffering and death is in “farmed” animals rather than lab animals and most of the cognitive dissonance is in their breeders, slaughterers and consumers. And, except in the few remaining hunting/fishing subsistence environments, all that animal suffering and death is unnecessary for human survival and health.
DeleteIt is a tragic fact that some animal research -- but not all, most, or even much of it -- can be (human) life-saving. But aside from that, most animal research is sustained by inflating the percentage and likelihood of saving lives. That’s done to reduce cognitive dissonance. Denying that the victims are sentient is also a way to reduce cogdiss, but I think biologists and especially cognitive scientists (especially comparative psychologists and ethologists) know and admit the truth about animal sentience more than the general public does (except for their family animals).
Ainsley, it matters what animals feel because that’s the only way you can know that they are suffering (and so not to do to them what causes them to suffer). That’s what the Key article on pain in fish was about (11a). (Having a “mind,” by the way, means exactly the same as having feelings. Even what animals can do is only “mental” if it is felt; otherwise it’s just internal, or neural.)
So to get better at mind-reading animals other than family animals, it's good to visit (and help out at) a sanctuary.
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.
ReplyDeleteThis sentence stood out to me from this reading. Of course this is conjectural but based on the above statement, one might conclude that the opposite is also true– any person who lacks acute mind reading powers therefore does not feel as if other people feel. This may be genetically or culturally predisposed, but perhaps in relation to animal sentience, only so many humans have the ability to fully read the behaviors and “minds” of others in a way that would make them feel as if they feel. Perhaps all people lack is an acuity to see the sentience in other species, especially those most abstracted from the daily human life. Perhaps if the factors leading to such an ineptitude were discovered, we could also explain how largescale unethical treatment of animals and humans are simply not felt by their perpetrators.
I think it is for similar reasons we don't really care about the harm that most of our behaviors have. It is easy to care about few people close to you (i.e. family, friends, small community, etc.), but the further that the harm is done, the less we care about it. We are totally fine with buying cloths made by exploited children, but we would feel a moral obligation to help if we saw a child be exploited in front of us (even more so, if we knew the child). There seem to be hard limits for our psychological ability to be empathic, and we can not rely solely on it to make the right moral decisions.
DeleteAnother example would be the bystander effect, where we feel less responsibility to do the right thing when the responsibility is shared with more people.
Here, I believe that the best way to address this issue is with a science of morality (which I believe is objective). In the same way that we have a science of medicine which aims to maintain human health, we should have a science of morality with the aim to maintain wellbeing (arguably for all creatures). - Elyass A.
Hi Elyass,
DeleteA science of morality is a great way to think about the limits of our "psychological ability to be empathetic", as your point about having empathetic limits is something that I think is obvious. Humans naturally and culturally feel more empathy and attachment to those they know closely (friends and family), and it has been shown that humans feel more attachment to people who look like them - a factor which has been a large contributor to racism and discrimination throughout history. In this sense, the "speciesism" that Professor Harnad has mentioned in some of his articles is an idea that I think we are still a few decades away from even considering at a large scale, as humans - there is a natural loyalty and connection to organisms who are similar to us, and this has been shown scientifically too. It is a barrier to be overcome, and a science of morality is a great way to set up an objective way to look at these sorts of issues.
Genavieve, there might be cases of severe mental disability in which people cannot perceive that others feel – or even that others exist. But this is rare neurological pathology. Within the normal range there is no doubt variation in how well we can mind-read one another. Training and experience in psychology can enhance our mind-reading capacity in our own species (adult, adolescent, child and infant), and training and experience in ethology and comparative psychology can greatly enhance our mind-reading capacity in other species. With other species, especially less familiar ones, direct experience through helping in a sanctuary and fostering animals in need can also increase our perceptiveness for what they are feeling and why.
DeletePsychopaths/sociopaths, by the way, know perfectly well that others feel – they just don’t care.
