It comes down to &quot;do animals feel emotions&quot; which is really just a sneaky way to ask whether animals have a first-person experience at all. It&#x27;s easiest imho to apply a Turing Test here: if an animal behaves like it has emotions in every way, what authority can you claim to say they don&#x27;t? If there&#x27;s no test to distinguish between &quot;fake&quot; emotions and actual emotions, then is it even a meaningful question?<p>Anyway, what are the odds that humans invented empathy, uniquely, somewhere between ourselves and our most recent common ancestor with (mice, dogs, whatever)? It just seems so unlikely. How did our hominin ancestors get along with each other if they didn&#x27;t have empathy?