[7.0] The Minds Of Animals & Humans

* The human mind is the product of aeons of evolution, preceded by the minds of animals. In the current era, there is a wide range of animal minds, which suggest the steps by which the human mind evolved. The consideration of animal minds leads to the question: does the human mind differ from that of other animals in degree, or in kind? On inspection, the human mind isn't so different from that of other animals, except in one critical ability: a mastery of language that no other animals can touch, and which makes all the difference in the world.

[7.1] THE MINDS OF ANIMALS

* The mind of a human is an extension of the minds of animals. After all, humans not being mineral or vegetable, they're by elimination another kind of animal, structurally and functionally similar to other mammals. There are, of course, people who claim plants also have minds -- but the case for consciousness in plants is vanishingly weak.

It should be emphasized that even a minimalist virus does have an intentionality -- yes, there's that word again. All organisms do; they have a purpose, in the case of a virus, it's to infect host cells and replicate, which is all it does. That can be tricky to do, since a host has an elaborate set of defenses that a virus must be able to defeat to accomplish its purpose. A virus does have a "sorta" intelligence, but since calling a virus "intelligent" would be asking for trouble, we can use "intentionality" instead -- and leave, as deliberately undefined, where intentionality leaves off and intelligence begins.

The boundary is not well-defined in either direction. Our intelligence is derived from the action of neurons; but is a single neuron much "smarter" than a virus? Since a single neuron, as a rule, can't accomplish much on its own, it might be argued that the virus is smarter, since it is fully capable of carrying out its viral agenda.

Of course, nobody seriously believes viruses honestly perceive the outside world; they're only reacting automatically to specific stimuli. Nobody seriously believes plants or fungi have any perceptions either -- though plants can react, to a degree, to stimuli. A plant under attack by pests may release chemicals announcing its distress, with neighboring plants recognizing the signals, and reinforcing their defenses appropriately.

However, all that is done automatically. Plants do have intentionalities, having adopted a range of strategies and tactics to get through life; but such were all evolved, they weren't things that plants decided they were going to do. Why would a plant think? It has no "need to know" anything, no need to ask itself: "What do I do next?" -- since it has only a limited ability to respond to assaults from its environment. Under stress from drought or pests, it can't decide to go someplace else; it has to sit there and take it.

No observations show plants think, and nobody could come up with a credible experiment to show that they do. The only markers of the mind are behavioral, and plants have no behaviors suggesting they have minds. Asserting that a plant is conscious is very much like saying it is a zombie, but in reverse: instead of claiming that an entity that appears to have a mind really doesn't, the claim is that an entity that shows no honest signs of having a mind -- doesn't even have a nervous system -- really does. Either way, there's no basis for making the claim.

Organisms with honestly adaptive behaviors need a nervous system, to sense the world and react to it. One of the simplest examples is Caenorhabditis elegans, a millimeter-long roundworm popularly used as a "lab rat". It has about a thousand cells, with a few hundred of them being nerve cells. It has very basic senses and behavioral suite. To the extent it can learn, it is only in a "stimulus-response" fashion; if it gets into trouble associated with a particular stimulus, it will then take avoidance actions when confronted with the same stimulus. Nonetheless, nobody would claim it could think about anything, that it had a mind. The most that could be said about it is that it has a "reflex system": it gets a stimulus and makes a response, either by default instinct, or by a degree of conditioned learning.

A spider does one better than the C. elegans roundworm by having a brain. It also has eyes, and in general a much greater awareness of its environment than the roundworm. It is, however, still basically instinctive in its behavior, such learning capabilities as it has not being much of a reach beyond the stimulus-response capability of C. elegans. A web spider constructs its web instinctively, being born to do so, with different species of spiders spinning different sorts of webs. A spider is not, cannot be, trained by a parent to do anything; its essential behaviors are programmed at birth.

Although it is clearly aware of the outside world, a spider gets stimuli, and responds with reflexes. It has no real sense of time, it just exists, with little or no memory of the past, little or no anticipation of the future. It has little or no mind, just a reflex system -- if a more capable one than the roundworm's. Much the same applies to, say, parasitic wasps, which can have highly selective behavior in parasitizing their target prey species; their elaborate behaviors are unlearned, and they have only a limited ability to adapt to circumstances.

