I have become very interested in philosophy for quite some time. And one of the most important basic arguments in philosophy is whether human souls exist or not. Now, this post will not be on the topic of souls for I will be doing a separate post concerning that matter. The reason I brought soul philosophy up, is because of something I heard in one of the philosophy lectures on death in Yale's University. The professor mentioned one of the famous arguments supporting the soul theory, which explains that in order to have free will there must be a soul. The word freewill triggered a spark in my brain. It made me think, do animals have free will? Do animals have souls?
To answer that, we need to fully understand the meaning of the word "freewill".
Freewill: (adj) the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.
In other words, have a mind of your own, choose for yourself, speculate, and think for yourself.
Now, we all know what an innate behavior is. It is the basic sort of program in every creature; humans, plants, animals, and all the little creatures too. It is what a living thing does without having to be told to do or taught how. Examples of this in animals are, eating, flying, crawling, vocalizing, etc…
But we also know that animals have learned behaviors too. Simple example is training dogs some tricks. Moreover animals have the capacity to learn new things that are out of their nature, like the many chimpanzee experiments. Animals also have the capability to be conditioned to certain things, like in the dog experiment done by the psychologist Ivan Pavlov; where he rang a bell every time a dog could smell his food. Initially the dog only drooled in response to the food cent while the bell noise was insignificant to it, but eventually the dog made the connection between the sound and the food smell so whenever Ivan rang the bell, the dog immediately started to drool.
So as you can see, a dog drooling in result of ringing bells is something unnatural, not a response a dog is born with.
But that does not at all mean that animals (dogs in this matter) can reason and choose for themselves. Meaning even the behaviors which aren’t innate, do not prove free will in
animals.
To make this a bit clearer, let me give some free will examples in humans that are sort of relatable to animals.
To choose to kill someone, not out of instinct.
To choose to stay up all night staring at the stars.
To choose to end your life. Aka commit suicide.
We know animals kill each other. They can kill for food, pride, territory, mates etc…
But once again it all comes back to instinct. They do not kill because one lion is jealous of how cool the zebra print is. (Not that humans kill for these shallow reasons either, it is just an example.)
So, free will in killing in my opinion is ruled out.
Animals only stay up through their natural sleep time if they have something to do. Hunt, play, and eat and so on. But they certainly don't choose to stay up to watch stars, movies or any of that.
That is also ruled out.
The third example is kind of the soul reason of this entire post.
I want to know whether or not animals have free will that allows them to commit suicide.
Till now I am almost convinced that animals live on instinct and not freewill. They are more like a complicated living program. But finding out the answer to animal suicide may change my mind.
In order for a creature to commit suicide they must know that they are mortal. So now, the question is… are animals aware of their mortality?
Well, humans themselves might not have been aware of their own mortality at first until the first human died. Only then did we understand death, or did we? We will leave that for another post, but for now let's think. Animals witness others deaths of their kind. But does that mean they understand what it is? According to a newspaper an 11 year old gorilla named Gana was holding a dead little monkey baby and looked like she was grieving. People argue concerning the article saying that only because animals sometimes act like us doesn't mean that the same complicated reasoning underlies their actions. Well, we can safely look past that argument by reading another incident where a mother elephant was grieving for days for her stillborn baby and trying to wake the baby or get a response. If the elephant was really grieving for her unresponsive baby, it is a good chance that the elephant mother understood that there was no coming back. Meaning that at least some animals have a gist of what death is.
Now that that is out of the way and we can hypothetically think that animals are aware of their mortality, does it mean they can choose to end their lives?
In some cases, mother gorillas have died right after their children died. Well, that looks like suicide doesn't it? But is it really? The answer is, no. The gorilla mothers did not mean to end their lives. They were in so much sadness that resulted in neglecting one or more of the basic survival actions like sleeping, eating, self-protection etc…
The gorilla mom death might have suspiciously looked like suicide, but it wasn't really; because the mom death was in result of grieving and what accompanies it of neglectance and not the result of intentionally not wanting to go on as a living creature.
Other than the grieving death incidents, no other "suicide like" deaths have been ever
noticed in any of the animals.
In conclusion, there is no conclusion. This is an ongoing search for answers, what I have is
only a clue to start looking into the freewill suicide animal matter. Although I am slightly convinced that animals are intelligent instinctive programs, there is hope that they also
have free will and souls. So I will be clinging to that hope and continuing my search.
