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UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

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Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#71

Post by psbp »

elif wrote: post #65
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#72

Post by wqtz »

Here is the paper >> https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...

I was curious about how they were defining laughter? I am a bit skeptical to be honest about the idea of change in behavior when we apply something to animals that will trigger a laughter in human. We can't be sure if that change behavior is indicative of joy and expressed through the vocalization of laugher.

The paper seem to be (I have skimmed) focused on group dynamics to determine what is laughter. They indicate that how animals signals they were having joy by making vocalization and it indicates social play.

Here is a super cute video of how social play would work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2EmA_UwIM8

But I am not sure if the animals are laughing though.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#73

Post by tuatoru »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #70
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

I’ve thought about this quite a lot, and always come to the same unique characteristic: man can think about thinking.

I seem to recall an experiment with corvids (crows) that showed that they can figure out whether or not another crow can or cannot see a crow treat, based on the different angle of view.

In human children this ability (to realise that other people have their own point of view) is called "theory of mind", IIRC.

IOW crows can think about what other crows are thinking.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#74

Post by circlefavshape »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #62
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

Here's a few guesses, please correct me if I'm wrong about these! The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer. https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#cunninghams-law Culture list from https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes based on a manual categorisation of friends' liked Facebook pages, when trying to learn Mandarin while living in Taiwan a few years…

Politics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too.

News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this.

Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether other animals have those

Clothing may be unique to humans, but historically not all humans have used clothes.

Bird and whale song is probably music. Birds do courtship dances. IMO this probably counts as art.

Again if other animals have language they might also have comedy, religion, theatre - without knowing that they don't have language then we can't rule those out.

Business - not sure. If other animals have trade then I guess that's business? There's some evidence of exchange among other animals, but I'm not sure it counts as "trade" https://theconversation.com/what-trade-deals-can-teach-us-ab...

All that's left unique to us is cooking.

I suspect your first list could be reduced to one definite - "fire" - and two maybes "language" and "trade". I'd bet that maybe animals have language, but that we haven't deciphered it yet

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#75

Post by WanderPanda »

psbp wrote: post #71
elif wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.

This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#76

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

tuatoru wrote: post #73
IAmGraydon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve thought about this quite a lot, and always come to the same unique characteristic: man can think about thinking.

I seem to recall an experiment with corvids (crows) that showed that they can figure out whether or not another crow can or cannot see a crow treat, based on the different angle of view. In human children this ability (to realise that other people have their own point of view) is called "theory of mind", IIRC. IOW crows can think about what other crows are thinking.

Several animals display theory of mind, including the variety of pig common in farming.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#78

Post by cstross »

elif wrote: post #65
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

If you follow the links through to the original paper --

https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...

-- you'll see that a variety of felines (including domestic cats) are among the species listed as having play vocalizations.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#79

Post by yesenadam »

WanderPanda wrote: post #75
psbp wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.

This is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it e…

> the threshold will be so low

To take one "small" example, 7 billion male[0] chicks a year are put into a "macerator", aka "chick grinding machine". 7 billion. I don't think it takes a very "low threshold" to find this barbaric, just look at it and think about it. If that's not "barbaric" (whatever that means exactly), I'm not sure what would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_culling

> So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric

Many people already do, and have for many years.

[0] "the males of egg-laying chickens are killed as soon as possible after hatching and sexing to reduce financial losses incurred by the breeder."

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#80

Post by jrlocke »

This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented.

As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.

An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.

An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.

I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.

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