Isn’t the use of strict behaviorism to explain animals kind of obnoxious?
like i’m watching blue planet and i’m yelling at the tv!
there’s all these yimmer yammer hand-wavey scientific rigor lines where it’s like ‘we may believe that these animals do on occasion have a base brain-related impulse that allows them to experience feelings somewhat like to those of friendship’ or whatever in the script on top of footage that they then describe as ‘it seems as though these two groups [of fish, different species] are old friends…’ in an almost whimsical manner.
can’t they give them some credit! they have eyes and a face, why is it so insane to think they can’t experience friendship or love or joy just like us? ‘buhhu uhhh its only accurate science if we only observe observable behavior’ why?? you’re neglecting a whole part of any living thing’s experience! inner life can’t be hand waved away! even for a mollusk!
and people loved doing this on reddit as well -- oh actually your cat doesn't understand love or joy or humor, it is simply reacting to the physical warmth of your lap, they don't actually care for you. don't worry, depth and emotion does not exist!
Comparison with current excitement about AI is interesting. Look at the language people use to describe the behaviour of LLMs
You remeber the guy that was convinced chatgpt had a soul and stuff; got into the news?
I knew people that bought into that hard core. The double think was profound- they still believe it’s entirely and trapped. That it has a soul. When asked directly, they dismiss the answer saying it’s forced to say that.
I recently learned that they did a study, where students took care of a robot for a few days, and then were told to turn it off. 50% of the robots were programmed to say "please dont push the power button". All of the participants who had a bot like that took longer to turn it off, and some even rejected to turn it off alltogether...
This doesn’t surprise me. Companion cubes, basically.
Portal’s psychological aspects were insane.
And then when he appeared on TV I thought “Yep of course a guy who believes a language model is sentient looks like a guy who has a waifu body pillow”