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Do Animals Have Real Emotions? | Dr. Ralph Adolphs & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Huberman Lab Clips04:49Added Aug 31, 2026

Dr. Ralph Adolphs and Dr. Andrew Huberman discuss the concept of functional emotions in animals and AI, highlighting why separating emotional processes from ...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Do Animals Have Emotions?

  2. 00:00It is striking to me that maybe 30 years or ago or so there was discussion about whether animals have emotions based on
  3. 00:07these criteria priority veilance scalability and persistence. Is it generally agreed upon that animals have emotions? I believe they do because I
  4. 00:15love my dog and other animals and I want to believe that but as scientists if we step back do they meet the criteria for emotions that you're setting up here for us?
  5. 00:23Absolutely. Yes. So if you have those criteria, those functional criteria and you would add one or two others, many
  6. 00:30states in animals and certainly the states that we would ordinarily interpret as emotions in our pets, in
  7. 00:37our dogs, cats. By the way, I loved your dog in the in the waiting room there.
  8. 00:42They would meet those criteria and they would have functional emotions. Uh we should talk more about this is also the the claim now from anthropic that large
  9. 00:51language models have functional emotions as well. So wild. We have to return to that because I think it it kind of boggles the mind. You know, how could a machine have emotions? But

  10. Machine Emotions & Conscious Experience

  11. 01:00well, but again, these are functionally defined emotions and there's I think there's no problem assigning to AI to some extent and certainly to many animals uh those functional emotions.
  12. 01:11Where it gets complicated is that in us and also by assumption in animals I have no doubt they also have conscious
  13. 01:19experiences of emotions and most people take the conscious experience of the emotion as the ground truth for the
  14. 01:28emotion. Emotions without conscious experiences of emotions sound like an oxymoron. It's like you can't have that.
  15. 01:34They the conscious experience is the emotion which is what William James said which is what Joel Leoo says. And I think it's implicitly there across
  16. 01:42essentially every psychological theory is the assumption that emotions really are types of conscious experiences which I think is the intuition that if I ask
  17. 01:51you how do you know what's the ground truth right how do you know you're having an emotion you would say because it's a certain type of conscious
  18. 01:59experience because of how it feels. And if I asked you more specifically how do you know it's sadness versus anger versus fear you would say because of how
  19. 02:07they feel. They feel different. And so we take the conscious experience, our own introspective access to the conscious experience as the ground

  20. Studying Consciousness

  21. 02:16truth. That has a lot of problems associated with it. Deep philosophical problems. But just practically it has
  22. 02:23two big problems that I think science should avoid. One is it gets really problematic to know whether or not animals have emotions because we don't
  23. 02:31know how to test whether or not they have conscious experiences. I have no doubt that they do. It's just that there's no scientific way to test
  24. 02:39currently. So we should have different criteria. And the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you
  25. 02:47equate you conflate emotions with feelings. Well then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness.
  26. 02:55We spoke about Kristoff Kau earlier.
  27. 02:57Great respect for people that are studying consciousness, but I don't want to study consciousness. That's too hard.
  28. 03:03And there's lots and lots of debates and disagreements. So if we can avoid that and study emotions in the absence of

  29. Studying Emotion

  30. 03:10needing to study conscious experiences of emotions, we can move forward with the science which is what every other discipline does. So if you're a vision
  31. 03:19researcher, right? So you study vision, you study consciousness. No, you don't you don't need to. I mean you can but there's a huge amount of work that
  32. 03:27people do studying vision and how that works in the brain studying memory you know any other cognitive process without
  33. 03:36needing to study conscious experiences they're typically accompanied in humans and if you if you talk to the lay person on the street and you say I'm a vision
  34. 03:44researcher they take you to be studying the conscious experience of seeing perhaps or if you say I'm a memory researcher they take you to be studying
  35. 03:52the conscious experience of recollection But scientifically most people working in those fields don't study consciousness and it's perfectly valid
  36. 03:59to study vision and memory you know in in in horseshoe crabs or elesia where nobody has any claims about consciousness. We should do the same
  37. 04:08thing with emotion and then we can have an integrated science across species that can move forward without needing to tackle the difficult problem of
  38. 04:16consciousness. Again, yes, for sure we and other animals have conscious experiences of emotions and that's very
  39. 04:24important. [clears throat] But we also have conscious experiences of seeing and memory. As a scientific discipline, we should separate the conscious experience
  40. 04:31from the process from the emotion and that's the way we make progress. That's the one of the main arguments that David and I had in our book and that I reiterate in the forthcoming book.
  41. 04:46[music]