And the more sadistic ones actually enjoy hurting others, both human and nonhuman. Defenceless animals are their easiest targets:
Hare, R. D., Cooke, D. J., & Hart, S. D. (1999). Psychopathy and sadistic personality disorder. In T. Millon, P. H. Blaney, & R. D. Davis (Eds.), Oxford textbook of psychopathology (pp. 555–584). Oxford University Press.
Smith-Blackmore, M. (2020). Animal Abuse and Interpersonal Violence. In Veterinary Forensic Medicine and Forensic Sciences (pp. 301-306). CRC Press.
Elyass, yes, training and experience in morality is more important than ever in a globalized world in which we are unknowingly causing harm far away in space and time (e.g., Climate Change, pollution, and, yes, factory-farming, hidden by ag-gag barriers). We have the empathy in the face of local cues (family, friends, village); but cues are faint or invisible with remote causes and effects. Yet lazy evolution left us with the cognitive capacity to act, individually and collectively, to anticipate and remedy. There must be ways to transform distant cues so we can perceive and learn what needs to be done in the here and now.
Alex, lazy evolution is a potential ally. We do not have genetic kin-detectors. We, too, “imprint” on what is near, familiar, and similar. Might there be ways to induce global imprinting – in space and species -- by broadening our range of exposure during the critical period?
Harnad, S. (2007). Spare me the complements: an immoderate proposal for eliminating the “we/they” category boundary. In Social Brain Matters (pp. 69-80). Brill.
Harnad, S. (2007) Evan. In, Villaroya, Oscar and Forn, Francesc (eds.) Social Brain Matters. Stances on the Neurobiology of Social Cognition. Éditions Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York.
“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, to do whatever needs doing in order to survive and reproduce: those behavioral capacities that the slow but growing successes of modern robotics are showing to be implementable mindlessly (Arkin 1998; Samani 2015)?”
ReplyDeleteIn this quote from the section ‘The “easy problem”, Harnad asks why organisms would develop the capacities of the mind, if we know that the capacities necessary to keep the body alive and reproduce can be demonstrated without a consciousness (using the example of modern robotics). This sets up the hard question. This quotation reminded me of our previous discussions of evolution. Could a potential explanation be that it is beneficial for the organism to be able to organize and prioritize needs based on their particular and exact positionality in their environment? Could a sense of self, feeling or any other weasel word meaning consciousness, be the result of how truly complex it is to have the chance to survive and reproduce in a variety of species without a succinct method of organization within the mind? I don’t have the answers to these questions, nor the research to attempt to answer them, but I noticed how this quotation has the potential to link with prior questions and discussion in the course.
How and why does “organization” or “complexity” require feeling?
Delete“The other-minds problem is a catastrophe for any sentient species that we are hurting because we are skeptical about whether they feel pain.”
ReplyDeleteThis quote gets to the crux of the problem of the text: if the evidence for sentience in other humans (by language, nonverbal behaviour, mindreading) is insufficient for us when it comes to animals, then we allow ourselves permission to commit enormous acts of harm upon them. And if, in fact, we are wrong, then they actually ~do~ feel the harm that we inflict on them: they feel pain just like we do. But who is this ‘we’ that we are talking about? If, as Harnad has argued here, we take the leap of faith, so to speak, of believing that humans feel, who have we included and who have we excluded from that category ‘human’? I would argue, pressingly, that most humans are in fact excluded from the ‘benefit of the doubt’ that we extend to other minds. And this exclusion abides mainly by the same principles as the exclusion of animals: this occurs for our own well-being, be it economic or otherwise. We allow children in sweatshops to make our clothes, underpaid people to cook and serve our food, people estranged from their families to clean our homes. How would we be allowing all of those violations to occur if we actually believed that everyone (read: poor people, people the global south, non-white people, undocumented people) could feel? Perhaps this framework of ‘feeling’, like the liberal humanism that got us into this whole mess, was the wrong starting place. Where do we move forward from there? Is the truly revolutionary stance that of the abolition of the self?
Yes, (some) humans hurt humans even though they know they feel. And this is a global problem, enlarged because of globalization. I’m not sure what you mean by “liberal humanism” or “abolition of the self” but it seems that education and laws are the only cognitive avenues that lazy evolution has left us. Can you think of others?
