Well, I think that the mourning in these examples, as an emotional state, is real, and similar in many ways to the human state of mourning. Humans do lots of extra things on top of the base emotion, such as thinking about it, talking to others about it, and placing it into our model of how the universe works, which animals almost certainly do not do. However, the presence of such negative emotional states in animals, IMO, are enough for me to say that the word I use for humans in this situation, i.e. suffering, is also a reasonable fit to describe animals exhibiting those states.Seth wrote:Let's examine the reports of animals like elephants, dolphins and dogs who seem to "mourn" for lost members of the group or for a lost master (Hachi, the dog in Japan who went to the train station for years to wait for his master who died at work one day and never returned comes to mind)JimC wrote:Naturally, I agree that all of these phenomena are grounded in evolution. However, I think you are seeing "mind" from too narrow a perspective. "Sad" is an emotional state, which requires a much more developed brain than an ant, for example. But, given sufficiently developed brain processes, animal minds can do surprising complex things, and be in a variety of emotional states. On one level, these states are there as internal motivators for survival-oriented behaviour. However, they exist in us, they exist in babies, and they exist in higher animals. The fact that humans (beyond the baby stage) have an extra "overlay" of self awareness doesn't change the commonality we have with animals in a lot of our mental equipment. We associate suffering primarily with emotional states of grief, pain, loss, loneliness etc. The fact that we can be aware of our own emotional state of suffering, reflect on it, and talk about it is an additional layer of mental activity. Animals and babies may not reflect on their own suffering, but that doesn't mean that don't experience it.rEvolutionist wrote:I don't see how they can. It seems an oxymoron to me. "Sad" is meaningless without a mind to base it in. A baby's cry is most likely an evolutionary mechanism to utilise our own likely evolutionary propensity for empathy. There doesn't even have to be any emotion behind it. When babies want something, they cry. Why they don't, they don't.
We can tell, in most cases, whether a fellow human is suffering by observing their behaviour and body language, without any need for words. I think we can, in many cases, do the same with higher animals.
