The researchers successfully demonstrated that, like humans, cuttlefish brains can compute distance using incoming information from both eyes at once. However, they write in the paper, “Cuttlefish stereopsis is likely afforded by a different algorithm than in humans, and not just a different implementation.
Sentience in Animals
❝ The birds’ generosity has animal scientists intrigued. It’s one thing to pass a partner a piece of grub; it’s another to give them the currency to purchase it. Such acts of charity have long been thought to be restricted to primates like humans, orangutans and bonobos. Few, if any, other mammals were thought capable of it, let alone a creature with a bird brain.
But big-brained African grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) may be the first avian known to engage in this helpful behavior, Brucks’ team reports today in the journal Current Biology. Parrots, it seems, don’t just have the ability to comprehend metal rings as currency for food, but they also “understand the consequences their actions can have on another individual,” says Christina Riehl, an expert in bird behavior at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s pretty sophisticated reasoning.” ❞
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/parrots-share-currency-help-their-pals-purchase-food-180973917/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=socialmedia&fbclid=IwAR2dcTMcb4AhTWYMUjU6N8ZiAAZ5Zt-g1uTgF5Z2JXkdnehTXf913RNbxI8
“The HHHHHMM (H5M2) Quality of Life Scale provides guidelines for the assessment of a pet so that pet owners can maintain a rewarding relationship that nurtures the human–animal bond, while being confident that the pet is well enough to justify prolonging life. This Quality of Life Scale will relieve guilt feelings and engender the support of the veterinary team to actively help in the care and decision making for Pawspice patients. I feel that it is ethical to prolong a life worth living. On the other hand, I feel that it is not ethical to prolong death for our patients.”
Privileged beings (students) of the privileged species (human) at privileged time (XXI c.) and privileged space (Germany) ranked only 30% of the recent experiences as “worth living”.
The “Eternal-Playlist” thought experiment, by Thomas Metzinger:
“At Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, we began a first series of small pilot studies with a group of advanced philosophy students. We chose a signal-contingent, externally cued form of experience sampling. One tech-savvy student programmed an SMS server in such a way that, for seven days, it sent ten signals a day at random points in time to the participants, whose cell phones would then briefly vibrate. The participants’ task was to decide whether the last moment before the conscious experience of the vibration was a moment they would take with them into life after death. For many, the result was surprising: the number of positive conscious moments per week varied between 0 and 36, with an average of 11.8 or almost 31 per cent of the phenomenological samples, while at 69 per cent a little more than two thirds of the moments were spontaneously ranked as not worth reliving. If you are cued externally, it seems, less than a third of such experiential samples would have a chance of entering your very own “eternal playlist”.
[…]
in a second study we dropped the afterlife assumption and the “eternity condition”, replacing them with the following question: “Would you like to relive the very last conscious moment in this life?” Interestingly, under this condition only a little over 28 per cent of life moments were ranked as positive, while just below 72 per cent were considered not worth reliving
Source:
https://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophieengl/files/2013/07/Metzinger_Suffering_2017.pdf
“We replicate nine key results from the happiness literature: the Easterlin Paradox, the ‘U-shaped’ relation between happiness and age, the happiness trade-off between inflation and unemployment, cross-country comparisons of happiness, the impact of the Moving to Opportunity program on happiness, the impact of marriage and children on happiness, the ‘paradox’ of declining female happiness, and the effect of disability on happiness. We show that none of the findings can be obtained relying only on nonparametric identification. The findings in the literature are highly dependent on one’s beliefs about the underlying distribution of happiness in society, or the social welfare function one chooses to adopt. Furthermore, any conclusions reached from these parametric approaches rely on the assumption that all individuals report their happiness in the same way. When the data permit, we test for equal reporting functions, conditional on the existence of a common cardinalization from the normal family. We reject this assumption in all cases in which we test it.”
In Simon Knutsson‘s words:
That happiness and suffering are measurable, in principle, to the extent that is required to talk about the net balance among several individuals is highly controversial and widely rejected. That is, it is controversial that they are (in principle) measurable to the required degree in an objective, non-arbitrary, scientific way that does not involve value judgements on the part of the person doing the measurement. One could say “I assign number –10 to Ann’s suffering and +5 to Ben’s happiness, and then I add them together. These numbers are intertwined with my values, and others might assign different numbers depending on their values.” Although that might be the best we can do, it does not count as measurement in the objective sense that we are concerned with […].
Economist Yew-Kwang Ng says that the following statement is representative of the typical economics textbook view: “Today, no one really believes that we can actually measure utils.” He continues that the probably most widely used textbook says that “economists today generally reject the notion of a cardinal, measurable, utility.” For the kinds of claims discussed above, we would need utilities to be measurable on a strong kind of interpersonal cardinal scale (an interpersonally additive ratio scale), which is widely rejected by economists.