* A honeybee, however, is in a different league. While a web spider is a passive hunter, setting a trap and then tending it, a honeybee is a forager, flying from plant to plant in search of pollen. It must be aware of more than its immediate environment to navigate, and be able to recognize flowers from their cues. Honeybees will remember the flowers they visit -- and in time, optimize their overall route from flower to flower. Bees, in short, can solve the traveling salesman problem.

In other words, a honeybee actually thinks; it remembers, it anticipates the future, it learns, it constructs plans. Honeybees also have the ability to communicate to other members of the hive, most famously through the well-known "waggle dance" that a honeybee uses to tell colleagues where flowers are. Some species of hive bees can also communicate the presence and nature of hive invaders. Incidentally, experiments with bumblebees, which are solitary bees, show they can be taught to roll and reposition a little ball to get a sugar-water reward -- and bumblebees that observe other bumblebees do the trick pick it up faster than those that don't get any such training.

A bee, then, has a mind. A very limited one, of course, focused on what it "needs to know", mainly flowers and the hive, with little weight given to anything else. A bee's ability to learn and reason is limited to a handful of tricks, relevant to its lifestyle -- but that's true of animal reasoning in general, in that they reason as well as they need to in order to get by. They know what they "need to know". A bee's behavior is not purely instinctive, is not fixed at birth; a bee was born with meta-knowledge, a learning instinct, a behavior to acquire behaviors.

* Not so much is known about the behavior of other insects, so not so much can be said about their minds. Indeed, not so much is known about the behavior of animal species except for birds and mammals -- as demonstrated by a long-running debate over whether fish feel pain when they're hooked. Some researchers say no, they don't have a pain system or brain that's capable of giving them awareness, as opposed to reflexive reaction, to pain.

Other research suggests they do. In one study, fish were injected in the lips with bee venom or an acid solution; the fish reacted immediately as they might have been expected to, rubbing their lips on the side or bottom of their tank, rocking from side to side and breathing at a rapid rate, in obvious distress. Another study found that after encountering a painful event, fish demonstrate defensive or avoidance behaviors. If we don't know what it's really like to be a fish, it's still hard to see how they couldn't be aware of pain. Indeed, if they weren't aware of pain, would they have any real awareness at all? The question ends up becoming whether fish have the qualia of pain, which is not a real question. The assumption that they don't seems like an exercise in justifying the fact that we catch fish with hooks, and then eat them.

As far as the birds and mammals go, their cognitive abilities vary greatly from species to species. Crows and rooks can solve surprisingly complicated mechanical puzzles, bending wires to get treats out of inaccessible places. Parrots and cockatoos have exhibited some ability to use tools as well, and of course are known for the ability of some species of such to communicate with humans in human language -- like having an intelligible, if limited, conversation with a very small child.

As for mammals, everyone is familiar with how intelligent cats and dogs can be. Dogs are, as a rule, readily trained, and some can understand a large number of verbal commands. Dogs are also very well tuned to living with humans, having a high degree of "social intelligence" that allows them to interact with their owners. Cats aren't so easily trained and not so readily interactive, but that seems to be because they don't have the same motivation to play along with training as do dogs. A video of a particularly clever cat showed it opening a drawer, crawling into the drawer, and then closing it from the inside, so the cat could take a nap. In either case, most people accept that dogs and cats have minds, capable of a degree of reasoning -- and possessing personalities and preferences.

There are researchers in animal cognition who play up the ability of some animals, but not others, to recognize themselves in a mirror -- for instance, with the animal pulling off a red sticker attached to the forehead -- with that being seen as a marker of mindfulness. Experiments along such lines were pioneered by the American psychologist Gordon Gallup (born 1941). Obviously, animals that can recognize themselves in a mirror have a capability over those that don't, but it's difficult to say exactly what either that capability or its lack really says. Dogs, it seems, don't do well in self-recognition tests, but they are very smell-oriented, smelling each other on introduction -- and can't smell their image in a mirror. Dehaene suggests:

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Again, our own selves are only a component of all the many things in the world that we spend our time considering.

