Animal minds: How well can we understand a cat ... or a bat?

In 1974, philosopher Thomas Nagel published a most interesting essay called "What is it like to be a bat", which reminded us that animals not only have different minds from humans, they - in some cases - have different senses. Their whole experience of life may be different: For example, he notes:

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.

[ ... ]

I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

Nagel's main purpose was not really to understand what it is like to be a bat, which he believes unlikely. Rather, he opposed reductionism - as in "the mind is nothing but ..." as a strategy for understanding the mind. His point is that reductionism is not even a good way of understanding animal minds, let alone human minds.

As he says,

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable. Perhaps that is why current discussions of the problem give it little attention or get it obviously wrong. The recent wave of reductionist euphoria has produced several analyses of mental phenomena and mental concepts designed to explain the possibility of some variety of materialism, psychophysical identification, or reduction.

[ ... ]

Every reductionist has his favorite analogy from modern science. It is most unlikely that any of these unrelated examples of successful reduction will shed light on the relation of mind to brain. But philosophers share the general human weakness for explanations of what is incomprehensible in terms suited for what is familiar and well understood, though entirely different. This has led to the acceptance of implausible accounts of the mental largely because they would permit familiar kinds of reduction. I shall try to explain why the usual examples do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body—why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless. The most important and characteristic feature of conscious mental phenomena is very poorly understood. Most reductionist theories do not even try to explain it. And careful examination will show that no currently available concept of reduction is applicable to it. Perhaps a new theoretical form can be devised for the purpose, but such a solution, if it exists, lies in the distant intellectual future.

Conscious Entities notes,

Nagel's aim is to launch a kind of counter-attack against physicalist arguments, which would reduce the mental to the merely physical, and which were evidently getting into the ascendant in 1974 when the paper was published. Tempting as it may be to fall back on the familiar kind of reductionist approach which has worked so well in other areas, Nagel argues, phenomenal, subjective experience is a special case. Reductive arguments always seek to give an explanation in objective terms, but the essential point about conscious experiences is that they are subjective. The whole idea of an objective account therefore makes no sense - no more sense than asking what my inward experiences are really like, as opposed to how they seem to me. How they seem to me is all there is to them. Any neutral, objective, third-person explanation has to leave out the essence of the experience. The point about conscious experience is that there is something it is like to see x, or hear y, or feel z.

Non-materialist neuroscience, which we explore in The Spiritual Brain, treats the relationship between the mind and the brain in a non-reductionist way, like the relationship between a television program and a television set. The program requires the set but cannot be reduced to it. Little will be discovered about the program by analyzing the set. On the other hand, if the set is damaged, it may not transmit the program very well.

There are, of course, other non-materialist ways of looking at the relationship between the mind and the brain.

Other "animal mind" stories from The Mindful Hack

"Animal minds: Monkeys understanD money?"

"When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ... "

Animal minds: Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Researchers ask: What does it mean to be an animal?

Deception in humans and animals: The differences

Medical journal published article on cat's death predictions

Animal minds: But does the animal think it is art?

In response to a recent post on examples of animal art, a kind reader writes,

My memory of the stories concerning this animal are to the effect that Congo would "finish" his paintings; that is, he would stop at some point, and when his trainer, zoologist and surrealist painter Desmond Morris, tried to coax him to continue, he would instead -- in anger or frustration -- destroy the paintings.

So did Congo consider his paintings "art"? Perhaps not, but to him they were clearly more than just random markings on paper or canvas, made only to please his trainer.

Well, okay, but there is a vast spectrum between Congo considering them more than random markings on paper and Congo considering them art. And what I don’t know is where Congo’s perceptions fit.

Some thoughts:

The fact that an animal doesn’t like to be disturbed while completing a routine can be due to a number of causes - the most common being, in my experience, that the animal feels internal pressure to complete the routine, and treats interruptions as a form of hostility. The animal may or may not have any interest in or awareness of the outcome of the routine. The routine itself must be completed. A number of otherwise friendly cats I have known would attack a human who interrupted a kneading or toileting routine. Some dogs behave similarly.

The fact that Desmond Morris was Congo’s trainer does not fill me with confidence, because he was one of a long line of people are naked apes enthusiasts (or, to turn it around, enthusiasts for the idea that apes are people too).

Many of us doubt that the ape analogy tells us much about humans, and - more topically - have mixed feelings about how much the ape enthusiasts’ well-meaning ideas really help protect apes. Why isn’t it okay for apes just to be apes?

The animal I have lived with for most of my life is the cat, and I am very glad that cats are not close enough to humans in body shape or genetics that very many people have written books that could be titled “Man: The naked cat.” Cats have suffered much at human hands, but not that indignity - not so far. It is still possible for cats to be quite different from humans in their mental states and behaviour without any attempt made to revise the record to suit various agendas.

All that said, recently I got one of Rupert Sheldrake’s books on animal minds from the library, notably Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home (1999). I will either review it here or link here to a review elsewhere.

