All Or Nothing Paradoxes.

[lucusloc]

How do we know that humans are not feeling animal equivalent emotion?

I am going to hazard a guess that it is the fact that our wetware is several hundred to several thousand times more powerful than the comparison (depending on species). Not to sound disrespectful (I will put it as polite as I can, but it is a pointed question none the less) but I find it hard to understand how the obvious difference in intelligence capability between our closest competitor (e.g. the most rudimentary of stick tool use compared to the entire modern world) is not something that would obviously extend to our emotional capability as well.

Apes and elephants will never go though a stone age revolution, let alone and industrial one, without massive evolutionary changes to their brainpower. Why would we presume that obvious intelligence gap does not apply to basically every other area of our cognition too?

 

[CamoDeafie]

Apes and elephants will never go though a stone age revolution, let alone and industrial one, without massive evolutionary changes to their brainpower. Why would we presume that obvious intelligence gap does not apply to basically every other area of our cognition too?

Technically speaking, from a taxonomic and evolutionary view; humans are apes.

Edit, unless of course, you subscrbe to the notion that humans didn't evolve from anything; but thats not here nor there

 

[Koda]

I am going to hazard a guess that it is the fact that our wetware is several hundred to several thousand times more powerful than the comparison (depending on species). Not to sound disrespectful (I will put it as polite as I can, but it is a pointed question none the less) but I find it hard to understand how the obvious difference in intelligence capability between our closest competitor (e.g. the most rudimentary of stick tool use compared to the entire modern world) is not something that would obviously extend to our emotional capability as well.

Apes and elephants will never go though a stone age revolution, let alone and industrial one, without massive evolutionary changes to their brainpower. Why would we presume that obvious intelligence gap does not apply to basically every other area of our cognition too?

And so somehow thats evidence that whatever chemical reaction it is that causes an emotion is different in only the human species?

 

[Flopsweat]

Technically speaking, from a taxonomic and evolutionary view; humans are apes.

Edit, unless of course, you subscrbe to the notion that humans didn't evolve from anything; but thats not here nor there

But on a more practical level, you can't teach one to read or write.

 

[CamoDeafie]

But on a more practical level, you can't teach one to read or write.

Yea, you can teach an ape if its a human but an ape that doesnt belong to the hominid family? Nope, as far as we can tell.

 

[lucusloc]

And so somehow thats evidence that whatever chemical reaction it is that causes an emotion is different in only the human species?

umm yes. If by nothing else but simple virtue that it is acting on millions more neurons than in other animals. Even if we assume the chemical reactions are exactly the same (a presumption I do not hold but will accept for the purpose of this discussion) the interaction will be several order of magnitude more complex in execution by simple scale. That dopamine hit will have a whole hell of a lot more impact on a human than a cow. There is just a lot more for it to hit.

 

[Xaevian]

Technically speaking, from a taxonomic and evolutionary view; humans are apes.

Edit, unless of course, you subscrbe to the notion that humans didn't evolve from anything; but thats not here nor there

 

[Koda]

umm yes. If by nothing else but simple virtue that it is acting on millions more neurons than in other animals. Even if we assume the chemical reactions are exactly the same (a presumption I do not hold but will accept for the purpose of this discussion) the interaction will be several order of magnitude more complex in execution by simple scale. That dopamine hit will have a whole hell of a lot more impact on a human than a cow. There is just a lot more for it to hit.

thats like saying 5 gallons of water is different water than 1 gallon of water.

 

[Flopsweat]

thats like saying 5 gallons of water is different water than 1 gallon of water.

It's not anything like that.

 

[lucusloc]

thats like saying 5 gallons of water is different water than 1 gallon of water.

Well if you are dropping 5mg of dopamine in it it really is. That is just basic chemistry. More water means more dilution, and more possible dilution gradients before equilibrium (and a longer time to equilibrium, among many other variables)

But past that we are not talking just basic chemistry, we are talking the processing power used to interpret that chemistry. Complexity scales exponentially with the number of possible connections. A dopamine hit on 1000 neurons is going to be orders of magnitude less complex a reaction than that same hit on 10000. There is just more processing you can do with it. It strikes me as absurd to say both organisms would experience the same thing when the organism with more neurons simply has more to experience.

 

[Koda]

Well if you are dropping 5mg of dopamine in it it really is. That is just basic chemistry. More water means more dilution, and more possible dilution gradients before equilibrium (and a longer time to equilibrium, among many other variables)

But past that we are not talking just basic chemistry, we are talking the processing power used to interpret that chemistry. Complexity scales exponentially with the number of possible connections. A dopamine hit on 1000 neurons is going to be orders of magnitude less complex a reaction than that same hit on 10000. There is just more processing you can do with it. It strikes me as absurd to say both organisms would experience the same thing when the organism with more neurons simply has more to experience.

