Animals and Sapience

After a bit of a detour in a different thread, I've been thinking about it so I wonder what about other peoples opinions on the topic. What animals, if any do you believe are sapient and why? If you believe that humans are the only sapient animals, what do you think it is we have that they do not?

Discussion of how animals should or shouldn't be treated cropping up is sort of unavoidable but there's probably already an animal rights thread so let's not make that the main focus.

edited 28th Mar '16 9:51:22 PM by LSBK

Seems reasonable so opening.

I don't think there's a sharp line between sapience and non-sapience, so much as a very wide gray area. I could easily think of a few other species that are "close enough" so to speak. Dolphins (overused, I know) and certain kinds of monkeys are basically just slightly less intelligent, weird looking people as far as I'm concerned.

I don't feel nearly as much empathy for other animals as I do for corvids humans though, which admittedly isn't entirely consistent with my moral values, but that's how it is.

edited 28th Mar '16 1:34:11 AM by Corvidae

I suspect if it's anything, it might be morality. I mean, there are a lot of very intelligent animals out there, but have we established that any of them have a sense of right and wrong, of empathy, of accepting other beings as having rights and deliberately choosing not to impinge on those rights? To go back to the overused example of the dolphins, they might be smart but they are also very into their infanticide.

Perhaps that's an overly anthropocentric view of morality - certainly it's, what do you call it? Objective morality? I mean, for all we know dolphins do have a moral code and just consider infanticide to be morally okay. That's not a moral code I would agree with or one that's compatible with ours, but if we ever meet aliens we might have to expect that kind of thing to happen.

I guess every social animal will have a sense of "this behaviour will cause me to be kicked out of my group/the rest of my group will not tolerate it if I do this". Which is probably at the root of morality. But I'm not convinced that's all there is to it.

edited 28th Mar '16 3:35:54 AM by LoniJay

Eh, "right and wrong" is pretty arbitrary if you ask me. Just look at how varied our own values can be. Empathy (and cruelty) is nowhere near exclusive to humans though.

The exact line between "this feels right because of instincts and stuff" and "I've actually thought a bit about my morals" is hard to draw.

Yeah, different cultures put different actions and values into the 'right' and 'wrong' baskets, but every culture at least has those baskets to begin with.

Is there an animal that has a concept of 'morally right' and 'morally wrong'? Beyond 'will earn me rewards/punishment'? (this is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one, I don't know).

Well, from what I understand most mammals (and surely some other animals too) indeed have some sense of empathy. Wolves appear to have some conception of justice, though according to some research it's possible they might not truly feel "shame" for their actions despite them giving you those big doggy eyes.

So it depends on how we define morality. Humans are more or less the only being that can really "philosophize", but animals that work in groups will inevitably begin developing rules.

Another part of this equation is if we were to come across animals that seem to be demonstrating behaviors once thought only human, how to tell if they're doing it for the same reason or if we're just anthropomorphizing them.

Like, apparently there's evidence of African elephants mourning and attempting to bury their dead like we do. It seems hard to image the observed activities being anything else but is that just because that has to be what they're doing or we just want to think they're capable of i?

I think all animals are sapient, except maybe ones with no central nervous system, but even then... Attempting to draw any kind of arbitrary line between "humanlike animal" and "other" just strikes me as having no purpose whatsoever other than to justify mistreating them. Like, there's this whole line of argument which claims that insects can't feel pain because they lack the chemical signals that verterbrates use to detect pain, which is total nonsense for obvious reasons I don't feel the need to explain. The only thing I get out of that argument is "why do you want to believe that insects can't feel pain?"

Why do people want to believe that, I dunno, pigeons can't feel sad?

edited 28th Mar '16 10:48:50 AM by Clarste

A central nervous system doesn't even seem necessary for emotion. Plants respond to emotional stimulus.

Regarding social behaviors, I used to have a ball python named Envy. He had a wealth of personality. He was obsessed with mirrors and with my hands; anything I was holding, he wanted to coil around. If I was typing, he would slither onto the keyboard. If I was playing a video game, he'd wrap around the controller. Whatever I was doing, he wanted to do it too.

The thing I remember most, however, was one of his first feedings. I was gripping the mouse by the tail and putting it down into his feeding tank when he got overzealous and struck. He missed the mouse and bit my hand instead, but instead of holding on and coiling like his instincts have taught him, he immediately released my hand, wrapped his head under his tail, and gave me the most pathetic look.

I've read that a snake who attacks the wrong target has to be forced off because he isn't smart enough to realize the mistake, but Envy knew. It was all over his behavior. He let go of his own volition because he knew he'd done wrong. He had crossed a social boundary and was expecting to be punished for it, like a child who accidentally knocks over and breaks the cookie jar while going for a snack.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:20:20 AM by TobiasDrake

I think anyone who works with any animal for any length of time will begin to notice personality traits. Like, I watched an interview with a cricket farmer who was talking about the different personalities he'd noticed and how he felt sort of bad about killing them.

That seems less about emotion to me and more about not being able to find anything to indicate they feel pain. Which isn't the same thing as not responding to negative stimuli.

I recall another story involving a snake with vaguely similar implications. About how this one snake wasn't eating no matter what people gave it, but then they put a gerbil or something in it's cage and instead of eating it coiled around it. After the rodent was introduced it began eating regularly but never touched it's "companion".

