Animals did not possess souls, Descartes reasoned, and so they were simply pure automatons. What we saw as exhibitions of joy or grief we in truth nothing more than clever counterfeits. It was even argued that animals did not feel pain; they simply reacted to stimuli in a programed way that looked like they were feeling pain.
Philosophers are so wise.
It's easy to mock philosophers. They often have bad answers but they're often the first to ask good questions.
Western philosophy has traditionally drawn distinct divisions between 'mind' (an intangible, abstract entity) and 'body' a (tangible, concrete entity). This dualism pre-dates Descartes, and goes all the way back past Aristotle and Plato, to the Iranian prophet
Zoroaster (who is generally held to have had influence on Judaism, Christianity and Islam).
Descartes popularised and formalised dualism and so pervasive is his paradigm that we now have different sciences for each: psychology and physiology.
This particular division means that for us to consider animal thoughts and emotions, we need to argue not that they have brains (we know they generally do), but that they have
minds. The possible relationship between brain and mind has always been mysterious; the first doesn't necessarily imply the second (as illustrated by a comatose patient, or shoppers at a clearance sale). Does the second require the first?
I don't know whether we yet have a reliable test for mind -- it's not conversation (computer programs can manage that); it's not necessarily brainwaves. I don't know what it is.
But at core, the mind/body split is socially constructed. If we don't listen to Zoroaster and his successors but look at other societies, they often see things differently.
And mind -- whatever it is -- seems not to just be located in the brain. A
recent test with placebo painkillers (tablets that don't actually do anything) showed that spinal nerves fire less with a placebo. So apparently, our spinal-column is part of our mental system too. Moreover, there's a whole branch of psychology called
somatic psychology that works on changing mental patterns by changing the mind-body interaction, using essentially a different construct of how we think. Though its theoretical foundations seem dubious (a lot of somatic psychologists have some belief in
vitalism), in clinical use it has enjoyed noticable success for certain therapies (like trauma disorders). So who's to say that body isn't
also in the end, part of mind?
And if body is part of mind then it's very hard to argue that other animals with their awfully clever bodies, don't also have awfully clever minds -- we might just need to shift our Zoroastrian/Cartesian dualist construct to something more practical to fully appreciate it. (Scientists, for the most part, have already had to do this.)
