It’s not obvious to me that nonhuman animals never have life goals, depending on how we draw lines. I think ensuring the welfare of one’s children (or other kin or bonds) or being high in the social hierarchy could be a life goal in nonhuman animals. This could apply fairly generally to social animals, child-rearing animals, or, depending on the cognitive requirements, only in a more limited way to just the smartest animals, e.g. subsets of primates, cetaceans, cephalopods (some octopuses even live in groups), corvids, parrots or elephants. I quote and respond to the requirements you proposed in turn.
Life goal: A terminal objective toward which someone has successfully adopted an optimizing mindset.
An “objective” can be anything someone wants to achieve. Typically, objectives are about affecting the world outside one’s thoughts or conforming to a specific role or ideal.
An objective is “terminal” if someone wants to achieve it for its own sake, not as a means to an end.
Parenting and the welfare of one’s offspring is the thing that’s reinforcing for parenting animals. If we said that it’s egoistic hedonism first, then that might get things backwards (although I’m not sure): their reinforcement is determined by their psychology that induces emotional contagion and other parenting instincts and orients them towards parenting in the first place. Saying that I only care about others because I feel bad for their suffering leaves out the explanation for why I feel bad for their suffering, and we might be able to locate a terminal objective there, although maybe this is a stretch, and what happens at this level in particular doesn’t meet the other requirements.
This is speculative, but smarter animals may even have beliefs about parenting as a goal in itself, separately from the reinforcement. I recall a case of a grandmother (nonhuman) primate berating her daughter for not caring for the grandchild. If they have an intuitive sense that others have responsibilities towards their own offspring, and are self-aware, they may have an intuitive sense that they themselves have responsibilities towards their own offspring, and fulfilling these responsibilities could amount to a life goal.
By “optimizing mindset,” I mean:
Caring about preventing changes to one’s objective (or the intention to pursue it)
I suspect this is relatively rare among nonhuman animals. Parenting animals may feel distress when their offspring are taken from them or killed, but this is not the same as asking whether they would want to not care at all, which I suspect few or no nonhuman animals are capable of.
Caring about the objective with a global scope of action (as opposed to, e.g., caring about it only during work hours and within the constraints of a narrow role or context)
Parenting in nonhuman animals plausibly meets this. They may continue to feel distressed when separated from their offspring in a way that is irregular/unplanned for long, although the mechanism could be fairly simple here: separation anxiety. Cows, for example, dislike being separated from their calves. Other animals gather or hunt for food for their offspring when they are away from them, although it’s plausible they forget that their offspring exist when they’re away.
Looking out for opportunities to pursue the objective more efficiently, e.g., working on improving one’s skills or remodeling aspects of one’s psychology[2]
Many animals will adopt more efficient approaches if they come across them and happen to try them, just through fairly simple exploration and learning. I’d guess none of them would actively try to think of ways to be more efficient, though.
First, the person needs to understand (at least on an intuitive, implicit level) what’s entailed by “being strategic in one’s thinking about objectives.” For instance, this type of mindset is conveyed (in a theoretical, explicit way) in Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Lesswrong sequences.[5] However, people can also intuitively and implicitly understand this (“street smarts over book smarts”).
There are multiple places we could draw lines. I think many nonhuman animals are capable of at least limited planning, which could mean they are “strategic”. At least, they also pursue options that they’ve learned are better through experience (including for many, through social learning), even if they don’t reason about them. Their goals determine how outcomes are reinforced for them, so that they may respond to their offspring’s distress with their own distress (e.g. chickens), and learn to prevent outcomes causing distress to their offspring. Some nonhuman animals who are capable of somewhat general causal and abstract reasoning even if it’s nonsymbolic, e.g. primates and corvids, could plausibly meet a higher bar for reasoning.
Second, the person has to decide that an objective is worthy to orient their life around – we can no longer view it as instrumental in satisfying needs. (This may not feel like a “decision” in the typical sense. Instead, someone may feel unable to contemplate choosing/acting differently.)
I think nonhuman animals can meet the parenthetical (probably not explicit decisions). I suspect for a lot of people, not becoming a parent or not taking adequate care of your children was never really an option, in some cases something they never even considered explicitly, and I would not want to exclude those as life goals.
It’s not obvious to me that nonhuman animals never have life goals, depending on how we draw lines. I think ensuring the welfare of one’s children (or other kin or bonds) or being high in the social hierarchy could be a life goal in nonhuman animals. This could apply fairly generally to social animals, child-rearing animals, or, depending on the cognitive requirements, only in a more limited way to just the smartest animals, e.g. subsets of primates, cetaceans, cephalopods (some octopuses even live in groups), corvids, parrots or elephants. I quote and respond to the requirements you proposed in turn.
Parenting and the welfare of one’s offspring is the thing that’s reinforcing for parenting animals. If we said that it’s egoistic hedonism first, then that might get things backwards (although I’m not sure): their reinforcement is determined by their psychology that induces emotional contagion and other parenting instincts and orients them towards parenting in the first place. Saying that I only care about others because I feel bad for their suffering leaves out the explanation for why I feel bad for their suffering, and we might be able to locate a terminal objective there, although maybe this is a stretch, and what happens at this level in particular doesn’t meet the other requirements.
This is speculative, but smarter animals may even have beliefs about parenting as a goal in itself, separately from the reinforcement. I recall a case of a grandmother (nonhuman) primate berating her daughter for not caring for the grandchild. If they have an intuitive sense that others have responsibilities towards their own offspring, and are self-aware, they may have an intuitive sense that they themselves have responsibilities towards their own offspring, and fulfilling these responsibilities could amount to a life goal.
I suspect this is relatively rare among nonhuman animals. Parenting animals may feel distress when their offspring are taken from them or killed, but this is not the same as asking whether they would want to not care at all, which I suspect few or no nonhuman animals are capable of.
Parenting in nonhuman animals plausibly meets this. They may continue to feel distressed when separated from their offspring in a way that is irregular/unplanned for long, although the mechanism could be fairly simple here: separation anxiety. Cows, for example, dislike being separated from their calves. Other animals gather or hunt for food for their offspring when they are away from them, although it’s plausible they forget that their offspring exist when they’re away.
Many animals will adopt more efficient approaches if they come across them and happen to try them, just through fairly simple exploration and learning. I’d guess none of them would actively try to think of ways to be more efficient, though.
There are multiple places we could draw lines. I think many nonhuman animals are capable of at least limited planning, which could mean they are “strategic”. At least, they also pursue options that they’ve learned are better through experience (including for many, through social learning), even if they don’t reason about them. Their goals determine how outcomes are reinforced for them, so that they may respond to their offspring’s distress with their own distress (e.g. chickens), and learn to prevent outcomes causing distress to their offspring. Some nonhuman animals who are capable of somewhat general causal and abstract reasoning even if it’s nonsymbolic, e.g. primates and corvids, could plausibly meet a higher bar for reasoning.
I think nonhuman animals can meet the parenthetical (probably not explicit decisions). I suspect for a lot of people, not becoming a parent or not taking adequate care of your children was never really an option, in some cases something they never even considered explicitly, and I would not want to exclude those as life goals.