Could the intelligence of a species be measured by how many emotions it has?

Could aliens have emotions we are not aware of?

Tau.Neutrino said:

Could the intelligence of a species be measured by how many emotions it has?

Could aliens have emotions we are not aware of?

Or possibly none.

>Could the intelligence of a species be measured by how many emotions it has?

it’s certainly arguable humans are (more) intelligent (than other animals) because of a greater range of emotions, as contrasted with the proposition (it, the gift, the rational) being less the product of emotions.

emotions of course are used for influence, control even, so it’s not surprising the waters got muddied somewhere.

pathologies too (of mind and behaviour), historically, certainly within popular culture (conceptions of) focus/sed on a lack or loss of emotional control, so the baby got tossed out with the bath water, some.

if it helps I can unpsychologize the entire thing for you. Convince you you were born a tabula rasa, with a highly (perhaps infinitely) plastic brain, with limited structure initially, just a few general purpose cognitive tools, from there social environment took the raw materials and here you are. Any lack of genius-of-the-normal is for none other reason than your environment was unhelpful, or/and you didn’t try hard enough.

further, I might view you as a black box – input/output – who needs this crap about mental states and what generates a home-in-the-head. All that subjective nonsense.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Could the intelligence of a species be measured by how many emotions it has?

I think that would be a very poor measure of intelligence, even if we could measure how many emotions other species have, which we can’t.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Could aliens have emotions we are not aware of?

Sure, I’d say it’s near certain that they do.

The same applies to other species on Earth.

it could, for the appropriate definitions of “intelligence” and “emotions”

for example, you could define “intelligence” as the unit mass, and “emotions” as the number of nucleons, and then the number of emotions a species has would be a very good estimate of its intelligence

SCIENCE said:

it could, for the appropriate definitions of “intelligence” and “emotions”

for example, you could define “intelligence” as the unit mass, and “emotions” as the number of nucleons, and then the number of emotions a species has would be a very good estimate of its intelligence

Huh?

SCIENCE said:

it could, for the appropriate definitions of “intelligence” and “emotions”

for example, you could define “intelligence” as the unit mass, and “emotions” as the number of nucleons, and then the number of emotions a species has would be a very good estimate of its intelligence

I guess so, but it would be a pretty confusing use of words.

OTOH, if your point is that neither “intelligence” nor “emotions” are defined in a way that allows them to be quantified, then I agree.

> Could the intelligence of a species be measured by how many emotions it has?

This has already been done.

I found one scientific paper about emotions in animals that counted the number of different emotions in different species of pet animals – dog, cat, rabbit, hamster, mouse, rat, horse, ferret, etc. as judged by their owners. This was the study I quoted in an old thread on this topic that found among other things that “shame” is a more common emotion in animals than “anger”.

From memory, the rat and mouse showed fewer emotions than the other pet animals. The other pet animals were quite similar.