8 ms·

How Animals Think

93 points by alexandrerond 11y ago

hyperpallium 11y ago
Intelligence is useful, so evolutionary pressure has increased it in humans, dolphins, corvids, octopii, etc. Perhaps it just takes time for the pressure to give results - and we just happened to be first? But it may be that some particular evolutionary pressure or circumstance is required to get our kind of intelligence (ie the problem is demand, not supply). It's been argued that exchange (trade) supplied that pressure. It requires intelligence, and therefore amplifies the value of intelligence. So, when corvids start to exchange, just wait a few million years, and we'll have some homegrown alien intelligences.
- egjerlow 11y ago
  I think the point the article was trying to make was that 'our kind of intelligence' is neither a single, well-defined entity - for example, the author points out that chimps might be more 'politically' intelligent than ourselves - nor is it likely to be one thing that made us into what we are ("Thinking seriously about evolutionary cognition may also help us stop looking for a single magic ingredient that explains how human intelligence emerged"). If this hypothesis is true, other species might not necessarily display 'our kind' of intelligence, even given time, because they are in different contexts than ourselves, and introducing a single phenomenon (say, trade), is then unlikely to produce beings who think similarly to ourselves.
  - hyperpallium 11y ago
    Note I said "alien intelligences" :) It's hard to know how different or in what way without a decent sample size. But the similarity I anticipate is our reflexivity, we can think about ourselves, our actions, our plans, others - even about thinking. We have an ability to abstract that is lacking in animals, and it would be pretty obvious if they had it because it's so useful, Though surely some species or individuals have its beginings or precursors - it just hasn't taken off yet. This reflexivity/abstraction reminds me of the Chomsky formal language hierarchy. Regular expressions are very useful but less powerful than context free grammars. And once you get to recursively enumerable, anything is possible. A similarity is that each non-terminal in a CFG generates a language, and can be used to define other languages - each is a level of abstraction. BTW I'm partial to the idea that spiders may be the next intelligence, as the brain-body ratio is off the chart (because they're small, yes...). But they aren't social. tl;dr I disagree with the article that other animals' intelligences are not less, just different. We have something better. Though it won't always be so. Of course, there are many other facets of our intelligence - our long term memory, motor skill memory, working memory, language ability, visual processing etc - that we are very strong in; I think mostly the best. It's hard to know how important they are to "our kind of intelligence" (which I think there is a clear definition of, given above).
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Intelligence is useful, so evolutionary pressure has increased it in humans, dolphins, corvids, octopii, etc. Perhaps it just takes time for the pressure to give results - and we just happened to be first? I buy that. It follows logically. Similarly the argument that we're the dumbest possible creatures that are still able to create science and that it doesn't mean our level is some kind of hard intelligence limit - it's just that at some point we've reached the necessary capabilities that allowed us to start a secondary, much faster evolutionary process - that of technological advances.
  - hyperpallium 11y ago
    Yes, and if we look back at other advances, such as eukaryotes and multicellular, the next advance is built atop rather than displacing it. (Though some could argue that bacteria are doing just fine, even "winning".)
DanielBMarkham 11y ago
This is intellectually dangerous ground, as the author points out, mainly because it asks us to reason -- to form a theory of mind -- about creatures who have minds significantly different than our own. As the author also points out, it's easy to fall into either the scoffer or booster categories: we either want to dismiss animal intelligence completely or overstate it. So when I got to this, "a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form." I had to bail out. No other species has a true persistent language. Yes, bits and pieces are here and there -- there's no doubt animals communicate, sometimes even about complex things. And there very well be some sort of oral history. But true language in the way we use it? (Insert long discussion here about what that means) Nope. So this article comes down into the "modified booster" category: it's so amazing and special simply because we don't understand it all I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. You can call that a ladder if you want, but no matter how you do it? I'm not going to eat a monkey, but I'd eat a cow. Or a fish. Somehow we need to sort that all out, and whether that involves a complex web of indicators or not, the result is going to be a sliding scale, like it or not.
- mbrock 11y ago
  How do you create this scale of sentience though? I really have no idea "what it's like to be a cow." What fact, theory, or experience convinces you that a cow's life is significantly less sentient than a monkey? (I'm genuinely curious.)
