"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days."
Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
Fair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours).
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days
And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas?
Why possibly days and not possibly weeks?
but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed
Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down.
it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty
But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
You are correct. The underlying scientific article is clear on the timeline of observations. My problem is with the editing done by the phys.org article.
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive.
It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
You might also argue that although there may be a non-emotional argument for why grieving could be beneficial, it’s possible or even likely that evolution encoded this instinct in something like emotions. Just how evolution encoded the tendency to care for one’s family and community in emotions for humans.
Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.
I would say that someone acting in good faith who was referring to something other than what is described in the article would have said so and would have said what they were referring to, which you again have not done. I would also note that "seem to defy alternative explanations" is not remotely "rigorous" and is not a conclusion or consensus within the field of marine biology, which you do not represent. It is telling that you write "Kudos to the author for not being so bitter and jaded, like me, and reporting this thinking some change might come" when you imply here that there are some other behaviors (which you are keeping tight to your chest) that already "seem" to defy alternative explanation, while implicitly agreeing here that inherent strong maternal attachment isn't grieving.
I don't engage with people acting in bad faith or who write such snotty comments that are intended as oneupmanship but not to impart information. Goodbye.
Indeed. The same goes for widows at funerals. I mean, has anyone ever dissected the brain of a grieving human and said “aha hah! Here it is!! The grief!”
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
That's a very closed definition of grieving. So by your definition a future perfectly simulated human brain cannot grieve because no chemicals are involved?
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
I'll write the dissenting opinion that the models still aren't very good at planning rather it's the agentic harness and prompts thereof that are giving us better planning ability on long and larger tasks.
My son, Jeffrey, was a very tiny, very sick premature baby, born Feb. 9, 1985, at a gestational age of 25-26 weeks. During the almost two months of his life, he was on a respirator, with several lung diseases, a heart problem, kidney problems, and a brain bleed.
... Jeffrey had holes cut on both sides of his neck, another hole cut in his right chest, an incision from his breastbone around to his backbone, his ribs pried apart, and an extra artery near his heart tied off. This was topped off with another hole cut in his left side for a chest tube. The operation lasted 12 hours. Jeffrey was awake through it all.
The anesthesiologist paralyzed him with Pavulon, a curare drug that left him unable to move, but totally conscious. When I questioned the anesthesiologist ... she said Jeffrey was too sick to tolerate powerful anesthetics. Anyway, she said, it had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain. She seemed sincerely puzzled as to why I was concerned. It turns out that such care, or lack thereof, is possible because, as a neonatologist explained, babies, unlike adults, don't go into shock no matter how much agony they suffer.
Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?).
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
That obviously doesn't mean that we're not different--we obviously are, and it's not intellectually honest to deny it. There are SO many examples of things that have some common trait but are obviously different--skyscrapers and huts are both buildings, but they are different. Cheetahs and Usain Bolt both run fast, but they are different. Bacteria and oak trees are both alive, but they are different. "alike" and "different" are both words, but they are different. And so on ad infinitum.
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.
These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
That's a very selective interpretation of what GP said, in fact I don't see how you even got to that conclusion.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
Any parent here who has known this loss can relate. Didn’t think I’d see this on HN but yeah this is heartbreaking.
I’m sorry, my thoughts go out to you.
Ahh I appreciate that but I’ve not experienced it personally though I know friends who have.
Orcas have also been seen to carry their dead calf's around.
https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/southern-reside...
"She remained with it for several hours and possibly even days." Interesting article, but that comment veers into speculation. Speculation diminishes the value of a scientific article.
I'm confused by how that is speculation.
The key word is possibly. Any statement with possibly in it could be true or false, it is speculation.
Rather, the word “possibly” indicates uncertainty, the very foundation of science.
Fair, but does that mean that the entire article is speculative? They were not around long enough to confirm whether or not it happened for days, but the fact that the mother stayed for at least some hours appears to be confirmed (although as another reply said, the motivation for staying could be different than ours).
You will likely find a lot of these hedging comments in scientific articles, as it’s hard to know and prove something with 100% certainty and it’s an important task for researchers to also indicate the limits of what they’ve discovered. I think ;)
And that is perfectly fair. But what is the “possibly days” based on? Did they see the two whales acting weirdly a day later, but then they didn’t see them four days later? Or is it just based on the hunch of the person who made the observation? Or is it the hunch of the researcher? And if it is a hunch is it based on knowledge of similar reported events in the past? Is it based on the observed state of the adult whale or maybe the state of the carcas?
Why possibly days and not possibly weeks?
Is it confirmed? So that’s the problem. The hours are comming from the same sentence which describes the days. Both by a person who did not whitness the event personally. Your reading is that the second part of the sentence (the days) is speculation, while the first is reporting on observed fact. My reading is that the journalist did a bad job separating the first hand observed facts from the second hand speculation. We just simply won’t know until someone asks the Captain what exactly they have seen and writes it down.
