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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

I've actually been interested in whether they feel emotions we cannot.

I agree with jotux that pack-related emotions are probably something we'd have a hard time with. We have tribe-related emotions but they are probably not the same thing.

Further, humans have evolved at least one emotion that appears to have virtually no analog anywhere else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust If you don't think that's an "emotion", read that page and follow some of the references; I have found it to be a very interesting topic. If humans have this one, it would seem to defy imagination that there aren't other lines that have other emotions that we don't. In fact I've seen it suggested that it's actually amazing how much similarity there is in the entire mammal line between emotional states and the expressions of those states. To a certain extent, mammals are capable of very basic emotional communication across the entire line. We take it for granted, but compare with, for instance, reptiles.

I've seen animals behave in a way that suggests disgust. For instance, cats don't like strong smells on themselves. My cats are much more reluctant to be petted after I've just washed my hands with fragrant soap. They often sniff at my hand and back away. On occasion they'll even threaten to swat at my hand.

I assume they evolved (what I'm suggesting is) the disgust behavior because it makes them easy for other animals to smell, which makes it hard for them to hunt, and easier for larger animals to hunt them.

In fact, the Wikipedia article you linked to has a section about an acquired disgust response in mice. I agree that there's a difference between acquired disgust and innate disgust, but it's an indication that animals are capable of feeling something akin to disgust.

I'm embarrassed that I never thought of this, but now that you mention it, it seems obvious there would be subsets of emotions other animals feel that we do not. Even if our capacity for emotion is greater, it seems unlikely that the VENN diagram of our emotions and their emotions would show their circle completely contained within ours.

One thing I do think about a lot is what mental capacity other animals have that we do not. An elephant's brain is way bigger than ours. Considering that other large animals have proportionately smaller brains, it must be that size for a reason. I wonder what mental things are easy for an elephant but hard for a human?

> I wonder what mental things are easy for an elephant but hard for a human?

Controlling an articulated trunk with tens of thousands of muscles for one.

Yes, and probably lots of spatial-intelligence in general. Memory is also attributed to them by folk lore, but that's debatable.

Due to their body size, elephants need to move around a lot for forraging and, in the African Savahna at least, find water. The survival of the pack often depends on the matriarch ability to navigate through land they have not visited in many years, and finding all the scarse watersprings without the benefit of navigation instruments.

That's pretty interesting. I think most people feel that animals only have a simple subset of human emotions they can feel but maybe there are emotions they have that we do not. I imagine dogs, with a strong sense of social belonging to a pack, experience emotions related to social structure that are difficult for us to understand.

Vernor Vinge, in Fire Upon The Deep, explored that idea in pretty interesting ways. I didn't love the book (I like him as an author, and this one is considered a classic, but it didn't really grab me), but the Tines (dog-like pack animals) were an interesting thought experiment. In it, a single Tine is roughly akin to a smart dog, but when combined into a pack (linked via some sort of sound-based communication), they're of roughly human intelligence (or better) and able to perform advanced tasks, allowing them to build complex machines. Their individual pack members act as limbs in a whole "person". When one member dies, it is more like an amputation than a death...and a new pack member can be added, while mostly keeping the character and memories of the whole person. Thus Tines are potentially very long-lived (like great grandfather's ax).

There is discussion of emotions that members and packs experience that humans find foreign. Belonging to a pack being one of them; a lone Tine member that can't merge into a new pack is considered a tragic case.

Anyway, probably worth a read just for those novel ideas about other lifeforms.

In the documentary Blackfish, they note that an area of the brain which plays a big role in emotions is much larger in killer whales than it is in humans. They speculate that the social/emotional lives of whales in a pod could be far richer and more complex than what we experience.

Watching a cat track a bird through a window definitely gives the impression that there's a sort of focus and attention there that we might not have an equivalent of.

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