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    Or a bumblebee, right? Beats me. I've given it some thought, and I could speculate. My point was to separate that part out, though. Acknowledging that there must be a scale is the first step. Once we go there, then we can start talking about what goes into producing one. Some folks don't even want to go there (as this article implies) Being conscious, in my mind, is the ability to observe information and change your mental model of the world based on it. If that definition works, then animals are certainly conscious. Perhaps sentience is the ability to do that as a community, over time, and about abstract concepts. Monkeys might be able to locate new sticks in their environment, use them to spear fish, and pass that to their offspring. But they couldn't formulate a theory of virtue over several generations. (At least I don't think so) Perhaps that definition is a starting point? (Just trying to provide you with some kind of answer)
proc0 11y ago
The article seems to push the idea that we think less of animals and that should change, but I don't think it's clear that the motive behind us humans pulverizing the animal kingdom is because we think we're superior to them. The reasons are mostly that they have stuff we want, and we just ... take it. For millions of years we've used fire to burn their tasty meat, and tools to shred them into usefulness, so it's pretty clear we're at the top at their expense. At the same time, we can see our ancestors (and still many natives around the world) held a deep connection to nature. I don't think the problem is not recognizing the complexity of the animal mind, especially mammals. The problem is that we can't stop. Nothing has stopped humans in the past, and now feeling sorry won't change anything either. We can just hope technology will outgrow the pace of our need to exploit animals, because I don't think it will stop otherwise if we're realistic. We'll quickly recognize animal minds, and eat them without a problem, unless we get some lab steak.
- rntz 11y ago
  > The article seems to push the idea that we think less of animals and that should change, but I don't think it's clear that the motive behind us humans pulverizing the animal kingdom is because we think we're superior to them. The article doesn't put forward the idea that we should think more of animals for their sake; it's just saying that our understanding is factually incorrect.
  - voidlogic 11y ago
    > it's just saying that our understanding is factually incorrect. There are many different views on animals currently, I personally think we don't have anything they don't just more of it- more complexity and nuance. This gap exists between any two species being compared (human vs clam, human vs dog, dog vs clam). I'd like to believe that most atheists with some background knowledge in evolutionary biology would agree with me. I also think that different animals have very different levels of spatial reasoning, emotional, social intelligence, etc. Its multidimensional. In short I don't think its fair to assume all people have a one dimensional, human vs animal POV. Plenty of people consider humans to just be other animals. For example say my border collie can reason about as well as a 2 year old, perhaps he has the emotional intelligence of a 6 year old.
Omnus 11y ago
Psychologists often assume that there is a special cognitive ability—a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form. I'll have to read the book to see if De Waal addresses this issue differently - but there is one glaring omission here that seems to destroy the entire argument. Human language and internal thought (the infinite use of finite means) appears to be entirely unprecedented in nature. This ability appears to gives rise to our heightened creativity and ability to model and understand the world. It is usually the first thing mentioned when psychologists talk about a "special cognitive ability" or "secret sauce", so you would have to address it if you want to make a reasonable point here. ...a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether an octopus or a crow can do the same things a human can, but how those animals solve the cognitive problems they face Humans can solve problems beyond those faced in their immediate environment for survival purposes - that is the key mystery that causes us to compare other animals to ourselves. Sure, we should strive to understand the ways in which an octopus solves the problems it faces, but there is nothing wrong with asking how close it is to our own abilities in this regard.
- chronolitus 11y ago
  >Human language and internal thought (the infinite use of finite means) appears to be entirely unprecedented in nature The other day, the theory that dolphins might have an evolved language was discussed - a highlight was the fact that word frequency in dolphin whistles follows zipf's law [1]. I'm not saying they do, but I'm curious. If it turned out that they actually possess the ability to use language, and can even think in it, do you think would you be willing to accept that we are not inherently special? Is coherent thought magically human, or does it simply emerge from high level abstraction and complexity? [1]http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0321 http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0321
  - Omnus 11y ago
jessriedel 11y ago
Can't we just have one popular article about science that isn't sold as a story about a small upstart group of researchers overturning those antiquated ways of thinking? It's so painful and divorced from reality.
gooseyard 11y ago
Another very good article on this topic, by Daniel Dennett http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/dennett_anim_csness.html http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/dennett_anim_csness.ht...

