Let’s consider this from the only perspective we are scientifically aware of.
Let’s consider the evolutionary tree from single-celled animals to Homo Sapiens. Will you admit that with greater brain development likely comes greater awareness and greater cognitive function?
If so, I think we can postulate that a single-celled animal is not aware of the future, but a human is. So there likely is a gradual scale of awareness as the evolutionary tree is climbed, no?
At some point (branch?), the organism starts to become aware of not only the present, but the likely future. This might not be a firm crossover, but a gradual development.
So to answer the OP, as animals evolve, they gain an increasing awareness of not only their own mortality, but everything else.
Do you deny that there’s a vast body of published research on animal cognition, as well as on its linguistic dimension? Or is it your assertion that it’s all “fraud”, and animals have no real cognitive capability? If not, I’m not sure what your point is.
What have we here, the Jim Inhofe of animal cognition?
To be sure, even among the serious animal cognition / animal language researchers, Penny Patterson’s work with Koko has been criticized on her overt “rich interpretations” grounds. Going way back a few years, even Herb Terrace ultimately rejected his own work with the chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky on essentially the same grounds. I don’t think anyone seriously accuses Patterson of outright hoax or fraud though.
As these sorts of criticisms have arisen over the years, subsequent researchers have taken note and have taken pains to design their projects to overcome those criticisms. Herman et al did a language acquisition study with dolphins, in which they went to great lengths to avoid Clever Hans effects, and certain important trials were run with blind observers who called the animals’ responses as they saw them. (“Blind observer” means someone who had no prior knowledge of what the “correct” response was supposed to be.)
Are you sure about that? I spent a little while working in research subject protection, and there was more of a chance that the rats would stand on their little hind legs and sing karaoke than that the IRB would approve surgery on them without anesthesia without a compelling reason. I can remember only three studies where the animals may have suffered. Two were tests of new anesthetics: whether the drug stopped pain was what they were trying to find out. The third was a test of a drug for an infection of infants; they were testing it on infant mice. The researchers said, in effect, “Look, we’ll inspect the mice several times a day and euthanize any that seem too far gone, but we can’t promise we won’t miss one, because they’re so little.”
It wasn’t my interest in animal welfare/sadism that brought me to reading The Sociopath Next Door, (it was more my challenges relating to people) but I recommend that book to anyone who wants to know more about how people think. It’s a continuum of empathy/compassion levels but basically a much larger percentage of the population than we think have little or no empathy for others. I believe this is part of the issue with animal welfare, based on my conversations with those people mentioned above. Along with our natural tendency to egotism. LOTS of people are unable to step into someone else’s shoes to ponder what things are like there, and this goes double for animals. I feel that for those people, the concept of anthropomorphism as a convenient crutch. For example, someone like me and perhaps you, would say “Don’t beat that dog, how would you like it if someone did that to you?” and those empathy-less people would laugh and throw the A word at you to try to discredit your concern. This has actually happened to me where people say it’s JUST a dog, it doesn’t feel pain like me and you, you’re just anthropomorphizing. So far I haven’t figured out a good argument for those people because I feel they’re just irrational.
Yep, and again it’s all too easy for people to discount these observed behaviors with the argument that “the plural of anecdotes is not data”. However, my opinion is that there must be some point beyond which a body of experiential evidence (anecdotes) must add up to data, but I don’t know where that point is. If we have ten identical anecdotes, that’s clearly not data. How about ten thousand? Ten million?
If you’re interested in the topic of animal slaughter and welfare practices, I very much recommend Temple Grandin’s books and work. She’s a high-functioning autist who has a high degree (I forget, masters or doctorate) and works with meat processing plants to reduce the terror and sadism. Her observations are fascinating and she explains things so clearly that you will go “well, duh, of course that’s what scares the animals, why can’t THEY see it?” She’s made some huge improvements in the beef and pork processing industries and is trying to do the same for poultry. My opinion is that if we HAVE to process animals for our food supply, we should do it as humanely as possible, so I applaud Grandin’s work, however she has many detractors.
