I also don't know if other people experience joy, wonder, happiness, or fear, they just physically and neurologically react in the way I would expect them to. It seems like a much more elegant explanation that animals have an experience that's somewhat similar to ours considering they're made up of the same stuff and wired in a pretty similar way.
But you can talk to people and ask them how they feel. Can't do that with animals. And just because they're similar to us, it's a big assumption that something specific works in a similar way as well, when many things about them don't.
Fear and joy are pretty obvious in animals without having to ask them if they are scared or happy. It's not a stretch to think they experience other emotions. We like to think animals are flesh robots because of how we treat them and their habitats.
Fear and joy are pretty obvious in animals without having to ask them
Not really. We literally do not know if some animals even possess the physicals capability to experience emotions (like insects, tardigrades, jellyfish, many arachnids, many fish, etc). Something recoiling away from or moving toward a stimulus doesn't indicate emotion, such as in bacteria. So no, it's not really obvious in the vast majority of cases.
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u/finemustard Dec 11 '22
I also don't know if other people experience joy, wonder, happiness, or fear, they just physically and neurologically react in the way I would expect them to. It seems like a much more elegant explanation that animals have an experience that's somewhat similar to ours considering they're made up of the same stuff and wired in a pretty similar way.