But it is not hard to describe what was observed, and clearly separate it from what they think or speculate. Also it is not hard to ask the person who actually did the observing to describe what they have seen, instead of it being described by someone else who was not present.
"possibly days" is a quote from the article, which is linked.
You are correct. The underlying scientific article is clear on the timeline of observations. My problem is with the editing done by the phys.org article.
They are indicating a range (hours to days) for a value, and the “possibly” qualifier indicates some uncertainty in the range’s upper bound.
I'd say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.
But they need to explain why the range is so large. Did they witness whales at the site on day 2? It's unnecessarily ambiguous.
Your pedantry and rigid lack of any insight is not representative of science just your own intellectual flaws
I disagree. Fundamentaly the article is about an observation someone made of an animal’s behaviour. It is very important to be clear about what they seen, who seen it, and when. This article is not clear about that.
What we know from the article that Rescue boat Capt. Andrew Mulville whitnessed the two whales behaving unusually. They also took a video of the behaviour. We don’t know how long they whitnessed it, or if there were multiple separate observations or just the one.
And then we have Dr. Olaf Meynecke who was not personaly present and says that “She remained close to the calf, maintaining eye contact and positioning herself next to her calf over several hours and maybe even days.” It is valid to ask what is that based on? Is Dr Meynecke narrating what Capt Mulville seen? Is he saying that based on his knowledge of other times when behaviour like this was observed? Is it just speculation? There is nothing wrong with speculation but it is better be cleanly separated from the description of what was seen.
The reason why this is frustrating is because something interesting (and likely supremely tragic) happened to these whales. But we are hearing about it in a distorted fashion. It is a game of telephone, where the captain seen it, told about it to the researcher, who told the journalist who is telling it to us. It is fundamentally important to keep it clear which parts are comming from the captain’s first hand account and which parts are speculation or elaboration by the researcher.
Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.
Sure, we've got them beat on language and planning, but we're currently in the process of being passed up on both those fronts by multi-dimensional arrays of floating point numbers sitting inside of sand. So, like, how special is that then, really?
Do LLMs grieve?
Nope.
They can pretend to, of course, and use the language of grief, but if you can't feel the cold bottomless pit that has bored through your gut then you aren't really grieving.
Do whales grieve?
Just as much as any human that isn't me, as far as I can tell from all available evidence.
So, yes, I absolutely believe they grieve, just like I believe humans who aren't me grieve.
I hope that’s just because you haven’t had a reason to grieve… Either way, hope you are well!
Thanks, stranger.
I'm old enough that I have experienced significant grief a few times in my life.
Given our mortality, we should welcome some degree of situational grief, as grief is the absence of a previous love that we were lucky enough to experience in the first place.
Of course, there are also profoundly unfair versions of grief (like the loss of a child) that I wish nobody (or no whale, for that matter) would ever have to experience.
"That isn't me" in the above comment means "I know I can grieve, but I can only tell indirectly other people can do so as well."
It doesn't mean "I've never felt grief".
They exhibit behaviours that seem to defy alternative explanations, though I doubt anyone could say for certain whether they do or don’t
You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive.
Here's an article about orcas: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047
It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)
You might also argue that although there may be a non-emotional argument for why grieving could be beneficial, it’s possible or even likely that evolution encoded this instinct in something like emotions. Just how evolution encoded the tendency to care for one’s family and community in emotions for humans.
Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.
No, they really don't. The article says
Yeah, that's not grieving.
What if I told you that marine biology is a large and rigorous field that is not fully encapsulated by TFA?
I would say that someone acting in good faith who was referring to something other than what is described in the article would have said so and would have said what they were referring to, which you again have not done. I would also note that "seem to defy alternative explanations" is not remotely "rigorous" and is not a conclusion or consensus within the field of marine biology, which you do not represent. It is telling that you write "Kudos to the author for not being so bitter and jaded, like me, and reporting this thinking some change might come" when you imply here that there are some other behaviors (which you are keeping tight to your chest) that already "seem" to defy alternative explanation, while implicitly agreeing here that inherent strong maternal attachment isn't grieving.
I don't engage with people acting in bad faith or who write such snotty comments that are intended as oneupmanship but not to impart information. Goodbye.
Indeed. The same goes for widows at funerals. I mean, has anyone ever dissected the brain of a grieving human and said “aha hah! Here it is!! The grief!”
No, of course I haven't been doing that, and it's going to be a while before I would have collected a representative sample anyway, if I had been.
How do you know that they don’t? And conversely, how do you know any other human than yourself do?
Insofar as grieving is an inherently, fundamentally a very particular chemical process, the answer is a resounding “no”.
If you simulate that chemical process in a computer, if necessary a quantum computer?
You don't even need quantum imo.
On a personal meatbag level emotions are magical and something ineffable.