DeleteBut with nonhuman species “liberal humanism” has been “liberal anthropocentrism” rather than humaneness. Almost all humans hurt nonhumans (needlessly), whether or not they know they feel. A lot more education and laws are needed there.
(I’ve never mentioned “speciesism,” by the way, because I think the notion is incoherent: insentient plants and microbes are species too. The moral problem is with our treatment of sentient species. Anthropocentrism says it all)
The first paragraph under “Consequences of error”, made me better understand what Harnad meant in class by “its the problem of the feeler” if we assume they don’t feel and they in fact do. Originally I thought this had to do with it being their problem to prove that they do feel. However, the paragraph clarified that it is tied to suffering. It has no bearing on us if we assume non-sentience for a sentient being, but it is that assumption of non-sentience that leads to the potential harm of the feeling organism. For example, I can reasonably conclude that by pencil does not have feeling, and thus breaking it will not cause the pencil to feel hurt. However, for other organisms, we are unable to conclude this — due to the impenetrable barrier of the other minds problem (save mind-reading) and Descarte’s Cogito. So, it is the benefit of the doubt that we give to other organisms that lead us to treat them as if they do have sentience, and thus why most of us would not kick a T3 robot — because it *might* feel hurt.
ReplyDelete”it is the benefit of the doubt that we give to other organisms that lead us to treat them as if they do have sentience, and thus why most of us would not kick a T3 robot — because it *might* feel hurt.”
DeleteAnd cows and pigs and chickens and fish and lobsters?
During the class I was wondering if I could understand the relationship between the other mind problem, the ‘hard problem,’ and the ‘easy problem’ in this way: trying to solve the easy problem can’t give any answer to the hard problem but answering the easy problem is providing information to solve the other-minds problem. There is a huge gap between the ‘hard problem’ and the ‘easy problem,’ and using the approaches the same as solving the easy problem, such as ‘brain function localization’ or the discovery of the mirror neurons, logically could not solve the hard problem. However, solving the easy problem is providing more information, reducing the uncertainty when facing the other-mind problem. After reading this article, I wonder if completely solving the easy problem could answer the other-mind problem. In this article, Prof. Harnad suggests that the problem of the other minds is that the other minds cannot be observed, what…can only be inferred from what their bodies are doing.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, the ‘easy problem’ is how and why organisms can do all those things they can do. To solve the easy problem, we need to have a causal explanation of brain activity and one’s behavior. Though we are far away from solving it, does it mean that by telling how and why the activity in our brain make us could do what we could do, we could synchronize one’s behavior by monitoring, observing, and measuring one’s brain events, and therefore making the ‘mind’ observable? Such as we could predict or simulate the state of our heartbeat by monitoring it through equipment. However, I don’t think it could be counted as entirely observable since whether the other mind is feeling or what the other mind is feeling remain a mystery.
You are right that solving the easy problem (EP) can help with the other minds problem (OMP). Science is not maths, so you can’t prove with certainty that others have minds, any more than you can prove that apples will always fall down rather than up. That’s part of the normal under-deterimination of science: just probability based on evidence, not certainty or necessity as in maths. But the OMP, though, is harder than apple-falling, partly because of the HP: gravitation is a highly probable explanation of how and why apples fall down and not up. Gravitation itself is not directly observable, but its effects are observable, all over the universe. Gravitation is a physical force. Without it, physics could not explain anything. In contrast, solving the EP would explain everything without ever needing to assume an unobservable “force”: feeling. That makes the OMP somewhat more underdetermined than the rest of science. And it seems to leave the HP inexplicable. Yet feeling is the only thing that matters.
DeleteThe difficulty of identifying whether and what other species feel has been described in this course as the other-minds problem. The only resources we have are correlates of feeling: behavior (including language), anatomy, and physiological (including neural).