This has definitely been a problem with early animal cognition research. But these flaws get the scientific community debating the problem and it has actually led to improvements. Don’t forget that Jane Goodall was strongly smacked down for her early research with wild chimpanzees because she NAMED them and described their behaviors with anthropomorphic terms. First of all, you do NOT name your test subjects because it makes you lose your objectivity (that’s the scientific position). She used names instead of numbers because a large part of her study was the social dynamics and family structures. It’s pretty cumbersome to say that 123 was the father of 456, and after a while you’d have to say things like "8765 attacked 23422 (his grandsire). And at that point it’s just a major hassle to read and keep it all straight who was who. So she had very valid reasons. She was also smacked down for using “emotionally laden” descriptions of their behavior instead of clinical descriptions, like she would say “he was angry” instead of “he displayed aggression”. Jane Goodall broke the ice for us and now researchers can use these techniques, with caution to make sure they don’t anthroporphize. But they still fight over it a lot.
I very much recommend the Alex the Grey Parrot research because Irene Pepperberg came up with an interesting training/research approach to eliminate the appearance of leading Alex into his responses. She designed what she calls the “rival/model” technique to train prior to each study. She would first “train” a lab assistant while Alex observed, demonstrating correct and incorrect responses and rewards and corrections. It’s better described in her books than I can do justice to, but it sounded very rigorous and objective to me and I didn’t see any occasions where I felt that she’d coached him to make a particular response.
It sounds like your lab does use anesthesia for your rats when possible and for that I applaud you. I didn’t say no labs did that, I just said it was U.S. law that it’s not required. Anesthesia is only legally mandated for dogs, cats, and primates. Labs that go beyond the legal minimums are fantastic.
Depends. Were there other cases where they bleated and crowded into a corner that weren’t death-related? You put mortality in quotes – did you mean death or just that something unpleasant/irregular is happening and they are reacting to that because it might cause them injury?
There’s a huge gulf between “An animal’s unconscious instinct recognizes a situation as potentially dangerous” vs. “An animal’s conscious cognition observes other dead animals and muses about the nature of its own inevitable eventual demise.”
It’s pretty clear the former goes on, even in goats. Not always on all circumstances, but sometimes in some circumstances.
Put me down as someone who believes the latter never happens on any Earth animal other than humans. Although I’m willing to be persuaded in the case of some unusually smart animals such as perhaps porpoises, dolphins, or elephants that something vaguely like a pale shadow of that occurs in some of those animals some of the time.
Also put me down as someone who believes humans are not *that *far over the line into self-aware territory. We certainly see plenty of evidence than plenty of humans spend a huge portion of their lives very much un-self aware. IMO there’s a lot of room above that for smarter, more insightful intellects than the one humans have.
It’s even been argued (rhetorically) that even humans are nothing more than very complicated SR machines.
Skinner trained pigeons to knock ping-pong balls back and forth over a net. His explicit point was that, while it may look like they are playing ping-pong, they are doing nothing of the sort. They are just behaving in a mechanical way according to the behavior-shaping training they have had.
But it can also be argued that humans are doing just that too. We’re just capable of responding to a more elaborate set of stimulus/response/reward contingencies. What if you simply subjected pigeons to a similarly elaborate set of stimulus/response/reward contingencies until they learned all the appropriate responses? If you could get pigeons to do that, then are they playing ping-pong? An argument could be made that they would then be doing exactly what humans do when they play ping-pong, nothing more nor less.
Herb Terrace trained a chimpanzee to use sign language, and reported rather elaborate results with his little Shakespeare. But in the end, the concluded that the chimpanzee was just doing rather elaborate imitation, without having any understanding of what it was “saying”. But how do we know that humans aren’t doing just the same thing when we talk – just more elaborately?
Intelligence is not a single, quantifiable attribute. Poets and physicists utilize different types of intelligence, even different parts of the brain.
Non-human animals have evolved types of intelligence that are suited to their survival. Salmon return to their birth streams every year. Gorillas find food and protect their young. Whether we attribute them to instinct or intelligence, these behaviors have been selected as advantageous to the survival of these species.
We wouldn’t expect Robert Frost to design a nuclear reactor. We wouldn’t expect a human to find his birthplace without the aid of technology. Why would we expect a gorilla to learn American Sign Language?
This is very much like the ongoing arguments about artificial intelligence that have come up in a number of threads, with regard to whether machines can truly be intelligent and specifically whether they can really be said to “understand” anything as opposed to just mechanically manipulating symbols.
