
Animals think, therefore... - adamnemecek
http://www.economist.com/news/essays/21676961-inner-lives-animals-are-hard-study-there-evidence-they-may-be-lot-richer-science-once-thought
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avdempsey
If you enjoyed this you should check out Carl Safina's book "Beyond Words"
(review here: [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-
liv...](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/10/08/amazing-inner-lives-
animals/)).

While we shouldn't simply assume animals have minds, what we have tended to do
instead is just as bad: assume they do not. In the West, Descartes famously
declared animals are automata. Safina shares this quote from Voltaire in
response:

``` Voltaire disdainfully called out Descartes’s contradictions of logic, even
referring to him and his followers as “barbarians”: “What a pitiful, what a
sorry thing to have said that animals are machines bereft of understanding and
feeling,” wrote Voltaire. He continued: Is it because I speak to you, that you
judge that I have feeling, memory, ideas? Well, I do not speak to you; you see
me going home looking disconsolate, seeking a paper anxiously, opening the
desk where I remember having shut it, finding it, reading it joyfully. You
judge that I have experienced the feeling of distress and that of pleasure,
that I have memory and understanding. Bring the same judgment to bear on this
dog which has lost its master, which has sought him on every road with
sorrowful cries, which enters the house agitated, uneasy, which goes down the
stairs, up the stairs, from room to room, which at last finds in his study the
master it loves, and which shows him its joy by its cries of delight, by its
leaps, by its caresses. Barbarians seize this dog, which in friendship
surpasses man so prodigiously; they nail it on a table, and they dissect it
alive in order to show the mesenteric veins. You discover in it all the same
organs of feeling that are in yourself. Answer me, machinist, has nature
arranged all the means of feeling in this animal, so that it may not feel? Has
it nerves in order to be impassible? Do not suppose this impertinent
contradiction in nature.

Safina, Carl (2015-07-14). Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel (pp.
79-80). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition. ```

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drumdance
Good article. I'm not a vegetarian, but I suspect that a hundred years from
now humans will look back on our times as barbarous in their treatment of
animals.

~~~
karmacondon
Many animals would happily eat us. So if animals can think, does that mean
that they've made a conscious decision to eat other animals? And if so, why
are we wrong for making that some decision?

~~~
shawndumas
Benjamin Franklin became a vegetarian at the age of 16 but gave it up when he
was on a boat and someone was frying fish and it smelled delicious. When the
fish was cut open Franklin could see smaller fish inside:

"…when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their Stomachs:
Then thought I, if you eat one another, I don’t see why we mayn’t eat you. So
I din’d upon Cod very heartily and continu’d to eat with other People...”

~~~
shasta
The way I heard it, old Ben saw the little fishes inside the stomach of the
big fish and decided it should be OK to kill and eat the fisherman.

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jstoiko
Until today, it is believed that self-awareness is what distinguishes humans
from other species. If ever that gets debunked, I think that would be the
start of the end of meat consumption.

~~~
asciimo
There are plenty of humans who are not self-aware, yet we do not eat them. And
it looks like US meat consumption is trending downward at WWII rates
([http://www.earth-
policy.org/data_highlights/2012/highlights2...](http://www.earth-
policy.org/data_highlights/2012/highlights25)).

~~~
fixermark
As it stands right now: yes, cannibalism is more-or-less universally
considered abhorrent in a world where (a) all sources are more-or-less
indisputably considered a pre-, current-, or post-person and (b) eating wild
human flesh is a short trip to an entire fascinating category of otherwise-
non-communicable diseases.

The cannibalism question may become a bit more complicated in a future that
holds the potential of carefully-monitored and maintained cloned muscle tissue
from a donor cell culture that is itself never hooked up to a brain. ;)

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exizt88
I'm sorry, but did anyone else find the article extremely hard to read due to
the box to the right with the comments and sharing button?

~~~
Paul_S
Get some plugins for your browser and hide social widgets. We have the
technology.

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littletimmy
I am quite pessimistic about the human regard for animals. It was very
recently that we got to regard other _humans_ as intelligent and deserving of
respect - black people, an example in particular. By the time we get to
accepting animals as deserving of respect, we might have killed most of them.

~~~
noondip
“As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.”
-Tolstoy

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gpvos
The title "Animal minds" of the actual article is sufficient. No need to use
this suggestive title, "Animals think, therefore...". The article is actually
mostly about the question whether animals think or not; less so about the
conclusions we could or should draw from that.

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such_a_casual
While I admire the effort to show that other animals are smarter than we give
them credit for, I am not aware of any evidence that animals engage in asking
questions. Despite teaching animals ways of communicating with us (such as
sign language), animals do not ask us questions. This seems to be the defining
characteristic of what it means to be human. People begin to ask questions
almost as soon as they are able to. I think the sad reality is that these
animals are in fact stupid.

source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Limitations...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Limitations_of_ape_language)

Please correct me with a source if you find the above paragraph to be untrue.

PS: I still have a pipe dream that we will discover that orcas can ask
questions.

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cristianpascu
I only read half of the article, but it seems to me that the language used is
philosophically naive. Although it's a popularising article, it should still
have a certain standard.

Animals feel, communicate, imitate, take decisions, actions, play, eat, sleep,
run from dangers, do all kind of stuff.

But thinking?

Before answering this question seriously, a definition of thinking should be
in place. Dualists traditions such a christianity have attributed souls
(although not immortal souls) to animals. Having a soul (the article goes the
brain-is-the-mind path) clearly involves having mental states, no doubt about
that. Being God's creations, animals deserve a good treatment, to touch on the
ethical side of complex issue.

The simple fact the animals can see, hear, smell, etc. implies phenomenal
experiences (as David Chalmers, among others, calls them). There is no science
yet to explain them but there're there, for the simple reason that we
experience them and they look familiar to what we do when we experience them.

But thinking? I believe a proper definition of rational thinking involves the
ability of having articulate language. I don't know of any animal species
capable of that. Sounds? Yes. But sentences with truth value? Anyone?

The danger here is to project our abilities into a small set of faculties
animals have and say, look!, we're no better, we're no different.

~~~
flying_squirrel
Who says that human 'thought' necessarily requires inner speech?

~~~
ddingus
I am just going to share this:

My daughter collected plushie toys, which the cat liked to take and shread.
One day, she had enough. The cat took one too many and she raged! I watched as
the two of them went from room to room.

The cat totally understood she meant to do it some harm. And it knew why too.

I'll avoid too much detail, but the end game was in her room. Door closed, her
and the cat matched up. She would go over the bed, cat under, she would go one
side, the cat the other... perfect zero sum game, and it ended with her on the
bed, the cat on the other end, both eye locked, intent!

She had that torn plushie, yelling, the cat watching intently, tail moving
slowly...

Truth is, at her age, she could not actually get that cat, and he knew it.
When they both arrived at that realization, there was "the talk" as described.

That cat never took another plushie, and they bonded closely over the next few
months, having come to a basic understanding, I'll add as beings, people.

Of course, I observed this all with great interest and would have put a stop
to any real harm, but for those two, it was as real as it gets!

She was maybe 7, the cat 2 or three.

In terms of basic intelligence, factoring out higher order language and other
human capabilities, they were pretty well matched. The cat could totally read
her, and she the cat. They both were planning, reading the other and
responding.

This was one of the more interesting animal, human interactions I've ever
seen. She was vocalizing and gesturing with that plushie. The cat was also
vocalizing and using body language, its face and tail to carry out its end of
the argument.

She later reported to me the result. The cat knows which plushies are OK. She
would designate one or two, and the cat would not mess with the favorites.

