“I’d love to get your thoughts on whether it’s not only the neurobiological components of emotion that are widespread in the animal kingdom, but the subjective experience of emotions — or, conversely, whether aspects of cognition that are unique to humans modulate those components such that our experiences of emotions are likely singular.”
That’s a rather complicated way of putting it. Let me first try translating your question (which sounds like it comes from the abstract of a peer-reviewed journal article!) into ordinary lay English:
“Is the brain activity and the behavior that accompanies our feelings — and that we share with many kinds of animals — evidence enough that they, too, feel? or are human feelings somehow different?”
The answer is that there is a kind of mind/matter dualism — the idea that feelings are some sort of “non-material” stuff — lurking behind that kind of question (just as it lurks behind the belief in an immaterial, immortal “soul”).
I think the fact is that the only way we even know that other people feel is because they act much the same way I do when I feel (and so do their brains). That’s the “solution” to the “other-minds problem” (“does anything other than me feel?”): If it’s otherwise indistinguishable from me, then yes, it too feels. (That’s what’s behind Turing’s insight in the Turing Test. And, ironically, it’s the implicit assumption behind all biomedicine, both somatic and psychobiological).
I suppose that in the days of slavery, racists might have asked the same kind of question:
“How do we know that when Africans behave the same way I do when they seem to “feel” something, and so do their brains, that they really are feeling (or feeling what I or any other white person feels)? Maybe there’s something special, something different about white people”s feelings, and that’s what “modulates” their behavior and brain activity so that when it happens in them, it really means they are feeling something, but when it happens in black people it doesn’t?”
That link between dualism and racism is a bit shrill. But I think exactly — and I really mean exactly — the same reasoning is behind the notion of human exceptionalism that makes people think that when animals’ bodies and brains are doing pretty much the same thing ours are doing, they’re not really feeling: something else is going on.
And note that what is at issue here is not whether other species can think the same esoteric thoughts and harbor the same rarefied sentiments about the mind — “I think therefore I am,” “The quality of mercy is not strained,” “Sic duo faciunt item, non est item” — that we humans do.
That’s more a question about exactly what is being felt, rather than whether.
Let me speak, confidently, for other species here: “We don’t care whether you think we are having the same lofty sentiments you do. But please, don’t doubt that we are feeling. Let Shakespeare, in another racial context, be our voice”:
“I am a “beast.” Hath not a beast eyes? Hath not a beast hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, heal’d by the same means, warm’d and cool’d by the same winter and summer, as a “man” is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?.… If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”
Segner, Helmut (2016) Why babies do not feel pain, or: How structure-derived functional interpretations can go wrong Animal Sentience 2016.033
Safina, Carl (2016) Animals think and feel: Précis of Beyond words: What animals think and feel (Safina 2015) Animal Sentience 2016.002
Or, as often evoked from Jeremy Bentham from The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780):
The question is not, “Can they reason?”
nor, “Can they talk?”
but “Can they suffer?”
Video: The Mirror-Neuron Initiative