For what it’s worth, I have no doubt that many animals have specific mental and perceptual skills far superior to those of humans. But the felt need to map those skills onto specifically human tendencies like abstraction and metacognition seems like a byway. It doesn’t advance the understanding of either humans or animals much. For example, cats often have a much better sense of direction than humans, but they do not draw maps. They just go home. In some cases, you would be just as well off to follow the cat as the global positioning satellite.

Other animal minds stories from The Mindful Hack:

Researchers ask: What does it mean to be an animal?

Deception in humans and animals: The differences

Medical journal published article on cat's death predictions

Also, at Design of Life blog: Can animals do math? How much should wwe believe of what we read?

Researchers ask: What does it mean to be an animal?

This from an interesting call for papers:

CFP: Animal Bodies of Knowledge: Understandings of Species Difference
Across Disciplines

... For the hundreds of thoughtful essays, books, collections on race, gender, nationality, age and other bases for domination, the academy has been reluctant to raise similar questions about what we presuppose to be the differences, real or imagined, between human and non-human animals. Although the scientific and philosophical discussion of species difference has its roots in ancient Western thought, over the course of the last 150 years or so, this discussion has produced separate bodies of conflicting but also recapitulating knowledge across the sciences, the humanities and in creative/imaginative work. At the same time, different modes of interrogating what it means to be human as opposed to what it means to be an animal have become increasingly estranged from each other, such that thinkers from a given discipline (biology, philosophy, political science) run the risk of ignoring prevalent ideas or important advances in other disciplines. ...

Let me help: Only a human would wonder "what it means to be an animal."

Apparently, this edited collection calls for "papers across multiple disciplines (biological and social science, political and philosophical theory and practice, as well as imaginative work)" and if you think you could write one, provide 200 word abstracts and a 100 word biography to Vincent J. Guihan vguihan@connect.carleton.ca and/or Sinead Collins (s.collins@ed.ac.uk) by April 15, 2008 for consideration.

Note: Mario and I talk about about this "animal minds" question in The Spiritual Brain. Two things to watch out for is that most researchers are looking for similarities between animal and human minds. Differences are failures as far as they are concerned. Second, a lot of cherry picking goes on. Instead of looking at what the average animal does, the "star performers" are profiled. That's like assuming that you can learn a lot about how much science most people know by studying the life and theories of Albert Einstein.

Anyway, here are some recent stories related to the animal minds question:

Can animals do math? How much should we believe of what we read?

The cat who senses when elderly nursing home residents will die

Animal minds: Humans project guilt feelings onto their dogs?

In "Dogs' 'guilty' behavior may be owners' projection" (Seattle Times, July 3, 2009), Rob Stein reports that the ""guilty look dogs display may not be evidence that the dog is aware of guilt:

Horowitz asked each owner to show the dog a biscuit, instruct the dog not to eat it and leave the room. While the owner was gone, Horowitz either allowed the dog to eat the treat or removed it. The owner returned and was told the dog had obeyed the command or had been disobedient and had eaten the biscuit. Owners scolded the disobedient dogs. But half the time, the owners were told the truth about whether their dog had misbehaved while the other half were misled.

And this is the surprising thing: The dogs that had obeyed were just as likely as the ones that did not to exhibit one of nine behaviors associated with the "guilty look": dropping their head, pulling their ears back, avoiding eye contact, rolling over onto their side or back, dropping their tails, quickly wagging a lowered tail, licking their lips, offering a paw or slinking away.

Horowitz found that the pooches were most likely to show such behaviors when their owner believed they had disobeyed and scolded them.

"The most guilty look was when the owner scolded an innocent dog," she said. "It was a bit surprising."

Really, it's not all that surprising if we keep one thing in mind: The dog's primary concern is to stay in good with his people. He lets them make the rules about life with humans. And he is never going to feel more guilty than when he doesn't even know what he did wrong.

Horowitz stressed that her experiment "doesn't mean dogs don't feel guilty. When they are playing together, they have a code of behavior and can distinguish right from wrong. ... But I can't claim to know what they are feeling."

Horowitz concluded that such behavior is most likely the result of subtle cues that dogs picked up from their owners that make them anticipate punishment, rather than the dogs feeling guilty.

I always suggest that people who think there's no trick to understanding animal minds begin with "What is it like to be a bat?" by philosopher Thomas Nagel, if only to get some sense of the questions we want to know the answers to.

Other animal mind stories:

Rooks in captivity show more tool using feats, and many other animal minds stories at The Hack.

Animal minds: Are dogs or wolves smarter?

Animal minds are a big topic now.

Always fascinating for me, but I was all the more intrigued when a local panhandler sold me the "homeless" Outreach paper on the street - always a source of news that should be approached with caution - and guess what?

The lead article informs me that "Wolves are more logical than dogs."

My first reaction was, ''Try telling that to the police van driver whose back door features the notice "Police Dog."

Would the notice "Police Wolf" convince anyone that the creature in back of the van was more "logical"?

I have seen Mounted Police (= Mountie) dogs at work. I was impressed by their ability to disable a human by a simple method: One dog blocks his way forward and - on either side - two dogs grab his jacket wrists. If their captive gets really cold, they lie down on him to keep him warm until officers arrive. But, of course, the dogs have been trained to do all this. If they had flunked, they would not be on the force.

