UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows
470 points by madpen 3 years ago | 194 comments- Tepix 3 years agoThere are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better.
Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human, yet here we are.
- alecst 3 years agoThere’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals.
And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stories about ourselves that separate us more and more from the rest of the world. As if all of the beautiful things that make us human stemmed from symbolic reasoning. And yet we see every day: jealousy in chimps, maternal love in cows, play in dogs, compassion in elephants, frustration in cats, curiosity in pigs.
The story that we tell ourselves about our specialness gives us a moral free pass to treat animals how we want. Which is why I think these articles tend to polarize. It’s because the implication is that if animals are really so much like us, we’ll have to come up with a much better justification for treating them how we do. For now our reasons have hinged on their supposed lack of ability to feel emotion (or even pain!). In the future it might well be because they cannot symbolically reason. We have to have some reason, in the end, for treating animals the way we do, or otherwise face a moral crisis.
I do wonder how the pre-humanist humans felt about this, like tribal people. I know they had few qualms about killing animals but at the same time assigned human qualities to them. It might have been that surviving without meat was simply impossible, which is an argument one could not easily make today.
- jdavis703 3 years agoI see nothing immoral in a bear eating a human. It’s just being a bear. But just like any other social animal, as humans we’re of course going to kill that bear so it stops eating us. It has nothing to do with us being superior than a bear. We just don’t want to die like any other animal!
And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms). As animals, we naturally eat each other. If there is something immoral about this, does that mean a rabbit is morally superior to a fox?
- meowface 3 years ago>I see nothing immoral in a bear eating a human. It’s just being a bear. But just like any other social animal, as humans we’re of course going to kill that bear so it stops eating us. It has nothing to do with us being superior than a bear. We just don’t want to die like any other animal!
Right.
>And as humans I see nothing wrong with eating other animals (outside of animal cruelty, e.g. factory farms).
Bears can't have moral culpability because they aren't intellectually sophisticated enough, much like how a theoretical profoundly mentally disabled human, or an infant human, wouldn't be morally culpable for killing someone. The "mens rea" can't be established. However, nearly all adult humans do possess the capacity for moral reasoning.
>As animals, we naturally eat each other.
Even though bears and humans are animals, and animals often eat each other, we're the only animals blessed/cursed with the knowledge that if we were to maul someone to death, they'd experience terrible pain and suffering, their life would be cut short, and their family would mourn their death and lose resource support and potentially suffer and die themselves. If a bear had those thoughts, they would be morally culpable, but they almost certainly don't.
>If there is something immoral about this, does that mean a rabbit is morally superior to a fox?
No, because a rabbit's moral reasoning is in the same class as a bear's and a fox's, and not a human's.
- blacksmith_tb 3 years agoThough I do agree with the general principle that humans are animals, when it comes to eating each other, it's clear that our greater flexibility (and understanding of our own biology) allows us to choose our diets to a greater degree than other animals. Given that, us eating fewer animals (for ecologocial, health, and/or ethical reasons) seems like the best approach.
- cjrd 3 years agoA fox eats a rabbit out of necessity. In our modern economy, people don't need to eat animals; it's usually a matter of convenience, taste, and tradition. But in all reality, we can get by quite comfortably without doing so.
- seph-reed 3 years agoSuffering is bad. Abuse is bad. Enjoyment is good.
Suffering is inevitable, abuse is not. The best we can do in life is minimize abuse while maximizing enjoyment.
Meat is not immoral, abuse is. It's really that easy. Unfortunately, most meat comes from abused beings.
- adamc 3 years agoWe have options, and options imply choices and therefore morality.
I see lots wrong with it, since it creates pain and bad life experiences. This bothers me. But that's also a choice, of what kind of morality you embrace.
- meowface 3 years ago
- q1w2 3 years agoStudying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers.
The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to realize that we continue to be stimulation based creatures. What we think at any given moment is a product of what we were thinking a moment before and the sensory stimulus we are constantly receiving.
It occurs to me that when we create an AI that surpasses us, that that AI will likely create a fundamentally different way of thinking. Something not based on external stimulus and the churning of our thoughts - but something more purposeful and ordered.
And THAT entity will be the ultimate output of humanity. We cannot imagine what it will do, or what it will do with us (probably nothing - it will probably just leave the Earth). ...but I also imagine that we are not the first in the universe to create such an entity, and so there must be other massive timeless entities in space.
Perhaps they live in the darkest parts of the universe, in quiet contemplation, or perhaps they search for each other to resist cosmic expansion. Perhaps they peacefully merge, or collaborate, or war with one another on billion-year timescales.
It's a great mystery that will forever be beyond our level of intelligence. Unless, of course, the AI wants to upload us and bring us along for the ride. ...but that notion is probably just wishful thinking and hubris. It would be like us keeping a pet fungus in our pocket so it can enjoy a day at the office.
- lm28469 3 years agoUntil it's there it's 100% sci-fi. We've been through a few AI hype cycles already and the most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid.
