What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?

What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?

Karin Evans

Like de Waal’s other books, Mama’s Last Hug is full of stories, making it highly readable, informative, and emotionally resonant. In another story he recounts, a younger female in Mama’s colony, Kuif, couldn’t produce enough milk to keep her babies alive; so de Waal taught her how to feed an adopted infant with a bottle. Kuif turned out to be a caring and protective mother, learning on her own how to remove the bottle when the baby needed to burp. Afterward, each time de Waal approached Kuif, she showered him with affection and expressions that truly seemed like gratitude.

After Mama’s death, de Waal witnessed the other chimpanzees touching, washing, anointing, and grooming her body—gestures very similar to what humans do after a death. Given such observations of chimpanzees, de Waal asserts, “Their socio-emotional lives resemble ours to such a degree that it is unclear where to draw the line.”

So, though de Waal views elephants as highly empathic, emotional beings—given how they will rush to comfort a fellow elephant in distress, and how they can recognize themselves in a mirror—he acknowledges that some scientists remain skeptical because we can’t ask elephants (or any animal) about their feelings. “The possibility that animals experience emotions the way we do makes many hard-nosed scientists feel queasy,” de Waal points out, “partly because animals never report any feelings, and partly because the existence of feelings presupposes a level of consciousness that these scientists are unwilling to grant to animals.”

What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?

Karin Evans

I wonder what these "hard-nosed" scientists think is responsible for such behavior. If it doesn't signify the same sort of emotions and feelings such behavior means with humans, they still have to explain the behavior some other way. If they think animals are behavioristic bundles of instincts and stimulus-response complexes with no entity with feelings inside, then why the specific behaviors that have certain specific meanings to humans? If things like the actions by chimpanzees and elephants described by de Waal are just behaviors with nothing going on inside, why those particular behaviors in response to those particular circumstances? These would seem to be unlikely coincidences. I think even evolutionary psychologists have to presume the existence of "feelings" of some sort as the driving forces that animals have evolved to push them toward behavior beneficial to the individual or group. Of course, most evo-psych stories are exercises in creative imagination, but unfortunately some consider them science.

The video Mama

It is interesting that according to Michael Egnor, although animals have emotions and feelings similar to humans, there is still a fundamental qualitative not quantitative gap between animal consciousness and human consciousness - the exclusively human presence of intellection, abstract thought and free will. And intuition, understanding, wisdom, moral conscience, and aesthetic appreciation, all in addition to calculation (this last presumably an animal brain function greatly enhanced in humans). This huge difference would presumably still make animal consciousness fundamentally alien from human. Animal consciousness would then be different from the human in fundamental qualitative ways not just in degrees of shared characteristics.      

"The fundamental error committed by animal behavior researchers, aside from banality, is the equation of human will with animal passions. Will and passion are qualitatively, not just quantitively, different.

Both humans and animals have passions. Passions have a basis in material processes—brain pathways, neurotransmitters, and the like. Passions can be categorized as concupiscible and irascible. Concupiscible passions include love and hate, desire and aversion, and joy and sadness. Irascible passions include hope and despair, fear and daring, and anger. Both animals and humans have passions, which are based in material processes in the brain. It is in this sense that animal studies may cast some light on human passions.

But, in addition to material passions, humans have will. Will differs utterly from passion and animals lack it. That is because will follows on intellect, which is the human ability to think abstractly.

Animals don’t think in concepts. For example, dogs think of food, but not of nutrition. Dogs think of fear, but not of injustice. To summarize, animals think concretely about things or situations in particular; they do not think abstractly about things or situations in general.

Human behavior involves will as well as passion. We may be angry with other humans (as animals can be angry), but only humans have deliberate malice, in the sense of willful acting out of abstract decisions motivated by anger. Animals bite and snap. Humans calculate cold revenge. Conversely, animals love a human or another animal, whereas humans not only love but can will what is good for the loved one in an abstract sense. Dogs love their young (passion). Humans love their young (passion) and make sacrifices to set up college funds for them (will).

Why abstract thought is inherently immaterial: will differs from passion in that will follows on abstract thought, whereas passion follows on concrete thought. And abstract thought is inherently immaterial because its object (abstraction) is immaterial."

