Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Survival isn't the same as 'not wanting to be dead'. Not wanting to be killed really comes from the fact that the act of being killed is usually rather painful. Fear of heights after all, doesn't come from not wanting to be high, it comes from the fear of rapid lithobraking when you lose height too quickly.

No. Would you say a baby who tastes something that's disgusting and then avoids it necessarily does so because they are 'aware of poisons' or the concept of rotting food? Would you say an animal that avoids electric shocks is necessarily aware of electricity?

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Do animals know that being killed is painful?

I'm not afraid of heights and I know lots of species that aren't either.

Does an animal avoid an electric shock? Probably not the first one.

After that it is aware of the pain that a shock gives and it avoid it. So yes it is aware of electricity. Does it know how electricity works? No. But neither do many humans.

In regards to the baby, I don't understand your point.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Cognitive reasoning is not the same as a developed ability to question on an existential level. by far, humans have the largest pre-frontal cortex in relation to the rest of the brain. we are far more developed in the realm of being self-aware. we are planners - big planners. other species may show an ability to reason, predict and logical processing, but not the the degree of a human adult. if cavemen presumably didn't ponder life / death, I doubt that animals do either, regardless of them being lower order or primates.

most likely is that the animal learns to avoid dangerous situations from its main caregivers. an adult zebra will run in the presence of a predator. the child learns to run in the presence of that predator in future.

3 chimps in a cage with some steps. there are bananas on the top step. one chimp goes up the steps to get the bananas and gets sprayed with cold water. another of the chimps tries and the same thing happens. the third chimp tries and the other two warn it off.

one chimp is replaced by a new chimp which has no experience of the cage and steps. when it tries to get the bananas, the other two warn it off. another old chimp is replaced as before and again, this new chimp tries but it warned off by the other two.

finally, the last chimp is replaced. the cage now has 3 chimps that have never been sprayed with water, yet they all know not to try and get the bananas.

animals may not know the danger, but they know to avoid certain animals and situations through a level of semantic knowledge.

this is getting into Pavlov and Skinner territories of conditioning, reinforcement and superstition, and we could talk about that all day along with learning types. The animal does not know what electricity is, it is simply aware that a particular action results in an 'unpleasant state of affairs'. it has gained no knowledge of the technicalities of what happens, it just knows it hurt, and to avoid it.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

No, but that's the point. They avoid being killed because it is painful and they avoid pain. They don't avoid being killed on principle itself. Give an animal a choice of two identical options, where one will kill them instantly without pain, and another will not, it will make a completely random 50-50 choice. You'd have to indicate somehow that the lethal box contains the concept of death.

Can you figure out any way of communicating or indicating to an animal that 'this box features death' that does not actually indicate 'this box features pain'? Without doing so there is no way to determine or prove whether animals avoid being killed.


The point is your argument is flawed, simply avoiding something from your point of view, does not mean the animal understands or possesses awareness of it's underlying concepts. Animals (including us) avoid harm by reacting instinctively to environmental cues and senses, that can be proven. Without an experimental methodology that completely excludes this aspect of their behavior it is impossible to prove if an animal is avoiding 'being killed' because they are aware of mortality and death verses simply avoiding harm because they associate it with pain.

---------- Post added at 15:04 ---------- Previous post was at 14:58 ----------

P.S. This article is a good overview on the matter of animal self awareness and 'awareness of mortality':

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a..._suicide_.html

---------- Post added at 15:05 ---------- Previous post was at 15:04 ----------

Exactly this.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

debatable, i think. would it not be more likely an animal avoids death because of a learned response (usually through observational learning - i.e., peers / caregivers will run from certain other animals), or through classical conditioning or operant conditioning (whereby an animal may not go an sit in a raging fire because the nervous system creates unpleasant sensory feedback when the animal gets too close to something hot and thus learns not to get too close next time, for example)?

I'm not sure an animal is aware that being killed is painful per-se. not unless it has been lucky enough to escape the jaws of it's killer, or drop and rolled when it walked through a fire, to use the previous examples.

it's also true that the animal may learn a fear response when it hears the cries of fellow animals during the killing process, but it may not necessarily understand the pain which its peer is suffering.

as a comparison, humans will let out screams when in extreme pain and extreme terror too (unless they are British, of course!), but they may not always be discernible from one another.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Isn't that what I just said?

Isn't that what I just said?

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

No. You stated that an animal avoids being killed because it is avoiding pain. Yet without the experience of being killed or at least caught and escaping, an animal will not necessarily know that being killed is painful. Thus, it is fair to presume that an animal avoids predators through observational learning rather than first hand experience. That is to say, it sees peers and caregivers running, so it runs too.

Unless I am reading your post wrong? Which plausible!!

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

I think you're reading it wrong. My point was animals avoid pain, and don't know anything about death or being killed, that's been my core point all along. Avoiding pain indirectly leads to not being killed because they have evolved to feel fear or pain when encountering dangerous things likely to lead to death. Just like many animals fear heights, even though heights alone will not kill you (well, unless you exit the atmosphere and suffocate), but associating fear with heights has the protective effect of also protecting you from falling dangerous distances which does kill you.

If you somehow told an animal "this will kill you but not hurt" vs. "this will hurt but not kill you" they could well avoid the painful experience and choose death.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Ah, ok. Cool

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Did you see David Attenborough's life story last night, the elephant herd came across the bones of a long dead elephant, it looked like they knew all about death.

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

Amazing series and that was indeed a wow moment...

Re: Ghostly presence explained?
 

All that article seems to do is show that they can emulate certain feelings, I fail to see how that proves (or disproves) the existance of ghosts.