Yes they have. There’s quite a large literature on animal emotion and cognition and my general synthesis is that animals (at least mammals) have at least the same basic emotions as humans and often quite subtle ones such as empathy and a sense of fairness. It seems pretty likely to me whatever the set of base reward functions encoded in the mammalian basal ganglia and hypothalamus is, it can quite robustly generate expressed behavioural ‘values’ that fall within some broadly humanly recognisable set.
I expect that it has also happened to an extent with animals as well. I wonder if anyone has ever looked into this.
Yes they have. There’s quite a large literature on animal emotion and cognition and my general synthesis is that animals (at least mammals) have at least the same basic emotions as humans and often quite subtle ones such as empathy and a sense of fairness. It seems pretty likely to me whatever the set of base reward functions encoded in the mammalian basal ganglia and hypothalamus is, it can quite robustly generate expressed behavioural ‘values’ that fall within some broadly humanly recognisable set.