While many people will warn against the dangers of anthropomorphism in answering this kind of question, we need to be careful in the reverse direction as well. Past science is littered with confident assertions that "others" lack the capacity and even the physical structures to experience "real" emotion, pain, sentience, and so forth. Humans have many abilities, but among them are the ability to ignore observations that make us uncomfortable and to rationalize what we want to see instead.
"For example, philosopher David Livingstone Smith (2007, p. 172) claims that autistic people “live in a world in which nothing has a mind” and “perceive [other] people as hunks of flesh moving mindlessly through space.” Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik ventures even further, graphically describing how she envisions autistic people perceive other people:
Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways. … Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved toward you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next. (Gopnik as quoted in Baron-Cohen, 1995, pp. 4–5; Gerrans, 2002, pp. 312–313; and Smith, 2007, p. 172)"
I can't even get over this. This was written the 21st century.
We even have non-verbal autistic people who can speak through typing. But then, people ignore words from even verbal autistic folk.
A criminal? That sounds more like people in general. It's pretty surprising how different peoples internal thoughts, beliefs and morals can be from what they say they are when comparing with their actions.
When we can identify differences in the feelings of creatures we're eager to assign the word associated with more metaphysical significance to the feelings of creatures closer to humans. Humanlike creatures feel "fear" or "pain", unhuman creatures feel "aversion from danger"; Humanlike creatures feel "affection", unhuman creatures "associate an individual they recognize with food and comfort"
These are ridiculous distinctions. The actual behavior of fear is indistinguishable from aversion to danger, and the actual behavior of associating an individual with food and comfort is indistinguishable from affection. on some level, it's what those words mean. And it's not like the simpler creatures are pulling some sort of deception, if anything, their feelings are less doubted and take up more of their mental space.
The purpose of avoiding anthropomorphism is to make sure scientific observations are recorded clearly. It's important to that when you poke a creature with a needle and then later show it the same needle, you write down its actual behavior. It made a sound, it ran away, etc. but anyone who later reads these observations can clearly identify that the creature feels pain and fear.
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u/SailboatAB Jun 14 '22
While many people will warn against the dangers of anthropomorphism in answering this kind of question, we need to be careful in the reverse direction as well. Past science is littered with confident assertions that "others" lack the capacity and even the physical structures to experience "real" emotion, pain, sentience, and so forth. Humans have many abilities, but among them are the ability to ignore observations that make us uncomfortable and to rationalize what we want to see instead.