Ok interesting, I think this substantially clarifies your position.
I’m a bit puzzled why you would reference a specific study on octopuses, honestly, when cats and squirrels cry out all the time in what appears obviously-to-humans to be pain or anger.
Two reasons:
It just happened to be a paper I was familiar with, and;
I didn’t fully appreciate how willing you’d be to run the argument for animals more similar to humans like cats or squirrels. In retrospect, this is pretty clearly implied by your post and the link from EY you posted for context. My bad!
I don’t think it “has emotions” in the way we mean that when talking to each other.
I grant that animals have substantially different neurological structure to humans. But I don’t think this implies that what’s happening when they’re screaming or reacting to averse stimuli is so foreign we wouldn’t even recognise it as pain and I really don’t think this implies that there’s an absence of phenomenal experience.
Consider a frog snapping its tongue at an object it thinks is a fly. It obviously has a different meaning for [fly] than humans have—a human would never try to eat the fly! But I’d argue the concept of a fly as [food] for the frog overlaps with the concept of [food] for the human. We’re both eating through our mouths, eating to maintain nutrition, normal bodily functioning, because we get hungry etc… the presence of all these evolutionary selected functions are what it means for the system to consider something as [food] or to consider itself [hungry]. Just as the implementation of a negatively affective valenced response, even if different in its specific profile in each animal, is closely related enough for us to call it [pain].
In the study I linked the octopus is:
Recalling the episode where they were exposed to averse stimuli.
Binding it to a spatial context e.g. a particular chamber where it occurred
Evaluating analgesic states as intrinsically good
If the functional profile of pain is replicated—what grounds do we have to say the animals are not actually experiencing pain phenomenally?
I think where we fundamentally differ is on what level of self-modeling is required for phenomenal experience. I find it plausible that some “inner-listener” might be required for experiences to register phenomenally, but I don’t think the level of self-modelling required is so sophisticated. Consider that animals navigating their environment must have some simple self-model—to coordinate limbs, avoid obstacles etc.. These require representing [self] vs [world] and tracking what’s good or bad for me.
All this said, I really liked the post. I think the use-mention distinction is interesting and a pretty good candidate for why sophisticated self-modelling evolved in humans. I’m just not convinced on the link to phenomenal consciousness.
Ok interesting, I think this substantially clarifies your position.
Two reasons:
It just happened to be a paper I was familiar with, and;
I didn’t fully appreciate how willing you’d be to run the argument for animals more similar to humans like cats or squirrels. In retrospect, this is pretty clearly implied by your post and the link from EY you posted for context. My bad!
I grant that animals have substantially different neurological structure to humans. But I don’t think this implies that what’s happening when they’re screaming or reacting to averse stimuli is so foreign we wouldn’t even recognise it as pain and I really don’t think this implies that there’s an absence of phenomenal experience.
Consider a frog snapping its tongue at an object it thinks is a fly. It obviously has a different meaning for [fly] than humans have—a human would never try to eat the fly! But I’d argue the concept of a fly as [food] for the frog overlaps with the concept of [food] for the human. We’re both eating through our mouths, eating to maintain nutrition, normal bodily functioning, because we get hungry etc… the presence of all these evolutionary selected functions are what it means for the system to consider something as [food] or to consider itself [hungry]. Just as the implementation of a negatively affective valenced response, even if different in its specific profile in each animal, is closely related enough for us to call it [pain].
In the study I linked the octopus is:
Recalling the episode where they were exposed to averse stimuli.
Binding it to a spatial context e.g. a particular chamber where it occurred
Evaluating analgesic states as intrinsically good
If the functional profile of pain is replicated—what grounds do we have to say the animals are not actually experiencing pain phenomenally?
I think where we fundamentally differ is on what level of self-modeling is required for phenomenal experience. I find it plausible that some “inner-listener” might be required for experiences to register phenomenally, but I don’t think the level of self-modelling required is so sophisticated. Consider that animals navigating their environment must have some simple self-model—to coordinate limbs, avoid obstacles etc.. These require representing [self] vs [world] and tracking what’s good or bad for me.
All this said, I really liked the post. I think the use-mention distinction is interesting and a pretty good candidate for why sophisticated self-modelling evolved in humans. I’m just not convinced on the link to phenomenal consciousness.