Harry Harlow’s surrogate mother experiment, conducted in the 1950s, explored the importance of maternal attachment in infant rhesus monkeys. He separated newborn monkeys from their biological mothers and provided them with two surrogate mothers: one made of wire that provided food and another made of soft cloth but no food. This experiment demonstrated the crucial role of contact comfort in the emotional development of infants, challenging the idea that attachment was primarily driven by the provision of food.
Could fluffies, being essentially wetware robots with pre-programmed responses, be different? That’s what this lab is trying to figure out, coming next to a image self-post near you.
Yeah, it’s very good, but I don’t really think that fits with the whole “fluffies have their speech pre programmed” i’m going for. The results will not be the same.
I thought about going all in, but a fluffy in the Pit of Despair would just deafult to the “wan die” loop, so I’ll skip that and focus on this take on the Surrogate Mother
I’m interested in your take on the experiment, particularly with the pre-programmed behaviour angle and whether that makes your fluffies actual living things that have been cruelly labelled as a product, or just a biological furby incapable of a real emotional response.
I like the ambiguity of it. Like, they are, in the strict sense, alive. They have metabolism, they reproduce, the whole ordeal. But the real question is if they have an actual conscience or just something that looks like one.
In my headcanon, the answer a person gives to that is what separates hugboxers from abusers and the like.
I have the experiments (plural) planned out, and they fit with another experiment story I’ve read around here, of a fluffy being raised without any interaction. It still could talk, but boy, was it a depressed little thing.
I mean, it’s the difference between you messaging me and messaging chatGPT. But you wouldn’t be able to really tell the difference (except that GPT writes like it was the fucking HR of a tech company), so that’s the catch.
But it’s a “replicant vs human” thing going on here, I guess.
that experiment was downright evil, like A LOT of scientific experiments are. Sometimes I am reminded of how childshish all the “abuse” in the site is when compared to real life actions.
That’s looking at things with the benefit of hindsight.
The fact that love and comfort is almost universally accepted as an essential part of the mental wellbeing and development for the babies of social animals, stems from Harlow’s monkey’s experiments.
Prior to this, attachment theory, where loves solely comes from the fulfilment of physical needs (e.g. food) was the prevailing factor. Harlow disproved that, showing that baby monkeys need more than just food to develop.
You also say ‘a lot’ of scientific experiments are evil - the vast majority of experiments don’t involve any living things. How evil is trying to work out how quickly a tablet dissolves, or smashing molecules into things in a particle accelerator?
@nussako There’s also the Chinese Room argument, which furthers the pre-programmed biological toy angle.
