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Grep42
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Re: Animals in History that will be Missed

Post by Grep42 »

Animals can feel love, too. A mother cat will not eat a few days after her babies are adopted. A bird will die soon after it's mate, or have a period of mourning. Elephants embrace and cover their dead with branches. Crows even show signs of having funerals, a flock will sit silently near a dead body for a moment, then fly away silently. There are many cases of mourning in animals that I can only draw a connection to love through.
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Re: Animals in History that will be Missed

Post by Alrai »

animalguy888 wrote:I never said we were better than animals. First of all we are animals because we are not plants or rocks. Second I just said that animals are not as not intelegent as us. Meaning they do not have consciousness,they do not invent machines to solve everyday problems,and the do not have many if any emotions. Again im not saying were better im saying were different intelgence wise.
Consciousness is not defined by the majority of the scientific world to be "the ability to invent machines and have human like emotion", like you seem to define it here. Perhaps this is a simple matter of differing definitions, such that your definition of "consciousness" is different than those who oppose your view.

I re-link and stress this article: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consc ... /#concepts
The very first section of the article discusses how "consciousness" is defined.
But to be very brief and simplistic:
Consciousness is:
Not in debate:
1. When a creature is awake rather than asleep or in a coma
2. When a creature responds to factors of their environment
In debate:
1. "access consciousness" essentially conceptualizing and then applying concepts to reality
2. "self-consciousness" being aware of one's own consciousness

I would define higher consciousness, at least in part, by being self-conscious. The self-recognition mirror test by Gordon Gallup shows that in a controlled setting many animals are aware of, at the least, their physical bodies. Being self-conscious of the physical body is indicative of the ability to be aware of one' s own mind.
Gallup reenacted Darwin's initial experiment with two male and two female wild preadolescent chimpanzees, who had presumably never come into contact with mirrors or reflective surfaces. First each chimpanzee was put into a room by itself for two days. Next a full length mirror was placed in the room for a total of 80 hours in variant distances from the cage - starting farther away and moving closer. A multitude of behaviors was recorded upon introducing the mirrors to these wild chimpanzees. At first the chimpanzees made threatening gestures at their own images, they saw their own reflection as a threat. However after some time the chimpanzees used their own projected images for self directed responding - such as grooming parts of the body before unseen without a mirror, picking their noses, making faces, and blowing bubbles at their own reflections. To even further his findings of self recognition in chimpanzees, Gallup postulated another component to the experiment - manipulating the chimpanzee's appearance and observing the reaction.
Gallup built on these observations by devising a test that attempts to gauge self-awareness by determining whether an animal can recognize its own reflection in a mirror as an image of itself. This is accomplished by surreptitiously marking the animal with two odourless dye spots. The test spot is on a part of the animal that would be visible in front of a mirror, while the control spot is in an accessible but hidden part of the animal's body. Scientists observe that the animal reacts in a manner consistent with it being aware that the test dye is located on its own body while ignoring the control dye. Such behaviour includes turning and adjusting of the body in order to better view the marking in the mirror, or poking at the marking on its own body with a limb while viewing the mirror.
At first, even animals that are capable of passing the mirror test respond as the orangutan described by Darwin.[4] Also young children and people who have been blind from birth but have their sight restored, initially react as if their reflection in the mirror was another person.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

Fantastic and amusing example and explanation of the mark/mirror/self-awareness test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-pc_M2qI74
Or the entire documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz6IxZsL ... p_play_all
animalguy888 wrote:I love animals but It is a scientific fact that animals do not have consciousness.
It is most definitely not a scientific fact that animals have, or have not, consciousness. You cannot at one moment acknowledge that there is "no scientific consensus" and then that a "scientific fact has been established" on the matter. All of the sources we have all quoted state that there is no definite answer from science on the matter right now.
Last edited by Alrai on Thu Jun 28, 2012 11:29 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Animals in History that will be Missed

Post by Grep42 »

Fine, you win on self conciesnus. I will admit instead of thinking that they are, they think that everything "is".
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Alexander »

Merged these posts to my Debate topic so no one's flooding the other topic anymore. I think I'll post my opinions later.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Grep42 »

I still say animals have emotions.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Alrai »