So, nonetheless, wolves are more logical than dogs? That means that wolves are more logical than the people who train working dogs. Well, that could be right, could be wrong. Best look into it.

The story got started at LiveScience: "Wolves Beat Dogs on Logic Test" by staff writer Clara Moskowitz, (03 September 2009 02:11 pm ET). Well, it turns out,

The differences reflect an emphasis on different learning styles, scientists say.

"I wouldn't say one species is smarter," said Adam Miklosi of Eötvös University in Hungary, co-author of a paper describing the results in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Science. "If you assume an animal has to survive without human presence, then wolves are smarter. But if you are thinking that dogs have to survive in a human environment where it's very important to follow the communications of humans, then in this aspect, dogs are smarter."

The article is replete with stuff about how this is supposed to help us understand human evolution. Not the key questions, no.

The skinny: You want a dog? Excellent dogs wait at animal shelters. I am glad if they do not know they are near the euthanasia room.

Don't get a wolf. Get an animal that is completely happy with human society.

Animal minds: Our dog's world is not like ours

"Grr. Sniff. Arf.", Cathleen Shine's review of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know, by Alexandra Horowitz, tries to help us understand doggy minds:

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.” They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts [trying to understand our view of the world and how it affects them]. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction.

Not that examining eyes always provides an answer:

Dogs respond to baby talk “partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads.”

Yes, that is just the problem for the dog. He simply does not know what is happening in human society most of the time because he has not mastered the facility of language. My favourite cartoon for demonstrating that fact, anthropomorphically, was one in which a dog, driven downtown in a car, yaps happily out the window to his neighbour's dog, "Hey, they're taking me to the vet to be [tutored]!"

Sometimes it is a blessing for them, of course. An irrecoverably sick animal does not know that his people have humanely decided on euthanasia. That was always a comfort to me when I signed vets' releases to have beloved cats put down. The cats never knew and never could know, and could not understand why those decisions were made: Any other possible future would be too hard for an animal with their limited intellectual resources to manage.

See also: More animal mind stories at The Mindful Hack.

Animal minds: Art produced by animals: Is it art?

Recently, I was asked about claims that some animals can produce art. Here is one example, an eight-year-old Thai elephant known as Hong, trained by mahout Noi Rakchang and art teacher Khun Tossapol Petcharattanakool:

Two years ago, Hong began painting with her mahout, Noi Rakchang, and has steadily developed her skills. After learning how to paint flowers, she moved on to more advanced paintings. She now has two specialties. One is an elephant holding flowers with her trunk, and the other is the Thai flag. An elephant with so much control and dexterity is capable of amazing work. Just for clarification, with these realistic figural works, the elephant is still the only one making the marks on the paper but the paintings are learned series of brushstrokes not Hong painting a still life on her own.

In other words, what Hong has learned to do is execute a series of manoeuvres in an order that produces a picture recognized by humans. Hong is not expressing her own ideas, nor is it clear that she recognizes what she has drawn.

As Snopes explains, introducing a video,

The above-linked video is "true" in the sense that it represents the real phenomenon of elephants who have learned to paint — with the caveats that "painting" in this sense means the animals outline and color specific drawings they've been taught to replicate (rather than abstractly making free-form portraits of whatever tickles their pachydermic fancies at the moment), they work under the direction of trainers, they don't all exhibit the same level of proficiency, and the quality of their output can be highly variable

Some elephants are apparently able to remember a long series of actions to perform.

National Geographic provides some background to the story:

Asian elephants have been trained for centuries to haul logs for the forestry industry, but deforestation and restrictions on logging have meant the loss of jobs for many of them. Animals that can no longer earn their keep are frequently abandoned, mistreated, and starved.

For the past several years, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, Russian-born conceptual artists based in New York, have been teaching domesticated elephants and their mahouts (elephants' lifelong trainers) how to paint.

Clearly, a key purpose of the project is to provide a living for out of work elephants and mahouts:

"The paintings are collaborations," she said, "a way of communicating between the animal and humans. The mahouts frequently are choosing the colors, and the elephants are applying the strokes. The elephants quickly master the fundamental techniques of painting, and also develop distinctive sensibilities and styles."
Novica.com allows people to purchase beautiful art and give money to a worthy cause at the same time, said Milk, adding: "Our rallying cry is 'An elephant painting in every home.'"

Most elephant art, as displayed here for sale, is not at all remarkable - it is simply series of strokes made by a paintbrush held in an elephant's trunk, and imaginatively titled by the marketer.

Obviously only a few elephants can learn a precise series of brush strokes that map onto a human perception of a figure.

Here's a painting elephant at the Milwaukee Zoo, who is joined by a sea lion (pictured at the site) and various other animals that can be taught to hold a brush and rub paint on a canvas.

If by "is it art?", you mean "Will people buy it and hang it, to help the cause?", well then - if it is in a frame, it will look like art to them, right?

Dinesh Ramde's recent MSNBC story (April 7, 2008) explains,

Of course, beauty — and artistic talent — are in the eyes of the beholder. People who buy animal paintings are rarely art aficionados. Instead, they're typically animal lovers who know the money is going toward a good cause.

