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> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used t

> “Right,” Dennett replied. “He would be so different from regular lions that he wouldn’t tell us what it’s like to be a lion. I think we should just get used to the fact that the human concepts we apply so comfortably in our everyday lives apply only sort of to animals.” That's just silly. We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk, the effort was supremely insightful in helping us to understand animal cognition. Animals communicate with us all the time, they just do it non-verbally. We often just choose not to listen. A talking lion would still be a lion. He wouldn't be able to tell us directly what life on the fields is like, but that's what the researchers are for. I would not continue the 17th century delusion of non-sentient animals any further than we absolutely have to. Animals have exceedingly rich inner lives, and so do humans that don't have language. They just lack certain tooling. I'd put not having language on par with not having sight. A handicap for sure, but you're still a person and you still have thoughts. There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human.

goldenkey 10y ago
Consistency is really key. As long as there is consistency in thought and action, there is a level of understanding, whether innate or consciously. Language has nothing to do with consistency except for the outward showing of it to others. And it may possibly help with self-consistency..we cannot assert that yet.
sharp11 10y ago
Yes! Highly recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words.
n4r9 10y ago
I don't think Dennett is denying that animals have rich inner lives, or that they can express basic desires to us. He's saying that their conscious experience is somehow fundamentally incomprehensible to us.
- simonh 10y ago
  I'm not so sure. Maybe for an octopus, but as mammals we have fundamentally similar brains and neurology to many other mammals. When I quiet my mind, look around me passively and simply experience the input of my senses, I can easily suppose that the experience I have in those moments is very similar to the experience of a dog or a chimp in a similar mental state. If I'm not using the higher functions of my brain such as language and only using those functions I share with other mammals, I don't see why I should expect my experience of them to be radically different. Similarly, many mammals exhibit emotions and desires. We have those too and we evolved them from common ancestors. If a common ancestor of chimps and humans evolved these behaviors and we and chimps exhibit them, why should we necessarily expect the experience of them to be utterly and incomprehensibly different? Especially when many of the resulting behaviors in chimps and humans are so closely analogous and presumably also closely analogous to the behavior of our common ancestor? Surely any claim that we should expect them to be completely different or incomprehensible is the one that is extraordinary and needs to justify itself?
marmaduke 10y ago
Your quote doesn't support your conclusions about the subject or Dennett's views on them. A lack of sight from birth results in visual cortex used for other things. Damage to language areas can result in loss of comprehension or production, but neighboring tissue can recover the functionality. The lines we draw are fairly blurry to be honest. Dennett isn't saying that the language area makes the human but that language and narrative as a cognitive currency are what make us human; the neurobiology is incidental.
dmreedy 10y ago
That quote, and its context, is not an argument that animals do not have exceedingly rich inner lives, nor is it an argument that language is some prerequisite for such a state. It is an effort to address, and dismiss, the kind of "17th century delusions" that you're worried about (and, in fact, participating in, whether intentionally or not). The statements, "Animals are sentient", and, "Animals are not sentient", are opposite positions extrapolated from the same axiomatic premises; that there is some thing called 'sentience', that humans 'have' this 'sentience', and animals either do or do not. Most commonly this kind of thinking also assumes that there is one kind of thing called sentience, (often referred to in religions as a soul). Your phrase, "lack certain tooling", is in line with this logic; it implies that there is some absolute definition, some core kernel of "inner experience" that is separable from ancillary layers that it may leverage. This is analogous to the statement that a computer may be running an operating system, whether it has a keyboard and speakers or not. What Dennett argues, here and in general, is that this definition of sentience is not nearly holistic enough. That there is no one objective thing called 'sentience'. Instead, there are a bunch of different things; being a lion, being a bat, being a human. Each of these is a model of experience in and of itself, and is defined in and of itself; you can't factor out a common set of experiences or functions and expect them to translate. Part of being a human is being able to, amongst other things, see, hear, taste, and speak. These are not tools built on top of some common 'sentience interface'[1]. To continue (dangerous and leaky) software metaphors, it's much more like a spaghetti-coded monolith[2]; the features -are- the system, and their implementation is part of a feedback loop into the deepest parts of the system, and all the way back out again. The tools aren't 'used by' the 'sentience'; they _are_ the sentience, and the sentience is the tools. A practical demonstration to consider here is something like synesthesia, where what might superficially seem to be well-defined verticals are crossed and interwoven. And so, when he (extending Wittgenstein) says, "If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”, he's saying that if such a thing as a talking lion existed, it wouldn't help us understand lions because talking lions and non-talking lions have different experiences, in part because they have different capabilities, different available tools, and thus different architectures. This isn't to say that they don't each have some rich inner life. Just that these inner lives are not mutually comprehensible, shared, or even compatible. In fact, the article, further down, pretty much says just this, albeit in many fewer words: “If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” --- [1] This line of thinking is very close to the "17th century delusion" of something like a homunculus. It is made more palatable by using a word like 'soul', however [2] or, indeed, something like a neural network; the weights 'mean' something inside the system, but they're all relatively defined, not absolutely; you can't necessarily look inside the system and expect to understand what individual components 'mean' without addressing their entirely relative context.
randcraw 10y ago