We might be on a completely wrong path with our current approach too, difference of degree vs difference of kind, we don't know much about the brain and so far our binary way of computing isn't really promising, especially not in term of mimicking or surpassing the human brain, it might just not be the right tool.
- medstrom 3 years agoYou start out well with the first three paragraphs, but I don't get how you can decide it will 'probably' leave the Earth, let alone with such a high degree of confidence as saying 'probably'. Why wouldn't it make an army of bots to start converting all the matter in the solar system and beyond into more computing substrate or whatever else it finds useful?
- kingkawn 3 years agoAnything invoking “ultimates” is a fever dream of people who have lost sight of life for an obsession
- burnished 3 years agoYou might be interested by neuromorphic hardware. The basic observation is that animal computation and silicon computation operate in very different ways. Animals use lots of neurons that perform comparatively poorly (slow, not deterministic) that are sparsely connected, but have a high degree of parallelism. Compared to say a computer chip, which uses relatively few components that all operate at very high speeds with a high degree of determinism, are very thoroughly connected, and do not operate at nearly the same degree of parallelism. So if we want to explore AI maybe we should try making hardware that is more similar to the goop in our heads.
- menzoic 3 years agoEven AI will be influenced by external stimulus. If it's interacting with the world, then it has to have external stimulus.
- lm28469 3 years ago
- leafmeal 3 years agoMore about language, apparently, not all languages have that "ideas within ideas within ideas" property you were talking about. The Pirahã language of an indigenous people in Brazil is the counter example. This New Yorker article talks about it and the fascinating effects it had on the field of linguistics. Before its discovery most linguists, Led by Chomsky, believed having recursion in our grammars set humans apart from all other animals. Pirahã showed this might not be the case.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...
- Melatonic 3 years agoI always wonder how the hell I would think or solve even simple problems without language. It seems extremely foreign.
- theoriu234 3 years ago> We are like gods compared to other animals.
The linguistic ability of most Humans is at the level of GPT3 - probably why statistical approaches work so well in NLP.
- burrows 3 years ago> There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals.
Does emoting about a claim make it true somehow?
- stremrn8 3 years ago
- wcarron 3 years agoThere's nothing immoral with eating things. Why would there be? The other posters' rabbit-fox example is a great point.
I also strongly reject the idea that we need 'our specialness' to 'justify eating things and how we treat them'. I don't need justification beyond: 'That thing is made of meat. I can eat meat. I'm going to kill it and eat it'. There is no moral crisis. Things die. Things get eaten.
Just 2 days ago, I caught 2 mice that had been living a nice life in my attic (because I was lazy for a few weeks). I drowned them in a bucket. Is there a moral crisis there? No. They were vermin, living where I decided they cannot (because I live in that space). There is no difference between that and a scorpion killing small spiders trying to spin webs in its burrow.
I also think you've touched on something: We created distinctions that 'separates us more and more from the rest of the world'. If what you say is true, then they're simply illusory. If humans are so like animals (indeed we simply are the apex animal), an attempt to force morality onto our natural impulses and diets is absurd. Therefore, killing and eating anything we can reasonbly digest is a natural behavior of the human animal. Returning to the rabbit-fox example... well, clearly you can see meat-moralilizing falls apart in a hurry.
- Stupulous 3 years agoThis is a fascinating twist to me. Human exceptionalism is what lets us justify not eating other animals- if we're not special then there is no reason we should be held to a different standard. I have encountered many conversations with the opposite premise and it never occurred to me that it should be reversed. Thanks for the new perspective.
- mbil 3 years ago'That thing is made of meat. I can eat meat. I'm going to kill it and eat it'
I am made of meat -- hopefully we don't cross paths!
- dTal 3 years agoIt sounds to me like you don't believe in morality in general at all. Assuming I'm wrong - what is morality to you?
- Stupulous 3 years ago
- jdavis703 3 years ago
- elif 3 years agoIt's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally.
I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.
- psbp 3 years agoI eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.
- WanderPanda 3 years agoThis is interesting! So you‘re extrapolating the reduction of babaricness that humanity expresses historically into the future and that the threshold will be so low that killing animals for food will be seen as one of the most babaric thing humans do by then. I think for this to happen we would need to shield us quite well from the inherent babaricness of nature. „Why should I not eat animals, if lions are doing it everyday?!“ on the other hand we also got better in shielding us from reality in form of video games, netflix etc. On the flipside these virtual worlds are often excessively babaric, e.g. horror movies or shooter games. So in the end it is not so obvious to me that we will see eating animals as babaric. Maybe we will rather view it as very inefficient and primitive instead?
- pm90 3 years agoI have come to accept this as well.
I try to use the “Alt meat” Version or fish when possible though to reduce meat consumption. But I’m incapable of giving it up altogether at this point.
I do find the alt - meat to be good enough for cooked meat though; I think there is a huge market here.
- lordnacho 3 years agoSame here, in some ways I regard myself as a pre-abolition slave owner/user (analogy breaks down somewhat, is it the farmer who is the slave owner?). I get the feeling society will change and this thing that used to be common will slide towards being seen as despicable, worthy of having your statue thrown in the water.