Ng adds that this skepticism about measurability is also “very common” among “sociologists and psychologists who study happiness.”
Some history is interesting here. The early utilitarians of the 19th century, such as John Stuart Mill and Henry Sidgwick, did not seem worried by interpersonal comparisons of utility. But as Bergström points out, “in the 20th century, things have changed a great deal. Now the dominant view — at least among economists — seems to be that interpersonal comparisons of utility are impossible or necessarily subjective and unscientific.”
Of course, there is not complete consensus on the matter; some believe that happiness and suffering (or utility) can be measured to the extent required to talk about the net balance or amounts among several individuals. Philosophers generally seem to be somewhat more optimistic than economists.
Source: https://foundational-research.org/measuring-happiness-and-suffering/
“If someone offered you a pill that would make you permanently happy, you would be well advised to run fast and run far. Emotion is a compass that tells us what to do, and a compass that is perpetually stuck on north is worthless.” —Professor Daniel Gilbert. Department of Psychology, Harvard University
“Many millions of people in the contemporary world have a compass that is perpetually “stuck on South”. They are always unhappy and discontented. They endure chronic pain and/or depression. Some victims of severe anhedonia can’t even imagine what it’s like to be happy. A minor blessing is that not all of their days are quite as terrible as others. So in one sense, their emotional compass can point North as well as South: a motivational system of sorts still functions. But the whole of their lives is spent in an Antarctic wasteland of misery and despair.
At the other extreme, a small minority of people are blessed with a compass that seems perpetually “stuck on North”. In pathological cases, they may be manic. But sometimes they are in varying degrees just “hyperthymic” i.e. the hedonic set-point around which their lives oscillate is unusually high compared to the Darwinian norm. Hyperthymic well-being is chronic; yet it’s not uniform. Thus some days of hyperthymic life are even more wonderful than others; pursuing their favourite activities makes hyperthymics even happier than otherwise. So again, the hyperthymic emotional compass is bidirectional: its scale is different, but it works. The relevant contrast here lies in the way hyperthymics are animated by information-signalling gradients of well-being, whereas dysthymics, depressives and victims of chronic pain spend their lives struggling to minimise ill-being. Either way, affective gradients rule.” —David Pearce
Source: https://www.gradients.com/
“While every sensitive being fundamentally wishes to avoid suffering and experience happiness, curiously, human societies have almost never made non-suffering and happiness their founding values. Why? The ideology of reproduction has existed for 100,000 years, while the belief that the spirit survives the death of the body appears. We must reproduce so that a progeny can take care of our spirit after our death. The supreme value is reproduction, and therefore life. The strength of this discourse is such that the ideology of reproduction, which has forged most of our laws, has finally imposed itself through unconscious internalization, even today. To come out of it, to deconstruct this ideology is a condition for the flourishing of the values of non-suffering and happiness that appeared much later, only 2500 years ago, in India and Greece.”
From the Jean-Christophe Lurenbaum’s book: “Is “Being Born” in the Best Interest of the Child? – Ideology of Reproduction versus Non-Suffering”
“A key to understanding what is behind conservatism and progressivism is that the former is pro-life or for “reproduction” in the broad sense, whilst the latter is for suffering-alleviation” — Robert Daoust
One woman is entirely insensitive to physical pain and has no palpable negative emotions.
Joanne Cameron experiences suffering mostly as “an abstract thing.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/13/a-world-without-pain
“Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words, but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and was asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly. He could describe a key as a key no matter what its size or color, and could determine how the key was different from others. Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned “grey” after being told “grey” six times. This made him the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked a question—and an existential question at that. (Apes who have been trained to use sign-language have so far failed to ever ask a single question.) Alex’s ability to ask questions (and to answer to Pepperberg’s questions with his own questions) is documented in numerous articles and interviews.
Alex was said to have understood the turn-taking of communication and sometimes the syntax used in language. He called an apple a “banerry” (pronounced as rhyming with some pronunciations of “canary”), which a linguist friend of Pepperberg’s thought to be a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits he was more familiar with.
Alex could add, to a limited extent, correctly giving the number of similar objects on a tray. Pepperberg said that if he could not count, the data could be interpreted as his being able to estimate quickly and accurately the number of something, better than humans can. When he was tired of being tested, he would say “Wanna go back”, meaning he wanted to go back to his cage, and in general, he would request where he wanted to be taken by saying “Wanna go…”, protest if he was taken to a different place, and sit quietly when taken to his preferred spot. He was not trained to say where he wanted to go, but picked it up from being asked where he would like to be taken.
If the researcher displayed irritation, Alex tried to defuse it with the phrase, “I’m sorry.” If he said “Wanna banana”, but was offered a nut instead, he stared in silence, asked for the banana again, or took the nut and threw it at the researcher or otherwise displayed annoyance, before requesting the item again. When asked questions in the context of research testing, he gave the correct answer approximately 80 percent of the time.”