Everyone accepts that the great apes are brainy, and well more humanlike than any other animal. Indeed, experiments have shown that chimpanzees can solve certain classes of puzzles more easily than humans can. Nobody sensibly doubts they have a mind, more capable than that of most other mammals. To be sure, despite their obvious intelligence, they are not capable of behaviors, such as reading or driving a car in traffic, that any normal human adult is capable of.

[7.2] LANGUAGE & THE MINDS OF HUMANS

* Considering the minds of animals, particularly the great apes, leads to the question of how the human mind differs from animal minds. Is it just that humans have more of the same abilities chimpanzees have? That may well be true in many respects, but humans have something no other animal really has: language. The great apes have shown a fair ability to pick up sign language and can acquire a useful vocabulary of words -- but they have only primitive notions of syntax, symbology, and abstract concepts. Human language skills are vastly more sophisticated.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889:1951), a Briton of Austrian origin, once notably said: "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." Dennett has replied:

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Language makes a huge difference, most visibly in the ability to communicate "memes" -- ideas, fads, jokes, anything we can intelligibly talk about. With modern communications, language allows all of humanity to act as a global "groupmind" -- if one that's going off in all directions at once, and often bitterly at odds among itself. However, it also makes a huge difference in what we can think about.

Science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov (1920:1992) recollected a conversation he had with his father, who had come to America from Russia. The elder Asimov said he had been thinking over an issue, with his son asking: "Did you think in English or in Russian?"

The elder Asimov considered that for a moment, and replied: "I just thought."

The difficulty with this answer is, if that were the case, the elder Asimov would have been hard-pressed to say what it was he was thinking about. If Alice is sitting around brainstorming about a problem and then gets an idea, it doesn't do her much good unless she can articulate it. The brain, as a powerful neural network, deals with abstracted messages encoded in neural paths, patterns that have to be encoded as words to be recorded and communicated.

Alice has to think it out by talking to herself, sometimes out loud. In doing so, she can see if the idea hangs together, and what the consequents are. She may have problems articulating exactly what the idea was: "No, that's not quite right." She may find the idea was incoherent, that it didn't really go anywhere; or she may find that she's articulated something she knows is different from the original idea -- and to her surprise, may find it insightful. "Oh, I never thought of that before!"

In the same way that an artwork starts out with a general idea that becomes concrete and detailed as it is drawn out, a person writing a book usually starts with only an abstracted concept of what the book is to be, fleshing the ideas embodied in it -- sometimes with difficulty, sometimes finding the end result to be different from the original concept. The completed book then communicates the ideas to readers who, at least if they can follow the text, then form up their own abstracted notions of what the book is about. If asked to articulate those ideas, readers will do it in their own style, which may be greatly different from that of the book -- or they may simply mangle the ideas. It happens.

Formal systems of reasoning, such as law or physics, are impossible to consider without language; though of course physics also involves mathematical analysis, and the mechanical visualization of the action of physical systems. Pictures, as the saying goes, are worth a thousand words. Without language and imagery, we would have no sophisticated technologies, since such things cannot be built without specifications -- not only based on text, but also imagery such as blueprints, schematic diagrams, and charts for performance specifications -- and we could not use them without operating manuals.

No other animals can understand law or physics; no other animals can understand operating manuals. While other animals are capable of straightforward mechanical reasonings -- service dogs, for example, have been trained to use their noses to activate a touchscreen display to call for help -- there's no evidence that other animals can entertain abstract reasonings of any complexity. Certainly, no other animal is capable of serious written language -- which takes language to an entirely different level, allowing commentaries to be recorded indefinitely, and communicated around the world.

Claims have been made that other animals, lacking the language capabilities of humans, are not really conscious. They're certainly not conscious the way humans are, with little ability to comprehend the world beyond its manifest image, little ability to plan things out beyond pragmatic cunning, and little glimmering of the future course of their lives.