Originally I was reducing my meat intake for health reasons but thinking about it more and more it does seem to be a cruel thing to kill animals for meat, and doesn't seem necessary. I still do it at a reduced rate because I'm basically not strong willed enough and I want to be part of society, which has very few qualms about raising animals for slaughter. I also can't deny the stuff tastes good, and one thing I've seen with addictive traits is it's very hard to separate your desires from your moral judgement: if you want something, you will think of an excuse to get it. So now I just acknowledge the hypocrisy and eat a bit of meat now and again.
One loophole I thought about was wild animals. Maybe someone has thought about this more than me, but wild fish and roaming animals would be condemned to either predation, disease, or starvation if we didn't hunt them. Does that change the moral calculus? I'm not sure.
- lm28469 3 years agoThe only barbaric thing about it imho is the scale and way we do it, not the process of eating meat in itself. There is a big difference between eating 300gr of cheap meat from a shady slaughterhouse every day vs once in a week piece of meat hunted by a local friend.
But that's capitalism for you, we basically have meat factories now, we have to make it cheap and in mass quantities no matter the "moral" aspect of it
- WanderPanda 3 years ago
- jdavis703 3 years agoAfter 14 years of eating a plant-based diet my partner got a cat. Then I started buying the cat raw meat. Shortly after I became an omnivore again. I still try to minimize meat for my own health and the climate, but it’s hard to argue about the ethics of meat eating while feeding an obligate carnivore.
- toper-centage 3 years agoThat's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.
- toper-centage 3 years ago
- cstross 3 years agoIf you follow the links through to the original paper --
https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...
-- you'll see that a variety of felines (including domestic cats) are among the species listed as having play vocalizations.
- williamdclt 3 years agoI've never heard of "can it laugh" as a criteria to judge morality?
- ramblerman 3 years agoOP is suggesting that laughter is a measure of intelligence, and that it might be immoral to feed a more aware/intelligent creature to a lesser one.
In the same way we might be uncomfortable eating dolphins.
- ramblerman 3 years ago
- Ygg2 3 years agoWe keep cats, cause they are small and fun to be around. Not because they laugh or have high IQ.
- psbp 3 years ago
- naasking 3 years ago> We've merely reached an intelligence threshold
Depends what you mean by intelligence. Ravens and chimps are almost as good as humans at causal reasoning, ie. correlating and inferring causes and effects from observations. This seems to fall under a typical understanding of "intelligence".
Where we differ is that we can communicate such knowledge between individuals very effectively, and across generations, which seems to yield a compounding effect. I think small, compounding network effects like this are behind apparent human "superiority".
- peterburkimsher 3 years agoHere's a few guesses, please correct me if I'm wrong about these!
The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer.https://github.com/dwmkerr/hacker-laws#cunninghams-law
Culture list from https://github.com/peterburk/sortlikes based on a manual categorisation of friends' liked Facebook pages, when trying to learn Mandarin while living in Taiwan a few years ago.
Unique to humans:
{ Art, Dance, Photography, Theatre, Banking, Business (Management), Causes (NGOs), Comedy, Cooking, Clothing, Driving, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Religion, Sport, Transport, Software, Hardware }
Shared with other species:
{ Accommodation, Children, Cleaning, Construction, Drinking, Education, Games, Health, International, Military, Pets }
- circlefavshape 3 years agoPolitics is definitely not unique to humans - alliance-building is commonplace among social animals. It's well-known that primates have a sense of fairness, so they might have causes too.
News is essentially gossip writ large, so if other animals have language then they definitely have this.
Banking, photography, driving, movies, software and hardware are all recent human inventions, so it's kinda irrelevant whether other animals have those
Clothing may be unique to humans, but historically not all humans have used clothes.
Bird and whale song is probably music. Birds do courtship dances. IMO this probably counts as art.
Again if other animals have language they might also have comedy, religion, theatre - without knowing that they don't have language then we can't rule those out.
Business - not sure. If other animals have trade then I guess that's business? There's some evidence of exchange among other animals, but I'm not sure it counts as "trade" https://theconversation.com/what-trade-deals-can-teach-us-ab...
All that's left unique to us is cooking.
I suspect your first list could be reduced to one definite - "fire" - and two maybes "language" and "trade". I'd bet that maybe animals have language, but that we haven't deciphered it yet
- vageli 3 years ago> All that's left unique to us is cooking.
Seems we may not be the only ones that cook after all.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/06/03/411748170/ch...
- Ygg2 3 years agoWhat's unique to humans is the quantity and quality. Sure. Every species does something we do. But compared to us, not a single species does everything, nor to a degree we do.
- vageli 3 years ago
- macrolime 3 years agoSeveral species can dance to music
https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/04/01/297686709/t...
- circlefavshape 3 years ago
- fleddr 3 years agoHuman being are only "special" within the context of our very recent modern world.
Take an average human being and drop them at an island. Now we have a "base" human being, the pure species if you will. Things like humour, sarcasm and ethics have lost all meaning now, which shows they're not special at all.