To me the “symbol manipulation” argument is ridiculous, and has mostly been raised by misguided nitwit philosophers like John Searle. As I’ve said before, and as Steve Pinker correctly observes, all intelligence is intrinsically computational – “patterns of interconnectivity that carry out the right information processing” – and intelligence is simply an emergent property of that process. Intelligence and consciousness are both emergent properties of computational systems that become manifest at sufficient levels of complexity. Some computer systems already exhibit undeniable traits of intelligence, and higher-level animals like primates and dogs have cognitive functions many orders of magnitude more complex than any machine we’ve ever created. The question of whether such animals possess cognition, intelligence, will, and consciousness is entirely moot, and doubting it is absurd.
An extensive series of stimuli operating on very large and complex neural networks that carried out computational information processing tasks in the scientists’ brains.
Just because a process is clearly very complex and is not a priori “knowable”, or its details understandable to an observer, doesn’t mean it’s not computational and hence qualitatively both “mechanistic” and deterministic. <wry grin> back atcha
I truly don’t mean this to be insulting, but the fact that your dog constantly amazed you says more about you than it does about your dog. It’s understandable that people become attached to pets and project human traits onto them (been there myself), but if you can look at it dispassionately, you’ll see that what appears to be a sad face (display of emotion) is simply a gesture that the dog associates with getting his ears scratched. The same with what he wants, likes, and dislikes; he’s been conditioned to do the things that result in certain behaviors from you.
There is a fundamental qualitative difference between humans and all other animals. It’s a difference in type rather than degree. All animals, including humans, have evolved types of intelligence that provide an evolutionary advantage. Dogs and other common pets that have been domesticated for a long time have developed characteristics that endear them to their owners. These characteristics don’t require a higher degree of intelligence, only a susceptibility to conditioning.
Any attempt to teach animals to communicate with humans is assuming that the animal has evolved traits that might be useful now or in the future but provided no survival advantage at the time they evolved. The same is true of attributing higher intelligence to domesticated animals when they learn to interact with their owners in an apparently intelligent way. To believe that natural selection sometimes favors traits that will only provide future advantages is to believe that evolution is goal oriented. And that’s just another version of creationism.
My point is that a scientist who espouses that theory doesn’t believe he does because a stimulus caused him to, and so the theory is no more true or false than a male robin driving a red handkerchief out of its territory is true or false. He believes he examined evidence and reasoned that the theory is true, and he hopes to convince other scientists, not as SR robots, but rational beings. Or am I totally missing something?
Knowing that you are going to die involves the ability to think about the future. Not many living things can do that. When they die, they die.
That said, when I realize that I am going to die someday, I tend to comfort myself that I will just be a part of Mother Nature, and the materials that make me will persist while my consciousness is gone.
So your position is that my observations about intelligent behavior in my dog based on a decade of direct observation and experience are all in my head? Okee-doke.
Stated without basis, and contrary to all evidence. You’re missing an extremely fundamental point here. You can classify intelligence “types” to your heart’s content, but the profoundly important point is that apparent differences in “type” are the result of differences in degree. Intelligence is a continuum in which new attributes like learning ability, will, and consciousness arise gradually along the continuum. To state that human intelligence is of a fundamentally different “type” from that of all other animals as if it was created by magic with no apparent cause or reason seems to me to be very much along Creationist lines of thinking. It also seems connected to the idea that machines can never be “intelligent” because they “just manipulate symbols”. I might of course be misinterpreting your meaning, but it does strike me as an unsupported and unscientific declaration of human exceptionalism and disconnection from nature.
It assumes no such thing. It requires only the recognition that a sufficiently developed intelligence possesses generalized adaptive learning capabilities.
My view, which some behaviorists would disagree with, is that everything is stimulus-response. That there may be a cognitive process between the “S” and the “R” doesn’t change that. The robin driving a red handkerchief out of his territory is an instinctive kind of SR. The politician who wins an election has done so because he provided the right stimuli to elicit the desired response from the electorate. The reason person “A” is your best friend and you cannot stand to be in the company of person “B” is entirely based on the S-R interactions that arise, if you really think about it.
Not to speak for the other poster, but yes, your dog displays intelligent behavior but it is a jump to “emotion”:
“My dog would constantly amaze me with his displays of emotion, wants, likes, and dislikes, and his sometimes clever cunning to get things he wanted or to avoid being tricked. He was, admittedly, exceptionally smart, and he also had many of the traits of an alpha dog, which made him a challenge to train but a wonder to observe.”
And a huge leap to “wisdom” (bolding mine):
“Some of us who have had a dog that developed a fatal illness will know that there may come a point where the dog gives up on life, where that endearing optimism abruptly vanishes and he appears, knowingly, to embrace death. You can see it in his behaviors, and for those who have been privileged to be close enough and attuned enough to their dog, you can see it in his eyes. We think of dogs as our “dumb chums” but they are the product of a million years of evolution. They sometimes seem to have a wisdom that is more than we can fathom.”
