I call this phenomenon a “moral illusion”. You are engaging empathy circuits on behalf of an imagined other who doesn’t exist. Category error. The only unhappiness is in the imaginer, not in the anthropomorphized object. I think this is likely what’s going with the shrimp welfare people also. Maybe shrimp feel something, but I doubt very much that they feel anything like what the worried people project onto them. It’s a thorny problem to be sure, since those empathy circuits are pretty important for helping humans not be cruel to other humans.
Mostly agreed. I have no idea how to evaluate this for most animals, but I would be very surprised if other mammals did not have subjective experiences analogous to our own for at least some feelings and emotions.
I call this phenomenon a “moral illusion”. You are engaging empathy circuits on behalf of an imagined other who doesn’t exist. Category error. The only unhappiness is in the imaginer, not in the anthropomorphized object. I think this is likely what’s going with the shrimp welfare people also. Maybe shrimp feel something, but I doubt very much that they feel anything like what the worried people project onto them. It’s a thorny problem to be sure, since those empathy circuits are pretty important for helping humans not be cruel to other humans.
Mostly agreed. I have no idea how to evaluate this for most animals, but I would be very surprised if other mammals did not have subjective experiences analogous to our own for at least some feelings and emotions.
Oh, for sure mammals have emotions much like ours. Fruit flies and shrimp? Not so much. Wrong architecture, missing key pieces.
Fair enough.
I do believe it’s plausible that feelings, like pain and hunger, may be old and fundamental enough to exist across phyla.
I’m much less inclined to assume emotions are so widely shared, but I wish I could be more sure either way.