The typical urban person would probably die at the island as they can't hunt or farm. Somehow this pretty critical base knowledge was not passed on.
In the more optimistic scenario, the island people adapt to relearn basic survival, which would rank them as social hunters. Which is fine, but not that special.
Importantly, these smart hunters would be unable to reinvent even the basic necessities of the modern world. Because even a human with 20 years of education doesn't know how anything works, they only make use of things. Again, the knowledge is NOT passed on.
So it's not us that is special, it's our modern world that is special. Which is situational and the result of a handful of critical inventions, many less than a century old.
These inventions were not guaranteed or destined to be. There's even historic cases of anti-development in humans, where a population failed to pass on learned techniques and tools, after which subsequent generations became increasingly less "sophisticated". None of which is surprising, as for the entire existence of our species, minus 10K years (agriculture), we were social hunters. Not god-like creatures. The average modern human being is less than a social hunter when the electricity goes down.
- timoth3y 3 years ago“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” -- Mark Twain
- elif 3 years agoMark should see my dog after he eats cat food.
- elif 3 years ago
- JumpCrisscross 3 years ago> there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals
This is a compact and ex post facto unsurprising list. Primates, social mammals, domesticated mammals and certain birds. The line between us and social apex predators (cats, dogs and certain birds, all of whom our ancestors allied with ages ago) are blurry. The line between us and most species are stark.
- circlefavshape 3 years agoWow. You've just given me a vision of a future where we know enough about other animals that we've been forced to give up on human exceptionalism, so we fall back to insisting on social-apex-predator exceptionalism instead
- JumpCrisscross 3 years agoIf we can’t acknowledge that complex tool wielding and laughter are potentially galaxies apart in terms of abundance, that future looks grim.
- JumpCrisscross 3 years ago
- circlefavshape 3 years ago
- menzoic 3 years agoAlso keep in mind all of our perception or judgements about who is more superior are being made by...humans
- abeppu 3 years agoI think even if laughter is something we have in common with lots of animals, humour still seems rather special to me. Laughing when tickled doesn't clearly indicate anything special is going on, but constructing and telling a joke requires not just language at the level of a structured system of symbols carrying meaning, but also a kind of counterfactual theory of mind. A humorist understands and manipulates expectations in order to violate them in a nonthreatening manner.
- throwawayboise 3 years agoTFA speculates that laughter or similar vocalizations are a signal of nonagression in play. Play is necessary for animals to learn to hunt and survive. There is no indication that the "laughter" is due to a feeling of "joy" as humans experience it, but I guess there's no way to really know either. Do we observe animals telling jokes to each other, or laughing when another of their group slips and falls?
- shafyy 3 years agoWhat is more, there is probably some overlap of "intelligence" among humans and other species. E.g., I'm pretty sure that there are Chimps that are more intelligent and self-aware than some humans. Most certainly funnier, if we would understand their humor :-)
- heresie-dabord 3 years ago> Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human
In humans, humour is a debugging process, which is fundamentally rational. The very fact that a statement can be correct or erroneous is the basis of language and therefore education and social evolution.
> there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals
Evolution is true. But... the ESA and NASA have sent a space telescope to a stable position at Lagrange point 2, and the PRC has a rover exploring the dark side of the Moon.
Humans do have greatness.
- toper-centage 3 years agoIs there any fundamental difference between poor people and rich people other than their privilege and riches? Could poor people send a space telescope to space?
Human animals have very similar tools to those of other social animals. We're just privileged to somehow be able to stack up our experiences to create science and technology. But isolated tribes in the amazon could never send telescopes to space.
So we're only special due to our circunstance. Our bodies are barely fit to stand and walk all day, we're pushing the limits of where we're supposed to live, and our diets are all wrong. But we make it work because our ancestors developed knowledge sharing to a global level.
Were just very lucky priviledged apes.
- lm28469 3 years ago> In humans, humour is a debugging process
I always find it amusing that we evolved brains, developed computers to crudely mimics our brain, created words to describe said computers and we now use these words on us as if we were computers ourselves... it's almost insulting, we're not computers. Your memory has nothing to do with ram/ssds, your brain isn't a cpu, these are all one way over simplified analogies
- heresie-dabord 3 years ago> I always find it amusing that [...]
Egg zachary. You are amused by something, you explained where you think you see an error.
You can choose a different verb to avoid "debug", but you just provided a suitable illustration of humour as an application[1] of reason.
[1] tech pun not intended, but fitting
- heresie-dabord 3 years ago
- toper-centage 3 years ago
- IAmGraydon 3 years agoI’ve thought about this quite a lot, and always come to the same unique characteristic: man can think about thinking.
- ajuc 3 years agoMy parents had 2 dogs, Irish setter and a mutt we rescued. The mutt was significantly smarter. I've seen her burying a bone she got in one place, notice that the other dog is watching, wait for the other dog to go back home, and rebury the bone in a different place.
This implies at least basic theory of mind and thinking about thinking. This wasn't the only evidence btw.