I think Dennett responded too narrowly to the question and thus misreprested his own point of view. "A lion that talks like a human" is not a well formed thought experiment, since no real lion could talk like a human. A lion that that does wouldn't be like any lion we've ever seen. And if Koko could talk like a human, she too would no longer be like any gorilla we've seen. The main point of limited consciousness in lions is lost in an implausible fantastic model of a superintelligent lion that doesn't exist and never could. There's no point in extending that (lousy) line of reasoning to gorillas too. Through our experience communicating with Koko and with higher primates like chimps, we've come to understand how much 'more conscious' a chimp is than a gorilla, and how we can better assess consciousness without using language. We've seen that the chimp is aware of more of the world than is a gorilla, both inner and outer worlds -- the content of one's own mind and the minds of others. This really isn't so different from what Dennett espouses, that consciousness is a continuum that begins with a lowly few-cell organism that's aware of nothing in the universe more than a sugar gradient, and ends with another organism (man?) that's attuned to the loftiest truths and actively strives to achieve ideal/complete consciousness, or Satori. I suspect that on reflection, Dennett would not defend his own "lion-ness" argument for the same reasons you suggest. Koko is an existence proof to the contrary.
zaptheimpaler 10y ago
I totally agree (not any kind of expert). Even babies don't talk for a couple of years, but they are very much alive and in fact some psychology says that most of personality is baked by about 7 years old. Then most of it is must be determined without words or language, rather by memories & connected emotional experiences. Not hard to imagine that animals might experience the world similarly to babies via instincts & emotions.
ctdonath 10y ago
There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human. That's an interesting position for him, considering (IIRC) his co-author Douglas Hofstadter (The Mind's I) has a sister who is a perfectly normal & functional adult except for her complete incapacity for language.
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
  What "incomplete incapacity for language" means? There is speech, hearing, reading, writing, signs language… I can't imagine a "normal functioning" human that cannot communicate in any way with others. Surely there are things she can do to express herself and understand others?
- bbctol 10y ago
  To be fair, that is a ludicrous misrepresentation of Dennett's position.
- mcguire 10y ago
  Interesting: "Our folks’ third and last child, Molly, born in Palo Alto, was, sadly, not what anybody had thought. By four or so, Molly was visibly abnormal — not saying any words at all, nor absorbing any. It wasn’t autism; it was a profound brain malfunction, probably dating from birth or prior to birth, but what was wrong, nobody could say — no diagnosis. Molly just didn’t pick up any words, who knows why, and our Mom and Dad had such anguish for so long on Molly’s account, as did Laura and I. What bad luck." https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipography.html https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipo... The second sentence of the quote does seem strongly opposed to what I know of Dennett's position.
31h 10y ago
> We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk I think you're overstating your case. "although the gorilla learned a large number of signs she never understood grammar or symbolic speech" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Koko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Koko > humans that don't have language Which humans are those? Language arises pretty spontaneously among humans even if they're deaf or blind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language Yet no amount of exposure will make a dog or ape understand language. > There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. You mean the entire left hemisphere?
- metaphorm 10y ago
  > There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. > > You mean the entire left hemisphere? probably not that, that's overkill. there are smaller, more specific areas in the brain directly associated with language faculties. two prominent examples are Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area which are both involved in speech comprehension (but not in control of the physiological apparatus for forming speech sounds).
  - andrewflnr 10y ago
    Um, Wikipedia says Broca's area is involved in speech production. If you just mean the specific details of working the lips, vocal chords, etc, wouldn't that be the cerebellum's job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
    - metaphorm 10y ago
      yes, it is involved in the neurological processing of speech production w.r.t to grammar and syntax. that's a separate function from fine control of muscles used to produce speech sounds.
naasking 10y ago
> A talking lion would still be a lion. But it's not. Lions can't talk, almost by definition. A talking lion is necessarily a creature so different from a regular lion that it can't reliably tell you what being a regular lion is like. It's like how smartphones aren't really phones, they're computers with telephony capabilities. Calling them phones is ridiculous when you really think about it, but we apply that label for historical reasons based on their evolution from early phones. Still, opening up a smartphone won't really tell you anything about how regular phones work.
- thevardanian 10y ago
  Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. Lion communicate with each other instinctively. They at the very least understand each other, whether we understand lions is a different point.
  - naasking 10y ago
    > Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. In other words, completely different brains than regular lions. So, not lions.
    - scott_s 10y ago
      I agree with your position (and with Dennett's). "Talking" is not like an independent module with a lede you can attach to a lion's brain to get it to talk. It must be integrated with the lion's brain, and that necessarily changes the brain to the point that it's no longer a "lion." This is because even simple statements like "I am hungry" require the ability for sophisticated abstraction. "Talking" is more than mere vocalization, it's also the thought processes behind the vocalization. Once you've changed a brain so that it is capable of those sophisticated abstractions, it's no longer the same.
    - thevardanian 10y ago
      Is a person missing half a brain, in a vegetable state with little hope for recovery not human?
tomlock 10y ago
And in the act of teaching Koko to talk - we changed Koko.
- rspeer 10y ago
  Koko did not talk. She imitated hand signs. Her handlers were gorilla handlers, not linguists. They were willing to accept any combination of hand signs as communication, and they got to decide what was being "communicated". The phenomenon was no different from dog owners who believe their dog understands English.