It is interesting that according to Michael Egnor, although animals have emotions and feelings similar to humans, there is still a fundamental qualitative not quantitative gap between animal consciousness and human consciousness - the exclusively human presence of intellection, abstract thought and free will. And intuition, understanding, wisdom, moral conscience, and aesthetic appreciation, all in addition to calculation (this last presumably an animal brain function greatly enhanced in humans). This huge difference would presumably still make animal consciousness fundamentally alien from human. Animal consciousness would then be different from the human in fundamental qualitative ways not just in degrees of shared characteristics.      

There seem to be an awfully big pile of unproved assumptions in Egnor's ideas.

[Laird]

Yes. I wonder how he would respond to evidence that animals plan for the future. It might not be a college fund, but it is wilful.

https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-w...humans-do/

https://www.livescience.com/2620-humans-apes-plan.html

Also this, for example:
"Dogs think of fear, but not of injustice."

There seem to be an awfully big pile of unproved assumptions in Egnor's ideas.

Egnor at least has made what I think is a good case for the immateriality of abstract thought.  From https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/what-is-a...to-dr-ali/ :

"Concrete thoughts about tokens are material in origin—they arise from brain processes in an (as yet) imperfectly understood way.

Abstract thoughts about types are immaterial in origin—they do not, and cannot, arise from brain processes. Immaterial entities cannot arise from material things, because (to paraphrase Thomas Aquinas) the effect of a cause must, in some sense, be in the cause. A cause in nature cannot give what it does not, in some sense, have. I cannot impart momentum to an object unless I have some momentum (energy) to give. Matter cannot give rise to immateriality.

Abstract thought is qualitatively different from concrete thought. To understand this, consider a chiliagon. A chiliagon is a closed regular polygon with 1000 sides. It is very simple to understand abstractly. However, it cannot be imagined concretely—it’s not possible to form a clear picture of a chiliagon in your mind.

Furthermore, abstract thought is not merely an assembly of a large number of concrete thoughts—you don’t understand what a chiliagon is simply by imaging a series of many-sided polygons approaching a 1000-sided figure. Thus we see that abstract thought and concrete thought are different types of thought."

And, from https://mindmatters.ai/2019/07/can-mater...t-part-ii/ :

"I have pointed out the research done by Dr. Roger Sperry on patients who had the two hemispheres of their brains surgically disconnected (for which Sperry won the Nobel Prize). It is clear evidence that higher mental function, such as abstract thought, does not arise from material processes in the brain. The reasoning is straightforward: the patients who had their brains essentially cut in half had completely normal powers of abstract thought after the procedure. They were still one person, and no intellectual function was affected in the slightest.
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I (also) pointed out that there are no intellectual seizures—that is, that epileptic seizures never evoke abstract intellectual thought—despite the materialist claim that abstract thought arises entirely from brain function. This inconsistency of materialist theory with scientific evidence was first noted by Dr. Wilder Penfield, who was the pioneer in epilepsy neurosurgery. Penfield noted that during his fifty years of clinical practice and research that stimulation of the brain—either by seizures or by a neurosurgeon during surgery—never evokes abstract thinking. I have noted the same thing in my practice. I know of no report in medical history of an abstract thought evoked by a seizure or by brain stimulation. Which is odd, if the brain causes abstract thought."

Egnor's contention that animals' consciousness is entirely brain-based and cannot entertain abstract thought appears to be mainly based on religious teachings. Regardless, I think he may be right. This could be explained in a non-religious though spiritual/metaphysical way as due to spirits having decided to inhabit animal bodies only when a suitable body (the human) was available. There are some New Age channelings to this effect.

Also this, for example:
"Dogs think of fear, but not of injustice."

I think that the left-hand Capuchin's behavior (the one that was given the cucumber not the grape) can still be argued to be based on concrete not abstract thought. Specific physical objects and their physical nature are the subjects of the thoughts, not abstract immaterial concepts.

I think that the left-hand Capuchin's behavior (the one that was given the cucumber not the grape) can still be argued to be based on concrete not abstract thought. Specific physical objects and their physical nature are the subjects of the thoughts, not abstract immaterial concepts.

The difficulty here is in trying to argue that animal and human thought is fundamentally different. If we devalue animal thought, we simultaneously devalue human thought too. That doesn't achieve anything.