Beyond syntax to semantics

...Ethologists who study animal behaviour increasingly accept the idea that fear keeps animals away from predators, lust draws them toward each other, panic motivates their social solidarity and care glues their parent-offspring bonds. Just like us, they have an inner life because it helps them navigate their outer life...

...After you spend time with wild animals in the primal ecosystem where our big brains first grew, you have to chuckle at the reigning view of the mind as a computer...Our rational mind is truly embodied, and without this emotional embodiment we have no preferences. In order for our minds to go beyond syntax to semantics, we need feelings. And our ancestral minds were rich in feelings before they were adept in computations...The brain that ‘feels’ precedes the brain that ‘thinks’...

-- Stephen T. Asma.

Asma's On Monsters is referenced in this post.

'Grieving animals?'

Dan Sperber asks a question.

A laugh is quite catching, you see...

The infectiousness of laughter even works across species. Below my office window at the Yerkes Primate Center in Atlanta, Georgia, I often hear my chimps laugh during rough-and-tumble games, and cannot suppress a chuckle myself. It’s such a happy sound. Tickling and wrestling are the typical laugh triggers for apes, and probably the original ones for humans. The fact that tickling oneself is notoriously ineffective attests to its social significance. And when young apes put on their “play face” (as the laugh expression is known), their friends join in with the same expression as rapidly and easily as humans do with laughter.

...That is where empathy and sympathy start—with the synchronization of bodies—not in the higher regions of imagination, or in the ability to consciously reconstruct how we would feel if we were in someone else’s “shoes.”

-- Frans de Waal

Twilight souls

Having proved men and brutes bodies on one type: almost superfluous to consider minds. [1]

Almost but not quite:

He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke. [2]

What, then, to make of the 'new, scientific' study of morality by the likes of Marc Hauser, which may point to something like this:

the science [sic] of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new, richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of consequences. We probably won’t like what we see. [But] those awkward realizations may be the greatest value of moral science. [3]

How far are we here from:

No man can ever attain to anywhere near a true conception of the subconscious of man who does not know primates under natural conditions. [4]

Carlo Fausto [5] quotes Friedrich Nietzsche:

Our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls.

and Mia Couto:

In Lua-do-Chão, there is no word to say “poor.” One says “orphan.” This is true misery: to have no kin.

Footnotes

1. Charles Darwin, Notebooks on transmutations of species.

2. Darwin, 1838 notebook.

3. Reinventing Morality, a review of Moral Minds (2006).

4. Eugène Marais, in a letter from 1935, republished in an introduction to the The Soul of the Ape by Robert Ardrey. Ardrey was an advocate of the now unfashionable 'killer ape' hypothesis. More popular these days may be the 'kind ape' hypothesis. ('Twilight souls' is a term used by Marais to describe the Chacma baboons of the Waterberg. There is evidence that Australopithecus africanus and, later, Homo erectus lived in the Waterberg.)

5. Feasting on People: Eating Animals and Humans in Amazonia, 2007. DOI: 10.1086/518298

Image: Gaza

Turning of the bones

...elaborate displays of apparent maternal grief [by a gorilla] may reveal less about our [human and gorilla] shared awareness of death than our shared impulse to act as though it didn’t exist...

-- writes Nathalie Angier in a well-balanced article about the reactions of various animals (including apes, elephants, lions and social insects) to death.

Many have argued that believing that (or acting as if) death is not what it seems is a key driver of religious behaviour in humans. The Malagasy practice of famadihana, the Turning of the Bones, may be only one of the more striking examples - an "an evocation of being together again, a transformation of sorts so that the dead can experience once more the joys of life [and] most importantly...an act of love", in the words of Maurice Bloch.

It's also a commonplace that one of the hardest things to look at directly is your own death. The 'true story of your death' may appear somewhere in a book in the Library of Babel. Or, it may hit you before you know what's happening like a Bullet in the Brain.