Ramde also notes the interesting case of the chimpanzee Congo three of whose 1950s works recently sold to a collector for about 13 times what the auction house expected. To a human, these three abstracts appeared suggestive, like patterns in the clouds, but we have no way of knowing what they meant to long-deceased Congo.

Other animal mind stories at The Mindful Hack:

Researchers ask: What does it mean to be an animal?

Deception in humans and animals: The differences

Medical journal published article on cat's death predictions

Just up at MercatorNet: Wild animals are not people

From my post on animal minds:

Spurred by a horrific recent case, it focuses on their unpredictability, as far as humans are concerned: Herold wants the world to know that she is not a
"horrible" person and that Travis is not a "horrible" chimp. According to her, it is a "freak" thing.

Looking at the story from a traditional Christian perspective, I would pass on the question of whether Herold is a horrible person. I agree that Travis is not a horrible chimp. The very idea is an irrelevance; he is a chimp, period, and therefore not responsible for his actions.

But this incident was not a freak event. A wild animal kept in an urban environment may suddenly and unexpectedly rampage (which is why questions have been raised about pet ownership laws in the wake of this incident). All too typically, the stories sound like this ...

A companion piece by John Young addresses technical issues of animal mind, focusing on Alex the Parrot:

The New York Times obituary of Alex noted the judgment of some scientists that although the parrot learned to communicate in basic expressions, "it did not show the sort of logic and ability to generalize that children acquire at an early age." That is a key point. Sense knowledge, including the power to imagine and remember, fully explains Alex’s achievements. Constant repetition over many years of training conditioned him to associate objects with sounds and to imitate what his trainers did. In one exercise Dr Pepperberg employed a trainer to compete with Alex for a reward, such as a grape. The parrot saw what the trainer did to get the grape, and imitated him.

So far as I know, Alex genuinely had the skills he was credited with. But - just a caution - many accounts of animal intelligence achievements ("why, they're just like us, so we are just like them!") are overblown. (I'm not so sure about Alex's "last words," for example ... )

There is plenty of scope for observer bias in a field where only the discovery of intelligence will be rewarded and feted, but not the discovery of its absence. That doesn't mean that researchers are dishonest; only that observer bias is not likely to be addressed very often or very honestly.

The really intriguing part is that if a researcher tries to document animal behaviour that would tend to elevate animals without denigrating humans, he becomes a pop science target rather than a darling. Paging Eric Pianka ...

When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who researches animals and telepathy, recalls the day Richard Dawkins Inc. descended on him:

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that “this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was.” She added, “We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry”. So I agreed and we fixed a date. I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

In the event,

He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in “the paranormal” because of wishful thinking.

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, “I’m don’t want to discuss evidence”. “Why not?” I asked. “There isn’t time. It’s too complicated. And that’s not what this programme is about.” The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, “If you’re treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it’s not irrational to believe in it. I thought that’s what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn’t interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.”

Richard said, “It’s not a low grade debunking exercise; it’s a high grade debunking exercise.”

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Now, one of Sheldrake's subjects is animals and telepathy. I don't know what to make of animals and telepathy, but this much I know is true: As Mario Beauregard and I discussed in The Spiritual Brain, there is good reason to believe that the human mind is not as tightly bound to the brain as many believe. I don't know a clear reason that animal minds would differ from human ones in that regard.

Those who deny animal telepathy almost always also deny human telepathy - because they are materialists. Telepathy is a threat to materialism, not to human uniqueness. Put another way: Telepathic animals seem to be telepathic about the things they can understand as animals. As I wrote to a friend recently,

For example, a dog knows he loves his master, but he does not say to himself "Someday my master will die, and I will die too. I wonder which of us will die first?" Such a mental operation is not part of the type of intelligence that a dog has.

Now consider the dog who was videotaped "sensing" when his mistress was starting for home from a remote location, and beginning to show signs of alertness: The dog knows he is waiting for his mistress, but he has no idea what she is doing when she is away from home or why, let alone how these activities might affect the timing of her arrival.

The dog's telepathy, if demonstrated, functions around his existing canine intelligence; it does not admit him to new worlds of intelligence that would give him a human type of information.

That is how one might reasonably expect animal telepathy to function, and some of Sheldrake's papers do look quite interesting.

Theory of Mind: Deception in humans and animals

Here's an interesting item by Simon Baron-Cohen on key differences between human and animal deception:

True deception assumes the deceiver knows that (1) other beings have minds, (2) different beings’ minds can believe different things are true (when only one of these is actually true), and (3) you can make another mind believe that something false is actually true. Defined in this way, one can see that deception is no trivial achievement! The deceiver needs to have the mental equipment to juggle different representations of reality. No wonder that scholars of animal behavior are wary of elevating a single instance of behavior to genuine deception, and prefer to reduce it to simpler mental processes like learned associations.

I think that his distinction is critical. The human deceiver is not merely trying to learn a trick that works; he is trying to deceive the mind of the other party. He has not succeeded unless he does that.

Think of all the "cheatin' heart" stories you have ever heard. The cheating spouse wants the faithful spouse to believe in the cheater's fidelity. If the cheater's excuse is only warily accepted, the cheater feels alarmed. Perhaps nothing bad has happened, but the other party's mind has not been convinced.