93 points by alexandrerond 11y ago

Intelligence is useful, so evolutionary pressure has increased it in humans, dolphins, corvids, octopii, etc. Perhaps it just takes time for the pressure to give results - and we just happened to be first? But it may be that some particular evolutionary pressure or circumstance is required to get our kind of intelligence (ie the problem is demand, not supply). It's been argued that exchange (trade) supplied that pressure. It requires intelligence, and therefore amplifies the value of intelligence. So, when corvids start to exchange, just wait a few million years, and we'll have some homegrown alien intelligences.

egjerlow 11y ago
I think the point the article was trying to make was that 'our kind of intelligence' is neither a single, well-defined entity - for example, the author points out that chimps might be more 'politically' intelligent than ourselves - nor is it likely to be one thing that made us into what we are ("Thinking seriously about evolutionary cognition may also help us stop looking for a single magic ingredient that explains how human intelligence emerged"). If this hypothesis is true, other species might not necessarily display 'our kind' of intelligence, even given time, because they are in different contexts than ourselves, and introducing a single phenomenon (say, trade), is then unlikely to produce beings who think similarly to ourselves.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Note I said "alien intelligences" :) It's hard to know how different or in what way without a decent sample size. But the similarity I anticipate is our reflexivity, we can think about ourselves, our actions, our plans, others - even about thinking. We have an ability to abstract that is lacking in animals, and it would be pretty obvious if they had it because it's so useful, Though surely some species or individuals have its beginings or precursors - it just hasn't taken off yet. This reflexivity/abstraction reminds me of the Chomsky formal language hierarchy. Regular expressions are very useful but less powerful than context free grammars. And once you get to recursively enumerable, anything is possible. A similarity is that each non-terminal in a CFG generates a language, and can be used to define other languages - each is a level of abstraction. BTW I'm partial to the idea that spiders may be the next intelligence, as the brain-body ratio is off the chart (because they're small, yes...). But they aren't social. tl;dr I disagree with the article that other animals' intelligences are not less, just different. We have something better. Though it won't always be so. Of course, there are many other facets of our intelligence - our long term memory, motor skill memory, working memory, language ability, visual processing etc - that we are very strong in; I think mostly the best. It's hard to know how important they are to "our kind of intelligence" (which I think there is a clear definition of, given above).
TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Intelligence is useful, so evolutionary pressure has increased it in humans, dolphins, corvids, octopii, etc. Perhaps it just takes time for the pressure to give results - and we just happened to be first? I buy that. It follows logically. Similarly the argument that we're the dumbest possible creatures that are still able to create science and that it doesn't mean our level is some kind of hard intelligence limit - it's just that at some point we've reached the necessary capabilities that allowed us to start a secondary, much faster evolutionary process - that of technological advances.
- hyperpallium 11y ago
  Yes, and if we look back at other advances, such as eukaryotes and multicellular, the next advance is built atop rather than displacing it. (Though some could argue that bacteria are doing just fine, even "winning".)

DanielBMarkham 11y ago

This is intellectually dangerous ground, as the author points out, mainly because it asks us to reason -- to form a theory of mind -- about creatures who have minds significantly different than our own. As the author also points out, it's easy to fall into either the scoffer or booster categories: we either want to dismiss animal intelligence completely or overstate it. So when I got to this, "a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form." I had to bail out. No other species has a true persistent language. Yes, bits and pieces are here and there -- there's no doubt animals communicate, sometimes even about complex things. And there very well be some sort of oral history. But true language in the way we use it? (Insert long discussion here about what that means) Nope. So this article comes down into the "modified booster" category: it's so amazing and special simply because we don't understand it all I honestly believe that what our species needs is a sliding scale of sentience. You can call that a ladder if you want, but no matter how you do it? I'm not going to eat a monkey, but I'd eat a cow. Or a fish. Somehow we need to sort that all out, and whether that involves a complex web of indicators or not, the result is going to be a sliding scale, like it or not.