goldenkey 10y ago

Consistency is really key. As long as there is consistency in thought and action, there is a level of understanding, whether innate or consciously. Language has nothing to do with consistency except for the outward showing of it to others. And it may possibly help with self-consistency..we cannot assert that yet.

sharp11 10y ago

Yes! Highly recommend Carl Safina's Beyond Words.

n4r9 10y ago

I don't think Dennett is denying that animals have rich inner lives, or that they can express basic desires to us. He's saying that their conscious experience is somehow fundamentally incomprehensible to us.

simonh 10y ago
I'm not so sure. Maybe for an octopus, but as mammals we have fundamentally similar brains and neurology to many other mammals. When I quiet my mind, look around me passively and simply experience the input of my senses, I can easily suppose that the experience I have in those moments is very similar to the experience of a dog or a chimp in a similar mental state. If I'm not using the higher functions of my brain such as language and only using those functions I share with other mammals, I don't see why I should expect my experience of them to be radically different. Similarly, many mammals exhibit emotions and desires. We have those too and we evolved them from common ancestors. If a common ancestor of chimps and humans evolved these behaviors and we and chimps exhibit them, why should we necessarily expect the experience of them to be utterly and incomprehensibly different? Especially when many of the resulting behaviors in chimps and humans are so closely analogous and presumably also closely analogous to the behavior of our common ancestor? Surely any claim that we should expect them to be completely different or incomprehensible is the one that is extraordinary and needs to justify itself?

marmaduke 10y ago

Your quote doesn't support your conclusions about the subject or Dennett's views on them. A lack of sight from birth results in visual cortex used for other things. Damage to language areas can result in loss of comprehension or production, but neighboring tissue can recover the functionality. The lines we draw are fairly blurry to be honest. Dennett isn't saying that the language area makes the human but that language and narrative as a cognitive currency are what make us human; the neurobiology is incidental.

