[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud; copying my EA Forum comment about these papers from a couple weeks ago]
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.
[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud; copying my EA Forum comment about these papers from a couple weeks ago]
If the evolutionary logic here is right, I’d naively also expect non-human animals to suffer more to the extent they’re (a) more social, and (b) better at communicating specific, achievable needs and desires.
There are reasons the logic might not generalize, though. Humans have fine-grained language that lets us express very complicated propositions about our internal states. That puts a lot of pressure on individual humans to have a totally ironclad, consistent “story” they can express to others. I’d expect there to be a lot more evolutionary pressure to actually experience suffering, since a human will be better at spotting holes in the narratives of a human who fakes it (compared to, e.g., a bonobo trying to detect whether another bonobo is really in that much pain).
It seems like there should be an arms race across many social species to give increasingly costly signals of distress, up until the costs outweigh the amount of help they can hope to get. But if you don’t have the language to actually express concrete propositions like “Bob took care of me the last time I got sick, six months ago, and he can attest that I had a hard time walking that time too”, then those costly signals might be mostly or entirely things like “shriek louder in response to percept X”, rather than things like “internally represent a hard-to-endure pain-state so I can more convincingly stick to a verbal narrative going forward about how hard-to-endure this was”.