Before that we had a different dog, also a mutt. He was pretty aggressive and had a separate fenced area inside our backyard. There was a cherry tree just outside that fenced area and our cat liked to sit there, but only if the dog is locked in the fenced area. That dog learnt to close the gate to look as if it's locked and sit in there waiting for the cat to climb the tree, AND wait for us to go to school/work, and only then he would leave the fenced area and bark under the tree at the cat for hours. We only knew thanks to neighbors.
In general theory of mind is very useful to any social animal and especially to predators, so I don't think it's as unique to humans as some people say.
- giantg2 3 years agoThe more domesticated the animal is, the dumber it tends to be. Wild animals, or even strays, have to think to survive. I wonder if this also translates to humans given the articles about IQ peaking in the previous century.
- giantg2 3 years ago
- tuatoru 3 years agoI seem to recall an experiment with corvids (crows) that showed that they can figure out whether or not another crow can or cannot see a crow treat, based on the different angle of view.
In human children this ability (to realise that other people have their own point of view) is called "theory of mind", IIRC.
IOW crows can think about what other crows are thinking.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3 years agoSeveral animals display theory of mind, including the variety of pig common in farming.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3 years ago
- ajuc 3 years ago
- alecst 3 years ago
- bckr 3 years agoThis is one of the most beautiful ideas to have ever entered my awareness.
Laughter is hard to beat in terms of sheer beauty--the more of it in the universe, the better. And on same planet what's more!
- peterburkimsher 3 years agoLaughter is remarkable because, like clapping, it's contagious, and it shares joy and happiness with a whole community.
In the process of laughing together, our bodies move in time, which synchronises our muscle movements, which synchronises our heartbeats.
Yes, laughter is very powerful, and is a wonderful force for good in the universe :)
- the_af 3 years agoI've read, but forgot where, that grinning -- not exactly laughter, but a related act -- is also related to aggression or has its roots in it. It's hard to deny exposed teeth in a wide green -- think chimpanzee -- look at least slightly threatening.
- bckr 3 years agoThink about this--as omnivores, we are happy when fed by flesh--Feasting amidst laughter--joy amidst butchery.
Can we transcend this--sublimate laughter into a realm of undeathful life? Should we? Are vegans and transhumans idealogical bedfellows?
I love chickens--as pets and as dinner.
- bckr 3 years ago
- uhtred 3 years agoI find it sad that not many people seem to laugh genuinely. So many people do the fake laughter, wiping away imaginary tears, at things which just aren't funny but which they seem to think they should appear to find really funny in a group.
- fastball 3 years agoNot to be nitpicky but I would say there are definitely situations where laughter is not a positive (edit: or beautiful) thing – laughing at someone else's misfortune, laughing in pain, etc.
- lostlogin 3 years agoCompletely agree. However some of the most painful things I’ve done have been objectively hilarious.
I wish I’d seen me drop a beehive.
- nomilk 3 years agoFrom Paul Graham's 'Taste for Makers' essay:
> humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them.
- nomilk 3 years ago
- bckr 3 years agoAbsolutely. Nevertheless, and to nitpick, "beauty" and "positivity" are not isomorphic.
- jcims 3 years agoI just have to say that i have had a word stuck on the tip of my tongue for an embarrassingly long time, maybe six months now. I’ve had occasion to use it several times recently on a project but it was just stuck wherever words get lost. I’m cruising HN in a post completely unrelated to what I’m doing and there it is, in living color: isomorphic.
I could feel the tension release in my brain as it sunk in. Thank you!
- fastball 3 years agoSure, but I wouldn't call laughing as the world burns "beautiful" either – more "psychotic".
- amelius 3 years agoBut rats and cows don't know that.
- jcims 3 years ago
- baskethead 3 years agoTragedy and comedy are the basis of all theater.
- bouvin 3 years ago“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.” Mel Brooks [1]
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21470-tragedy-is-when-i-cut...
- fastball 3 years agoBut not all theater is meant to make you laugh?
- bouvin 3 years ago
- trollied 3 years agoIndeed. I have a nervous laugh that sneaks out in less than ideal situations :(
- lostlogin 3 years ago
- peterburkimsher 3 years ago
- mch82 3 years agoFor those wondering which animals…
> They found such vocal play behavior documented in at least 65 species. That list includes a variety of primates, domestic cows and dogs, foxes, seals, and mongooses, as well as three bird species, including parakeets and Australian magpies.
Quote from the UCLA Newroom article referenced in the OpenCulture article, https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/animals-laugh-too-ucla-an...
- KineticLensman 3 years agoThe full list is in the original research article [0], in both tabular and cladogram form.
[0] https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...
- neuronic 3 years agoSince this is so broadly spread among species I wonder if there are other forms of laughing that aren’t easily detected if you don’t know about it. Does some form of muscle spasms occur in all of these animals?
Closely watching my cat now.
- rcarmo 3 years agoYou should watch it closely anytime, it is very likely to be plotting something even if you can't tell it's laughing manically...
- KineticLensman 3 years ago> Since this is so broadly spread among species I wonder if there are other forms of laughing that aren’t easily detected if you don’t know about it
Yes. As per the original research article, some of the vocalisations are outside the range of human hearing.
