on animal cognition. A thoughtful essay (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, December 09, 2016, 01:37 (2905 days ago) @ dhw

How much do we really know about animal cognition? We can assume other humans have consciousness because we recognize our own mental state, but animals are at a different level:

https://aeon.co/essays/why-wont-biologists-say-that-animals-might-be-conscious?utm_sour...

my colleagues and I trained ducklings to recognise, for example, two red spheres, via imprinting. This is the process by which young birds can learn to identify and follow a moving object, normally their mother. The shapes were attached to rotating booms, and the ducklings followed them around like a mother duck. Then we gave them a choice between two more pairs of shapes: two red pyramids, and a red cube and a red rectangular prism.

To everyone’s surprise, the ducklings could spot the difference. Both sets of shapes were new to them, but the identical pair had a familiar ‘sameness’, and so the ducklings were drawn to it. They showed an equivalent preference for matching colours – when they were primed on two green spheres, for example, they picked a blue pair over a mixed violet and orange pair – and for difference itself, preferring mismatched shapes or colours when they had imprinted on a non-identical pair.

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It helps researchers maintain an intellectual distance and avoid anthropomorphism, which is a cardinal sin in the study of animal behaviour.

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The reluctance of my field to engage seriously with animal consciousness is, I believe, holding back our efforts to truly understand their behaviour.

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Anthropomorphism becomes a problem here because it inevitably calls upon the idea that animals are conscious, which is a hypothesis that cannot be tested.

For example, when my ducklings show that they can tell apart pairs of objects that are identical from pairs that are mismatched, we can say that the ducklings can discriminate abstract relationships, or learn abstract relationships, or compute or recognise or parse abstract relationships. ....What we cannot say is that the duckling thinks that the relationships are different, in the way a human might.

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Whatever evolutionary history has led a duckling to do something will have tailored that behaviour to success, whether the action is consciously thought about or not. So to the external observer of behaviour, or even of neurons firing, there will be no difference.  (my bold)

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My lab ducklings mustn’t think – getting at the heart of what they do requires that I approach them from this perspective. I want to understand how their behaviours have evolved, and the adaptive purposes they serve. If they are thinking, regardless of the definition, it is merely part of the process that governs their behaviour, a process that will be evolutionarily constructed to produce the outcome that is beneficial to the duckling.

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In the case of my concept-learning ducks, they might have made the discrimination by recognising visual features, rather than forming concepts.

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Cognitive abilities such as abstract representation are not the same as consciousness. They just seem to cohabit in the one species – humans – to which we are comfortable ascribing consciousness. Cognition is a much easier nut to crack than consciousness, and seems to be reliably related to various physical properties (brain-to-body ratio, and neuron number and density, for example, among many others). There is no reason to shy away from ascribing cognitive abilities for fear of accidentally summoning the spectre of consciousness.

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It is only a muddling of the distinction between consciousness and cognition, and researchers’ convention against assuming consciousness, that forces us to play down the intellectual prowess of our companion species. We would do well to break this habit.

To be clear, I have no crusade to blow open the doors of animal behaviour research and declare every animal a conscious mind. But nor should we be hubristic about the differences between humans and other vertebrates. That’s another sin in the biological sciences.

Comment: We cannot get inside, but we can recognize animal's cognitive abilities, tool use, intentionality of purposive activity, etc. But we can be sure they do not analyze or evaluate what they do, as we do. Humans are different, not by degree, but by kind. Giant essay. Worth reading it all.