Different in degree or kind: animal minds (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, February 20, 2016, 13:13 (3199 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: ...do you or do you not agree that fear is a feeling that something bad is going to happen, and do you or do you not believe that animals HAVE (not just “SHOW”) this feeling? If you believe it, then there is no disagreement between us on this issue.
DAVID: They do show it. But they cannot study their reaction as we do, debating flight or fight, or negotiating, or questioning why we feel afraid.-DAVID: The depth of emotion you are trying to give animals is romanticizing.
dhw: I do not recall discussing depth of emotion. Once again, we cannot know the depth of emotion experienced by our fellow animals or our fellow humans. We can only identify the emotion itself by our observation of behaviour, i.e. when animals “show” what looks like fear (as defined earlier) in situations that would engender fear, I believe that fear is what they feel. Do you or do you not agree?
DAVID: Yes, review above the difference between animals and humans.. -There are two points at issue here, arising from articles by Greer and O'Hear which you quoted as support for your beliefs. Firstly, Greer denies that animals have these emotions. You have now agreed that they have them. Secondly, my argument is that our own complexities, which you keep repeating and which I have already accepted a thousand times, are the result of our self-awareness working on these basic characteristics inherited from our animal ancestors. In other words our quest for knowledge, our moral sense, our appreciation of beauty - the three examples chosen by O'Hear - are not human inventions that take us out of the evolutionary process. We still explore, we still have to weigh the needs of the individual against those of the community, we still admire the peacock's tail, we still fear something bad, we still love our young, we still fight because we are angry....We are hugely sophisticated animals, the “raw emotions” are not anthropomorphizations but inherited characteristics, and these and other common characteristics are the basis of what you have so aptly described as our “evolutionary extensions”.