In the first several chapters, Damasio mentions feelings in the context of other non-human organisms on several occasions. Each time, he indicates that certain "simple creatures" are able to have emotions but are unlikely to have feelings associated with those emotions. As well, he carefully phrases his wording so that it implies a low or no probability, but he never says that they conclusively do not have "feelings". For example:

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...very simple creatures can carry out some of these emotive behaviors even if the likelihood of feeling those behaviors is low or nil. (Pgs. 33-34)

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Since Damasio's definition for feelings (see below) precludes the ability of ever knowing for sure whether other organisms have such feelings (because of their hiddenness / subjectivity), what are some of the evidences that point to the "probability" that some organisms do not experience feelings? By what method or mechanism can we draw the line between feeling and non-feeling organisms?

Definition of emotions and feelings:

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...emotions are actions or movements, many of them public, visible to others as they occur in the face, in the voice, in specific behaviors. To be sure, some components of the emotion process are not visible to the naked eye but can be made "visible" with the current scientific probes such as hormonal assays and electrophysiological wave patterns. Feelings, on the other hand are always hidden, like all mental images necessarily are, unseen to anyone other than their rightful owner, the most private property of the organism in whose brain they occur. (pg. 28 )

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Eric

I guess we can never really no for sure, but we could make very good educated guesses.
Put simply, we can discount certain creatures on the basis that they simply do not meet the necessary requirements for having feelings.
Does this rock on the ground have feelings? Of course not. It lacks the basic requirements for feelings (a central nervous system, a brain). But can we know that it has no feelings? Of course there is no way to determine that it does not, but any sort of panpsychism of this sort is pure nonsense. (in the same way that we cannot KNOW that god does not exist, or that we cannot KNOW that the purple penguins don't exist)

Can we apply the same sort of logic to other simple creatures? I suggest that we can...to an extent.
Does a bacteria have feelings? Again, we can answer that with a confident no, as it is lacking the necessary causal mechanisms.
What about a spider? What about a fish? What about a mouse? Now we are on shakier ground. Why can we not apply the same logic to these creatures? Because our understanding of the causal mechanism of our own feeling is incomplete. We have stated a necessary condition for feelings: A central nervous system and a brain. But we have not defined a sufficient condition. Those creatures which fail to meet the necessary condition can be dismissed as being without feeling.
As for those other creatures? Well for the moment we have to leave the question open to a degree. They may or may not have feelings.

To get around this problem we will need to tighten up our necessary condition. Damasio suggests a way of doing this, by claiming that the construction of neural maps of the various systems of the body is also a necessary condition.

So, now armed with our tighter definition, we return to our "maybe" set of potential "feelers". Eliminating creatures apparently becomes an empirical biological task.

This is all well and good, but we are bound to come across a grey area...and this is by no means a problem. I strongly believe that feeling, and consciousness in general is not a matter of yes and no, have s and have-nots, Rather there are levels of "awareness".
We are conscious. Is a cat conscious?
If by that you mean is a cat conscious in the same way that we are, then the answer is a definite no. But a cat is surely conscious in its own way. It would be a "simpler" type of consciousness than we enjoy, but it would most definitely be consciousness.


Some people find the idea of different "strengths" of consciousness very difficult to accept. I am conscious. I have feelings. I have thoughts. In short I am aware that I exist, in a way a rock is not...it seems a simple on/off situation. But this I believe is far from the truth, and in fact humans can actually experience "lower" levels of consciousness. Think of being in a drunken stupor. Think of being so incredibly tired that you literally cannot keep your eyes open. I am not suggesting that this is what it is like to be a cat...rather I am attempting to show that feeling and awareness are not all or nothing things, and as such we cannot divide the animal kingdom into neat categorizations of "aware" and "unaware".

So in short, in order to answer the question we need a clearer understanding of how the physical brain causes feelings in humans. In dealing with humans we have a major advantage...they can talk to us and tell us about what they are feeling. (We will have to take their word for it, and assume that they are not liars, or mere unfeeling zombies).
Our ultimate goal would be to come up with some sort of model which describes the sufficient conditions for the various aspects of feeling. Armed with this knowledge, we can go out, and examine other creatures, and decide if they are feeling, and if so, to what extent.

CSflim

Congratulations on an interesting and well written post.

This is a subject that fascinates me and I have thought about it a lot.

When I was about 15 I read "The Herring Gull's World" by the ethologist Nico Tinbergen. (there is a big colony of Gulls near where we live) Some things he said in the book have stuck with me ever since. He described how when two male gulls share adjacent nest sites they are often show aggression to each other. Sometimes they fight but at other times they seem to be torn between two conflicting emotional states. They want to fight but at the same time they feel inhibited. In these situations they sometimes "fight" with a tussock of grass out of what looks like sheer frustration. I think Tinbergen called it "redirected aggression". Another situation is the archetypal fight/flee response.

My point is how does the animal know it is frustrated if it does not experience feeling.

Here is an piece of dialogue from my book in which one of the characters outlines how I think it happens.

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'it's the ability of two emotions to counteract each other that makes emotional behaviour such a powerful weapon. Simpler organisms like insects or other arthropods seem to behave differently. In any given situation, they will behave in a fixed way, as determined by a genetically determined stimulus/response system. Although some experiments have shown that their behavioural system is perhaps not quite so rigid as it first seems. It would not be too far off, to describe such creatures as being similar to robotic automatons, blindly running a

there is a very specific reason why we can not 'know' that other being have feeling: it can't be tested! the situation is the same as you and I discussing color. I can say something is red, you can say something is red. However, even though we agree that the color is red, we can't know that we both experience color or 'red' the same way. It is impossible for me to look inside your brain and know the exprerience is the same. We can discuss it, even agree on terminology, but we can no KNOW it is the same. This example draws from my college phychology course were I got slammed for suggesting that if humans could get ET, the extra-terrestrial, to cooperate, we could know its understanding of color.

Color seems to be the posterchild for discussing perception, so I'd like to share some material I've been reading. It turns out that our purported inability to know what another perceives as color is not as absolute as it seems, for this reason: we can do research to find out what specific wavelengths different cones respond to. Some interesting results shake out. For one thing, we assume a tri-color world; we make all our colors from three primaries, and naturally assume the rest for other animals. This is not so. Dogs and cats are sensitive to two wavelengths, thus the impression that they are color blind; but most birds have separate receptors for five different wavelengths. Like ET, we cannot know what color perception feels like for a bird. The champion known so far to science is, of all things, a shrimp, which can perceive ten separate primary frequencies AND two different gradients of light polarization; another capability common among many animals, and almost absent from human beings (our polarization sensing ability is so week that its existence is controversial).

That being said, there is another line of investigation that lends hard data to speculation about perception, and that is individual variability. It turns out that humans are the champions here: individual humans vary with regard to what exact frequency we are responding to so much that individual humans are farther apart than some related species we have studied.

So my point comes almost full circle: odds are that when you say "red", my perception is not very close to yours.

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If you make yourself really small, you can externalize virtually everything. Daniel Dennett, 1984