- rcarmo 3 years ago
- JumpCrisscross 3 years agoSo in summary: primates, social mammals, domesticated mammals and vocal bird species?
- marcosdumay 3 years agoThat short list is just social mammals and social birds. But I can't say if this is not selection bias from the researchers.
- marcosdumay 3 years ago
- KineticLensman 3 years ago
- MattGaiser 3 years agoSo what does that look like in a dog? My family has a dog and she has a pretty nice life and is usually pretty happy, especially when upsidedown having a belly rub. Are her flailing legs and head and panting considered dog laughter?
- niyaven 3 years agoThis is an accurate recording of dog laughter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIj4WAP6BaI
According to research[1] whispering while playing with your dog can initiate play more reliably. This is because our whisper is closer to the frequencies of their laugh. It is even more powerful than the play-bow.
- joshschreuder 3 years agoMy dogs growl and yip when wrestling with each other, I feel like this probably comes under the “non-aggressive vocalisation” mentioned in the article.
Growling is obviously a well known sign of fear and aggression but I guess the context is important.
- niyaven 3 years agoWhen playing dogs will indeed bark, growl and whines, but also produce a forced exhalation: that's their laugh. Other sounds can be produced in other contexts indeed, whereas this dog laughter is exclusive to play.
- sgt101 3 years agoDo you mean the "sorta sneeze" they do? I think mine do that when they think/want that we are going on a walk or into the garden to run about. It's a signal of "let's go adventuring".
There's also the high pitched excited yip and then the tongue out wiggling walk thing as well both of which might be laughter I think.
- sgt101 3 years ago
- niyaven 3 years ago
- xapata 3 years agoMaybe wagging? Some dogs play-growl when playing tug.
- niyaven 3 years ago
- jrlocke 3 years agoThis is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented.
As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.
An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.
An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.
I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.
- alecst 3 years agoHow come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it?
Why isn’t the starting point that they do have feelings like us and we have to find evidence against it?
Really, other animals are so similar to us on every dimension except language that I wonder why people reason this way. Mammals in particular. I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty. It’s harder to buy an argument that we are just projecting our human notion of guilt onto her, rather than she simply feels guilt.
To put it another way, your position implies that all of these things were experience — laughter, grief, guilt, shame, deception — might have begun with humans. For me, that’s a position you need a lot of evidence for.
- medstrom 3 years agoEven more concerning, who's to say a simpler mind / smaller brain would experience less sorrow? Maybe our large brains actually put a cap on the sorrow we are capable of, due to interference, and a simpler brain is capable of experiencing pure sorrow so much more deeply?
- jrlocke 3 years ago> I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty [therefore she likely experiences guilt].
I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.
Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.
- omginternets 3 years ago>How come for you the starting point is that animals do not have feelings and emotions like us, and that we have to have evidence for it?
That's not exactly what he's saying. He's saying that the overall qualia of an animal is not that of a human. In other words, despite (arguably) having certain experiences that are similar (or even identical) to humans, the totality is different in an important way.
More concretely, the argument is as follows: just because a dog feels guilt doesn't mean (a) it's felt in an equivalent way to humans, nor (b) that the overall experience of a dog is equivalent to that of a human.
- alecst 3 years agoIt’s not clear how (b) is relevant to the conversation.
Regarding (a) I would have the exact same reply. Unless the word “equivalent” is playing a critical role for you, because it will be impossible to prove or disprove equivalence. My experience of guilt may not even be equivalent to yours strictly speaking, and we belong to the same species, I assume ;-).
- alecst 3 years ago
- me_me_mu_mu 3 years agoAlso animals have they own languages it’s just they use smell or grunt or bop
- medstrom 3 years ago
- naasking 3 years ago> This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states.
Here's an even less popular opinion: most human-like mental states are a fiction, so the distinction you're trying to draw probably doesn't really exist. The mental states you attribute to suffering are merely a proxy for the behaviour you see from both humans and paramecia.
- gman83 3 years agoIt's been pretty well demonstrated, for example in pigs: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8sx4s79c
- anshumankmr 3 years agoThey are like us, but they aren't us. This is an example of the former.
- glenstein 3 years agoI completely agree, and I think it's gotten out of control.
Lately it has become vogue to attribute human intelligence to slime molds because they do complex things like solve mazes. Then that behavior gets put side by side with, say, mice trying to solve mazes.
Perhaps the most egregious, in my opinion, is the way people unreflectively attribute terms to plants. I hate being a nerd about definitions, but sometimes playing and joking around with definitions serves to embed fundamental misunderstandings about the natural world.
Here at hn and elsewhere, I've seen people insist that plants can "feel", that they "communicate" and are "conscious", very intentionally attempting to insist that it's same in the deepest sense as what humans do.
- alecst 3 years ago
- pleb_nz 3 years agoI had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species.
- wombatmobile 3 years ago> I had no idea laughter had previously been believed as confined to so few species.
What humans believe about other species tells us a lot about humans, and nothing about other species.
