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I set a mouse trap yesterday morning and last night went to check on it. The mouse that was caught in it was pretty much gone from being eaten by another mouse (which I'm guessing is the one that I caught this morning). I guess nobody told them about this study.
Mice are pretty much just herbivores. I think you might something other than just mice to worry about...
That doesn't necessarily show empathy. In a dangerous environment, for instance, it can be better to have others around to lessen your individual risk. It could be freeing the trapped rat in the hope that when the big nasty humans come back they will pick the other rat.
I don't see why empathy and pragmatism have to be mutually exclusive. You can think of empathy as a heuristic for choosing an optimal action: in a lot of cases, one way or another, helping out a fellow rat is beneficial, so empathy is an advantage. Especially as a rat, you don't have the capacity or time to use a significantly more accurate method to choose an action anyhow.
That doesn't necessarily show empathy. In a dangerous environment, for instance, it can be better to have others around to lessen your individual risk. It could be freeing the trapped rat in the hope that when the big nasty humans come back they will pick the other rat.
Wouldn't your individual risk be lessened by leaving the other rat trapped, so that it is easy prey and more likely to get picked?
There are plenty of possible ways things could work out. For instance, if the rats have figured out that the humans can identify individual rats and treat them different (which they might figure out if the humans have done several kinds of experiments on the same rats because each experiment would have a control group that gets different treatment), the rat outside might think "the humans but this other rat in the cage--if I let it out, then when they come back they'll be distracted putting it back in, and might leave me alone".
Or maybe it would be good to let the other rat out so that if danger arrives, you can go hide in the cage.
Or it could make sense to have the other rat out so that the two of you can more quickly explore the environment and find a way to escape.
The main point is that you can't really attribute letting the other rat out to empathy, as there are many other possible explanations for why a rat might let another rat out.
It is oversimplifying to say something like "oh it's helping the other rat for selfish reason X", but it is equally misleading to apply human models of mind, which we have due to our unique ability to introspect and share that introspection with other members of our species.
Models such as kin selection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection) attempt to explain altruism within an evolutionary model, but even if there is a totally different cause for this particular altruistic behavior (and even if it is shown to be almost wholly altruistic, rather than just indirectly self-beneficial, assuming such a distinction exists), there are very few grounds to assume empathy.
The most interesting result to me is that the rats demonstrate distress at seeing the suffering, and cease upon release. But before talking about empathy again, we must show that the distress is its own separate thing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voight-Kampff_test#Voight-Kampf...) rather than mere frustration at failed attempts of rescue.
So, sure, we've learned something, but I don't think we've demonstrated empathy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Mice are pretty much just herbivores. I think you might something other than just mice to worry about...
I think he meant that the mouse was eaten by a rat. Rats are much bigger and hunt, kill and eat the similar but smaller mice. In fact there is a term for it: muricide. Rats also practice infanticide. So, yeah rodent morality is also complex.
I understand "empathy" to mean the ability to feel someone's emotions/pain/etc. What this demonstrates is that rats will go to another rat's aid, and nothing about their internal models for doing so. It is oversimplifying to say something like "oh it's helping the other rat for selfish reason X", but it is equally misleading to apply human models of mind, which we have due to our unique ability to introspect and shar…
My question is: why don't we show more empathy towards animals? The experimentations and vivisections, urban sprawl and deforestation, the abandonment of pets when they become inconvenient - we as humans don't consider the cruelty of our actions. We figure as long as it can be profited from or paved over, it's justifiable. It's not. One day mankind will grieve because of the suffering we have caused animals. But by t…
Why do we show any empathy towards animals? You can't kill and eat something you empathise with. Empathy towards humans makes sense but I don't see the evolutionary advantage of treasuring all life. That said, I can't even kill spiders. It doesn't make any sense but I've an unavoidable feeling of guilt if I don't release them outside unharmed. Yet I have no problem eating meat. My empathy is irrational.
Empathy is irrational, since it relies on identification with the other being. It's always easier to identify oneself with a living being than to a piece of meat.
On the other hand, it's also very rational; it's a much better strategy than if it was guided by pure knowledge, since it optimizes cooperation: otherwise, you'd either be completely indifferent to someone you can actually help (e.g. injured person near you) or live in mental anguish by the fact that you know that thousands are constantly being killed by wars, curable diseases, etc.
That doesn't necessarily show empathy. In a dangerous environment, for instance, it can be better to have others around to lessen your individual risk. It could be freeing the trapped rat in the hope that when the big nasty humans come back they will pick the other rat.
Wouldn't your individual risk be lessened by leaving the other rat trapped, so that it is easy prey and more likely to get picked?
That doesn't necessarily show empathy. In a dangerous environment, for instance, it can be better to have others around to lessen your individual risk. It could be freeing the trapped rat in the hope that when the big nasty humans come back they will pick the other rat.
But their actions should still count as a precursor to empathy. I believe these things are a continuum and divisions along the way are pretty arbitrary. For example does a parrot talk or is it just pattern recognizing? To that I say, what is the difference? Can we say talking is more than simply pattern recognition recursed to the next level?
Consider Searle's Chinese Room, where he argues that since a human following a program to translate Chinese does not understand Chinese then a machine running the same also does not understand and hence is not 'strong AI'. I do not agree with his conclusion as I find such a distinction to be meaningless. You can't define what a mind is, human or not, by whether its aware of its operations. That is too slippery a concept and not necessarily an advantage. You can only observe and enumerate what properties the mind does (not) exhibit.
Read Peter Watts' Blindsight if you want to see this line of thinking handled incredibly well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(science_fiction_nov...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do we show any empathy towards animals? You can't kill and eat something you empathise with. Empathy towards humans makes sense but I don't see the evolutionary advantage of treasuring all life. That said, I can't even kill spiders. It doesn't make any sense but I've an unavoidable feeling of guilt if I don't release them outside unharmed. Yet I have no problem eating meat. My empathy is irrational.
"When one man dies it is a tragedy, when thousands die it's statistics." - Stalin (not confirmed). Empathy is irrational, since it relies on identification with the other being. It's always easier to identify oneself with a living being than to a piece of meat. On the other hand, it's also very rational; it's a much better strategy than if it was guided by pure knowledge, since it optimizes cooperation: otherwise, yo…