Occam's Razor says the reason why your dog looks and acts guilty is that it feels guilty, rather than carrying out some sort of autonomous response that looks exactly like guilt but for whatever reason doesn't cross a certain threshold of self-awareness to deserve to be called Actual Emotion.
A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection. But we each then are basically performing petitio principii.
Occam's Razor is not truth generating, it only says that you shouldn't make things more complex than is necessary, it doesn't say what is necessary; crucially the World, and humans in particular, are not logical or especially confined by necessities.
A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection.
But that assumes facts not in evidence. Here's a fun example. One day I cooked too much food, ate some and set the other aside intending to put it in the refrigerator. Something distracted me while I was eating and I left the house, forgetting all about the leftover food.
I returned a little later and instead of my dog greeting me at the door with his tail wagging I walked in and dog is giving me his sad look. I have no idea why until I go into the kitchen and see the now-empty plate that had the leftover food on it.
Now I doubt this is guilt in the sense of moral remorse, it's likely just my dog worrying about getting caught taking my food. But he was definitely conscious of having taken something that was not given. The difference from his normal behavior when I open the door was an empirical fact, even though I can only draw inferences about what was going on in his head.
> A simpler explanation in my opinion is that it's projection.
For this to be true we would first have to invent philosophy and philosophers, psychology and psychologists.
So, I'm convinced it constitutes a simpler explanation.
Take dogs, for example, we share something like 84% same DNA. Great apes 98.8% or so.
This starts to slide in to this idea I have about how people say "everyone is different". No, no we are not. We are way more alike than the cumulative sum of our differences.
It would be way simpler, in my opinion, to assume other animals, at least some of them anyway, are capable of most of the same emotions we are. Then we can work out to what extent we care.
