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Crows are self-aware just like us, says new study (2020)
- willcipriano 5y agoA short video I enjoy along these lines: Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04
- colechristensen 5y agoI don’t doubt that corvids are quite intelligent, but I do find the conclusion jump in this type of science from “we did these experiments and saw these results” to “crows are self aware” to be quite dubious. Specifically the connection between X and Y in “we are demonstrating X by doing Y” is very often quite weak and prevalent across scientific disciplines.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- codeulike 5y agoHere's what the experiment did: The crows were trained to watch for a flash — which didn’t always appear — and then peck at a red or blue target to register whether or not a flash of light was seen. Ozzie and Glenn were also taught to understand a changing “rule key” that specified whether red or blue signified the presence of a flash with the other color signifying that no flash occurred. In each round of a test, after a flash did or didn’t appear, the crows were presented a rule key describing the current meaning of the red and blue targets, after which they pecked their response. This sequence prevented the crows from simply rehearsing their response on auto-pilot, so to speak. In each test, they had to take the entire process from the top, seeing a flash or no flash, and then figuring out which target to peck. Not sure I'd say this means 'self aware' but it does seem smart, as in evidence of problem solving rather than just conditioning
- throwawayboise 5y agoStill seems to be it could be mostly conditioning. It's essentially a two-part stimulous to provoke a response. Also many animals can problem-solve up to a point, even use tools, but that is not what "self aware" means to me. Self-awareness is more being able to think of yourself in the abstract, behave in consideration of how others may see you, etc.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nathias 5y agoyes, but we can't know if they are so we have to speculate based on behavior and other cognitive functions that we associate with self-awareness.
- xg15 5y agoWhat I don't quite understand is why the "null hypothesis" here is frequently assumed to be "crows are not self-aware". We have no idea how prevalent self-awareness in the animal kingdom actually is, so shouldn't it rather be "we don't know whether crows are self-aware or not"?
- matt-attack 5y agoThe funny thing is we have no way of knowing that any other human (other than yourself) is self aware. This is why the study of consciousness is so difficult. We each clearly know that we are having a subjective experience, but we have no way of knowing that any one (or anything) else is. I kind of sympathize with the hypothesis that simply all matter has some degree of self consciousness.
- WalterBright 5y agoOf course, us being self-aware is pure conjecture.
- jakear 5y agoWe think therefore we are -- aren't we?
- beardyw 5y agoI was part of a test. The whole flash, red, blue thing was way over my head.
- wolverine876 5y agoDon't feel bad - you can post on Hacker News! That's impressive! (Though I suppose there's another way we could interpret look at that phenomenon ...)
- maximus-decimus 5y agoI will let you know I am very aware of my lack of self-awareness.
- wolverine876 5y agoSpeak for yourself! I'm here all week - I think.
- AlbertCory 5y agoIt seems to me that most of these animal experiments boil down to asking "do they have experiences like we have?" Of course they don't -- they're crows and we're humans. Duh. It's a philosophical problem, not a scientific one. Nagel [1] says, "* But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." Definitely read the whole article. So when we're asking if corvids are self-aware, we can't help really* asking if their experience of self-awareness is the same as ours. And we cannot know that, as Nagel so elaborately demonstrates. Consciousness (and intelligence) are not binary on/off choices. They're points in a multi-dimensional space. [1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf
- m463 5y agoThinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular understanding. By Temple Grandin, Ph.D. Department of Animal Science Colorado State University https://grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html https://grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html
- AlbertCory 5y agoThanks, I actually heard her talk at Google. Some pointed jokes about how the sort of people who work in tech tend to be autistic, like her.
- AlbertCory 5y agoI was at this [1]. You can see me in the crowd scene at 4:39 in the baseball cap. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA4tE3_2qmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA4tE3_2qmI
- Madmallard 5y agoNever understood the self-awareness consciousness stuff. How is it rational to think at all that any species with a brain is anything more than a collection of responses to that stimuli, humans especially included?
- a9h74j 5y agoI suggest The Ego Tunnel by Metzinger. The arguments and demonstrations are far better than merely hand-wavy and circular.
- tommiegannert 5y agoI think we have to interpret it as "we have named this vague notion we feel ourselves as Self-Awareness". Now we're searching if others have it too. It's clear we can classify stimuli, and responses, in various ways: internal/external, autonomous/conscious, selfish/altruistic, fast/slow. So I don't think it's strange researches want to understand the notion of self-awareness. Whatever that might turn out to be biologically. The problem is it's way out there on the emergent system spectrum, so really difficult to pin-point. In short, there doesn't have to be anything magic about us putting names on classes of responses. We already know we are self-aware, by unknown definition.