Baron-Cohen says that people with autism/Asperger's syndrome have trouble recognizing deception because they seldom concern themselves with the minds of others:

And even after twenty-five years in the field of autism, I am still shocked. A Ph.D. student with Asperger’s syndrome said to me last week, “I’ve just discovered that people don’t always say what they mean. So how do you know how to trust language?” Her “discovery” at the age of twenty-seven is one that the typical child makes at age four, in the teasing interactions of the playground.

He argues that there are some advantages to autism in his interesting essay.

Do animals have souls?

In this podcast, psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor (pictured here) discuss the question:

On this episode of ID the Future, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and UCLA psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz join Casey Luskin for a discussion of materialism and its effect on modern science. Listen in to a conversation that begins with the question of whether animals have souls and turns to a lively discussion of Francis Crick and the way his materialist ideology blinded him to the implications of his own scientific discovery.

Christian apologist C. S. Lewis had an interesting take on the question of whether beloved pets would be found in heaven in The Great Divorce, wherein a lady who is great in heaven (though not on Earth) is surrounded by animals:

‘What are all these animals? A cat - two cats - dozens of cats. And all those dogs ... why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

‘They are her beasts.’

‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’

‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves. And now the abundance of life she has in Christ from the Father flows over into them.’

Lewis's basic idea was that animals who get caught up in the human experience follow the people who loved them.

I hope that is good theology, because I have sometimes made use of it to comfort people who are broken up by the death of a beloved animal.

See also:

When pop science TV wants to hear only one side ...

These podcasts with Jeff Schwartz and Mike Egnor, on whether the mind is an illusion (science fiction alert).

Adopting a dog better for your health than pills?

Animal minds: How well can we understand a cat or a bat?

Mind: We still have no explanation for why humans have minds - or thoughts

In James Randerson's "We know nothing about brain evolution" (Guardian UK, February 19, 2008) we learn that Harvard's Richrd Lewontin has pointed out the obvious:

"Why we know nothing about the evolution of cognition". He systematically dismissed every assumption about the evolution of human thought, reaching the conclusion that scientists are still completely in the dark about how natural selection prompted the massive hike in human brain size in the human line.

The main problem is the poor fossil record. Despite a handful of hominid fossils stretching back 4m years or so, we can't be sure that any of them are on the main ancestral line to us. Many or all of them could have been evolutionary side branches.

Worse, the fossils we do have are difficult to interpret. "I don't have the faintest idea what the cranial capacity [of a fossil hominid] means," Lewontin confessed. What does a particular brain size tell us about the capabilities of the animal attached to it?

Of course Lewontin is right! First, cranial capacity is not the best measure of intelligence, as brain absent humans show. While we are here, a number of studies show that some birds (notably crows) are smart - even though they do not have the brain parts we humans associate with smartness. At the time, I said,

I've long been skeptical of claims that intelligence evolved as an aid to survival. The vast majority of life forms that have survived for millions or even hundreds of millions of years did not require - or acquire - intelligence. The newer notion that intelligence is spurred by the need for complex social interactions seems a bit closer to the mark, though not entirely satisfactory. After all, many insects have achieved complex social interactions without anything like what we humans regard as intelligence.

There is no "survival of the fittest" reason why humans should be conscious! None whatever. Bacteria are way more fit than humans, but do they have thoughts? Nada. And they are probably better off without them.

So we are stuck being human and having minds, and we really can't claim that our minds give us a survival advantage. Its more the opposite. We give our minds a survival advantage.

Hat tip: Pos-Darwinista

Animal minds: Monkeys understand money?

Well, no, they don't. And then again, who does?

Why is so much of our communal life governed by an entirely abstract concept? And if that does not help us see that the human mind is immaterial, what does?

Well, some do try to find other explanations.

In a "Cultural Animal "post coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs, "The Evolution of Economic Rationality: Do Monkeys Understand Money?" Roy F. Baumeister reports at Psychology Today (July 15, 2008) that

Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows. (This already is a difference of gigantic proportions in that monkeys must learn about resource-exchange using something that is already a primary reinforcer - food - whereas humans can extend the range of their motivations to secondary reinforcers.)

That should have ended the experiment, if the object was to understand an abstraction as pervasive as the power of money, but ...

A resource (marshmallows) exchange task was introduced whereby pressing a lever would give another monkey a marshmallow; hence this was a task that involved a bit of altruism. Not only were monkeys taught about the game. Two specific monkeys were conditioned (entrained), such that one always pulled the lever for his monkey partner (thus being a very generous partner) and the other never pulled the lever for his partner (stingy). Then they let these conditioned monkeys play the game with other monkeys. Monkeys that played with the highly generous monkey figured it out and quickly took advantage of him. Monkeys that played with the stingy monkey also figured it out quickly and subsequently shunned or were aggressive toward him.

Thus, monkeys can at least understand and respond effectively to the difference between a generous provider and a tightwad. Still, the fact that these differences had to be done with marshmallows instead of a more abstract representation of value (which is what money is) suggests a limited capacity to use or understand money.

