The animalization project; replacing the person with the object

I've been watching the TTC lecture series 'The neuroscience of everyday life' with Sam Wang. Today I want to use lecture #26 as a jumping off point for a few comments on the misuse of metaphor in science.

Quotes and comments;

1. Wang talks about us sharing emotions with animals to begin this lecture. [1.]

- It strikes me that this insistence on animal/human continuum is part of the project (a necessary part) to replace morality, ethics and philosophy with science. This is the attempt to find answers to all questions via what is called the scientific method. e.g. all answers will be found within the laboratory. The dream is that all answers will be as 'objective' as measuring weight and space. The hope is that measurement will replace wisdom; that facts will replace faith... that man the scientist will no longer need help from god to make his way in the world.

This grand project requires that the 'experts' dumb man down; that they turn him into an animal... and turn that animal into mere matter in motion. The 'soft' sciences require the diminishment of man; the dehumanization of man... man as person replaced by man as object.

I hope Professor Wang will forgive me, but to conflate animal and human emotions is just plain stupid. These are simply not the same. This is just bad science. In no way is it empirical. It's more absurd than even to compare the love a child has for its teddy bear, with the love a parent has for his child or for his spouse.

The 'fear' a mouse has for being eaten cannot by rationally compared to the fear a human being has of death or of war, etc. (or the fear of being embarassed intellectually). The same words (terms) should not be used. (That would of course ruin the Darwinian game, so I don't expect that will happen.)

Similarities do not constitute identity. We might even wonder if these 'similarities' are anything more than metaphors and analogies. (e.g. is the fear of a slug the same as the fear of a mouse? is the fear of a slug the same as the fear of an amoeba? is the fear of a worm the same as the fear of a chimp? is the fear of a bear the same as the fear of a salmon? Is there any way to know? Is there any way to measure?

- To conflate human emotion with what is called animal emotion shows us how heavily modern biological science is influenced by metaphor. In my view this is more like poetry than empirical science.

- He talks about AI people building in affective responses into robots... I see this claim as more poetry. (Wang dang doodle? Sorry.) It's simply not legitimate science to talk about the emotions of artificial thinking machines.

Notes;
1. Sam Wang; The neuroscience of everyday life; lecture #26. The weather in your brain
2. Wang tells us that the 'emotion' of disgust goes back (along that old evolutionary road) to animals having to distinguish what is good to eat from what is harmful. I guess the speculative theory' is that this capacity somehow 'evolved' into the diverse human emotions of disgust. (Darwin only knows how :=] This is more equivocation... maybe we could call it Darwinian poetry.