Pollywogs (the larval form of frogs, after eggs, and before growing legs) are an example where huge numbers of them are produced, and many die before they ever grow into frogs, but from their perspective, they probably have many many minutes of happy growth, having been born into a time and place where quick growth is easy: watery and full of food
Consider an alien species which requires oxygen, but for whom it was scarce during evolution, and so they were selected to use it very slowly and seek it ruthlessly, and feel happy when they manage to find some. It would be wrong for one of that species to conclude that a species on earth must be happy all the time because there’s so much oxygen; because oxygen is abundant, we are neutral to it.
Most of the animal-life-moments I’ve seen in nature have exhibited a profound “OK-ness”. Just chilling. Just being. Just finding some food. Just happy to exist.
Emotional status must be inferred. There are some cases we can easily infer happiness or suffering in nonhumans, by similarity to how we express emotions: a dog jumping around and excited to go outside, a pig squealing and struggling as they are lowered into a gas chamber. There are others we cannot easily know the experience of: a duck sitting in a lake, a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. To call them happy without an analysis from first-principles of what evolutionary pressures might lead to the experience or not of happiness in such moments is to project happiness onto them.
I think most of the rest of your comment is similarly projective.
I wonder if you have the opposite sort of bias to that which you say the OP might have; maybe you have a very happy outlook which causes you to project happiness-to-exist onto life forms you do not understand.
Certainly when “life itself” becomes questionable for animals in nature, they seem to do everything they can to keep their life… escaping danger, seeking safety, eating food (rather than engaging in a hunger strike or trying to forgo water and thirst to death to bring their own end on faster). Every indication we have is that animals are NOT suicidal, but rather they seem to “net value” their own lives. Presumably because these are good lives according to their own subjectivities.
A human with chronic depression will still flee if under attack. Evolution imbues beings with a drive to survive even when in great pain. It does not care whether we suffer, indeed it uses suffering to motivate us; the counter that we would choose to kill ourselves if we suffered enough does not hold, evolution gets around that by then also selecting for us to not kill ourselves.
(I note these things without implying a side on the question of what kinds of mental states are most common in wild animal lives, which looks difficult to speculate about with confidence.)
Consider an alien species which requires oxygen, but for whom it was scarce during evolution, and so they were selected to use it very slowly and seek it ruthlessly, and feel happy when they manage to find some. It would be wrong for one of that species to conclude that a species on earth must be happy all the time because there’s so much oxygen; because oxygen is abundant, we are neutral to it.
Emotional status must be inferred. There are some cases we can easily infer happiness or suffering in nonhumans, by similarity to how we express emotions: a dog jumping around and excited to go outside, a pig squealing and struggling as they are lowered into a gas chamber. There are others we cannot easily know the experience of: a duck sitting in a lake, a caterpillar crawling across a leaf. To call them happy without an analysis from first-principles of what evolutionary pressures might lead to the experience or not of happiness in such moments is to project happiness onto them.
I think most of the rest of your comment is similarly projective.
I wonder if you have the opposite sort of bias to that which you say the OP might have; maybe you have a very happy outlook which causes you to project happiness-to-exist onto life forms you do not understand.
A human with chronic depression will still flee if under attack. Evolution imbues beings with a drive to survive even when in great pain. It does not care whether we suffer, indeed it uses suffering to motivate us; the counter that we would choose to kill ourselves if we suffered enough does not hold, evolution gets around that by then also selecting for us to not kill ourselves.
(I note these things without implying a side on the question of what kinds of mental states are most common in wild animal lives, which looks difficult to speculate about with confidence.)