dmreedy 10y ago

That quote, and its context, is not an argument that animals do not have exceedingly rich inner lives, nor is it an argument that language is some prerequisite for such a state. It is an effort to address, and dismiss, the kind of "17th century delusions" that you're worried about (and, in fact, participating in, whether intentionally or not). The statements, "Animals are sentient", and, "Animals are not sentient", are opposite positions extrapolated from the same axiomatic premises; that there is some thing called 'sentience', that humans 'have' this 'sentience', and animals either do or do not. Most commonly this kind of thinking also assumes that there is one kind of thing called sentience, (often referred to in religions as a soul). Your phrase, "lack certain tooling", is in line with this logic; it implies that there is some absolute definition, some core kernel of "inner experience" that is separable from ancillary layers that it may leverage. This is analogous to the statement that a computer may be running an operating system, whether it has a keyboard and speakers or not. What Dennett argues, here and in general, is that this definition of sentience is not nearly holistic enough. That there is no one objective thing called 'sentience'. Instead, there are a bunch of different things; being a lion, being a bat, being a human. Each of these is a model of experience in and of itself, and is defined in and of itself; you can't factor out a common set of experiences or functions and expect them to translate. Part of being a human is being able to, amongst other things, see, hear, taste, and speak. These are not tools built on top of some common 'sentience interface'[1]. To continue (dangerous and leaky) software metaphors, it's much more like a spaghetti-coded monolith[2]; the features -are- the system, and their implementation is part of a feedback loop into the deepest parts of the system, and all the way back out again. The tools aren't 'used by' the 'sentience'; they _are_ the sentience, and the sentience is the tools. A practical demonstration to consider here is something like synesthesia, where what might superficially seem to be well-defined verticals are crossed and interwoven. And so, when he (extending Wittgenstein) says, "If a lion could talk, we’d understand him just fine. He just wouldn’t help us understand anything about lions.”, he's saying that if such a thing as a talking lion existed, it wouldn't help us understand lions because talking lions and non-talking lions have different experiences, in part because they have different capabilities, different available tools, and thus different architectures. This isn't to say that they don't each have some rich inner life. Just that these inner lives are not mutually comprehensible, shared, or even compatible. In fact, the article, further down, pretty much says just this, albeit in many fewer words: “If you think there’s a fixed meaning of the word ‘consciousness,’ and we’re searching for that, then you’re already making a mistake,” --- [1] This line of thinking is very close to the "17th century delusion" of something like a homunculus. It is made more palatable by using a word like 'soul', however [2] or, indeed, something like a neural network; the weights 'mean' something inside the system, but they're all relatively defined, not absolutely; you can't necessarily look inside the system and expect to understand what individual components 'mean' without addressing their entirely relative context.

randcraw 10y ago

I think Dennett responded too narrowly to the question and thus misreprested his own point of view. "A lion that talks like a human" is not a well formed thought experiment, since no real lion could talk like a human. A lion that that does wouldn't be like any lion we've ever seen. And if Koko could talk like a human, she too would no longer be like any gorilla we've seen. The main point of limited consciousness in lions is lost in an implausible fantastic model of a superintelligent lion that doesn't exist and never could. There's no point in extending that (lousy) line of reasoning to gorillas too. Through our experience communicating with Koko and with higher primates like chimps, we've come to understand how much 'more conscious' a chimp is than a gorilla, and how we can better assess consciousness without using language. We've seen that the chimp is aware of more of the world than is a gorilla, both inner and outer worlds -- the content of one's own mind and the minds of others. This really isn't so different from what Dennett espouses, that consciousness is a continuum that begins with a lowly few-cell organism that's aware of nothing in the universe more than a sugar gradient, and ends with another organism (man?) that's attuned to the loftiest truths and actively strives to achieve ideal/complete consciousness, or Satori. I suspect that on reflection, Dennett would not defend his own "lion-ness" argument for the same reasons you suggest. Koko is an existence proof to the contrary.

zaptheimpaler 10y ago

I totally agree (not any kind of expert). Even babies don't talk for a couple of years, but they are very much alive and in fact some psychology says that most of personality is baked by about 7 years old. Then most of it is must be determined without words or language, rather by memories & connected emotional experiences. Not hard to imagine that animals might experience the world similarly to babies via instincts & emotions.