ReplyDeleteThe other-minds problem is how to know what and if another organism feels; this problem only exists because the minds of others cannot be directly viewed (and in the case of animals, they cannot communicate to us directly using language like other humans can). In this article we reflect on how we can assume animals do not have minds just because we can’t ‘prove it’ for sure. Nonhuman animals can communicate, they just can't talk. As a result, our compassion for nonhuman creatures is totally dependent on whether we believe they have feelings (and whether we care enough about that feeling even if we believe it exists).
I think the main idea you are getting at is right. However, humans can vary in their abilities themselves, for example some not being able to talk. Additionally, some animals, although they might not speak, can still communicate quite effectively among others of their species as well as humans. Thus, I don’t think it is only the other minds problem that prevents us from attributing feeling to animals. I think our current beliefs rely on what benefits us and the fact that we do not have to confront the implications of our actions directly, specifically with meat consumption. We might never be able to prove that an animal has feelings so instead we it seems more reasonable to decide to act as if we know they do.
DeleteMelissa, “our compassion for nonhuman creatures is totally dependent on whether we believe they have feelings (and whether we care enough about that feeling even if we believe it exists).”
DeleteJust as it does with infants and brain-damaged humans, and based on the same evidence (as Marisa points out.)
And our “beliefs” are not quite a matter of choice. They are feelings too. Mind-reading is not just theorizing; it’s perceptual.
“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.”
ReplyDeleteThis is basically what I said in the conclusion of my 11a skywriting. In the name of the minimization of suffering, we should assume that animals can feel, since to assume the opposite could cause enormous amounts of suffering. It could even empower some people to commit all sorts of cruel, senseless acts on animals for no good reason. While I am not against eating meat, I do think that we should provide farm animals with a good life while they’re around, as well as a quick death if we are to kill them. What is truly disgusting are such acts as industrial farming of animals where they are locked in cages with no space to themselves, and the harvesting of shark fins followed by the release of finless sharks back into the ocean. These are unnecessary practices driven by greed. And that leads into a closely related problem: too many people value profit over people, never mind animals. Of course, there will always be some people who lack empathy and don’t care about hurting anybody, human or non-human. That is a result of a lack of empathy combined with humans’ innate curiosity. But the fact that actual financial incentives exist to commit horrible, unspeakable acts on sentient beings is a problem in itself. I won’t get into any more platitudes about the horrors of capitalism. But teaching children how to better tap into their natural empathic sense instead of putting them into competition from the start would be a good place to start minimizing such greed and disregard for other life.
“While I am not against eating meat, I do think that we should provide farm animals with a good life while they’re around, as well as a quick death if we are to kill them. What is truly disgusting are such acts as industrial farming of animals where they are locked in cages with no space to themselves…These are unnecessary practices driven by greed.”
DeleteYour reflections are good, and I think your heart is in the right place.
But I have a question for you:
Do you think killing and eating meat is a necessary practice?
Besides the question of “what is that members of other species are feeling and thinking”, I feel like there is also another important question (for many people), which is “what species”. Most people would probably agree that house pets, like cats and dogs, can feel certain emotions, such as happiness, sadness, angry and they feel pain. Even though these animals don't talk, whether cats and dogs feel pain won't be doubted. I believe, according to humans' high level of mind-reading capacity, they could feel the same for other animals (pigs, cows, sheep, etc.), yet they choose to neglect it. This difference of preference goes back to the cognitive dissonance that we have discussed in class, and somehow shows the hypocrisy of humanity.
ReplyDeleteHi Zhiyuan! I think this is a really good point, and something I was also considering when reading through this paper and the Key one. Key argues that fish do not feel pain, but I believe he wold have been met with a lot more backlash if he a wrote a paper arguing that dogs do not feel pain. You are right that this is the cognitive dissonance discussed by Professor Harnad. Since people eat fish, pigs, cows, etc. then it makes it a lot easier to pretend that these animals do not feel pain, or are less “intelligent”. In a way, this serves as a sort of justification. If people can make themselves believe that these “less intelligent” animals do not feel pain and don’t understand the atrocities that are happening to them, then it makes it a lot easier to eat them. This is the only real difference between the species that we choose to believe do feel, such as our pets, and the ones we believe don’t feel.
