No emotions are communicable as emotions are qualia. However you can describe an experience or experiences that give you similar emotions, and if the other person feels quallia for those experiences they will assume you have the same.
Is your red the same as mine? We cannot ever say. But does your red happen when you see something I’d also call red? Most likely (unless you’re color blind).
The same is true of emotions. Maybe when you lose a loved one, you feel the feeling I do when I’ve accidentally hurt someone in a way I feel I can’t undo. Both are pain, but we will never know if the pain we feel for any specific experiences are the same because all feelings are incommunicable.
Now emotions typically have physical effects too and it is likely that people with similar bodies have some sort of qualia you can reference using the experiences that are associated with them “I feel cold” “I feel weak” “my body feels heavy” etc. Or maybe someone already can predict that they’d feel a specific qualia if they went through what you describe, but that’s never guaranteed.
Unfortunately you don’t have the option of verbal communication with a cat, but you do have physical effects. Furthermore, emotions arise from experiences yes? Remember how you can assume someone has a qualia for cold because they’re human and you’re human so if you experience a qualia corresponding to cold then likely so do they?
Well ennui is listlessness caused by lack of stimuli yes? We most likely feel it because we’re “predators” and have the desire for stimuli and engagement. The same can be said of cats. Ergo, it is entirely possible they could feel an emotion corresponding to it just like us. I would be more surprised if most animals did not feel boredom.
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