I can agree with you that humans are more intelligent than other species, but my original question was if the chemical that causes an emotion is different in humans. You kinda unintentionally side skipped that part. If the chemical that causes a given emotion is different for the same emotion, then Id agree we experience that emotion differently. How much more or how stronger, notwithstanding.

 

[lucusloc]

I can agree with you that humans are more intelligent than other species, but my original question was if the chemical that causes an emotion is different in humans. You kinda unintentionally side skipped that part. If the chemical that causes a given emotion is different for the same emotion, then Id agree we experience that emotion differently. How much more or how stronger, notwithstanding.

That gets into the nuances of brain chemistry, which also seem to scale with over-all brain complexity. Humans do have more complex chemical signaling pathways available to us than other mammals, including some chemicals that are pretty unique to us as far as we can tell. How much that impacts our emotional response is unknown, because most of what we have nailed down in humans seems to fit the general mammalian template. It is only the nuance that seems to be different, but as they say the devil is in the details, and that nuance may be what makes our intelligence unique in the first place.

But past that the strength and complexity is entirely my point. Even if cows and humans use the exact same chemical cocktail for our various emotions the strength and complexity of those emotions is a key difference between the species. Humans will have the capability for both a wider range and more nuance withing that range for any given general emotion. Stronger and weaker joys, more blending of different emotional states, more granular ranges within those states, and the ability to remember, recall and recreate those states to boot. And that is before we even start mixing all that with our language and intelligence capabilities that let us get others involved in minute detail too.

That calf may be "happy", but it will never be happy in the same way a human can with all the subtlety and introspection and depth we can muster with the same stimulus. It simply does not have the processing power to experience the emotion in that way, and that makes it an entirely different experience between the two of them.

 

[TTSX]

Hurry up and whip em out already, you two. One of yours is clearly bigger

 

[CamoDeafie]

So,basically the difference between a solar/coin battery calculator from the 1970s, and a supercomputer at MIT?

 

[Flopsweat]

So,basically the difference between a solar/coin battery calculator from the 1970s, and a supercomputer at MIT?

The supercomputer is not self-aware, and actually can't understand complex concepts. It can simply navigate a complex matrix very rapidly, but one path at a time. It can, through multithreading and load sharing, break those tasks across multiple processes, but it's simply doing math really fast. The human mind isn't just more complex than that of a lobster - it has capabilities that don't exist in animals whatsoever.

 

[CamoDeafie]

The supercomputer is not self-aware, and actually can't understand complex concepts. It can simply navigate a complex matrix very rapidly, but one path at a time. It can, through multithreading and load sharing, break those tasks across multiple processes, but it's simply doing math really fast. The human mind isn't just more complex than that of a lobster - it has capabilities that don't exist in animals whatsoever.

Neither can the solar/coin battery powered calculator from the 1970s but... the calulator cannot do as much math as the MIT Supercomputer, though both use the same transitors/chips/electron data transmission concepts

 

[Andy54Hawken]

I can't say much on what animals feel or how they think.
All I know is that I respect the life I take when I hunt and eat.
The same for the meat I buy at the grocery store...it is a life...it deserves respect.

I have seen what I think is emotion in animals...
Whether it is the same "level" as a human does not matter to me.
At the end of the day , for me at least....all life deserves respect...no matter if I understand what that life thinks or feels or if I don't.
Andy

 

[Koda]

I can't say much on what animals feel or how they think.
All I know is that I respect the life I take when I hunt and eat.
The same for the meat I buy at the grocery store...it is a life...it deserves respect.

I have seen what I think is emotion in animals...
Whether it is the same "level" as a human does not matter to me.
At the end of the day , for me at least....all life deserves respect...no matter if I understand what that life thinks or feels or if I don't.
Andy

All of this is how I believe. It ends any "paradox" on animal emotions for me anyways.

 

[arakboss]

Proponents of Carnivore diets will claim that their diet will promote the greatest health and lifespan for the person eating the diet.

Proponents of Vegan diets will claim that their diet will promote the greatest health and lifespan for the person eating the diet.

Which of the two diets will promote the greatest health and lifespan for the animals? I am going to side with the Vegan diet on this question.

A difference between the two diets is the carnivores are looking out for their own welfare while the vegans are looking out for their own welfare and the welfare of animals.

 

[arakboss]

View: https://youtu.be/8MprLRv-IHs?feature=shared