DeleteAnother of the (many, many) ways to soothe cognitive dissonance is to imagine that the animals we eat have a happy life, cut short without terror and pain -- or that their consumption is (still) necessary for our survival and health.
DeleteFor my skywriting on 11B, I would like to return to the question I asked during the lecture.
ReplyDeleteFrom the beginning of the course to the end, we’ve talked about feelings as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. We didn’t ask if a T3 robot would feel what it is like to understand grounded words to a certain degree. We established that humans feel AND despite the OMP, we established that many other living species are sentient as well. The things that do NOT feel are (Chalmer’s) zombies and non-living organisms. So, either you feel, or you don’t, it’s not a spectrum.
With this in mind, I became curious after reading this part of the article: “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. … Nonhuman animals, after incalculable and unpardonable suffering at the hands of our species, may now be beginning to have some hope of being accorded legal status and protection as sentient beings. This is hence the historic time to build a clear and full understanding of what sentience is, species by species, and what is needed to understand and protect it.”
When accounting for legal status and protection for diverse sentient beings, how do we decide differently, species by species, when feeling itself is an all-or-nothing phenomenon? Either a being feels or does not feel. What other criteria is necessary for making different ethical decisions?
While watching the seminar on Invertebrate Animal Sentience, Dr. Irina Mikhalevich’s presentation of “The Consistency Case for Invertebrate Moral Standing” provided some insight to my question.
DeleteShe first stated that there is (more or less) a universal agreement that sentience is necessary but not sufficient for moral standing. Moral standing refers to as that being having intrinsic value rather than mere instrumental value. She also differentiated between the concepts moral standing (all-or-nothing) VS moral status (threshold). Moral status comes in degrees and is relative so although an elephant and a mouse might both have moral standing, an elephant would have a higher standing relative to the mouse. Thus, in triage scenarios, the well-being of the elephant would be prioritized over the mouse. But why do elephants have a higher moral standing when both elephants and mice are sentience species?
Dr. Mikhalevich also pleas for consistency when developing public policy for invertebrates. She states that invertebrates tend to be morally excluded because of different cognitive affective biases such as size threshold bias (larger size = greater value), lifespan threshold bias (longer lifespan = greater value) and the conservationist fallacy (larger population size = less value).
I agree with Dr.Mikhalevich’s plea for consistency because of the all-or-nothing aspect of feeling. I also found myself guilty of the different cognitive affective biases mentioned when accounting for the value of different species. However, knowing that these are biases and are wrong standards for legal status or public policy, I am again curious as to what criteria is proper for each individual species. (How do we order the moral status of sentience beings who all have a moral standing?) Is this what the field of animal sentience entails? Understanding aspects of sentience for each species in order to develop the most suitable legal protection?
So, I haven't watched Dr. Mikhalevich's presentation, but I did hear some arguments in the field of animal ethics that, for me, make a lot of sense and that might help to explain how/why does moral status comes in degree.
DeleteThe argument I heard was loosely related to utilitarianism, in the sense that it "classifies" animals based on their ability to suffer. Feeling, of course, seem to be an all or nothing process, as you said: you either feel or you don't. However, it seems reasonable to me to suppose that suffering, which is more complex, can be a matter of degree.
Not all animals (humans included) can suffer in the same way. Very social animals, like human or dogs, will acutely suffer from being separated from their group, while other animals who have less developed social cognition probably would not experience as much psychological distress (think about separating a wolf from its pack vs a fish from its school). Similarly, I feel like we could reasonably infer a great ape (a social animal that is used to being cognitively stimulated) would endure deeper psychological suffering from being locked in a cage for years than, let's say, a beetle.
Of course, these type of reasoning can always be dangerous (as we might just judge animal based on their similarity to us), but I do feel as if there is a case to be made there. We shouldn't make any being suffer for nothing, but recognizing that some can suffer more acutely than others can in the grand scheme of things reduce the overall amount of suffering that animals endure.
