One group of questions includes: What are the ranges and important categories of mental states/processes/abilities?
Some of the categories we’ve considered are:
What does it take to “have a mind” in general, that is, to have any of those states/processes/abilities? Do minds just inhere in our physical brains? or do they involve some kind of non-physical soul? These are called metaphysical questions about the mind. We’ll discuss this label more later. Over previous classes, we’ve engaged with some of these questions, and in coming weeks, we’ll engage with others.
At this moment, though, we’re engaging with a second group of questions, including: What creatures/entities have particular mental states/processes/abilities? And what creatures have any minds at all? And when trying to answer these questions, how can we tell or know? When we ask how we can know something, there’s a question of how high we want to understand the threshhold to be. As I said in class, we’ll never get certain proof that some non-human animal has a given mental state/process/ability. But neither can you get certain proofs that other humans have those (or any) mental states. Still we do think it is pretty reasonable to think other humans have minds and mental lives like our own, and we can ask, what would make it also reasonable to think such-and-such animals have these? It doesn’t necessarily have to be as reasonable to think so, as to think that other humans do. But it’s interesting to sort out what kinds of evidence would make it more reasonable, and how much more reasonable they’d make it. These are called epistemological questions about the mind. (“Episteme” was a Greek word that translates roughly as “knowing.”) We’ll discuss this label more later too.
The third group of questions is why does it matter which creatures have which mental states/processes/abilities? Our readings suggest connections between some mental capacities (it’s controversial which) and the status of “being a person.” What does this mean?
These three groups of questions obviously bear on each other. But they’re not the same questions.
Note that sometimes we’ll specify the inner mental stuff, and have to imagine what the outer evidence for that inner stuff might look like. Other times we describe outer behavior and other kinds of bodily responses, and have to imagine which inner mental stuff it’s evidence that the animals possess. This is OK, but in each case, try to keep track of when you’re describing something “inside” the creature’s mind or part of their mental life, and when you’re instead describing outer signs/evidence.
Our current readings don’t doubt whether animals like chimps and parrots have feelings like pain. (Some later reading will raise and discuss such doubts about animals, and then much moreso about AIs.) Our current readings instead focus on what cognitive abilities animals have, suggesting intelligence/reasoning/thought, and explore what concepts animals can understand. Our list of these abilities (not claimed to be exhaustive) was:
Language and communication, and transmitting skills/knowledge
Some of the behavior animals display is a matter of instinct (like possums playing dead, or caterpillars building a cocoon); other behavior can be acquired (such as squirrels figuring out how to get into your “squirrel-proof” bird feeder). In a variety of documented cases, animals can sometimes pass on skills or knowledge they learn to their communities and offspring. Examples include elephants teaching their young about migration routes and where water holes can be found, and the snow monkeys I described who figured out how to wash sweet potatos before eating them.
Not all teaching or communication involves signals (sounds, gestures) in ways that invite counting them as a language. We mentioned some other criteria that are salient here.
Do animals ever correlate arbitrary signals with what they mean? Or only signals that are instinctually hard-wired, or that sound like what they’re referring to (like imitating the sound of a fire truck)? Sometimes these correlations are arbitrary.
One question is whether some signals only express an animal’s internal state, or whether they communicate something about the outside world. If the latter, can they be about things that aren’t (or don’t seem to be) immediately present (“displacement”)?
For at least some animals — vervet monkeys in the wild, some apes in lab settings, Alex the gray parrot (the real-life model for “Chiapa” in the Star Witness reading) — there’s good evidence that signals can be about outside objects, and can in some cases request items that aren’t yet present.
The author of Dr Dolittle’s Delusion discusses when is it reasonable to interpret alarm calls as referring to (“denoting,” “meaning”) things in the outside world — such as particular kinds/categories of danger — as opposed to just expressing “I’m scared” or some other aspect of the animal’s internal state, such as “I’m going to run”?
For ground squirrels, our evidence best supports that alarm calls just reflect the animal’s internal feeling of urgency or fright (pp. 170-1). With vervet monkeys, on the other hand, our evidence supports that their alarm calls also communicate information about the kind/category of external danger. Arguments for this are summarized starting on p. 171.
Against the hypothesis that an alarm call means the action a vervet is about to take, the author counters: [W]hat the vervet actually does after giving the call varies. The monkey may do nothing at all, or may climb up a tree, or may climb down from a tree, without any necessary and inflexible relation between call and action.
(p. 189)
Against the hypothesis that it means I’m scared or something like that, the author points out that vervets don’t give the calls when alone, and are more likely to give them in the presence of their close family than other members of their group. The author concludes: [A]ll of these features demonstrate that alarm calling is sensitive (at least) to the audience, which means it cannot simply be a direct reflection of the monkey’s internal state of alarm. Rather than being merely expressive, vervets perhaps produce alarm calls in order to influence the behavior of the other vervets, to get them to take appropriate evasive action with respect to the specific threat that is at hand.
