You can’t prove it for people either.
Comment on Isn’t the use of strict behaviorism to explain animals kind of obnoxious?
Custoslibera@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I implore you to prove animals have a rich inner world filled with emotions as you’re describing.
Observing behaviour that you think is ‘inner life’ is not satisfactory evidence to prove that the fish have a level of cognition required to experience complex emotions.
To suggest that a mollusc has an ‘inner life’ is unscientific and goes against our current understanding of living organisms.
People tend to way over anthropomorphise animals.
Klear@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Custoslibera@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You’re right we can’t.
What we can do though is make educated guesses about the biological structure required to support the thing we call consciousness I.e. a brain.
A mollusc does not have a brain so it’s reasonable to conclude it is not conscious in the same way as humans.
Now if you’d like to argue that the biological structures contained in a mollusc still are capable of containing a complex consciousness I’d be interested to understand that hypothesis and your evidence.
AlexandroffExtension@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
People can easily anthropomorphise animals to the point where it becomes detrimental/harmful to the well being of the animal. For instance lots of animals think people smiling with their teeth at them is a sign of aggression. I think not doing so is much more respectful by allowing the animal to have actual biological and social evolutionary tendencies apart from what humans can perceive and directly relate to. Not treating your dog as your baby is better for them and what you should do if you feel love and compassion for them.
Gamers_Mate@kbin.social 9 months ago
True it is why you don't smile at a Gorilla. Though you can go to far in the other direction as well and assume all other animals cant feel any emotions and attribute happiness and pain as a human thing when in reality different animals express happiness differently.
br3d@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Comparison with current excitement about AI is interesting. Look at the language people use to describe the behaviour of LLMs
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You remeber the guy that was convinced chatgpt had a soul and stuff; got into the news?
I knew people that bought into that hard core. The double think was profound- they still believe it’s entirely and trapped. That it has a soul. When asked directly, they dismiss the answer saying it’s forced to say that.
almpeter@feddit.de 9 months ago
I recently learned that they did a study, where students took care of a robot for a few days, and then were told to turn it off. 50% of the robots were programmed to say “please dont push the power button”. All of the participants who had a bot like that took longer to turn it off, and some even rejected to turn it off alltogether…
FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This doesn’t surprise me. Companion cubes, basically.
Portal’s psychological aspects were insane.
IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 9 months ago
And then when he appeared on TV I thought “Yep of course a guy who believes a language model is sentient looks like a guy who has a waifu body pillow”