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Comment by happytoexplain | Hacker News Reader

I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering. This status quo naturally persisted into the era of science until science demonstrated it to be wrong in this case. Should they have known better, sooner? Obviously - I don't fully comprehend what could lead to such a bizarre and terrible assumption. But the problem seems to predate the age of empiricism and medical science.

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You can see this all the time right now. People always talk about dogs as though they are philosophical zombies that merely learned to imitate the emotional displays we see from them. I see people talking about animals frequently caveat their intuition by saying things like "I'm sure he's just learned that if he does that he'll get food" or the like.

But the notion that fellow mammals which evolved to live in social groups don't experience any of the same emotions we do despite using the same brain structures in the same contexts is absolutely insane to me. They clearly experience even fairly complex emotions like jealousy of their peers. I can give my child a snack that my dog likes and it's no big deal. But if I were to give the cat that same treat and not my dog, she will flip her shit. Another dog would be similarly. In fact, my dog will jealously guard a treat she doesn't even like from the cat or another dog. Like she won't even eat it in a neutral context. But in the jealousy eliciting context, she will take it and bring it somewhere and guard it.

Like it's insane to me that people think the entire range of our emotions and thoughts evolved solely in humans. There are other social mammals and have been for a long time.

I see those as two basically different phenomena:

1. Is X capable of feeling pain / sentient?

2. Is X capable of having emotions?

It seems probable that (1) is a precondition of (2), such that we should not be surprised if there are sentient creatures (perhaps including dogs) that are capable of feeling pain, are intelligent, and able to produce apparently emotional displays without having evolved the underlying experience of emotion.

Human emotions are complex and came about as the result of a long period of evolution with an intricate social system built on top of it. The emotions that e.g. dogs show are the result of a few-thousand year history of humans selectively rewarding a particular animal for displaying a certain behavior.

It is, IMO, beyond the pale to suggest that animals like dogs don't experience pain or have subjective experience. (And the same goes for pigs, cows, and most other vertebrates.) That would come as a surprise to some rather intelligent historical figures like Descartes. I don't think it's similarly strange to think that these animals don't experience emotions in quite the same way we do, or that an apparent display of "sorrow" doesn't map 1:1 to an internal experience of sorrow in the way we might expect.

> You can see this all the time right now. People always talk about dogs as though they are philosophical zombies that merely learned to imitate the emotional displays we see from them. I see people talking about animals frequently caveat their intuition by saying things like "I'm sure he's just learned that if he does that he'll get food" or the like.

Dogs are a little bit different from other animals, though. I've always kept dogs and cats (currently have 3x dogs, 3x cats) and every single dog I've had over the years has been able to look at my face to see what I am looking at.

In other words, by looking at my face, they know where to turn their heads to look at what I am looking at, and by my expression, they know when to do it.

This is obviously not a "do action = get treat" type of scenario, and I don't know of any other animal that are in tune enough with humans to do that. To me, that's a very strong indication of higher-order thinking.

> Like she won't even eat it in a neutral context. But in the jealousy eliciting context, she will take it and bring it somewhere and guard it.

All my dogs have done the same; many of them will just bury it somewhere on the property and then forget about it.

"You shouldn't feel bad about eating an octopus alive or boiling a lobster alive. It's tastier and they don't feel pain anyway."

If someone is making it up, that's terrible, but if they're basing it on some evidence it's not crazy. Not everything, not even all humans, have the same types of pain.

That's a great example because I disagreed with them and have no problem consuming anything based on its nervous system or perceptive capabilities

but then these same people, themselves, will suddenly have a cognitive maturity enough to notice things the same way I could my whole life, and then freak out about consuming them!?

I'm dumfounded! When was that the line!? It was only the line because in some cultures the humans were cognitively stunted the whole time!? Can I trust a single thing they say and perceive? Can they even pass the turing test?

There’s a huge difference in brainpower between an octopus and a lobster.

I don’t personally boil lobster alive, but I only place them slightly above plants and bivalves on my personal scale of how bad I feel bad for killing/eating them.

> I feel like it's the opposite - that, historically, many people (regardless of profession) always generally assumed that certain living things did not feel pain or otherwise suffer for some definition of suffering.

I'm not sure that's the case. Most people believe dogs feel pain by observing them, for example. Indeed, it is the most immediate common sense conclusion one can make based on observation. It wasn't until modern philosophy, specifically Descartes, characterized animals as zombie meat machines (pure res extensa). Aristotle, by contrast, did not deny non-human animals sensation or pain, as is evident in De Anima in which he reasons that sensation is in fact necessary for animals (this occurs in the context of determining the necessary faculties entailed by the nutritive soul, the sensitive soul, and the intellectual soul).

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