(p. 189)
Those arguments tell us that the monkeys’ alarm calls don’t just mean “I’m scared” or “I’m going to run.” Instead they seem to mean something about the outside world. But it’s still an open question what they say about the outside world. Does a given alarm call mean “Leopard”? Or perhaps “Predator that attacks from the ground”? Or perhaps “Danger: go climb a tree!” On pp. 190-1, the author discusses some considerations that might better support this last interpretation.
Sometimes animals combine multiple signals into wholes with new meanings. Do these combinations ever have a “syntactic structure” in the way human languages do, or are they only an “unstructured linguistic soup”?
No one would expect animals to have the same syntax as any human language; but do their communications at least exhibit some of the fundamental structural properties of our languages? These include:
Words combining into phrases that group together:
Mary is across the street. Mary’s dog is across the street. Mary’s small dog is across the street. Mary’s small dog that is afraid of Paula is across the street.
There being structure to phrases that goes beyond their superficial order. Consider:
Pat ridiculed [Harry’s theory that Mary was across the street]. Pat persuaded [Harry’s students] [that Mary was across the street.]
The difference between these shows up when you convert them into passive forms. For the first sentence, it would be grammatical to say “Harry’s theory that Mary was across the street was ridiculed by Pat.” It would sound awful to say “Harry’s theory was ridiculed by Pat that Mary was across the street.” (You could get away with “Harry’s theory was ridiculed by Pat — I mean his theory that Mary was across the street.”) With the second sentence, though, the situation is reversed. Saying “Harry’s students that Mary was across the street were persuaded by Pat” sounds awful. “Harry’s students were persuaded by Pat that Mary was across the street” sounds fine.
This is taken to be compelling evidence that our original two sentences have different underlying structures (indicated by the square brackets [ ]).
Phrases can interact with elements they aren’t immediately adjacent to, in the “surface order” of the sentence. Consider:
Mary is too embarrassing to ask anyone to dance with. Mary is too embarrassed to ask anyone to dance with Bill.
Notice how in the first sentence, nothing comes at the end after “with.” It’s understood that we’re talking about dancing with Mary. You could be more explicit and say “too embarrassing to ask anyone to dance with her,” but it’s also OK to leave it implicit that you mean Mary. With the second sentence, on the other hand, you have to explicitly say who you’re talking about dancing with. In the example, we say “dance with Bill,” but it’d also be OK to say “dance with her,” meaning Mary. It would not be OK to leave it implict, by saying “Mary is too embarrassed to ask anyone to dance with” and then stopping with a period. Notice also it’s understood that in the first sentence, we’re talking about the prospect of us the speakers asking something. Whereas in the second sentence, we’re talking about the prospect of Mary asking something. All of these differences in the sentences come from the choice of saying “too embarrassing” versus “too embarrassed.” The effect that choice has on who’s understood to be doing the asking is a “local” one: it affects how the next words in the sentence’s surface order are understood. But the effect it has on whether the object of “with” can be left implicit is more distant.
In Chapter 10 the author of Dr Dolittle’s Delusion argues there is no compelling evidence for attributing any of these kinds of structure to animal communications.
Self-awareness
One kind of experiment here is called the mirror test, which you can read more about, or may already have heard of. Only a few groups of animals have passed this test, including apes, dolphins and orcas, magpies, and a single elephant. Surprisingly, manta rays and one fish species have also passed it.
Other kinds of experiment aim to test which animals are able to recognize their own limits (such as lack of knowledge), and compensate for them. Apes, some monkeys, and dolphins have demonstrated these abilities to some extent, and rats may also have done so.
Complex emotions, including social emotions; and social intelligence/cognition
The kinds of emotions we’re talking about here include sympathy, envy, blame, resentment, and grief. Some animals are claimed to demonstrate a “sense of fairness” (dogs, ravens, and Capuchin monkeys).
Plenty of animals have complex social relationships: sometimes cooperating, other times not, keeping track of and responding to the social status of themselves and others. What’s more unusual is for animals to show evidence of understanding that others aren’t just sources of behavior they like/dislike, but that other animals also have minds of some kind.
some animals do seem to attribute intentions to others, such as distinguishing between your being unable versus unwilling to give them a reward
some animals keep track of what other animals can perceive
A good example are ravens, who have the habit of making food caches, which they try to hide from other ravens — and try to raid each other’s caches when they find them. When adding food to a cache, ravens seem to be keeping track of what other ravens can see. If other ravens are visible, the one hiding food will try to disguise where they’re putting it, and will keep away from their actual cache. If other ravens are audible but can’t see them — for example, they’re in an adjacent room in a laboratory — then the raven hiding the food will no longer be so cautious. But if other ravens are audible and they know there’s an open peephole between the rooms, then they’ll again be cautious.
what’s least clear is which animals are able to attribute false beliefs — that is, representations they themselves know to be false — to others
The author of Dr Dolittle’s Delusion discusses the “broken-wing displays” of piping plovers on pp. 37, 45-8. Predators are effectively deceived by this, and drawn away from the bird’s nest. But does the bird “intend to mislead” the predators, or are they just doing something they know will result in the predator moving away?