A dog may enjoy a ride in the car, but what's a car to a dog? It's a thing that he can sit in along with the family, and goes very fast to new and interesting places. A dog doesn't and cannot know much more about a car than that. It could be trained to understand the word "car" and know that a car trip's coming, but otherwise the dog wouldn't have a word for "car". Take a photo of a cat, the cat has no idea, and can have no idea, of what the silly human is doing, and doesn't care. We tend to marvel at animals doing clever things because, compared to humans, animals are generally pretty stupid.

Thanks to the "groupmind" established by language and the global internet, today humans are, to a degree, more intelligent than those of a century ago, able to access a vast store of information on demand. The advantage is only to a degree: with one hand, the internet has granted almost unlimited access to information; with the other, it has flooded the world with misinformation. Great effort is being put into dealing with the online misinformation plague, but it is hard to know how long it will take to get it under control.

Language is obviously important for communicating factual information; but human language is not remotely restricted to communications of facts. Humans are highly flexible in their use of language. Language is particularly important to human social intelligence, our critical ability to get along with each other and in society -- but that implies a considerable use of language not to communicate factual information, but to convey emotion, to determine or establish social status, and sometimes to conceal or misdirect.

Most conversations are just for socialization, and may not have any other meaning than to indicate how one feels. Even when they are nonsensical, they still may have meaning as entertainment; cleverly-put-together gibberish, such as nonsense verse, or illogic, as in the classic LOONEY TOONS cartoons, may be extremely amusing. There is a certain skewed logic to clever humor, often to convey a satirical moral through mockery.

Taking that thought a bit farther, we may enjoy the emotions evoked by a song, even if the lyrics are inane. We even enjoy those emotions when they're evoked by instrumental music that has no lyrics -- that "message" being communicated through some mostly mysterious process by melody, tempo, and sound colors. In any case, communications need to have meaning to be more than mere "word salad" -- but meaning is a concept that is very hard to nail down.

* As a footnote to the question of minds and language, there's the issue of the cetaceans, the dolphins and whales, who appear to have relatively sophisticated language abilities. In 2008, two pygmy sperm whales got disoriented in a bay on the North Island of New Zealand and repeatedly beached themselves, despite the efforts of a conservation officer and a few citizens to get them back out to sea -- but then, a dolphin well known to locals for playing with swimmers, who had been named "Moko", showed up, chatted with the two whales, and guided them out of their predicament.

Humans have a tendency to read into animal behavior things that aren't necessarily there. There are old stories of fur trappers and the like being "warned" by the cawing of crows that there was a cougar lurking nearby, though in modern times the general belief is that the crows were tipping the cougar off to the location of a potential meal, in hopes of getting table scraps. However, in the case of Moko and the whales, it was hard to believe something wasn't going on. Said the conservation officer: "I don't speak whale and I don't speak dolphin, but there was obviously something that went on, because the two whales changed their attitude from being quite distressed to following the dolphin quite willingly and directly along the beach and straight out to sea."

Dolphins and whales may indeed have a rich language by animal standards. Sounds carry for long distances in the water, and the ability to communicate important facts -- the presence of food or predators, or something interesting to investigate -- would certainly have substantial evolutionary value. It is known that individual dolphins have a distinctive call associated with each of them, with mothers able to selectively call their calves, suggesting that dolphins have names. As suggested by the story of Moko, there appears to be some communications between cetacean species. Although dolphins have distinctly different call patterns from whales, there are cases of dolphins imitating whale calls, and some cases of whales imitating dolphin calls.

That's all very suggestive, but it is hard to make too much of it. It might be possible, as suggested in humorous sci-fi stories, that dolphins are actually wizards at theoretical mathematics -- but there's no cause to think they are, and it's difficult to understand what they could do with math if they were. Although there's more to math than numbers and arithmetic, they're the basic elements out of which modern evolved; it is hard to see that dolphins would have a "need to know" numbers beyond: "One, two, three ... many ... a great many ... vast." They would certainly have little use for being able to do much more than add two plus two.

