The minds of other animals

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Saturday, January 21. 2017

The minds of other animals

Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize animals,and to spiritualize them too. Students of animals try very hard to resist those natural inclinations. Animals lack personalities, self-awareness, etc. Those of a species are identical robots, maybe, until you get to the apes.

An animal researcher discusses his challenge in objectifying creatures: The minds of other animals. Animal consciousness is taboo in many areas of biological science. What’s so hard about the inner lives of other species?

I recall Darwin's other classic text, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Do people still read it? We did, at least selections from it.

Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Psychology, and Dr. Bliss at 15:38 | Comments (16) | Trackbacks (0)

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Animals lack personalities, self-awareness, etc......

Well... certainly you are entitled to your opinion, but you must not be an animal lover, or ever have owned an exceptional animal.

They have emotions, they have self-awareness, and they know happiness, contendedness, anger, and shame. Just like humans, each of the higher mammal species has a range of intelligence at the individual level, and when you interact with the high end of apes, horses, dogs, and yes, even cats, a sensitive person can understand and connect with these personalities. Animals have emotions.

#1 Aggie on 2017-01-21 15:39 (Reply)

Assuming animals are flat, robotic, inferior, and disposable gets you few benefits. Once I realized they were easily our equals except for evident reason, language, and other human cognition a whole world opened up. This latter is dismissed as anthropomorphizing, but lacking a working definition, the word solves nothing. It's just a little linguistic handle.

Funny, the ostensible religious mind as often tends toward extremes in the matter, which gets us back to the problem of either devaluing what we don't care to understand or admitting we don't understand what we do indeed care about. All dogs go to heaven for a reason.

#1.1 Ten on 2017-01-21 17:28 (Reply)

Read ekmans annotated version. Published around 1996

#2 Ns on 2017-01-21 15:59 (Reply)

Animals lack self awareness ...try catching my cat

#3 Ron Spins on 2017-01-21 16:30 (Reply)

When my children were young we had a dog. I love dogs and cats just don't love owning them. The dog was a yard do no house and not allowed outside the fence. A good dog that would mind and respond to your every command. But when the dog got outside the fence she went deaf. She couldn't hear me call and as I approached her she would move away as fast as necessary. She had 'that' kind of self-awareness. My son could easily catch her because he never gave the impression he was trying to catch her. He would lie on his back, flail his arms and legs and make noises the dog interpreted as playful. the dog would come to play and was caught.

#3.1 GoneWithTheWind on 2017-01-22 10:30 (Reply)

Bliss's flippancy is well suited by brevity. "Animals X, Y, Z, etc." Now there's an argument, although I also enjoyed the tacit appeal to the implied simple binary polarity of science.

#4 Ten on 2017-01-21 17:22 (Reply)

I'm not sure by what term one decides that animals lack personalities....many show as much variation as people.

Now personality does not necessarily correlate directly to sentience or self awareness but it seems to be one of the components we associate (rightly or wrongly) with those attributes.

#5 jay on 2017-01-21 18:40 (Reply)

Wiki:

Sentience is the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively.[1] Eighteenth-century philosophers used the concept to distinguish the ability to think (reason) from the ability to feel (sentience). In modern Western philosophy, sentience is the ability to experience sensations (known in philosophy of mind as "qualia"). In Eastern philosophy, sentience is a metaphysical quality of all things that requires respect and care. The concept is central to the philosophy of animal rights and also the anti-abortion movement because sentience is necessary for the ability to suffer, and thus is held to confer certain rights.

#5.1 Ten on 2017-01-21 19:28 (Reply)

Anyone who believes animals lack self-awareness, emotions, or personalities has never raised a horse or a dog.

#6 eric on 2017-01-21 19:27 (Reply)

Tool use by animals

#7 Ten on 2017-01-21 19:32 (Reply)

Animals lack personalities,HA!
Only an educated fool or just plain fool would state so.
Complete and total idiots!

#8 RL on 2017-01-21 20:43 (Reply)

They're not at all like humans. I tried to convince my cat to abort her babies by telling her it's her "right" that evil men are trying to deny her of, but she didn't fall for it.

#9 Talnik on 2017-01-21 21:40 (Reply)

"Those of a species are identical robots ..."

I don't anthropomorphize animals, but I'm afraid my experience completely contradicts that statement. I've owned both cats and dogs and every one has had a unique personality, frequently with quirky (and sometimes irritating) traits.

#10 Cleve Watson on 2017-01-21 23:32 (Reply)

See ekmans annotations in Darwin s book in 1996 edition. He updates research on Darwin s observations

#11 Ns on 2017-01-22 09:06 (Reply)

I think they are not self-aware in the same way humans are. That's a far cry from saying they have no personalities. To be blind to the quality of their subjective experience would require being blind to the more primitive parts of our own experience, which is to say, to over-rationalize things to a harmful degree.

#12 Texan99 on 2017-01-22 10:10 (Reply)

Even fishkeeping will quickly make you realize, that even tiny tropical fish have personalities. They may have brains as tiny as a pin head, yet in a school of say
rosy Tetras, different individuals will have different behavior. Some are shy, some bold, some more curios, etc. Any body who has kept large fish like cichlids, or sunfish knows what i mean. These fish can become real characters and pets. So when I hear someone say animals have no emotions, this is someone who never kept one.

#13 brierrabbit3030 on 2017-01-22 10:35 (Reply)

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Saturday, January 21. 2017

The minds of other animals