Apparently yrying to promote monkey intelligence over human intelligence, Baumeister proclaims,

If you and someone else worked equally to earn $100, and that person has the power to divide it and chooses to offer you only one dollar while keeping $99 for himself, well, you are still better off with one dollar than with nothing. Hence economic rationalists find it slightly scandalous that people ever refuse any offer. Economists think that if people were true to financial logic, they would act more like monkeys.

Well, only if they had nothing better to do, right? The rest of it gets slightly more interesting:

But a fully developed sense of fairness means that you are uncomfortable with being overbenefited as well. That is, it bothers you to get more than your fair share. Here is where humans seem to part company with other creatures.

Now herre Baumeister seems to connect with reality. Surely we have all suffered through overly lavish compliments, overly generous rewards? ... what's going on? (I did my job. Can't I just please go home now?) However,

What happens when monkeys overbenefit from an exchange - do they experience guilt, embarrassment, shame, or try to rectify the situation? Apparently not.

Well, monkeys wouldn't see the problem, would they?

In The Spiritual Brain, Mario and I spent some time on the problem of people tryingto understand human psychology from ape or monkey psychology. Basically, it doesn't work. Having a human mind, however you want to interpret it, really does make all the difference.

A number of interesting issues are raised in the Comments.

Mind reading technology: In your face and in your mind - or maybe not ...

Here is a Fox News interview with Japanese physicist, Michio Kaku, who is quite convinced that in the near future we will be able to read people's minds - high tech phrenology, really.

(= Bumps on the brain explain your mind.)

You know, I heard all this a zillion years ago when video killed the radio star.

As I recall, computers were going to think like people. That didn't happen, but ... on to the next thing, no delays!

Evolutionary psychology! You ARE the cave man! Okay, so that didn't turn up a single piece of useful information, and just got further and further from science? Well, obviously, .. More money for research is needed ...

Oh yes, and ... chimps think like people! Didn't you know? When was the last time you tore off your neighbour's arm and ate it before her eyes?

Was it last summer at the block barbecue? I guess her aunties must have been kind of cautious about offering her bracelets for Christmas ...

Actually, it makes more sense to argue that dogs think like people than that chimps do (at least dogs like being around people, which is a beginning .... )

Anyway, look, welcome to the latest schtick: Neuroscience will soon read your thoughts, as per this video. Wowza! Or maybe not ...

A couple of thoughts, to orient a reasonable person:

1. From Mario Beauregard, lead author of The Spiritual Brain:

This study is based on a certain correspondence between elementary visual stimuli and the spatial organization of very basic visual processing in the occipital cortex.

Thoughts are much more complex and correlated with diffuse neural processing throughout the brain. That is, there is no correspondence between the spatial organization of neural processing associated with thoughts and the nature of these thoughts.

This is why it is impossible to read thoughts with fMRI scanners (this is also true for other neuroimaging techniques).

2. From me, following up on Mario:

Thoughts are not like bricks in a building. Here's an obvious example: Consider abstractions like: Toronto

My idea of Toronto (Canada's largest city, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, where I live) is probably different from yours. I've lived here for about 45 years, so I probably have many more ideas and associations than you would. So how could there be a "one on one" map of our ideas and of all other possible subjects' ideas?

3. Friends have offered additional thoughts, for example, neurosurgeon Mike Egnor:

It's interesting scientifically only in that it highlights fMRI's ability to image cerebral metabolism in real time with much better resolution than was ever possible before (it's much better than PET scanning, which was the gold standard).

fMRI works by imaging local changes in cerebral blood flow, which corresponds to activation of small regions of the brain.

This latest flurry appears to be the usual 'science-as-press-release', although at least it's not some idiotic evolutionary theory. Researchers in Japan have tweaked fMRI to be able to image geometrical patterns of blood flow (and neuronal activity) in the occipital cortex that corresponds to reading letters. It so happens that the visual system maps with high fidelity. That is, the patterns of light activation of the retina are transmitted with spatial fidelity to the occipital cortex, so if you're looking at a circle of light, there actually is a tiny circle of neurons activated in the occipital cortex. fMRI can resolve this, so it can read 'letters' that the person is reading by imaging the cortex. It is quite laborious (it takes multiple images and, as I understand, many minutes of looking at a letter to get an image).

The ocular system is a bit atypical in its mapping fidelity. In most other regions of the cortex, especially in the large association areas where much of our thought seems to be mediated, there are no maps that we know of. The motor system and the somatic sensory system have maps, but less refined.

... fMRI doesn't allow us to 'read minds'; it merely images patterns of cortical activation that we've know about for decades. There is nothing qualitatively different about the 'lie detection' capabilities of fMRI and the stuff we already use. People give physiological clues when they are lying; wives of cheating husbands and parents of naughty children have known this for millennia. Liars sweat, get tachycardia, avoid eye contact, stammer, and get different patterns of blood flow in their brains. It's all physiology. There's nothing spooky about fMRI.

By the same account, there is no substitute for skillful evaluation of the data. If fMRI is to be used for lie detection (it apparently has already been used for that purpose in a criminal case in India), it needs to be vetted with the same rigor as lie detectors used in courts today. The potential for abuse, even tyranny, is real and scary. People defer to fancy technology, and fMRI is very alluring.