The simplest possible interpretation of the bird’s actions would be that the broken-wing behavior is no more than a reflexive and completely automatic response to danger. Ristau shows that cannot be correct, however. When the predator does not follow the mother, she comes back toward it, repeats the display, and moves away again, until finally she attracts its attention. (p. 46)
Also, the plovers use different strategies to repel large animals like cows that aren’t predators (p. 46).
So the behavior seems to be more than just a reflex; it’s instead a voluntary attempt to engage the predator. But should we count it as “intentionally misleading” the predators?
That more sophisticated interpretation of the bird’s behavior attributes to the plovers a “theory of the predator’s mind,” that is, an understanding that predators have a perspective on the world, that the plover can manipulate into representing the world falsely (p. 45, 47-8). There does not seem to be good evidence that the birds do understand this. Also, We have no evidence that the plover deceives other animals (or other plovers) about other things in other ways
(p. 46).
The author also discusses apparently deceptive behavior in vervet monkeys. Sometimes a monkey gives a fake alarm call not because it’s itself scared or about to run for cover, but because it wants other monkeys to run away (p. 190).
Did the monkey only intend to affect the behavior of its companions, or did it understand that it was doing so by way of their having a perspective or representation of the world, that it could manipulate? (p. 190)
While the monkey’s tendency to call depends on the audience, it does not seem to depend on the state of knowledge that members of that audience can be inferred to have. If the point of calling “Leopard!” were to make sure that everyone knew there was a leopard, one monkey would not need to call if other monkeys had already called, or could perfectly well see the leopard. That is not what happens. When one calls, the others also call, regardless. There is no evidence that they take one another’s state of awareness of the danger into account in signaling. (p. 190)
Later the author concludes:
[V]ervets have a system which they use with the apparent purpose of influencing one another’s behavior. There is no evidence that they…have a theory of mind in the sense of an understanding that other monkeys have their own knowledge of the world, that this knowledge plays a role in determining their actions, and that one can influence another’s behavior by affecting that knowledge. As a result, we can conclude only that vervets intend to modify one another’s actions, not that they try to deceive or otherwise shape one another’s beliefs. (p. 192)
Humans are thought not able to attribute false beliefs to others, and thus not able to “intentionally mislead” in the sense considered here, until age 4–5. Although the author of Dr Dolittle’s Delusion argues that vervet monkeys aren’t doing this, there’s evidence that some other primates may be able to. I’m not sure any other species have clearly shown this ability.
Abstract concepts
The kinds of things experimenters look for here include: can we show the animals stimuli of say, red red blue, then loud loud quiet, and expect them to transfer familiarity with these patterns also to bright bright dark? And can they recognize similarities that have to do with how one uses or relate to things, and not just to the things’ intrinsic properties? (For example, humans can recognize ways in which a cup is similar to a spoon and a plate.)
Animals that have demonstrated the most ability of this sort include: rats, sea lions, pigeons, and African gray parrots.
Reasoning and problem-solving; ability to make and use tools
Many animals especially those in the “core group” I mentioned in class have demonstrated these abilities to some extent. Jumping spiders have shown some surprising problem-solving abilities, and leafcutter ants and some fish have shown some abilities to make and use tools. Other tool-users beyond the “core group” seem to include sea otters, bears, mongooses, vultures, and seagulls.
One lesson that surveys like we’re doing can teach us: it’s less clear that humans are special in kind from other animals than we might have thought, and many in the past did think. (As opposed to merely special in degree.)
Second lesson, that I encourage you to pay special attention to: More useful to our discussion than the details of which animals can do what, are the ways that one can effectively argue that so-and-so animals have such-and-such a capacity, and argue that so-and-so other animals don’t. What do good arguments look like, from premises about behavior and other responses to conclusions about the presence or absence of inner mental states/processes/abilities?
Third lesson: It’s not clear where the sharpest and deepest lines are in the list of states/processes/abilities we consider. What should we think about animals who have some of these mental capacities but lack others? Do some of the capacities count as fundamentally most important? (For example, for whether the animal counts as a “person” and should have the rights that go with that?) If so which ones, and why?