mbrock 11y ago
How do you create this scale of sentience though? I really have no idea "what it's like to be a cow." What fact, theory, or experience convinces you that a cow's life is significantly less sentient than a monkey? (I'm genuinely curious.)
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Or a bumblebee, right? Beats me. I've given it some thought, and I could speculate. My point was to separate that part out, though. Acknowledging that there must be a scale is the first step. Once we go there, then we can start talking about what goes into producing one. Some folks don't even want to go there (as this article implies) Being conscious, in my mind, is the ability to observe information and change your mental model of the world based on it. If that definition works, then animals are certainly conscious. Perhaps sentience is the ability to do that as a community, over time, and about abstract concepts. Monkeys might be able to locate new sticks in their environment, use them to spear fish, and pass that to their offspring. But they couldn't formulate a theory of virtue over several generations. (At least I don't think so) Perhaps that definition is a starting point? (Just trying to provide you with some kind of answer)

proc0 11y ago

The article seems to push the idea that we think less of animals and that should change, but I don't think it's clear that the motive behind us humans pulverizing the animal kingdom is because we think we're superior to them. The reasons are mostly that they have stuff we want, and we just ... take it. For millions of years we've used fire to burn their tasty meat, and tools to shred them into usefulness, so it's pretty clear we're at the top at their expense. At the same time, we can see our ancestors (and still many natives around the world) held a deep connection to nature. I don't think the problem is not recognizing the complexity of the animal mind, especially mammals. The problem is that we can't stop. Nothing has stopped humans in the past, and now feeling sorry won't change anything either. We can just hope technology will outgrow the pace of our need to exploit animals, because I don't think it will stop otherwise if we're realistic. We'll quickly recognize animal minds, and eat them without a problem, unless we get some lab steak.

rntz 11y ago
> The article seems to push the idea that we think less of animals and that should change, but I don't think it's clear that the motive behind us humans pulverizing the animal kingdom is because we think we're superior to them. The article doesn't put forward the idea that we should think more of animals for their sake; it's just saying that our understanding is factually incorrect.
- voidlogic 11y ago
  > it's just saying that our understanding is factually incorrect. There are many different views on animals currently, I personally think we don't have anything they don't just more of it- more complexity and nuance. This gap exists between any two species being compared (human vs clam, human vs dog, dog vs clam). I'd like to believe that most atheists with some background knowledge in evolutionary biology would agree with me. I also think that different animals have very different levels of spatial reasoning, emotional, social intelligence, etc. Its multidimensional. In short I don't think its fair to assume all people have a one dimensional, human vs animal POV. Plenty of people consider humans to just be other animals. For example say my border collie can reason about as well as a 2 year old, perhaps he has the emotional intelligence of a 6 year old.

Omnus 11y ago

Psychologists often assume that there is a special cognitive ability—a psychological secret sauce—that makes humans different from other animals. The list of candidates is long: tool use, cultural transmission, the ability to imagine the future or to understand other minds, and so on. But every one of these abilities shows up in at least some other species in at least some form. I'll have to read the book to see if De Waal addresses this issue differently - but there is one glaring omission here that seems to destroy the entire argument. Human language and internal thought (the infinite use of finite means) appears to be entirely unprecedented in nature. This ability appears to gives rise to our heightened creativity and ability to model and understand the world. It is usually the first thing mentioned when psychologists talk about a "special cognitive ability" or "secret sauce", so you would have to address it if you want to make a reasonable point here. ...a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether an octopus or a crow can do the same things a human can, but how those animals solve the cognitive problems they face Humans can solve problems beyond those faced in their immediate environment for survival purposes - that is the key mystery that causes us to compare other animals to ourselves. Sure, we should strive to understand the ways in which an octopus solves the problems it faces, but there is nothing wrong with asking how close it is to our own abilities in this regard.

chronolitus 11y ago
>Human language and internal thought (the infinite use of finite means) appears to be entirely unprecedented in nature The other day, the theory that dolphins might have an evolved language was discussed - a highlight was the fact that word frequency in dolphin whistles follows zipf's law [1]. I'm not saying they do, but I'm curious. If it turned out that they actually possess the ability to use language, and can even think in it, do you think would you be willing to accept that we are not inherently special? Is coherent thought magically human, or does it simply emerge from high level abstraction and complexity? [1]http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0321 http://arxiv.org/abs/1205.0321
- Omnus 11y ago

jessriedel 11y ago

Can't we just have one popular article about science that isn't sold as a story about a small upstart group of researchers overturning those antiquated ways of thinking? It's so painful and divorced from reality.

gooseyard 11y ago

Another very good article on this topic, by Daniel Dennett http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/dennett_anim_csness.html http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/dennett_anim_csness.ht...