I must say that I'm appalled at the sensationalization of scientific research today, and at the idiotic things that scientists ... are willing to say in public. These advances in fMRI are genuine technical advances, and they will probably prove quite valuable in future brain research. But the notion that they allow us to 'read minds' is nuts.

Besides, we can already read minds. We can converse, which has orders of magnitude more sensitivity and specificity than a 3 million dollar fMRI machine.

4. And from another friend:

What it appears that they did at a basic level does not extend to the fantastical notions of Dr. Kaku. He's projecting into the future, and we know how well that works. I have no problem with the possibility that they may eventually be able to reproduce visual imagery from brain scans. But there would need to be massive breakthoughs in the resolution of brain scanning equipment.

The visual cortex is actually reasonably well mapped. Unfortunately, I think most of the data comes from animal studies. By recording signals at the thalamus level in cats, researchers were able to basically reproduce some of the images from the nerve signals. This was done with implants and not through fMRI equipment.

Essentially, I think the researchers are employing ID notions of reverse engineering to try and decode the signals within the brain. Even if many of these signals are decoded, it says nothing about how these signals give rise to consciousness or to the mind. It also says nothing about how the mind can "re-wire" the brain as in neuroplasticity. Dr. Kaku's notion of using this to read minds in a perfect way that won't be subject to the same problems as a polygraph is ridiculous. If there is a way to confuse the "mind reading" equipment, people would figure it out. It's all pure speculation in that regard.

Well, I have no doubt that people would find a way to confuse any brain equipment, though cats may not.

I also think that the best way to understand a cat is by following the cat around. You can take the cat apart, but then you have a dead cat. You will learn some things that way. But you would be amazed at what you can learn by just following the cat around. Remember that the cat's world is about 6 cm from the ground ... so the first thing you want to do in understanding a cat is lie down on the floor for a while and notice how different the world looks. It's as world that few humans see much of and all cats see a lot of).

Another resource: A psychologist's view of the question.

Here's the YouTube:

Can toads predict earthquakes?

Maybe. Consider: In 2009,

Dr Grant was studying toads 74km away in San Ruffino Lake in central Italy, when she recorded the toads behaving oddly.


Five days before the earthquake, the number of male common toads in the breeding colony fell by 96%.


That is highly unusual for male toads: once they have bred, they normally remain active in large numbers at breeding sites until spawning has finished.


Yet spawning had barely begun at the San Ruffino Lake site before the earthquake struck.

Also, no weather event could be linked to the toads' disappearance.


Three days before the earthquake, the number of breeding pairs also suddenly dropped to zero.

Significantly,

Some studies have been done on how domestic animals respond, but measuring the response of wild animals is more difficult.


Even those that have been shown to react, such as fish, rodents and snakes tend to do so shortly before an earthquakes strikes, rather than days ahead of the event.

For more, go here. (“Toads can 'predict earthquakes' and seismic activity”, Matt Walker, Editor, Earth News, BBC News, March 31, 2010)

So the toads have an early warning system, one that would be useful to know.

See also: Animal minds: Our dog’s world is not like ours

Humans project guilt feelings onto their dogs

and, of course, Oscar the Deathcat and “What is it like to be a bat?

Photo: Common toad (bufo bufo). Creative Commons License

Animal minds: Fishy business - dead fish reveals thoughts

Hilarious. Here.

I would hardly be surprised by something like this. I wouldn't even try to predict the behaviour of bacteria - relying solely on scanning - let alone humans.

Maybe that's just because I am an old hack. But if you can't interview whatever it is, you can't be sure what, if anything, it is thinking. Does it even think?

I remember a vet confessing that to me once about a tomcat. He said, "The trouble is, he is a cat and I do not know how he is suffering. He obviously is suffering, but he can't tell me how." As it happens, the prescribed antibiotics and painkillers worked and Tom lived a long life for a cat, but we never diagnosed the cause.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Animal minds: Learning may not pay, but some animals do it anyway

In "Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn't Better" (May 6, 2008), New York Times science writer Carl Zimmer tackles the question of how learning evolves.

If your science prof told you long ago that learning evolves because animals that learn faster are more likely to survive, forget it. Learning imposes costs of its own, as one experiment showed:

Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues pitted smart fly larvae against a different strain of flies, mixing the insects and giving them a meager supply of yeast to see who would survive. The scientists then ran the same experiment, but with the ordinary relatives of the smart flies competing against the new strain. About half the smart flies survived; 80 percent of the ordinary flies did.

Reversing the experiment showed that being smart does not ensure survival. “We took some population of flies and kept them over 30 generations on really poor food so they adapted so they could develop better on it,” Dr. Kawecki said. “And then we asked what happened to the learning ability. It went down.”

The ability to learn does not just harm the flies in their youth, though. In a paper to be published in the journal Evolution, Dr. Kawecki and his colleagues report that their fast-learning flies live on average 15 percent shorter lives than flies that had not experienced selection on the quinine-spiked jelly. Flies that have undergone selection for long life were up to 40 percent worse at learning than ordinary flies.