From a scientific stance, chemical make brain go happy or sad and there's nothing special or magical about that. Every emotion we feel is because it was evolutionarily valuable for us to do so.
That's a very closed definition of grieving. So by your definition a future perfectly simulated human brain cannot grieve because no chemicals are involved?
Lmao.
Whether anything a perfectly simulated human brain (or other organism see the fruit fly simulated brain) does is actually real - in the same sense it’s real for you and me - is still up for debate i think.
Assuming it’s possible to perfectly simulate a human brain
do humans? or is it only because we're the ones doing the research and so we say we do?
i think most people are automatons and can be programmed.
it is the most moral thing to program people to operate in ways that causes least harm to everyone else around them that has to live with them.
people like certain foods, outrage, and gambling/fomo.
...literally on this article.
You can give them emotional signals, but I feel like it's cruel to do so and would recommend against it.
I know the point you’re making is half facetious—do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?
When harnessed, yes. They still suck at it, but they are getting significantly better over a relatively short time.
And you don't have to look very far in any direction economically or politically to wonder if humans in 2026 are really as good at planning as we like to think and/or if we may be regressing in this area. Because a lot of things we are responsible for aren't going very well for the majority.
I'll write the dissenting opinion that the models still aren't very good at planning rather it's the agentic harness and prompts thereof that are giving us better planning ability on long and larger tasks.
It's like that time when they "discovered" that babies can feel pain.
I can barely read Jill Lawson's letter:
From: https://massagefitnessmag.com/massage/pediatric-pain-history... / https://archive.vn/5hTuT
Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.
Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...
Other animals use fire, while we continue to seem unique in creating it. Fire hawks take burning sticks and alight brush to flush prey.
https://wildlife.org/australian-firehawks-use-fire-to-catch-...
There was an episode (season 1, ep. 4) of Prehistoric Planet[0], where a raptor does that. I guess they got the idea from the firehawk (Lilith, is that you?).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_Planet
Humans had completely mastered fire by about 200,000 years ago - after 800,000 years of experimentation.
Speech is dated to around 60,000 years ago, though some say we started down that path 200,000 years ago: right when we mastered fire.
Probably due to the need for profanity after getting burnt.
"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."
— Daniel Dennett
https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves
"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.
It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."
"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"
We are not different. Whales exhibit culture too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_culture
https://www.reddit.com/r/evolution/comments/rduhmx/does_any_...
That obviously doesn't mean that we're not different--we obviously are, and it's not intellectually honest to deny it. There are SO many examples of things that have some common trait but are obviously different--skyscrapers and huts are both buildings, but they are different. Cheetahs and Usain Bolt both run fast, but they are different. Bacteria and oak trees are both alive, but they are different. "alike" and "different" are both words, but they are different. And so on ad infinitum.
If you had read the link above, you would have seen
"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."
which I have added to my comment.
I won't pursue further discussion when it's at such a shallow level of thinking as "we are not different" despite numerous clear differences.
P.S. nor with flaggable vituperation that only reflects extremely badly on the person who responded to me
There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.
Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.
These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.
Surely you realise that there’s a balance between “stop reproducing and die to avoid harm to the world” and “consume all resources available for short-sighted gluttony”.
There are absolutely ways to lower our impact and lots of smart people working on figuring out how this can be made to work at scaley
So far, it appears those smart people have created a ideological caused self-extinction of western civilizations and thus a take-over by unapologetic expansionist imperialist cultural systems. Not very smart and not very longterm loadbearing.. it seems those "smart" people are mostly ideological driven and unable to work with the flawed, half-animal humans given.
But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.
So by your logic we should not treat humans with impaired cognitive abilities as equals?
Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.
Holy category error Batman!
Why do you put baby brain activity next inactive coma or sleep?
It sounds like, "Rocks, sand, turtles: these don't experience $things." I don't see why babies belong in your list as much as turtles don't belong in mine.
Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.
That's a very selective interpretation of what GP said, in fact I don't see how you even got to that conclusion.
"We" as a species is a far different entity than any single individual who is temporarily or even permanently impaired. And GP didn't even mention such impairment.
Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.
Try considering this with some nuance. Many people likely do not know that cows grieve or their bubble of habits and upbringing prevents this fact from reaching them. A story that brings empathy towards any animal is a step towards less suffering for all animals.
I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.
We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.
Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.
Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.
Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/
My dad was an anesthesiologist, and what he told me is rather different from that meme. The reason was that the safe dosing range for babies was unknown, and giving the wrong dose can lead to death or worse. The argument wasn't that babies couldn't feel pain, but that babies would not have lasting memories of it happening, and that it was less risky that overdosing them.
Yeah, that's not grieving.
Paper [0]
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44338-026-00232-9
Unsurprisingly, mammals (not just humans) also fear death and are very distressed when being lead to slaughter and seeing their peers go down before them.
Applies to every living thing with a limbic system. So yes, that steak or chicken nuggets...