Louise, you answered Iris’s question well: Minimize suffering. But let me ask you one. You said:
Delete“We shouldn't make any being suffer for nothing, but recognizing that some can suffer more acutely than others can in the grand scheme of things reduce the overall amount of suffering that animals endure.”
Do you think the overall amount of (“anthropogenic,” i.e., human-inflicted) suffering that animals endure is mostly necessary (for human survival and health), i.e., not "for nothing"?
This is the question that cognitive dissonance makes us not want to ask – or that makes us favor replies that justify continuing to cause animal suffering, or that minimize not the suffering but our belief in its “acuteness.”
I think the ability for humans to infer that other humans, as well as mammals and birds (as discussed in the reading) have minds as well is not a one way street, as I believe most people would agree that pet dogs can empathize with their owners, and can read how a human is feeling mood-wise. On top of the ability to feel, isn't the ability to empathize, in addition to being another example of feeling, another level completely in terms of determining someone has consciousness, from a human perspective at least? We assume other humans have minds based on their behavior, and we have the ability to empathize (in most cases), and thus, is that empathizing ability another aspect of consciousness? Therefore, because dogs and cats and horses and other animals have this ability to sense human feelings, is this another aspect that displays consciousness? Or is that simply due to the fact that we are more closely biologically related to mammals.
ReplyDeleteHi alex, i think the fact we are more closely biologically related to mammals is a major factor of why we think we can establish certain analagous structures and functions between humans and certain animals and thus use this to infer their experience of feeling.
DeleteWe are more closely related to other mammals, and most of those have "altricial" young (requiring long periods of nurturance). That's one of the (lazy) evolutionary roots of mind-reading capacity and empathy. Most mammals are also social, and need to cohabit and collaborate to survive. But more distant relatives (like birds and even fish) have similar traits. Lazy evolution finds similar ways across species, whether homologous or analogous (Weeks 4 & 7), including "mirror neurons" (or whatever mechanism underlies them).
DeleteAfter reading this article, I am very convince on the idea of animal sentience. Particularly, a quote that stood out to me was: “It does feel like something to think, but it also feels like something to be in any other mental state”. Harnad then explains that this is what it is to have sentience, since any mental state is a felt state, and therefore indicates the ability to feel. Therefore, if an animal can feel the felt state of touching something or hearing something, then who is to say they can’t feel other felt states such as pain or sadness? However, thanks to the other minds problem, we cannot be sure that anyone else (human or non-human) feels anything at all, whether it is touch or sadness. I think that Professor Harnad’s points on the benefit of the doubt were very compelling. It is true that we cannot know for sure that animals do feel anything because of the other minds problem. But it would be much worse for us to then assume that they feel nothing at all rather than giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they do. Assuming animals (or other humans for that matter) do not feel anything makes it a lot easier to justify horrific things such as abuse, torture and killing. If there is a chance at all that animals do feel (and there is quite a high chance), then treating them as sentient creatures is the only way to prevent harming creatures that feel as much as we do.
ReplyDeleteThe "chance" that other species feel is not small; the probability and evidence is enormous. And lazy evolution partially encoded this in our genes and brains with our mind-reading capacities ("mirror neurons").
Delete“It was in fact a quack theory, attributing the mind to the pineal gland into which a deity had implanted the power to generate feeling - in humans, but not in any other species” Descartes’ cogito thinking on animal sentience seems rather paradoxical. How can one argue that the only thing one can be certain of is that they can feel, but this same concept does not apply to animals? It seems rather biased to assume that this concept only applies to humans. The argument of a deity placing the ability to feel within the brain does not match his cogito proposition. How is he to know that any other human has had this bestowed upon them? Why is he suddenly certain of the fact that this hasn’t been given to animals? Animal brains and human brains are at the same level of impenetrability to Descartes yet he holds this is not true.
ReplyDeleteThis differs from 11b because Descartes has not yet relied on biological differences to explain the justification of the infliction of pain onto animals but he seems to be hinting at it with his suggestion of godlike intervention in the brain.