Actually, most life forms have not relied on high levels of individual learning to survive (or not, as the case may be). Quick learning is, after all, an alternative to built-in behaviour. Whether it is better or worse depends on the circumstances, I suppose.

The article closes with speculations about human learning. But I don't think the comparison to fly and worm learning really works.

The reality is that we humans must learn. If we don't, we suffer, just as we would if we didn't exercise. Friends who nurse people with Alzheimer and other dementias say that the best defense against the disease is to keep on learning. One Alzheimer nurse recommends learning a new language, for example.

A healthy neuron is a busy neuron? I would love to see a neuroscience study on that!

Animal minds: Rooks in captivity show more feats using tools

In "Tool-making Birds: Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention For Clever Rooks" (ScienceDaily, May 26, 2009), we learn that

Researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London have found that rooks, a member of the crow family, are capable of using and making tools, modifying them to make them work and using two tools in a sequence.

The interesting thing is that rooks have not been observed to use tools in the wild.

Rooks are, as anyone who has dealt with them knows, unusually intelligent birds, rivalling chimpanzees in tool use. As one researcher noted,

“Rooks have been shown to rival chimpanzees in physical tasks, leading us to question our understanding of the evolution of intelligence.”

Which is all the more interesting because they have smaller brains than mammals, and lack the parts associated with mammal intelligence:

The brain of a bird weighs about 10 times as much as a brain of a reptile of the same weight, but slightly less than that of a mammal of the same weight. However, there is considerable variation between birds of similar size. For birds weighing in at around 85g, brain weight varies from 0.73g for a Quail to 2.7g for a Great Spotted Woodpecker. There is therefore quite a range in the intelligence of birds, with game birds at the bottom of the list and Woodpeckers, Owls and Parrots at the top.

A bird's brain is different to a mammalian brain in that the complex folds found in the cerebral cortex of mammals are missing and the cerebral cortex itself is much smaller proportionally than in mammals. Instead the corpora striata, a more basic part of the cerebral hemispheres is proportionally larger and better developed. It is this portion of a bird's brain which is used to control instinctive behaviour - feeding, flying, reproduction etc. The mid-brain is also well developed as this is the part of the brain primarily concerned with sight, while the olfactory lobes are reduced as would be expected given that bird's in general have little use of the sense of smell.

The bird's skull is mostly occupied by eyes and the brain has to make do with what space it can find in a rather narrow cranium. - The Earthlife Web

The main thing to see here is that some birds, like some mammals, are very intelligent but others are not. There is no Tree of Intelligence that puts mammals above birds in principle.

Why is this level of ingenuity so rarely displayed in the wild? Researchers construct elaborate tests, which some birds pass. But birds like rooks probably only solve problems when necessary. In nature, most problems are solved more simply. For example, if food seems unusually hard to extricate, the clever bird is likely to resolve the problem just by flying on to an easier source. By contrast, in a cage in a laboratory, the bird lacks that option, and must display any ingenuity it possesses.

Coffee!: Crow drinking Stella Artois




For heaven's sake, someone, fetch that crow a glass.

Animal ESP researcher gives University College science and technology lecture

I see where Rupert Sheldrake, who studies awareness at a distance in animals and has produced some interesting results, gave the Annual iBSc Lecture to the Department of Science and Technology Studies, University College London: "The Extended Mind: Recent Experimental Evidence."

"Awareness at a distance", sometimes called ESP, is trashed by Richard Dawkins as a threat to materialism. At one point, Sheldrake had to ask Dawkins and TV entourage to leave his lab, when they made their intentions clear.

Oddly enough, ESP isn't particularly a threat to materialism except insofar as it challenges the idea that resolutely denying the possibility of action at a distance (as in gravity, for example) is in itself some kind of a science. Anyway, here's the abstract:

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But Dr. Sheldrake argues that there are good reasons for thinking that this view is much too limited. His recent experimental results suggest that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. Animals can be affected by human looks, and vice versa.


People's intentions can also seem to be detectable telepathically by animals from miles away. Hundreds of recent tests have also shown that some people can tell who is calling them before they pick up the phone. Our minds seem to extend out beyond our brains both through attention
and intention. Rupert Sheldrake will show how his hypothesis of morphic fields could help provide an explanation.


(Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. is a biologist and author of more than 80 scientific papers and several books, including "A New Science of Life" and "Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home". He was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and Research Fellow of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, a visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute in Connecticut and lives in London. His web site is www.sheldrake.org)

Sheldrake's idea of a morphic field reminded me of something, and then I suddenly realized what it was: Moving around a three million-person city. The guy whose face is parked an inch from mine on the Toronto subway at rush hour is not invading my space. But if I were just walking down a typical street ... it would be a confrontation. One is constantly adjusting one's idea of one's own space based on social assessments. It is not a rigid thing at all.

In any event, the idea that the mind is not wholly inside the brain does not seem unreasonable. The mind apprehends mathematics, yet it cannot really be said that the laws that govern mathematics are "inside the brain."

Note: Some people get really upset by what they hear. Or (?) Sheldrake was stabbed at a 2008 lecture in New Mexico ...