I think the rats are intelligent or desensitized enough to have learned that the humans are no threat. But it could be something similarly simple. Like an advan

I think the rats are intelligent or desensitized enough to have learned that the humans are no threat. But it could be something similarly simple. Like an advantage to helping those as a function of distance measured by genetic similarity, when in a foreign environment. Especially as social animals, strength in numbers type thing. So those who helped each other tended to survive to pass on those genes. Still selfish but emerges as empathetic looking. I too think empathy presumes a far higher intentionality and model of the self for the rat. But their actions should still count as a precursor to empathy. I believe these things are a continuum and divisions along the way are pretty arbitrary. For example does a parrot talk or is it just pattern recognizing? To that I say, what is the difference? Can we say talking is more than simply pattern recognition recursed to the next level? Consider Searle's Chinese Room, where he argues that since a human following a program to translate Chinese does not understand Chinese then a machine running the same also does not understand and hence is not 'strong AI'. I do not agree with his conclusion as I find such a distinction to be meaningless. You can't define what a mind is, human or not, by whether its aware of its operations. That is too slippery a concept and not necessarily an advantage. You can only observe and enumerate what properties the mind does (not) exhibit. Read Peter Watts' Blindsight if you want to see this line of thinking handled incredibly well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(science_fiction_novel) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(science_fiction_nov...