It certainly plausible that they have an elaborate culture of music, inventing songs to sing to each other, to appeal to a mate or to obtain status in their pods; or singing just for the fun of it, dolphins being notably playful creatures. The "songs" of humpback whales are known to evolve, with particular "songs" becoming fads, to migrate among the populations of whales. Exactly why they like particular songs is unclear.

There is considerable work in progress on using AI systems to comprehend the language of whales, as well as other animals, but we're still a long way from understanding the language of the cetaceans. Once we do, we'll finally be able to get a real idea of what's going on in their heads, since they'll be able to tell us about it. That leads to the next interesting idea: once we do understand the language of cetaceans, will we be able to teach them more about the world than they know from their own collective experience? Will we be able to teach them there are other worlds? Could we teach them math? We don't know.

[7.3] FOOTNOTE: BEAM ME UP

* In any case, having now completed a survey of the cognitive workings of the brain and their manifestations in the behaviors of the mind, a cognitive pragmatist can only wonder why anyone would claim the mind is completely and forever mysterious. The mind's behaviors seem open to inspection: we can, with a bit of caution, observe the way we think ourselves, and also observe, through discussion, how others think. Why made a fuss over the immaterial nature of the mind? The mind is no more or less immaterial than the dance choreography of a musical production, or any other elaborate pattern of behaviors; nobody sees any inexplicable mystery in dance choreography, and there's no inexplicable mystery of the elaborate dance of the brain that we call the mind.

To be sure, there's vastly more to learn about how behaviors are produced by the brain, but there's no cause to believe that the behaviors are the result of anything besides the actions of PONs. If the concern renders down to: "Science can't explain Harvey!" -- the answer is: "We have no need for that hypothesis."

It must be admitted that humans have an ingrained inclination to believe in the soul; Harvey; the Cartesian theater; qualia; and dualism in general. It also has to be admitted that even those who know better may find dualism hard to discard. As a popular example, sci-fi series like STAR TREK like to envision a "matter transporter" in which Mr. Spock is scanned down to the atoms in a matter transmitter, with information produced by the scan sent to a destination, where Spock is reconstructed.

Of course, a matter transporter is ridiculous, an RTX. It would be like scanning an entire big city down to the nails and paint, with the information transmitted to a remote world and the city perfectly duplicated there. Scanning all the molecules in a human body would be at least as difficult or more so, and the scanning process would be disruptive -- notably to the synaptic connections that encode memory. A matter transporter could be said to be possible in principle, but it's not realistic.

The matter transporter does pose an interesting question, however. Since the matter transmitter tears Spock down to atoms, then does he die every time he uses it? It might seem obvious that Spock dies -- but consider a variation on the matter-transmitter scenario. Suppose Alice were to be scanned, and destroyed, as in a matter transporter every time she went to bed; her scan is stored until just before morning comes, and then used to reconstruct her. Would she notice anything had happened? Assuming she were reconstructed with an overlay of having had a marvelous deep sleep -- as long as we're making things up, might as well do a proper job of it -- she would be none the wiser.

While consciousness is not an illusion, there is something really going on, once again it is rooted in illusions -- another one being the illusion of existing in a continuous flow of time. Alice, any one of us, effectively only exists in a transient HERE and NOW. The person she was a moment ago has ceased to exist, being merely a memory; and she really knows nothing about the person she will be a moment in the future -- her knowledge of her future person being as an extension of her present one, no more than a reflection of her intent of what to do next. She has no anticipation of ceasing to exist; when she is restored, she takes up where she left off.

The experience of being administered general anesthesia for a medical treatment underlines this reality; Alice goes under, comes back up again after the treatment, and has no awareness of the passage of time. The gradual nature of going to normal sleep, and the fragments of consciousness that occur in normal sleep, do grant a weak perception of the passage of time.

All that having been explained, the question remains as to whether anyone would want to take a trip via matter transporter, or would consider it suicide. There is a lingering dualistic belief that there is something -- a Harvey -- that the matter transporter wouldn't be able to scan. On close inspection, there's nothing that can be found to worry about. There never was.