What Kind of Emotions Do Animals Feel?

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.

Egnor thoughts seem to align with the biblical narrative humans are superior in all ways.

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.

This seems to presume the answer to what is in contention -  this presumes that human consciousness is qualitatively and fundamentally the same, of the same "substance" as animal consciousness, just quantitatively different. 

First, if human thoughts are devalued, so be it - that factor doesn't figure into which is the truth of the issue.

Second, if the truth is that animal and human consciousness and thought are fundamentally qualitatively different, then there doesn't seem to be any concomitant devaluing of human consciousness.

[Laird]

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 disagree. I don't see how the monkey's reaction can be characterised in terms other than, "Hey! That's not fair!", and fairness is an abstract concept.

I disagree. I don't see how the monkey's reaction can be characterised in terms other than, "Hey! That's not fair!", and fairness is an abstract concept.

I see your point.

[Laird]

I see your point.

That's very fair-minded of you. I appreciate it.

It's probably worth highlighting something said near to the beginning of that video clip, that the experiment had also been done with dogs, birds and chimpanzees (it was implied but not explicitly stated that the results were similar).

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

There's also the research showing bees can understand the concept of zero.

I really don't see how the Scholastic position, that humans alone possess apprehension of logical/mathematical universals, can withstand the ongoing research into animal cognition.

The following story bears on the issue of whether animal consciousness can encompass abstract thought.

Michael Tymn has submitted a very interesting article on animal cognition, based on the well-documented case of the Elberfeld horses (the ones of "Clever Hans" fame). There is much more mystery to this story than closed-minded materialists would like to admit. The article is on his blog at http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/en...ed_science . Some excerpts from the article:

"As the story goes, in 1900, Wilhelm von Osten of Elberfeld taught his horse, Hans, a Russian stallion, mathematics.  He would place skittles, or bowling pins, in front of Hans and count, then ask Hans to strike as many blows with his hoof as there were skittles in front of him.  “The results were astonishing,” Dr. Claparède reported.  “The horse was capable not only of counting, but also of himself making real calculations, of solving little problems.”
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A committee of 24 professors (of whom it later turned out that only 2 actually observed the horse and the owner together) appointed to study Hans reported that the horse merely obeyed visual clues given by von Osten, whether conscious or unconscious. This became known as the “Clever Hans effect,” a term still used by animal trainers today. 

In order to investigate, the world famous author and Nobelist Maurice Maeterlinck later visited the horses (there was a change in ownership and the teaching of the same ability to two more horses).

"Another theory (besides the Clever Hans effect) advanced was that of telepathy; that is, the horse was mind-reading. To test this theory, Maeterlinck took some large cards with  numerals on them, shuffled them and placed them in front of the horse without looking at them himself.  “Without hesitation and unasked, the horse rapped out correctly the number formed by the cards,” Maeterlinck wrote.  “The experiment succeeded, as often as I cared to try it, with all three horses alike.”  Since Maeterlinck was the only person present and did not know the numbers, there was no mind present to be read for the answers.

"In one test, Maeterlinck wrote a surd – a number which had no square root – on the blackboard, not realizing that it was a surd.  Maeterlinck looked to the horse for a square root.  The horse lifted his hoof, paused, looked back at Maeterlinck and shook his head.  This little test also opposed both the Clever Hans effect and the telepathy theory."

Note: This performance with the surd fairly well indicates that whatever being was communicating through the horse, whether it was actually the horse or "somebody or something else", it had the mental ability to grasp mathematical abstractions. For that matter, all the calculation tests in general demonstrate that capacity, since counting and arithmetical calculations inherently show the ability to hold mathematical abstractions in mind. 

Concerning the math tests, Maeterlinck wrote that “what strikes one particularly is the facility, the quickness, I was almost saying the joyous carelessness with which the strange mathematician gives the answers.  The last figure is hardly chalked on the board before the right hoof is striking off the units, followed immediately by the left hoof marking the tens.  There is not a sign of attention or reflection; one is not even aware of the exact moment at which the horse looks at the problem, and the answer seems to spring automatically from an invisible intelligence.

One test ended with asking the horse for the fourth power root of 7,890,481, which questioner himself did not know until after checking the horse's correct answer of 53, which took about six seconds before he began striking out the answer.
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"One day, one of the horses stopped in the middle of a lesson by the owner.  The horse was asked why and replied, “Because I am tired.”  On another occasion he stopped again and explained, “Pain in my leg.”
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"(A number of respected scholars and scientists) were reported to have studied the horses, all ruling out fraud and the Clever Hans effect, but not having any answers.  In the absence of a scientific explanation, (as a tribute to materialist ideology) the Clever Hans effect has still gone down in recorded history as the probable explanation.

If not the Clever Hans effect, if not some other type of fraud, if not telepathy, if not true intelligence on the part of the horses, then what other explanation is there?  Maeterlinck considered the possibility that the horses were mediums, much like human mediums, through which some higher power was working. As to why it was necessary to teach the horses in the first place, he opined that it would be like asking an automatic writing medium to do her thing without knowing how to write.  “Unconscious cerebration, however wonderful, can only take effect upon elements already acquired in some way or another,” he explained. “The subconscious cerebration of a man blind from birth will not make him see colors.”"

[Laird]

The theory that the horses were simply mediums seems not to hold up so well given that they responded in language with personal sentiments - as to why they were stopping in the middle of a lesson; why they couldn't talk verbally; etc. I suppose it is possible that some of their feats/communications were due to mediumship, and some due to personal skill/talent, but that seems to be an unnecessary and, frankly, uncharitable theory.

In any case: thank you dearly for sharing this, nbtruthman; it has given me an even greater appreciation of the sentience of our animal brothers and sisters, and the horror of what we put them through.

There's also the research showing bees can understand the concept of zero.

I really don't see how the Scholastic position, that humans alone possess apprehension of logical/mathematical universals, can withstand the ongoing research into animal cognition.

From another, more detailed article on this honeybee research, at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20...141031.htm :

"The bees were trained to choose an image with the lowest number of elements in order to receive a reward of sugar solution.
For example, the bees learned to choose three elements when presented with three vs. four; or two elements when presented with two vs. three.

When the experimenter periodically tested the bees with an image that contained no elements versus an image that had one or more, the bees understood that the set of zero was the lower number -- despite never having been exposed to an "empty set."

"This is a tricky neuroscience problem," he said.
"It is relatively easy for neurons to respond to stimuli such as light or the presence of an object but how do we, or even an insect, understand what nothing is?
"How does a brain represent nothing? Could bees and other animals that collect lots of food items, have evolved special neural mechanisms to enable the perception of zero?"

It seems to me that it is an enormous stretch to use the words "understand" and "perception" when referring to what the bees are doing in apparently detecting an image with zero elements by calculating that this number of elements is less than 1, 2, 3 or 4. We just don't know at what level of animal evolution and complexity something recognizably like the human conscious "understanding" developed. I personally don't think the bees can consciously "understand" anything in anything like the human sense - their brains are just too simple, and their behavior could be interpreted just as the neural implementation of a simple logic circuit. The special case logic circuit to detect zero elements in an image that had long ago evolved could be: IF (A-B) = A THEN B LT A. And then the bee chooses B and expects the reward, as per training. No requirement to form the mental concept of zero.

By extension, the apparent abstract thinking of at least some other more complex animals may also be purely behavior mechanized by neural logic circuits. This is not to fail to recognize that at some higher level of animal evolution there must appear a real inner life and a consciousness that can in truth "understand" by holding in mind.