Do Animals Have Real Emotions? | Dr. Ralph Adolphs & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Do Animals Have Emotions?

00:00It is striking to me that maybe 30 years or ago or so there was discussion about whether animals have emotions based on these criteria priority veilance scalability and persistence. Is it generally agreed upon that animals have emotions? I believe they do because I love my dog and other animals and I want to believe that but as scientists if we step back do they meet the criteria for emotions that you're setting up here for us?

00:23Absolutely. Yes. So if you have those criteria, those functional criteria and you would add one or two others, many states in animals and certainly the states that we would ordinarily interpret as emotions in our pets, in our dogs, cats. By the way, I loved your dog in the in the waiting room there.

00:42They would meet those criteria and they would have functional emotions. Uh we should talk more about this is also the the claim now from anthropic that large language models have functional emotions as well. So wild. We have to return to that because I think it it kind of boggles the mind.

00:51You know, how could a machine have emotions? But

Machine Emotions & Conscious Experience

01:00well, but again, these are functionally defined emotions and there's I think there's no problem assigning to AI to some extent and certainly to many animals uh those functional emotions. Where it gets complicated is that in us and also by assumption in animals I have no doubt they also have conscious experiences of emotions and most people take the conscious experience of the emotion as the ground truth for the emotion.

01:28Emotions without conscious experiences of emotions sound like an oxymoron. It's like you can't have that. They the conscious experience is the emotion which is what William James said which is what Joel Leoo says. And I think it's implicitly there across essentially every psychological theory is the assumption that emotions really are types of conscious experiences which I think is the intuition that if I ask you how do you know what's the ground truth right how do you know you're having an emotion you would say because it's a certain type of conscious experience because of how it feels.

01:59And if I asked you more specifically how do you know it's sadness versus anger versus fear you would say because of how they feel. They feel different. And so we take the conscious experience, our own introspective access to the conscious experience as the ground

Studying Consciousness

02:16truth. That has a lot of problems associated with it. Deep philosophical problems. But just practically it has two big problems that I think science should avoid. One is it gets really problematic to know whether or not animals have emotions because we don't know how to test whether or not they have conscious experiences.

02:31I have no doubt that they do. It's just that there's no scientific way to test currently. So we should have different criteria. And the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate you conflate emotions with feelings.

02:47Well then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness. We spoke about Kristoff Kau earlier. Great respect for people that are studying consciousness, but I don't want to study consciousness. That's too hard. And there's lots and lots of debates and disagreements.

03:03So if we can avoid that and study emotions in the absence of

Studying Emotion

03:10needing to study conscious experiences of emotions, we can move forward with the science which is what every other discipline does. So if you're a vision researcher, right? So you study vision, you study consciousness. No, you don't you don't need to.

03:19I mean you can but there's a huge amount of work that people do studying vision and how that works in the brain studying memory you know any other cognitive process without needing to study conscious experiences they're typically accompanied in humans and if you if you talk to the lay person on the street and you say I'm a vision researcher they take you to be studying the conscious experience of seeing perhaps or if you say I'm a memory researcher they take you to be studying

03:52the conscious experience of recollection But scientifically most people working in those fields don't study consciousness and it's perfectly valid to study vision and memory you know in in in horseshoe crabs or elesia where nobody has any claims about consciousness.

03:59We should do the same thing with emotion and then we can have an integrated science across species that can move forward without needing to tackle the difficult problem of consciousness. Again, yes, for sure we and other animals have conscious experiences of emotions and that's very important.

04:24[clears throat] But we also have conscious experiences of seeing and memory. As a scientific discipline, we should separate the conscious experience from the process from the emotion and that's the way we make progress. That's the one of the main arguments that David and I had in our book and that I reiterate in the forthcoming book.

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