Some took that to mean the snake was lonely, others just thought it was using the rodent's body heat to warm up it's metabolism. Who can say for sure.

edited 8th Nov '17 9:32:03 AM by LSBK

I think you might be confusing sapience with sentience here. I used to do that a lot too, but they're not quite the same.

And I don't "want to believe" anything by the way, I want to know, so I can base my choices and actions on accurate information, and also because I'm curious and shit.

I was pondering whether or not I should make the distinction in the opening. Probably should have.

Anyway, I'm sure a lot of people will argue that dogs and cats, among other animals but those are the ones people are the most likely to be close to, have personalities. But is that the same thing as being sapient?

For the record, I'm not trying to convince people one way or the other, I'm genuinely curious about what everyone has to say.

I don't think there is a difference between sentience and sapience. If you can perceive the world, and not just react to it like a photosensitive chemical, then clearly there's some sort of abstract process that takes sensory inputs and makes decisions based on them. That process can more or less complicated, and the creature more or less "dumb", but drawing any kind of arbitrary line serves no purpose whatsoever other than to dehumanize. Seems like a waste of time to me.

I understand what you mean but seeing as we're not talking about humans here, you might want to pick a different word.

No, that's exactly what I mean. Sapience is a word that exists only tell us what other animals are "human" in our culture. Which is exactly why it's pointless.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:32:58 AM by Clarste

Incidentally, I asserted back when this topic was a derail in another thread that sapience is basically an ambiguous, poorly-defined quality that humans use to assert their superiority. That wiki entry perfectly demonstrates why:

I've known plenty of humans who I would assert do not act with "appropriate judgment". Anyone who drinks alcohol, for instance, is voluntarily consuming poison for lulz. I joked in another thread about how some humans seek out foods containing capsaicin, a toxin that evolved to be unpleasant for mammals to discourage us from eating it, because humans have replaced evolutionary common sense with tools.

But nobody ever talks about whether humans have sapience. Of course we do. We're basically the definition: an entity with sapience is an entity we can relate to ourselves closely enough to be considered sapient.

Additionally, that "wisdom" we have is a learned behavior. An infant doesn't have much of it. We gain it through life experiences. What makes us wise is that we can be taught and that's not a trait exclusive to us. Even a gerbil can learn that throwing a switch causes food to be delivered to its cage.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:36:49 AM by TobiasDrake

So, do you feel that say, insects are as sentient/sapient/whatever you want to call it as us or other mammals?

I agree with this. Think of this thread as way to discuss how the term could be made less useless.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:42:13 AM by LSBK

Yes. Even a bee can be taught to associate abstract symbols with concepts like danger or food. IE: it perceives the world and makes judgements based on what it sees and compares to its memories.

Sapience is based on the idea of self-awareness: that a creature is capable of recognizing itself as an individual entity and that it is capable of learning through cognition instead of simply adapting to patterns.

The line is very hard to draw and depends in large part upon one's interpretation of a being's behavior. You could say that dogs demonstrate traits of sapience, but I would counter with the fact that we have bred them for tens of thousands of years to be extraordinarily responsive to human behavior. They have become almost symbiotic, with their pack instincts transferred to humans.

Cats, as natural loners, and with a lot less time being bred by humans for companionship, are correspondingly lower on the scale of apparent sapience, but they are definitely still there. What we interpret as affection is certainly present, but has been studied and found to be the redirection of a cat's fixation on its mother, something that can be trained back into even a wild cat. A domesticated cat has literally regressed to kittenhood.

Many of the great apes are observed to have a high level of social adaptability and self-awareness, and most especially can be taught language.

Snakes and birds are reptiles. Their brains don't contain the functions present in mammalian brains that process emotions like affection.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:42:34 AM by Fighteer

That's true.

Some predatory plants evolved specific traits intended to mimic a food source for insects. This deception relies on the fact that insects learn to associate those traits with food.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:39:36 AM by TobiasDrake

The thing about that is can you really say that's what a bee is doing. We have a pretty good idea how thinking works right? I think the general consensus is that insects don't have the capabilities for it. Obviously, I could be very wrong about that.

Reacting to something and thinking are not the same thing.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:40:50 AM by LSBK

This is the part that bugs me, honestly. I mean, yes, of course reptiles have different brains than mammals. But why is that relevant? For all we know they have the same functions performed by different parts of their brains, but even if they don't why is the only standard for sapience "how much like humans they are"? Are we really so self-centered that we need a dog whistle word for "human-enough-to-count"? Why can't we just say they're not human and be done with the discussion? Unless of course we're trying to justify causing them pain for no reason.

Just look at that face. It's adorable. The thing about that is can you really say that's what a bee is doing. We have a pretty good idea how thinking works right? I think the general consensus is that insects don't have the capabilities for it. Obviously, I could be very wrong about that.

Reacting to something and thinking are not the same thing.

I'm pretty sure we don't have a good idea how thinking works. Maybe a good idea about how human thinking works, what with all the human brain studies we've done, but even then I'm sure most neurologists would agree that we've barely scratched the surface of how the brain works. Non-mammal thinking is almost completely alien to us, no doubt partly because we've defined it out of existence.

When it comes to actually laboratory tests and whatnot though, it's pretty clear that all animals at all scales are capable of learning and making judgements. What more do you want, exactly?

edited 28th Mar '16 11:47:14 AM by Clarste

If we're going down that route, humans and all mammals are reptiles too. We just descended from a different group of reptiles than modern reptiles and birds did.

The term reptile is sort of bad for talking about things like this.

edited 28th Mar '16 11:45:01 AM by LSBK