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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

what you say is true, but I think we become a bit too optimistic about our own individual exceptionality.

Many people forget the animals feel emotions very much the same as us, that they act and feel very much like us, and what separates is our ability to work together- and specialise, our individual intelligence is not terribly far away - but we have specialised in education so we’ve optimised our minds to work in a collective society and to specialise in certain trade craft.

we think of animals as being “dumb” and we get surprised when they show signs of intelligence.

- sent from my iPhone, which I can’t build a single component of; using software I can’t write, using electricity I can’t generate, while sitting on a sofa I can’t manufacture in an apartment I can’t build.

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As long as you’re not chewing your couch and barking at your phone, I still think you’ve got the dogs beat

Sure, but I did those things too until I was “trained” (socialised).

Good boy :)

Being highly programmable is part of our distinction. You can't build any of these things, but you can learn to build all of them.

Your possible pinnacle isn't just not chewing the couch.

We still do. How is arguing on HN, Reddit, Facebook, or any other social network different from barking at our phones? We’re doing it with our fingers instead of our mouths, but otherwise it’s pretty similar.

Most people do or are highly susceptible to figuratively bark and fume at their phones. Doomscrolling, getting depressed by looking at lying influencers, being victims of selective arguments and rage bait… Good on dogs for not falling for that, perhaps we could learn from them. Good news is we can: just go play outside, have fun, run, throw a ball. And then turn that into a highly competitive sport, waste money and throw slaves at building stadiums to support a deeply flawed business which pits people against each other based on the colour of their shirt… No! Bad human! Sit. Can’t leave you alone for a minute without you trying to destroy everything.

Animals have emotions, but jumping to their qualia being the same as ours seems unjustified.

I feel like defaulting to not having the same is unjustified. Given that we have so much in common.

Defaulting to people having the same qualia is too much of a leap. You can't even begin to prove that your blue is my blue.

While I would expected higher variance as the evolutionary gap increases, IMO the null hypothesis should be that their qualia are the same space as ours.

We're pre-paradigmatic for qualia, we don't know what structures (brain or otherwise) give rise to it in order to guess what set of qualia can be had by any given system. Until we do, I can't even quantify my expectations on the variance from increased evolutionary distance, I don't even have a quantity to express the variance of.

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