(This post originally appeared on December 6, 2008. My apologies for not leaving it up, and for the excellent comments being gone.)
A little while ago, in a different context, Rick Lucke asked an interesting question, which essentially is this:
Are there any other animals that think the way humans do?
That's a hard question to answer with a simple yes or no. But in this post I'll take a shot at it, by exploring a few paths toward an answer. Even if these paths peter out, we may end up with a better grasp of why this is a hard question. The first direction we'll go in draws on ideas in the philosophy of mind, where I'm little better than a well-informed layman; the second direction draws on an article in the journal Animal Behaviour that I wrote earlier this year.
Let's begin by looking at a slightly different question: Are there any other human beings that think the way I do? This turns out to be a hard question to answer completely. We know a great deal about the physiology and functioning of the brain, and we have tools that let us observe what's going on as we think. At some level, yes, the areas of my brain that light up when I walk and talk correspond to the same areas of your brain when you do.
Is that enough? Not quite. Those signals coming from my brain as I talk, producing pretty colors on the fMRI screen, can only give the coarsest approximation of what I'm talking about. More generally, while we know something about how signals are processed in the brain, the information content (the semantics) of those signals generally remains entirely a mystery. By analogy, consider my hooking up a recording device to the ABS system on your car. Any given recording will tell me when you'd braked, but I'd be able to make only rough guesses about where you were driving. I'd have to ask you.
Back to animals: Unfortunately, we can't ask them what they're thinking. Worse, their brains don't look quite like ours. We might be able to map out correspondences, but where's the ground truth? It could turn out that we're measuring and comparing the wrong things. (Thomas Nagel explored the philosophical angles in a famous paper in 1974, "What is it like to be a bat?") Again by analogy, we might be saying, "These two boxes are about the same size, are both plugged into the wall, and have about the same number of buttons and lights on the front. Yes, my Tivo and my DVD player must have the same function."
So one answer to the question of whether some animal thinks the way we do is maybe--but it would still be hard to tell if it were the case.
Even if animals can't talk (and I'm over-simplifying here, because I'm not really up on the animal communication and language literature) we do have an out. We can watch what they do. Some animals turn out to be remarkably capable problem solvers. Here's Betty, a New Caledonian crow that made a splash in the animal cognition literature. She can be seen in the video below bending a hook out of a straight piece of wire in order to retrieve a bucket of meat from an experimental apparatus.
I met the Oxford zoologists who worked with Betty (now deceased) at a workshop in 2005. Betty was an Einstein among birds; the behavior shown in the video is all the more remarkable when you know that it's the first example of spontaneous tool manufacture observed in an animal. Betty was raised in captivity and had never even seen a wire hook before. It turns out that some crows do use create and use hooks in the wild, but Betty's ability to deliberately fashion a hook from unfamiliar material was surprising.
Almost as surprising is the performance of the great apes and other non-human primates in solving problems. (See a comment I left on bbd's blog for a funny story from Benjamin Beck's landmark book, Animal Tool Behavior.) For example, chimpanzees in the wild have been observed propping up stone anvils with other stones, to provide a more level surface for breaking nuts using another stone as a hammer. In the laboratory, young chimpanzees have undergone tests based Piaget's theory of cognitive development and have exhibited some of the same characteristics of human infants (for example, up to the substage at which object permanence is understood). There are two excellent and accessible books on non-human primate cognition: Primate Cognition, by Michael Tomasello and Josep Call, a comprehensive outline of the field up to the late 1990s, and Folk Physics for Apes, by Daniel Povinelli, a cautionary account of how experiments on apes should be carried out and interpreted.
So, we run intelligence tests and eventually get a feel for just how much animals think the way we do. Is there the problem? Yes, and it's been recognized since 1898 among animal cognition researchers, in the form of Morgan's Canon:
In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower in the psychological scale.
For example, it turns out that the simplest animals to use tools, a capacity we might associate with intelligence, are wasps. We'd be reluctant to say that the cognitive mechanism underlying human tool use is the same as in a wasp--they've only got a few hundred neurons. More generally, even if we observe an animal solving specific hard problems, there's no guarantee that it's solving problems the way we would. Far from being able to tell whether human beings and animals are thinking in the same way, we have discovered in our own work that it's even hard to characterize behaviors precisely enough to claim that human beings and animals are doing the same thing, even under laboratory conditions. Inferences are required, and they're not always reliable.
Enough with the academic discussion. Let's look at your own experience with animals. How smart is your pet? Does it think the way you do? In "The Truth About Dogs", Stephen Budiansky writes,
Or consider the countless stories about dogs that have "saved" people. In fact dogs have no particular instinct to save people and no particular understanding that that is what they are doing even when they do it. Search-and-rescue dogs are trained by exploiting the instinct to retrieve thrown objects. They are trained to fetch. And they are trained to fetch one toy only. Once they master that, they are ready for the next step: A person takes the toy and hides; the dog is encouraged to find -- well, his toy. When he finds the "victim," the dog is rewarded by getting his toy. At actual disaster scenes trainers get someone to go and hide with the dog's toy several times a day, so that the dog can score a few successes and not become frustrated.
This applies to cats, too. (Though I discovered, not unexpectedly, that there are about 130,000 Google hits for "heroic dog" and only 4,000 for "heroic cat". And the second hit was in quotation marks.) It's probably okay to believe that our pets think like us. But don't believe it too hard.
