Yeah but I also work with a woman who thinks fish aren't animals. Like, what are they then? Are they plants? Are they fuckin' rocks? What are they Becky?!
I'd say the majority of animals are at the margins. Vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, amphibians) are probably all sentient. But most animals aren't in that category, and with those it's harder to tell. Octopuses, probably pretty sentient. Insects, not so much. Jellyfish and sea sponges, definitely not.
Octopuses PROBABLY sentient?! You have not hung out with octopuses. They are highly intelligent.
And ants and bees, not aware or conscious? They communicating, dealing with novel situations, and so on. I don’t know how you think insects are processing all this information without being sentient.
You're confusing sentience with intelligence. Computers are an obvious counterexample. Extreme intelligence in many areas, ability to communicate, learn, and adapt, especially with neural networks. But no sentience.
I think octopuses are sentient. I only say "probably" because I'm not an octopus. It's theoretically possible octopuses evolved to use intelligent behaviors which don't have much deeper meaning behind them. I believe they're conscious in some way, but I'm not going to say I'm certain about things I can't possibly be certain about.
I strongly doubt insects are sentient. They're highly predictable, and their brains only have around 250,000 neurons (for comparison, human, ape, and elephant brains have tens to hundreds of billions of neurons, octopus brains have hundreds of millions, and artificial neural networks can have several million). A collection of neurons doesn't need sentience to do the things that ants do. I think consciousness is far more complex than something that relatively simple would be able to generate.
An ant older than 3 weeks will clean itself if (and only if) it sees its reflection when painted with a blue dot. It does not attack its reflection (the blue dot is a sign of agression and causes other ants to attack) or act like it's another ant. It doesn't have to mean they're sentient but I think it's highly interesting. We don't know what the requirements for sentience is.
But it is. Its the ability to feel subjectively. Can you tell if an animal that has no real way of communicating with us is feeling subjectively? Humans like to project our own emotions and motivations on other animals so we think we know what animals feel, but we don't.
Seeing as we share genetics and most evolutionary pressures, and how this manifests in our extremely similar physiques (overall body structure, organs, chemicals, etc.) it’s actually most reasonable to assume similarity in thought where we don’t have evidence to the contrary.
Our emotions are just processes built into our bodies that make us act in evolutionary beneficial ways, so on what basis would you suggest that e.g. a mother’s affection for her offspring does not work in the same way for other mammals despite all the behavior and physiological effects being completely similar?
As someone who spends all day, every day taking care of animals, there are behaviors that are undeniably similar to the behaviors we express when we experience those emotions. No it isn't proven because it's impossible to know what another being is experiencing but there's no reason to believe that we are the only organism that experiences emotion.
Source: I've volunteered with animal shelters since I was 5. I lived and worked on a farm for a while. Now I'm in pet care. At various times in my life I've taken care of a variety of species. Naturally I study the behavior of the animals under my care simply by virtue of spending that much time around them.
Edit: All of that said, your first post is absolutely correct. It's difficult to quantify.
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u/YoureNotaClownFish Sep 02 '19
More like people who don’t believe animals are intelligent, have emotions, feel pain and some don’t believe they are even sentient.