I believe animals have emotions also. The documentary I linked to, The Human Ape, has a segment showing bonobos caring for an injured member, as if sympathetic and interested in the well-being of that member.
Last edited by Alrai on Thu Jun 28, 2012 6:27 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Summerbreeze »

Ahem, I would like to make a statement here, so animals have no emotions, huh? So, what about your dog, when you get home, your dog is exited and happy. Your cat, warning your dog to stay away with a growl, anger and frustaration. Animals have emotions of all sorts and there is no denieing that. Many animals happen to have more emotions than humans in a way. Because humans really are not superior in any way.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Grep42 »

I wonder if the anti-emotion animal guy will join in. (National caps lock day)
Last edited by Kenya on Sat Jun 30, 2012 7:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Removing caps
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Alexander »

I agree, I think they can amount to them in some way. Maybe it's that they aren't so complex about it? Either that or they might have it in their heads, but they can't show it very well. We speak by tongue, they, or most of them, speak by body language. Maybe we don't pay attention to body language carefully enough. We don't know their "language" as well as they do. Another thing is that we can't necessarily enter their heads, so we can't tell exactly what they are thinking most of the time.
We may see ourselves as superior to any other animal on Earth, however that does not mean that these animals cannot amount to us in some way. Our emotions are complex, that's obvious. I want to point out that animals do have emotions, but maybe they aren't as complex as ours, or are they?
Another good example is that sometimes you can see dogs that are very overly depressed. One time I went to a hospital with my mom, and I got to pet this dog in the waiting room. She had this very upset, miserable look on her, her body on the floor as if she just plopped herself down to get the day over with, like she didn't enjoy just about anything coming for her. Anyway, I was allowed to pet her, in fact it was encouraged as supposedly it helps dogs relieve of their huge amounts of stress. I'm not sure if this actually works or not, but it didn't seem to work out for this dog, not by a long shot. I think she did enjoy it, but she was just so withdrawn from the world, it seems, that it's like she didn't even notice I was petting her.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Alrai »

Personally, I believe animal "consciousness" has a great amount of evidence backing it's existence.

Animal "emotion" is a lot harder to document and scientifically provide evidence for, however. Emotions, by definition, vary and change. I've never been one to question the validity of another person's emotion. If someone says they feel something, then I assume they truly do. Our own emotions are probably the one thing that we humans can be completely correct about, even if we cannot define the concept of "emotions" themselves perfectly!
As for animals, I believe it is completely a matter of common sense that they have "emotions". Because they are unable to communicate, and communication of an emotion is the only way we can be sure that any being is feeling emotion, coming up with proof for either the existence or lack of animal emotion is difficult. In affect, an animal must say "I am feeling ____" before we can prove they feel emotion. However, we know that animals' minds work in similar ways as our own do. They display different behaviors in different situations, and appear at the least "content" or otherwise in different situations. They don't speak in our language, but we can understand parts of their languages. Perhaps we are just projecting our own thoughts onto other animals and assuming they feel emotion like we do, but it makes sense to me that similar minds and similar actions is indicative of similar emotion.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by KibaWolf »

What about Wolves vs.foxes?
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by animalguy888 »

KibaWolf wrote:What about Wolves vs.foxes?
both lose in my opinion. Wolves are cool and foxes are nice but to me nothing can compare to orcas and other dolphins. Yes the orca is a dolphin.

Dolphins are ranked the second most intelegent creature on the planet right after humans which are the first.

To explain there intelegence I well randomly post part of an article.
If human standards for intelligence are applied to non-human animals, however, dolphins come very close to our own brain aptitude levels, suggests Emory University dolphin expert Lori Marino.

She's performed MRI scans of dolphin brains. The scans prove dolphin brains are:

big, relative to body size
intricate, with a neocortex "more highly convoluted than our own"
structured to allow for self-awareness and the processing of what Marino calls "complex emotions"
http://news.discovery.com/animals/dolph ... ained.html
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by KibaWolf »

By the way,animals are just as smart if not smarter than us!Dolphins get pleasure from random things.;)
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by Grep42 »

Now, Kiba. I can assure you that you are wrong on that. Take, the komodo dragon for instance. It eats it's children. That means it is purposly destroying it's own genes. While smarter creatures, like humans, care for their genes.
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Re: Debate/Discussion Topic

Post by KibaWolf »

If they're eating kids then they're starving to death.By eating the children,the mates can have a stronger litter next time around.
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