ctdonath 10y ago

There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. Dennett would have you believe that it's that one part that makes us human. That's an interesting position for him, considering (IIRC) his co-author Douglas Hofstadter (The Mind's I) has a sister who is a perfectly normal & functional adult except for her complete incapacity for language.

loup-vaillant 10y ago
What "incomplete incapacity for language" means? There is speech, hearing, reading, writing, signs language… I can't imagine a "normal functioning" human that cannot communicate in any way with others. Surely there are things she can do to express herself and understand others?
bbctol 10y ago
To be fair, that is a ludicrous misrepresentation of Dennett's position.
mcguire 10y ago
Interesting: "Our folks’ third and last child, Molly, born in Palo Alto, was, sadly, not what anybody had thought. By four or so, Molly was visibly abnormal — not saying any words at all, nor absorbing any. It wasn’t autism; it was a profound brain malfunction, probably dating from birth or prior to birth, but what was wrong, nobody could say — no diagnosis. Molly just didn’t pick up any words, who knows why, and our Mom and Dad had such anguish for so long on Molly’s account, as did Laura and I. What bad luck." https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipography.html https://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/autolipo... The second sentence of the quote does seem strongly opposed to what I know of Dennett's position.

31h 10y ago

> We taught Koko the gorilla how to talk I think you're overstating your case. "although the gorilla learned a large number of signs she never understood grammar or symbolic speech" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Koko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language#Koko > humans that don't have language Which humans are those? Language arises pretty spontaneously among humans even if they're deaf or blind - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language Yet no amount of exposure will make a dog or ape understand language. > There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. You mean the entire left hemisphere?

metaphorm 10y ago
> There is, literally, a part of the brain that if you shut it off, you lose language. > > You mean the entire left hemisphere? probably not that, that's overkill. there are smaller, more specific areas in the brain directly associated with language faculties. two prominent examples are Broca's Area and Wernicke's Area which are both involved in speech comprehension (but not in control of the physiological apparatus for forming speech sounds).
- andrewflnr 10y ago
  Um, Wikipedia says Broca's area is involved in speech production. If you just mean the specific details of working the lips, vocal chords, etc, wouldn't that be the cerebellum's job? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area
  - metaphorm 10y ago
    yes, it is involved in the neurological processing of speech production w.r.t to grammar and syntax. that's a separate function from fine control of muscles used to produce speech sounds.

naasking 10y ago

> A talking lion would still be a lion. But it's not. Lions can't talk, almost by definition. A talking lion is necessarily a creature so different from a regular lion that it can't reliably tell you what being a regular lion is like. It's like how smartphones aren't really phones, they're computers with telephony capabilities. Calling them phones is ridiculous when you really think about it, but we apply that label for historical reasons based on their evolution from early phones. Still, opening up a smartphone won't really tell you anything about how regular phones work.

thevardanian 10y ago
Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. Lion communicate with each other instinctively. They at the very least understand each other, whether we understand lions is a different point.
- naasking 10y ago
  > Talking lions are just lions with trans-species communicating capabilities. In other words, completely different brains than regular lions. So, not lions.
  - scott_s 10y ago
    I agree with your position (and with Dennett's). "Talking" is not like an independent module with a lede you can attach to a lion's brain to get it to talk. It must be integrated with the lion's brain, and that necessarily changes the brain to the point that it's no longer a "lion." This is because even simple statements like "I am hungry" require the ability for sophisticated abstraction. "Talking" is more than mere vocalization, it's also the thought processes behind the vocalization. Once you've changed a brain so that it is capable of those sophisticated abstractions, it's no longer the same.
  - thevardanian 10y ago
    Is a person missing half a brain, in a vegetable state with little hope for recovery not human?

tomlock 10y ago

And in the act of teaching Koko to talk - we changed Koko.

rspeer 10y ago
Koko did not talk. She imitated hand signs. Her handlers were gorilla handlers, not linguists. They were willing to accept any combination of hand signs as communication, and they got to decide what was being "communicated". The phenomenon was no different from dog owners who believe their dog understands English.