- pleb_nz 3 years agoReminds me of
[My father] taught me “See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird–you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way,” and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on. Richard Feynman, “What Is Science?“, presented in 1966
- pleb_nz 3 years ago
- kwhitefoot 3 years agoI think it is more that it is now demonstrated to be a feature of at least this many species.
- wombatmobile 3 years ago
- wqtz 3 years agoHere is the paper >> https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...
I was curious about how they were defining laughter? I am a bit skeptical to be honest about the idea of change in behavior when we apply something to animals that will trigger a laughter in human. We can't be sure if that change behavior is indicative of joy and expressed through the vocalization of laugher.
The paper seem to be (I have skimmed) focused on group dynamics to determine what is laughter. They indicate that how animals signals they were having joy by making vocalization and it indicates social play.
Here is a super cute video of how social play would work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2EmA_UwIM8
But I am not sure if the animals are laughing though.
- neuronic 3 years agoThis is probably me not being able to “read the room” but this study both makes me very happy and very sad.
I recently watched Dominion documentary [1] and the more we learn about animals cognition the more I feel the weight of their massive abuse especially in the last 150 years. (The recent story of an HNer interacting with a spider on his desk was really cool though, I don’t have a link anymore.)
Without judging anyone or their behavior in particular I just feel repelled by our treatment of other clearly cognitive beings. The people working these places don’t seem like ones you would want around anyone in society either and I don’t buy the story that it’s only bad in some places. I’d wager that it’s really bad in most cases.
- austinjp 3 years agoI think you're reading the room perfectly well. Or at least, reading the mood of plenty of people.
We're only going to find ever-increasing numbers of animals that demonstrate various forms of cognisance. Hopefully we'll continually re-evaluate our collective actions as a globally dominant species.
Perhaps you should avoid reading about Harry Harlow's "wire mother" experiments [0]. They're abjectly depressing, and demonstrate how horrifically cruel humanity can be toward other creatures.
- Luc 3 years agoCultured meat will become widely available soon. I have high hopes.
- seanwilson 3 years ago> widely available soon
I keep hearing this but we're likely still decades anyway from this scaling up to replacing most meat so I think individuals who care about this issue right now shouldn't be using it as an excuse for waiting to give up meat.
It's been just around the corner for ages and still not in supermarkets, let alone at the scale and cut variety required for everyone to replace meat with it.
Stances like "I'll switch when it's the same look and taste but cheaper" and "it's unnatural" are going to take time to go away too. And what about people that want a whole roast chicken or a duck leg?
There's lots of good replacements already for dairy milk for example but it's still popular so I'm not hopeful cultured meat will be different. Maybe the real issue is the cost of animal products don't take externalities into account and are artificially cheap.
- neuronic 3 years agoThis is my hope as well but I have already heard the backlash: it's pharma companies trying to control our food.
Increasingly, I feel afraid of the lunatics trying to hinder progress like some 14th century catholics. Progress to me means also an increasing awareness of the limitations of our ecosystems and that infinite growth is a myth.
- seanwilson 3 years ago
- austinjp 3 years ago
- GoblinSlayer 3 years agoHuh, foxes. Everything foxes say sounds like laughter though.
- liquid153 3 years agoWhat the fox say.
- liquid153 3 years ago
- Closi 3 years agoI wonder what their jokes are (outside of tickling) it’s hard to imagine a rat punchline.
- whythre 3 years agoI doubt any of the laughs are provoked by verbal ‘jokes.’ But rats are very smart, and play (wrestle) around with each other. It’s probably not too different from kids giggling as they engage in rough and tumble play.
- dotancohen 3 years agoI've seen a rat punchline.
One of my rats loved to nibble pencil erasers. She would find all sorts of creative ways to get the eraser from me. With rats, who need stimulation, it's good to have arms wars. I don't put the eraser in an impossible spot, rather a harder-to-get-to spot.
She figured out that if she distracts me while doing homework, I'll turn my attention to the distraction. She could then run around from the other side to scoop up my eraser and take it somewhere to nibble. I began to catch her in the act and call her name as if I'm frustrated (but laughing) when she does this, like I do with my children today when they put a clothespin on my shirt then run off. One time, she picked up the eraser and ran off. But I was too busy to play along right away, I just let her scoot off. So she sat there, with the eraser, waiting for me to finish and then chase her down. Apparently she was no longer stealing the eraser to nibble, rather, it had become a joke between us.
- sgt101 3 years agoyou love your rat and that's really sweet - you made my morning.
- sgt101 3 years ago
- bradrn 3 years agoI’ve seen Australian magpies do exactly the same thing. I was thoroughly unsurprised to see that they are in the list of laughing animals as well.
- dotancohen 3 years ago
- Ankaios 3 years agoAs hard as it is to imagine a rat punchline, I find it even harder to imagine the tiny little cups they'd put the punch in.
- quicklime 3 years agoI wonder if a rat would find this magic trick funny: https://time.com/4145151/orangutan-barcelona-zoo-magic-trick...
- wombatmobile 3 years agoQ: What did the duck say when he bought lipstick?
A: "Put it on my bill."
