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I'm literally a thinking lump of fat (mander.xyz)

submitted 13 hours ago by Neurologist@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] Soleos@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

The distinction being made when we talk about "understanding" and "choices" I about the distinction between sentience and sapience.

Dogs are sentient, meaning they have a conscious experience involving emotions and works with memory and instincts to determine motivated actions. This is a complex system that results in complex behaviour like preferring one food over another, stubbornly ignoring your commands, or recognizing when you're upset and coming up to you to comfort you. It's beautiful.

Sapience is related to the capacity to be meta/self-aware. This is what is normally meant by "understand" and "choice" when talking about how "special" humans are. As far as we can tell in experiments, dogs do not have the capacity to understand themselves like "I'm a dog who really enjoys walking" or "Good dogs take care of people, so I'm going to choose to take extra care of human because I want to be good." This is what you might call "wisdom" or "rational" behaviour, and some animals to exhibit sapience to an extent. Both can be involve what we think of as "choices" e.g. selecting one of several options, but they're distinct behaviours.

Humans engage in both, making it extra confusing. I'm not being particularly meta-aware and rational when I choose to cut off a piece of my steak and eat it. I am being more meta-aware when I choose to slow down my eating because I want to be respectful of my friend who cooked it for me, and I want to savour the moment, appreciating the flavours, texture, and effort that went into its preparation.

My dog knows that I prepare her food and she expresses her emotions and desires to me and she responds to my behaviour/communication. But she doesn't understand that I chose to rescue her or that we are two people living our short and shorter lives together.

[-] theneverfox@pawb.social 2 points 3 hours ago

How can we truly know this though - we don't even really understand sapience on a philosophical level, let alone on a scientific one. The word itself is based on homo-sapien, and ultimately it means "why are we the most special". It's been a constant game of moving goalposts

Here's a paper on animal metacognition. The intro is worth a read

Moving on to more common examples of metacognition, think of the many videos of dogs feigning injury when their human has an injured leg. That's the same as your example with eating slower

There's also a recent study I read where they trapped a rat in a tight cage, and another rat would learn to let them out. Then they added chocolate chips - the other rat would usually eat most of them before letting the other one out - but would save at least one

There's even videos of a dog having a conversation with those word-pads, where they had to be convinced that their owner was human and not a dog, but was adamant that the small dog was a cat

We hold ourselves back, because we're always starting from the perspective of humans being more, or that animals would act like us if only they were smarter... But ultimately, they have different priorities

Only recently have we started to look for things like language, culture, meta cognition, and every other "human" trait with an open mind. And we find it, everywhere

Whose to say dogs don't wonder where we go all day, why they get left behind, and ponder their life as a dog?

[-] zeca@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 28 minutes ago

Very well said!

[-] Soleos@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

You bring up some great points! Indeed it is very difficult to determine scientifically what kinds of reasoning occurs within animals' experiences and behaviours. My post was more to clarify the classic distinction between sentience and sapience going with the assumption that dogs aren't sapient. But as you indicate, it's absolutely an ongoing question we're actively interrogating. Sure, sapience is a bit of a floppy term, but we can choose more operational definitions around meta-cognition and the like. I leave it to the experts to refine terms and conduct research. We have very strong collective evidence that animals are sentient and very weak evidence (so far) to indicate sapience (however you define it). Epistemologically, we are limited in that we can only ever approach this question from the human perspective.

Your dog may well ponder their life as a dog, but the evidence for it is nil. So scientifically we cannot conclude it and assume the null hypothesis of non-sapience.

Philosophically we can consider how we approach the possibility of it though. Metaphysically, we can consider whether dogs' consciousness resemble humans re: perception, free will, or self. Ethically, we can consider if it's better to treat them as if they are sapient or not, I can imagine arguments either way. And an example of where we would is with humans who are extremely cognitively impaired.

Emotionally, we can also decide for ourselves what is the appropriately meaningful relationship we have with our pets in how we relate to them.

[-] zeca@lemmy.eco.br 1 points 16 minutes ago

It seems weird to me that the null-hypothesis there should be that dogs are non-sapient. It seems to be common for scientists to default on non-existence until evidence of existence is found. But in some situations existence and non-existence should have equivalent weights. In the field of mathematics, the existence of a thing can be logically equivalent to the non-existence of another thing, and we dont know which of the two exists, but we cant default to assuming neither of the two. Science is a bit different from pure mathematics though, but im not sure in what ways.