Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence? Humans are weird–this is sort of like a peacock saying why shouldn’t all animals have really long tail feathers. Why build in very high level abstract thought when simpler systems work as well? Non-great apes are an edge example (which the bird guy dragged in) but what about other animals? Do you attribute this level of philosophical awareness to honey gliders? Pangolins? Banded skinks? Greebes? Lionfish? Blister beetles? If not, where do you think the cut-off point is? I’m not the type to say “watch this video to see my point”, but maybe at least read people talking about this video.
How do we know that “very high level abstract thought” is required?
Being able to tell self from not-self must have become evolutionarily useful, oh, I don’t know, around the time of the first cell membrane maybe? Being able to tell live things from dead things must have been useful for a similar length of time, because live things do things that dead things don’t, and therefore pose different opportunities and different dangers. Being able to tell whether a particular non-self is a member of one’s own species must have become useful around the time of the invention of sex, if not sooner. Being able to tell which other species a particular non-self of a different species is must have become useful around the time species exhibiting different behavior first developed. Why should any of these things require “very high level abstract thought”? And what, exactly, do you mean by that phrase?
In terms of recognition of self: I think the mirror test is badly flawed if taken to prove a lack of such recognition, because other species may recognize by scent or sound or for all we know magnetic patterns, even if they fail to recognize themselves by sight. But if it’s taken only in the positive direction, as in passing the mirror test means an ability to recognize oneself: lots of species haven’t been tested, but so far the ones that have passed include not only humans, chimpanzees, and dolphins; but also magpies, some very small fish (cleaner wrasses), and Myrmica ants. That’s pretty widespread, I’d say.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test#Animals_that_have_passed
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2018/09/fish-cleaner-wrasse-self-aware-mirror-test-intelligence-news/
I didn’t watch the video. I read some of the comments, but didn’t find them very useful. We don’t know – as was pointed out in those comments – what consciousness is in humans. Given that we don’t know what it is, how can we say that other species don’t have it, or some precursor to or relative of it?
Wild Dog Plays Dead To Escape Lion
I can’t say whether or not he was playing dead or had actually passed out, but I think it’s fairly obvious he knew exactly when it was his time to get the hell out of there.
I also don’t know if his buddies have a sense of humor or not, but when he got away, they sure seemed to be laughing about it, lol
I dunno which is the more extraordinary claim: that humans alone possess a theory of mind, or that “consciousness” is some ill-defined set of phenomena we’ve retroactively lumped together, at the end of one particular branch of an evolutionary tree, in order to justify our special place in the universe. Its constituent parts are visible all throughout biology, from primates to birds to mollusks to dolphins, with other really interesting behaviors we don’t really understand showing up in fungal networks and insect colonies, and there may not be a “cut-off point” as much as a complicated continuum (or web) of behaviors, only a certain subset of which are readily identifiable to humans as “sentience.”
To me this seems like an application of the watchmaker argument, in that consciousness only “works” when it’s properly set up and then somehow magically “flipped on”, rather than just being a certain set of related emergent phenomena. But you don’t necessarily need an iPhone 15 to tell the time; different timepieces using completely different mechanics have independently arisen all over the world. To suggest that consciousness is somehow more special than the rest of evolution? THAT’s the extraordinary claim.
You can already find dogs smarter than some humans, cats more empathetic than some others, squirrels with better memories, birds with better navigational abilities, elephants that are better teachers… to say nothing of even more abstract behaviors like the use of language (and along with them, regional dialects between the same species), tool usage and experimentation, deception, etc.
To see all that and then claim that “no, none of that is consciousness” requires defining consciousness in a way that is arbitrary and tautological, i.e., to be conscious is to be human, and to be human is to be conscious.
Sure, there is probably some definition of consciousness that 90% of humans can satisfy and that 90% of all other species would fail to meet, but then you’d just be looking at consciousness as a statistical description of a certain set of evolutionary traits, which means there is probably a gradient of ancestors with different extents of it – just not easily found in the fossil record (though, arguably, I’d say burial practices would count). There is no one definition that 100% of homo sapiens can meet, and that no other species can.
The concept that there is an “I” sitting behind the scene playing in front of your senses, and that some (but not all) of the moving objects in your senses also have an “I”, and that when these objects stop moving they no longer have an “I”, and that I will someday in something called “the future” stop moving and stop having an “I” is so obviously a very high level philosophical concept that it beggars my imagination that you are even debating it.
What is a high level philosophical belief? Where is the data teasing apart these levels? How do you define them? The clear distinction you presuppose isn’t very evident at all, much less obvious.
‘Darren Garrison thinks it’s utterly obvious’ isn’t an answer to anything.
When I find that the only answer I can make to somebody’s argument is ‘but it’s obvious!’ I back off until I’ve managed to figure out why I think that it’s obvious, and how to put that explanation into words. Often I can do that; but occasionally in the process I conclude that I was wrong; or, at least, that the only thing I’ve got to back my position is my own certainty, which can hardly be expected to convince anybody else.
Calling it a “very high level philosophical concept” doesn’t amount to explaining what you mean by “very high level abstract thought”; though apparently you mean something that humans two years old or younger can handle, if we’re talking about basic recognition of animate from inanimate, that one is an individual, and that others can want things different from what one wants.
And you’re rolling in a whole lot of concepts together that don’t necessarily all come in one inseparable clump. Recognizing that “I” want something, recognizing that there are “others” who may want something else, recognizing that a specific “other” has died, recognizing that “I” might die sometime, recognizing that “I” am definitely going to die sometime, and thinking of oneself as “sitting behind the scene playing in front of [one’s] senses”, are six different things.
Nicely put, Reply.
There are many things that a human 2-year old can do that few if any other animal species show any sign of being capable of.
“When I find that the only answer I can make to somebody’s argument is ‘but it’s obvious!’ I back off until I’ve managed to figure out why I think that it’s obvious, and how to put that explanation into words.”