Mama's Last Hug
A whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on De Waal's renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos, and other primates. De Waal discusses facial expressions, animal sentience and consciousness, Mama's life and death, the emotional side of human politics, and the illusion of free will. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, all the while emphasizing the continuity between our species and other species. And he makes the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we don't have a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same is true for our emotions -- Adapted from publisher's description.
Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
5people
2019–2023years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In addition to "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" another book by Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" is also well worth the read.
- > You could feel the panic and protective instinct in her movements.
This comment reminded me of a great book I read called Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.
https://www.amazon.com/Mamas-Last-Hug-Animal-Emotions/dp/039...
- He's a primatologist, but has been a leader in studying emotion and intelligence in primates for decades. Both this book and his follow up, "Mama's Last Hug", are life-changing reads, literally.
- I'm surprised that HN is pretty much a single voice against Neuralink. How many chickens do you think it is ok to sacrifice to potentially help some paraplegic humans? How many monkeys? Is sacrificing a human life worth it? I mean surely depends on the probabilities involved, whether or not we can find some other path which is better at minimizing sufferring etc.
These are difficult questions, so I'm surprised people so quickly jump to an answer. And why focus on Neuralink. Here I found some animals usage report [1]. I'm too lazy to analyze it properly, but eyeballing it I don't think Neuralink datapoint is even meaningful. In 2017 75,000 monkeys were used in research [2]. It does not say for how many of these pain was minimized as [1] does, but ugh.. can somebody present a good case why Neuralink specifically is worth focusing on when discussing this issue? I'd also be happy to listen to good arguments for not experimenting on them at all, since it's not at all obvious to me. I've read Mama's last hug [3] and I understand why we may not want to, but at the same time, the trolley.
In my twisted mind we should probably be experimenting on humans more [4]. If after psychological evaluation somebody gives they full consent, moving science forward can be some way to live a meaningful life, if you think monkeys are very much like humans then with humans we can at least clearly communicate and better minimize suffering.
1. https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/animalwelfare/SA_O...
2. https://www.science.org/content/article/record-number-monkey...
3. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/45894068
4. I'm sure Nazi Germany surely fires for some after such statement as it does for me, but they did not minimize suffering. We should. We should just allow people to take risk if they want to. We allow skydiving and trying to climb Mount Everest. Why not allow to take it with benefit to other humans.
- I guess that the people considering this controversial, must consider the book "Mama's Last Hug" by Frans de Waal highly controversial.
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