relevant article I just read—On the origins of empathy for other species
Among the Mbuti foragers of West Africa, ethnographer Colin Turnbull noted that many magical rituals invoking animal spirits ‘convey to the hunter the senses of the animal so that he will be able to deceive the animal as well as foresee his movements’ (emphasis mine). Such an ability to take on the thoughts of others may have similarly scaffolded an understanding of one’s self
In many of these cases of deception and mimicry, we can find explicit references to having to think like an animal thinks, act like an animal acts, and pretend to be an animal. These forms of mimicry include not only mimicking the behavior of prey animals, but also mimicking the behavior of their predators in order to become better hunters.
… By allowing the thoughts of other organisms into our minds, we built a pathway to developing empathy with our prey. Like the rest of the world’s predators, humans have to kill their prey to eat it. Unlike the rest of the world’s predators, we have the capacity to empathize with our prey.
Outside of a Western context, the ethnographic record is rife with explicit examples of hunter’s guilt, or the pain felt from taking an animal’s life. I opened this piece with one example of a trapper’s guilt from Willerslev’s book Soul Hunters, but numerous examples from his ethnographic experience are recorded, such as in an interview with one young hunter who stated, ‘When killing an elk or a bear, I sometimes feel I’ve killed someone human. But one must banish such thoughts or one would go mad from shame.’Examples like these are abundant. Consider this excerpt from Robert Knox Dentan’s book on the Semai of Malaysia, where one hunter discusses the guilt felt after his hunts: ‘You have to deceive and trap your food, but you know that it is a bad thing to do, and you don’t want to do it.’ Dentan goes on to state, ‘trappers should take ritual precautions like those associated with the srngloo’ (hunter’s violence) . . . Animals, remember, are people “in their own dimension,” so that the trapping he is engaged in is profoundly antisocial, both violent and duplicitous.’
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Interesting read. Thanks for the write up.
do you know why this happens? shouldn’t the different seeds be converging to the same effiecient directions, like you say here :