- yololol 3 years ago
- purplecats 3 years agoperhaps more visceral humor in the form of schadenfreude
- coldtea 3 years agoEver watched Tom and Jerry?
- whythre 3 years ago
- Ccecil 3 years agoFerrets vocalize quite a bit and I fully expected them to be on the list before I checked.
Anyone who has had one as a pet knows they laugh when tickled and "talk" quite a bit. When they are happy they make a hard to explain "cooing" noise as they go about their mischief.
- mrVentures 3 years agoAnytime's a good time to go vegan.
- sigzero 3 years agoSure but no.
- sigzero 3 years ago
- notRobot 3 years agoComplete list of animals found to have play vocalisations (laughter) can be found in the linked study (pdf): https://gabryant.scholar.ss.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/site...
Includes species of cats, dogs, monkeys, rodents, birds, others.
- albatross13 3 years agoGood to finally have confirmation that my rats are indeed laughing at me when we try and play and they run away from me.
- kwyjibo1230 3 years agoHeinlein wrote in Stranger in a Strange Land that "Man is the [only] animal who laughs." Who's laughing now? (Rats and cows apparently).
All jokes aside, interesting research. We find ourselves more similar than dissimilar to our less sentient counterparts each year.
- 3 years ago
- gtsnexp 3 years agoThis is where everything started : https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31564493/
- pkrumins 3 years agoDoes anyone know if they found if cats laugh? I can't find it.
- GoblinSlayer 3 years agoNo way, cats play in total silence. They have keen hearing and don't need any special play signal on top of that.
- GoblinSlayer 3 years ago
- kingkawn 3 years agoThe supposed differences between us and other creatures are pretenses for our violence against them, not scientific observation or data.
- yread 3 years agoHow did they electrically stimulate the neurons of the rats? They wouldn't cut them open to study whether they are ticklish, right?
- jadbox 3 years agoI really want to hear audio samples of each of the species listed as just to hear the range of laughter types amoung species!
- 3 years ago
- 01100011 3 years agoI wonder what Gary Larson will do with this discovery...
- 3 years ago
- erfgh 3 years agoSo a guy tickles a rat and the rat makes sounds. This apparently amounts to "laughing" and somehow should make us feel the rat more closely resembles a human.
What a load of bunk.
- pygy_ 3 years agoWe’re distant cousins, it’s not surprising we have common traits.
AFAIK, there is no single trait that is qualitatively human. We distinguish ourselves quantitatively (our fine motor skills, the size of our working memory and culture).
- pygy_ 3 years ago
- angusiasty 3 years agoThat's an old finding. professor Jordan Peterson was talking about it for years. I can't remember the name of the researcher he was referring to, but he found that in rats.
- tamaharbor 3 years agoSo that cow WAS laughing at me!
- jiggawatts 3 years agoMy pet theory is that laughter isn't "just" a play signal, but a teaching method in social animals where the young learn from adults.
Slapstick is popular for a reason. We laugh instinctively at others' accidents because being laughed at provides a negative reinforcement for the individual that is the object of ridicule.
Being laughed at is not pleasant, at all. It's not "fun" or "play". It hurts. Most people will do anything to avoid being laughed at, especially in public or social situations.
That's... the point! Being laughed at is negative reinforcement, teaching us what not to do. The reason even our friends and family will hurt us emotionally in this manner when we make a mistake is not because they're cruel or mean, but because this is the mechanism the human species uses to make sure every tribe member learns the lessons they need to learn to keep each other safe.
That's why we all think it's funny if someone slips on a banana peel. We point and laugh as the victim is crying in pain.
We don't think it's funny if a banana tree falls on someone. We don't laugh. We run over to help immediately.
In the first case the person wasn't paying attention and needed their inattention corrected. They were at fault and needed to be taught how to walk safely, like a young child.[1]
In the second case they were not at fault and laughing wouldn't help them improve. They just need help.
If we didn't find laughing at silly people pleasant, we wouldn't do it, and then... people would learn less and make more mistakes. They -- our children or cousins -- might even die or accidentally kill other tribe members killed through their ineptitude. Hunting is lethally dangerous. Mistakes must be punished. Laughing minimises mistakes in our genetic kin and tribe members on whom our own reproductive fitness depends. Hence, laughing would be highly selected for in intelligent social creates like apes and especially humans.
PS: It's a fun exercise to think of more scenarios where you would laugh at someone or similar scenarios where you wouldn't. You'll find that much of the time you would laugh, the person you're laughing at would have probably learned a lesson from that that's beneficial to you. (e.g.: would keep you safer if they made less mistakes in the workplace around dangerous tools.)
[1] Young children are especially hilarious to adults precisely because they make so many mistakes that need correcting! We laugh less at adults because there's a delicate balance between hurting people emotionally versus the expected benefit of the lesson being taught. Similarly, senior people will laugh at the mistakes of junior people, but the other way around is very rare.
- spoonjim 3 years agoI’ve never understood why tickling feels so unpleasant but makes me laugh uncontrollably.
- goldroger9090 3 years ago[flagged]