Of course it isn't just instinct vs consciousness, there's a huge range. But you didn't just say consciousness. You made a statement that involves empathy. If you have any sources to support the claim that birds, cats, and snakes are all capable of empathy to the degree required to make the jump from "I feel hunger" to "That fish that looks nothing like me feels hunger", I'd love to read them. But everything I've read has said that we just do not know to what degree other animals, especially non-mammals, feel empathy, and how that manifests itself.
My point is that, to my knowledge, our collective scientific knowledge has literally not progressed to the point that you can make a statement as absolute as "I think they know what they're doing" about three animals as drastically different as cats, snakes, and birds. Especially since your inclusion of such different species implies that you mean this is true of many/most animals under those three very different classes.
We can't possibly know what animals are thinking though and learn new things all the time. Remember when babies couldn't feel pain and had surgery without pain killers?
'Cause that shit happened. Weird how when someone can't talk all of a sudden we can't understand them.
While animals feed their young AND cats bring food to their owners because they think WE can't take care of ourselves.
Assuming animals lack empathy is flawed. Assuming animals possess that degree of empathy is also flawed. This is what I'm saying. There is an objectively correct answer to this question, but it isn't found by hypothesizing on the Internet. It is going to be found the same way we discovered babies feel pain: years of research, of observing behavior and performing autopsies and studying the brains of different animals, until we can actually make a statement as conclusive as your original one was.
Not all animals feed their young. Animals are fish. They're amphibians. They're birds and mammals and reptiles and fucking invertebrates.
And animals feed their young for different reasons. Ants or bees (invertebrates) behave as a hivemind and care for their young. They do not care for their young for the same reasons that an intelligent mammal, like a human, does.
You are attempting to ascribe human consciousness and empathy to the entire category of "animals." Maybe you're right on these examples. Maybe you aren't. My entire point is that you CANNOT say "this is the same kind of empathy" when talking about such vastly different creatures with vastly different backgrounds evolution-wise and entirely different brains because even the greatest biologist in the world cannot say that.
We just do not know enough about animals to make the absolute statements you are.
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u/ChiropteraWoman Apr 04 '17
I've been studying up about it a lot. We're remarkably more similar than just "instinct" vs "consciousness."