What about the moose that spent 20 minutes rescuing a chipmunk from drowning in a barrel? Or the dog who held out a stick for another dog to grab onto and escape the rapids?
There are plenty of other examples of this, I’m sure; these two came to mind first because they were caught on video. What drives that behavior if not empathy?
> What about the moose that spent 20 minutes rescuing a chipmunk from drowning in a barrel?
Maybe he was just hungry... many big herbivores like cows and deer eat small animals gladly when available.
Maybe the leopard taking care of the gazella's calf after eating their mum is thinking "I'll save this tasty snack for later" and protects it from other predators for selfish reasons.
Our interpretation of what are thinking the animals can be wrong.
I would bet this bear actually would have eaten the crow, had that been its intention.
I'd think the leopard taking care of a calf is more likely to think it looks "cute" for similar biological reasons we do, and take care of it for that reason.
I would guess that a leopard in particular, if it wanted to store food, would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.
I also think "instincts" manifest themselves through emotion / emotion is how we experience instinct.
We feel fear, love, etc depending on the situation, and then it's these emotions that drive us to act in the manner we do.
Our actions are moderated by language-enhanced reflection, which is were we're really ahead of other animals.
The crow hits the bear in the face clearly just before the bear turns away and focus in the easier meal available. The video fades and do not show what happened later but the crow was far from being safe still.
Other possibility would be that the bear was just annoyed by the crowing sound so maybe it was not totally an altruistic conduct. Not easy to evaluate because we lack the first and last part of the scene. How the crow ended in the pool? Maybe was trow there by the bear. We don't know.
> leopard ... would be inclined to save it for later by just caching it (dead) in a tree.
That would be the best way to attract the maximum of flies and predators. Cats are know to play with their preys when satiated keeping them alive as long as possible. It seems that they have a lot of fun with it.
> Cats are know to play with their preys when satiated keeping them alive as long as possible.
When they do, it doesn't look like what the leopard was doing with the calf. They don't "play" in that sense, they just incapacitate the prey so it can't escape and "play" with it until it's dead. Definitely not what the leopard was doing.
>Our interpretation of what are thinking the animals can be wrong.
Of course it can, but by resorting to this sort of interpretative relativism, you're bringing the debate no further. Of course we can never tell whether animals feel anything such as emotion, but at this level, so you can't of other humans. In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.
> A) Of course we can never tell whether animals feel anything such as emotion,
I could think in some exceptions to this rule, but lets ignore the "never" and assume that this is true for now.
> B) but at this level, so you can't of other humans.
False. Even if I can't communicate with a slug, I can communicate fairly well with other humans, feel empathy and understand their feelings.
> C) In other words, the interpretation of emotions as authenthic rich mental states is just as valid for animals as it is for humans.
Causal phallacy. A is true, so B is true [in fact is false], so C is equally valid for A and B.
In fact neither A (of course we can't interpretate emotions of animals), nor B (we can't interpretate emotions in humans) justify C (therefore the interpretation of emotions is valid in both animals and humans).
Come on, you're just hand-waving here as much as the people you're trying to criticize. You don't like the idea that animals have empathy so you invoke delayed gratification as if that were a more common animal trait. Do you really think an animal is going to spend 20 minutes trying to get a tasty snack out of a barrel because it's hungry - and then set it aside for later once it has hold of the snack?
You're right to be cautious about interpreting animal behavior, but you're inadvertently making the same mistake from a different direction.
You are assuming that my goal is to criticize some people. This is wrong. You will not find any name or mention to anybody in my previous post.
You say also that I dislike something so this explains X. As you don't know me, you are not in the position to base your arguments on such claims. Ad-hominem fallacy
Am I "invoking" delayed gratification? where?
> Do you really think an animal is going to spend 20 minutes trying to get a tasty snack out of a barrel because it's hungry - and then set it aside for later once it has hold of the snack?
It depends on the context. If we can see the video we could discusse it properly.
Wild animals stopping what they are doing and running away when they realize there is an human around with a camera? I can see it. Yes. Definitely a very common behaviour.
You obviously dislike the idea in the sense of expending effort to refute it. Surely you can figure out why I would have drawn such an inference from your comments.
Empathy is an emotion experienced by both humans and animals. I don't dispute that. But I don't believe that empathy requires intellectual awareness of the inner life of other creatures, or generalizing that to all animals as we are. Empathy is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.
The whole put oneself in other shoes process is buggy as hell, even for our species. We basically draw a flat copy with mirror neurons and run it on our own hardware. If too much divergence accumulates, the other becomes a idiot or deity depending on outcome.
Empathy often does require conscious thought from me, I'm curious if that makes me a sociopath. I have to intentionally imagine myself in the other person's situation to understand why they might be upset about something. For example when I heard about the student who was recently suspended for creating an N-word pass at school, I felt that those who were offended were just being overly sensitive. I only changed my mind after someone suggested imagining the same thing with a slur against my ethnicity. I just don't seem to empathize with people by default in most situations.
The best clinical instrument for 'measuring' sociopathy is the Hare PCL-R, which tries to estimate both a person's tendency to engage in hostile interpersonal behavior and their attachment to social norms - you could think of it as the difference between actively murdering people vs. callously watching them die without helping. One can have a high score on one part of the scale and not on the other. Obviously this is far short of being an exact science.
As for empathy, it might be an inherent quality but I'm inclined to think that it's like most other things, you can cultivate it with practice and it manifests different ways in different people.
> It is an emotional reaction, like rage at a perceived slight, and does not require thought.
Of course, we can't know this.
It seems reasonable to speculate that other animals don't subvocalise in human languages,[1] though that doesn't necessarily mean they aren't capable of thought.[2]
1. It also seems reasonable to me to believe that dogs (some dogs?) might be capable of understanding some human language beyond simple commands. I typically have more luck with my two 2yo Border Collie cross if I explain to them why we're doing a new thing. More research is needed. Please deposit funds in my offshore bank account.
2. We could debate what is meant by thought, I believe that would be a distraction
There are plenty of other examples of this, I’m sure; these two came to mind first because they were caught on video. What drives that behavior if not empathy?