Alligator guy on YouTube says alligators have no capacity to feel affection and thus feel nothing for him. Alligator guy on YouTube (in a separate video) notes that some of the alligators he works with do a distinctive “baby call” to him when they want food, which adult alligators don’t do in the wild but baby alligators do to call their mother. I don’t know what the parent-child bond feels like phenomenologically for alligators but I have to imagine these alligators feel it for this guy in these instances. And I have to imagine it probably doesn’t feel nothing like affection, because, you know, evolution likes to repurpose things and doesn’t like to reinvent the wheel. Although maybe that’s not a good justification, if there’s no comparable ancestral tetrapod emotion. What do we know about the ancestral tetrapod, anyway?
our best analysis suggests it experienced nothing but an omnibenevolent love for all creation, with absolutely no other qualia