See? Now you are experiencing the same thing that I reported. It’s kind of funny but enraging at the same time, isn’t it?
A really good example (ok, anecdote for you purists) is in Irene Pepperberg’s book about Alex the grey parrot. She very carefully trained him to associate specific labels (she avoided the term “words” to avoid accusations of leading him) to objects and attributes. So for example she taught him basic shapes (round, square), attributes (wooden, plastic, green, red). She also taught him numeral labels (we’d call them numbers) and found that he was able to do very simple counting. In the middle of one training session where she was doing another repetition of “which object is green” (scientific methodology requires repeatable processes, so she repeated all of her experiments many times with him), she got confused and screwed up. She held up three different objects, none of which were green and asked him which object was green. She meant to ask him which one was wood. He said “nuh”, his label for “no”. At first she thought he was being obstinate so she asked him again, and then a third time. Then she realized he was trying to tell her that there were no green objects in her hand. He’d gotten the stimulus, processed that the query did not match any of the possible answers and told her so. She never taught him the concept of zero or none. She recorded that anecdote as one of the most remarkable moments in her Alex Studies.
I’m curious about your thinking on this, so let me probe a bit. Here is a scenario: the dog is on the couch and he’s not supposed to be there. You call him off but he just looks at you and doesn’t jump down. You gently grab his collar and pull him down, and he screams. You know you did not hurt him, so why did he scream?
This is an anecdote from a friend that really happened. I want to know your interpretation of his behavior.
He wants to stay on the couch. He knows that in the past when he has screamed, it resulted in the person stopping what they were doing so there is a chance that will happen again and he will get to stay on the couch.
Humans observed the sun revolving around the earth for thousands of years.
Regardless of how you characterize it, human intelligence varies over a wide range. Assuming that this range is part of the continuum you describe, and assuming that we have a method for measuring intelligence in all animals, where would you expect other animals to fall on this scale in relation to humans? Would the average chimpanzee be on the same level as an average human? Even after many years of research, no one has claimed to have taught an animal to communicate in ASL with the proficiency exhibited by an average deaf child, much less an adult. Would dogs be comparable to human teenagers? Suppose you say to a four year old child, “Sally, pick up the doll and put it on the table.” Sally should have no difficulty understanding and completing this task. A dog could be trained to do this, but without such specialized conditioning, the dog would not obey those instructions, even if the dog had been exposed to human language daily for ten years. Now suppose you abandon Sally and the dog alone in the woods. In accordance with your continuum idea, Sally has proven to be more intelligent than the dog, so we should expect the 4-year old child to have a better chance of survival in the woods.
The truth is, chimpanzees, bonobos, dolphins, and dogs are intelligent creatures, but their intelligence has evolved to suit their worlds. Look at any of the reports of animal communication research. Even accepting the reports on face value, the results are remarkable only when considered in the context of expectations for a non-human animal. If any of the data (word count, grammar, sentence length) were compared to the normal development of a child, only very young children would be less fluent. Your continuum idea would characterize all animals as being less intelligent than all but the least intelligent humans, and that is an unwarranted insult to the entire animal kingdom.
The type of intelligence that has evolved in modern humans allows us to think, plan, remember, design, construct; all to an extent that has never been possible with any other species. Out of millions of species that have evolved on earth, only one has reached this level. (A few closely related species may have, but they all went extinct millennia ago.) I believe this rarity is due to higher intelligence not being an evolutionary advantage in most cases. In fact, higher intelligence comes with significant disadvantages. Brain tissue consumes disproportionately more energy than other tissue, requiring consumption of more food to survive. A larger brain requires a larger head, which requires much shorter gestation periods, resulting in significantly less mature offspring, which require much longer periods of parental care.
I believe that modern humans were able to overcome the disadvantages of higher intelligence because they concurrently evolved the capability for complex speech. Many other animals can communicate within their own species, but none with the complexity that allows group learning, cooperation, and knowledge transfer to the extent possible with modern humans. There’s nothing magical or supernatural about humans evolving higher intelligence and advanced speech. It’s possible that many other species have started down the evolutionary path toward higher intelligence or advanced speech, but without the fortuitous timing that humans experienced, neither trait alone provided enough of an advantage to stay in the gene pool.
