Do (most) animals experience qualia as we humans do, or are they more like sophisticated machines that operate on input – output principle, with a little randomness thrown in. For example when an animal experiences pain, does it really experience that “ouch!”, or does merely its nervous system autonomously responds to a distress by making certain (evolutionarily developed) adjustments e.g. curling up, sending distress call (calling mother to come and help) to ensure survival. Perhaps we humans, capable of these qualia, associate physiological reaction to distress with subjective feeling of pain, so when we observe these reactions in animals, we assume they must also experience similar subjective feeling. Maybe the experience of qualia is the result of self-awareness, because the brain has to project the experience in a comprehensible way to our consciousness, while if an organism is not even aware of something happening, there’s no need for a given representation of it for conscious mind to grasp. Think of releasing of certain hormones in the human body – for example epinephrine – one is not aware of it being released (may be aware of effects afterwards, but not of direct spilling from an organ), thus there is no qualia associated with it. Think of breathing – when you don’t think about it, it just happens. Once you start focusing on it – you start experiencing the sensation of it – qualia. So do animals in your opinion experience things subjectively like humans do, or are they only responding to stimuli in a pre-programmed way? Also related question – do they really suffer? Or do we only think they suffer because they act in the same way as when we suffer, but without the real subjective sensation of pain?
You want philosphy. That’s over there in room 14b.
Human beings are animals, of the mammalian kind. If you are starting from the premise that humans are somehow separate, distinct, different, from animals your starting point is false.
The answer is yes. The only explanation makes any sense is to go full on realist ontology, and back it up with JJ Gibson’s ecology. It’s a minoritarian view, but it just works, and is correct to boot.
Oh and once you do that you can start playing with Truthmakers: The Correspondence Theory of Truth truthmakers and stuff, where it starts to get really fuzzy.
Sure, next time I’ll be more careful. I’m new here.
Humans indeed are somehow distinct in a few regards. For example humans are the only species that naturally uses symbolic language and is capable of (mental) displacement.
I’ll check that out, thanks.
Moving to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
By definition, they do experience qualia, since qualia are that which is experienced. Now, their qualia might be very different from ours… But then again, your qualia might be very different from mine. There’s inherently no way to know.
And stop all that Cartesian noise about animals and robots. Nobody has thought that way for centuries.
Hey, what you want is actually a theory of intentionality. Your question is really, does a very small organism have capability for intentionality (viz, directedness is a pretty good synonym)? That’s also where Gibson is going to be of use – perceptual systems and unlike most philosophers, he has good experimental data (having been not in the least professionally related to the armchair types).
ETA oh, I see that above, Chronos. Yeah, obviously. I assumed that line was given! I mean, we’re nobody talking about solipsism right? Well, from my perspective that seems given that nobody would ever think otherwise.
Agreed that the question is both ultimately without a provable answer and trivial. Presuming that something is magically completely different at the human level than at in any other animal is goofy. We may not know what the experience of a bat (to use the most famous discussion) feels like, but qualia are highly improbable to have emerged de novo in humans.
The interesting question is to determine what is about the structure of information processing in the brain that results in the emergent experience of qualia and consciousness. Is it, for example, the magnitude of self-referential processing streams that consider the system doing the processing as an object being analyzed (Hofstadter’s “strange loops”)? If so can one then apply the analysis that the greater the degree of entwined hierarchies of those self-referential information processing streams, the greater the degree that the system is experiencing qualia and is “conscious.” To that way of thinking “conscious” is a matter of degree and ultimately quantifiable if only indirectly by way of a proxy.
What the heck do truthmakers have to do with it?
Is it trivial that animals have experiences?
I don’t understand why you say this, and then say why we should think animals have qualia, and moreover how more research could be done on the matter.
Let’s say we code a very advanced simulation software of an animal in a traditional computer. Think very sophisticated tamagotchi. It would be in fact so advanced that its behaviour would be impossible to distinguish from a real animal. Imagine it would pass something like “animal Turing test”. Let’s say it would be a vertebrate, but not too cognitively advanced. Something like a fish, or perhaps chicken. Now to realistically emulate behaviour of such an animal may not be such an impossible task.
The question is, if the real animal experiences qualia, does the simulated one experience them too? How about we construct a mechanical chicken, coat it with feathers and stuff, upload software and let it among real chicken. For an observer, it would be impossible to distinguish it. Yet its modus operandi would be completely different. Would only real chicken experience qualia, or both, or none?
My point is that what if animals (bare humans and maybe few other species) operate like computers do, with no self-awareness i.e. qualia; except their “software” is not coded like in traditional computer but in the form of a neural network. Some higher forms developed a neural circuitry that allows them to be “aware” of some of the processes of this network, and they are experienced in the form of what we call qualia.
Oh, and here he comes out with some gourMET shit. (coughs) Quine (coughs). Now I have to think a second about a way to answer some of the claims in a different tone.
Oh, truthmaker realism is just a convenient way of pointing out how philosophy should be described. ETA hint your model is flawed. What if there weren’t qualia? What if cn opened onto the world, like a monad or wait for it this century like an animal? That’s why you need a criterion for truth, and also why you need a robust if not strenge ecology.
ETTA and research has been done in the area of perceptual systems. We’re all still stuck in the language of speculative philosophy but it’s been going on for a long time.
The question is trivial, not the fact that animals experience something that is qualia. Provable it aint, but of course I can’t prove to you that I experience qualia. I can provide behaviors that report I do. I am similar enough to you that you will believe those reports. But I cannot prove to you that I experience them. Most of us however accept that other humans experience qualia like they do and consider a request of proof for that to be trivial.
I’ve no idea what you are trying to say. I suspect achieving such is a task beyond my abilities.
Until we know the mechanism by which qualia are generated, I will have no idea whether any entity but me has them in his experience.
Presumably by those standards of proof there isn’t much one can prove. It seems to me not to matter much if you standards of proof are that high. I mean, if the question was some more mundane question about animal biology or history (say, about when or if an animal evolved), would you answer that you can’t prove what the answer is?
You aren’t (epistemically) satisfied by the fact that your human brain generates them, and your human brain, qua mechanisms, is pretty similar to other human brains?
No, because none of the mechanisms we know about include entities like qualia in them.
(To be clear–nor do I think other entities don’t have qualia in their experience. I’m just saying I have no idea. As to whether it’s very important whether other entities have qualia or not, I go back and forth on that. Sometimes, intuitively, it seems to me that the qualia in my experience have something deeply to do with my personal identity and my freedom. Other times, intuitively, that seems totally unmotivated.)
The whole concept of the quale is simply untestable and therefore useless for any comparison.
You can not prove that you yourself experience them, as they are, by design, subjective and unmeasurable.
I do know my dog only likes “realistic” soft toys and enjoys distant views…what ever that implies I don’t know.