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gwern comments on Mike Darwin on animal research, moral cowardice, and reasoning in an uncaring universe - Less Wrong
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I don't think a rat can be hurt by the pictures because they are too unrealistic: lacking motion, scent, and sound. (I recall a similar problem with octopuses: you can't use TV to show them anything because TV is too slow - they see the individual static frames with no 'motion blur'. If a lion could talk...)
Would adding sufficient realism induce, say, helping or empathetic behavior? I don't know. Some people thought monkeys wouldn't, but when the experiments were done, the subjects were willing to help others at some cost to themselves. Maybe the rat experiments have already been done.
I probably should have quoted the specific part I was thinking of in that comment:
This got me thinking about ① just how empathetic various animals can be towards one another, towards other species, and so on; ② how empathy relates to human intelligence; and ③ how much it relates to simpler forms of distress caused by another creature's suffering.