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I think the most interesting part of this process is watching them select the appropriate branches to use.
Gary, you raise an interesting and problematic case for animal researchers interested in tool use: nesting. Lots and lots of species do this. We tend to think of tool use as one of the hallmarks of intelligence (if we focus on primates, at least), and yet what counts as the use of tools? After thinking about this for a few years(!) I'm included to think that the field has gone in the right direction by talking about the "material culture" of different animal species, the different ways they make use of their environment. Thanks for the squirrel example. My main experience with them is to chase them away from our bird feeders.
With that said, dogs may not be as smart as a human, but they are far more dependable on average. That's why I love them so much.
A dolphin is a mammal, not a fish, but in another life I would love to have been a marine biologist studying them. They intrigue me. They seem to be like the perfect human being. They don't seem to have an angry, bitter aspect to their existence.
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So, some dogs are capable of a range of human thought beyond those we might interpret as instinctive...because some humans are capable of thinking like dogs.
I think that is what Hamlet was thinking about when he said --
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us paws...
This was a wonderful post Rob, very interesting.
Whales and dolphins, for example. By any measure, their brains are larger and more complex than ours; they've been on the planet millions of years longer than we have; they made the evolutionary choice to return to the sea; and they don't need to manipulate their environment to survive in it. What are they doing with those big brains? We've barely begun to pose the right questions...
(Fascinating post, Rob. I bet I said the same thing last time around ;)
Thanks for putting this back up. There were aspects of it I had forgotten. This could have been longer, in my opinion, but that’s just me. I’m glad to see the others who also appreciated it.
How we think, what we think, why we think what we think when we think it … lots of questions, I guess, and mostly only guesses for answers.
Regarding the question of whether or not other animals think like we do, Julie’s comment expresses something I’ve thought for a long time; “they think different but equal” (thanks for the phrasing, Julie).
I also liked Paul’s assessment – “some dogs are capable of a range of human thought beyond those we might interpret as instinctive...because some humans are capable of thinking like dogs.” Heh, my wife and I talk a lot about how these other species seem more able to pick up our communications than we are able to pick up theirs.
This ties into the idea that “frame of reference” would be an important factor; perceptions of the physical environment based on the sensory input available to the being doing the perceiving. Eye placement is one example; horses have a different visual field of perception than humans. Then, too, there is the aspect of physical ability to manipulate the environment; thumbs, claws, feet, etc.
Your analysis of the fMRI scans is one that is often overlooked when mainstream media (prime-time) shows present them to us; the issue of correlation versus causation is often ignored in those presentations.
Also, while it is likely less true among researchers, I think there is much bias among a majority of humans that we simply are superior beings and these other species are incapable of anything resembling actual thought.
My wife and I have recently been working with our Collie, teaching her hand signals along with vocal commands. Our most recent effort has involved teaching her a distinction between the commands, “Speak,” and “Whisper”. As you might guess, “speak” asks for a loud bark, while “whisper” asks for a quiet low-level growl, or sometimes just a sort of puff of air with almost no sound at all. As she has been learning this, it has been fascinating to watch her focus on the hand signal and apparently “think” about the difference between the “speak” hand signal and the “whisper” hand signal.
The process followed the same succession of hand signals each time. First, the command to “come”; then the command to “sit”; then the command to stay (at which point she consistently lowers her ears); then the command to “whisper” which instantly brings a raising of the ears, focus on the hand with her eyes, a slight hesitation, and then the reaction to our request.
For now, at least, I’m interpreting the evidence as indicating that many of these animals function on a much higher mental plane than many humans would like to admit, based on whatever benefit their denial might serve.
Great post, Rob.
Dolphins actually do have a material culture--there was some excitement a few years ago when researchers discovered bottlenose dolphins using sponges as foraging tools (to scoop while protecting their rostrums, or bottlenoses). The cool thing is that the researchers observed what's called cultural transmission: apparently daughter dolphins learn the behavior from their mothers, and the behavior may be due to one genius "Sponging Eve" dolphin in the past.
I don't have much to say about different but equal thinking--from a scientific perspective I think researchers (not me, I just read the papers) concentrate on what different animals can do, rather than associating value with it. So it's certainly reasonable to say "different (but we can't judge)". On the other hand, we can say, "These animals do better at these tasks than these other animals." That's just observation. One interesting thing is that we have some understanding of human intelligence, and we see some correlations between different ways intelligence can be demonstrated. (Think of mathematical people you might know who have a talent for music, or other kinds of "crossover" skills; here I'm thinking of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences, though I don't know it well. I'm presuming that there are connections between them.) But it turns out that a strict ranking doesn't apply in non-human animals, just as we see a lot of variation in human intelligence. For example, I mentioned Piaget above: dogs are better at some sorts of tasks in later stages than chimpanzees, if I remember correctly.
In 50 + years of sharing my life with critters of various kinds, I've met one (an Afghan Hound) who had something new to teach me - that she has an imagination - I don't know how else to tag it. That she will take an invisible 'something' and play with it - tossing it in the air, throwing it so that she can chase it, retrieve it and toss it again. The interesting thing to observe was that whatever it was she was imagining never went any further in her tosses than an existing object (a ball, a 'stuffy', a stick) might have gone. Always went the way anything tossed did - straightaway, up and then down.
I have no idea to this day what 'it' is that she plays with in these occasional games, I only know that there's nothing there to be seen. Memory? Imagination? Something different...