However, what Professor Harnad holds is true. We should not base our decision on the potential that they do not feel pain, especially given the fact that we have no skin in the game. If we hurt an animal, there will be no pain inflicted back upon us. In fact, it is most likely that there is something gained such as financial gains. We should try to avoid making judgments based on the fact that animals are unable to communicate that we are, in fact, hurting them, and that without this we will never know for certain whether they do or not. We should extend the same other-minds type of thinking in that we are unsure if anything other than our personal selves feel anything at all and thus won’t play with the potential of pain in others to animals as well. The consequences of if we don’t are too great.
Yes, Descartes overplayed his hand in highlighting uncertainty about whether other people feel while confidently asserting that nonhumans don't. (And Descartes' did justify doing whatever we wanted with nonhuman animals because they are just reflex automata -- although some of this may come more from his disciple, the Jesuit Malebranche)
DeleteAnd in point of fact we don't really believe that mammals and birds and other vertebrates and many invertebrates don't feel. It's not mind-blindness but cognitive dissonance that makes us want to deny or downplay the obvious. (Sincere other-minds uncertainty begins only at the level of sponges!)
(Remember that, according to Descartes on certainty, we are just as uncertain about whether apples will keep falling down and not up as we are about whether others feel.)
In the section “benefit of the doubt”, Harnad reminds us that the most prominent reason we believe others have minds is due to our acute mind-reading powers which make us feel as if other people feel. He raises a question about which hypothesis we should accept in uncertain conditions, stating that we often pick the option that has more evidence supporting it, and asks what is at stake by accepting the wrong hypothesis. This is just a personal opinion, but I think it’s fair to say that in this sensitive case of the experience of pain and suffering, the responsible option is to err on the side of caution and assume that animals do experience pain and suffering, although maybe not exactly manifested the same we do. While bearing in mind that human knowledge and our ability to “mind read” is fallible, we must still consider the potential gravity of the phenomena of pain, which leads us not to to accept the hypothesis with more support, but rather look at the consequences of accepting the wrong paradigm and thus basing our actions on that, which professor Harnad later goes into in the next section about the consequence of errors.
ReplyDeleteThat's the Precautionary Principle (q.v.)
DeleteIn this paper, Prof. Harnad discussed the other mind problem with an emphasize on species other than ourselves – animals. For this I wish to start with commenting on the ‘mind-reading’ capacity in human, as described “We can also infer what other people are feeling or thinking from their behavior (and sometimes also from measuring the electrical activity in their brains)” (p.4) This is the indication of having mind and serve as a basis for social cognition. As human are social animals, this ability is important for collaboration and survival. I believe there’re similar behavioral patterns in animals of communication and certain degree of mutual 'understanding' that within species, individuals are able to ‘feel’ other individual’s condition and either work together. The real problem here is that, as Prof. Harnad mentioned, between species, how we can judge if the others have a mind?
ReplyDeleteOur "mirror neurons" work well for "reading" the nonverbal behaviors of many other species (or human babies). And they get better and better with experience
DeleteI am expressed by Professor Harnad’s argument on whose other-minds problem. 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”. It reminds me that the problem we are facing is not a mere academical question of human beings concerning true or false. It is also an ethical question concerning our responsibility to other species.
ReplyDeleteWe often treat the other-minds problem as a pure question of our intellectual pursuit. From the standpoint of acquiring knowledge, we can talk about whether we can know for sure other species have mind, or whether we have sufficient evidence to believe that. Then we do realize that we can never know for sure others’ feelings, and the difficulties of acquiring convincing evidence will always exist, due to the nature of the other-minds problem. However, if we change our standpoint, and consider it as an ethical question concerning our responsibility to other species, then our view will change significantly. Then, we will realize that those skeptical concerns do not matter as much. Is it reasonable that someone lets another person suffer and does nothing to save that person, simply because he/she is skeptical about whether that person is a robot or a person? Hence, I like Professor Harnad’s expression that what we need to do is to sensitizing members of own species to sentience. What we need is to change the way we think of the question on other species’ feelings, and to change our attitude toward them.
...and, for most cases, heed rather than deny the obvious.
Delete