I wrote some bullshit in the similar sarcastic manner and accidentally posted it and deleted immediately, it was just cringe

I’m not arguing against reality here, yes emotions and feelings (I never mentioned soul btw) are neurological, they emerge in the brains, we are animals, other animals have nerves, nervous systems, brains, they definitely have feelings amd emotions and some definitely should overlap like those that you’ve mentioned. But do animals feel love? Passion? Regret? Sorrow? Loneliness? Resentment? OP’s question was about ennui, my point was that whatever their cat is experiencing it won’t fit into the category of human emotions that we created based on our observations of our psyche (that appears to be far more complex as compared to other animals) for us to use in communication with other people and that whatever animals are feeling they won’t be able to communicate to us. It’s fine to say “that dog looks happy” assessing its emotional state by means of empathy, but saying “that dog is happy” would make me want to ask “how do you know that, did it tell you?”

Also sorry for sounding like a condescending prick or too defensive, I honestly just wanted to share an opinion on animal rights in general, I’m not trying to convince anyone, if they think their pet is happy, that’s great

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I saw recently probably on youtube a person saying that their cat was transgender. I think that is insane and disrespectful to animal but some people just have opposite ideas I gues. I’m not saying that OP is the same crazy for asking the op question but I still think that we should consider animals to have animal feelings unknowable to us and respect that by assuming only the most basic ones like when they are hungry or hurt or feeling the yeeees when you scratch that spot

Thank you for a detailed answer! I know about qualia somewhat and agree with you on every point but only with the degree of uncertainty that you show - you say “entirely possible” and “we can’t be sure” because of the same ideas you express earlier that feelings and emotions are immeasurable (maybe there is some top notch neurological method for quantifying/qualifying emotions or will be in the future but none that I know of) - we can’t be sure even with people, like you meet a person who seems to be sad and you approach them and ask what’s wrong you look sad and they would go like no it’s fine it’s just how my face looks like.

My idea is only that it’s stupid to say things like oh my cat is sad or dog is happy or tortoise is feeling fine, we just don’t know and talking with certainty about things we don’t know and can’t measure is dangerous in my book. Disrespectful is a word that came to mind because many animals suffer from abuse, but simply talking about their emotions is at least not abusive. With people we can at least verbally communicate ideas of our emotions but with animals we can’t at all. Maybe cats have something similar to boredom, maybe not; ennui feels like an even more strong and complicated emotion, so seems to be even less likely

It’s disrespectful towards animals to project on them human emotions. Cats definitely have feelings but they are feline, mutually incomprehensible with us, although definitely partially communicable