Animal Minds Virtual Part 1

Hey everyone. So we are doing our classes this week online.

So you're gonna have these lectures. I'll probably have a couple of them.

I haven't really time these out.

I have a 15 minute limit on these presses that I do when I do a video recording.

So you don't have to watch too long of a video at a time.

So probably have three or four of them to get through all this material. Um

because it's like two classes. Right?

So we're Tuesday and Thursdays class are going to be these

videos over the andrews reading that we have for this week.

So if you remember from looking at the syllabus,

you're not going to have journal assignments for this week.

Um

but you will need to be watching these presses um at some point during the week.

And um I will have a discussion board for you that

you can participate in and that will count as your,

like your class participation and attendance grade

since we weren't meeting in person.

We're just doing this virtually this week. Okay. So, um we've been talking about

artificial intelligence and whether or not machines could

potentially be considered thinking things like us,

we know that we are we've already gone through the arguments um,

about human nature being such that we have minds and

we've talked about what that means to have a mind.

And then we've looked at whether machines might be said to have minds

and one of the arguments against this as we've seen is that it seems that

machines don't have the capacity to create

their own language to understand other language,

to have conscious experience, um to have emotions.

A lot of those things that you brought up.

Those are things that of course are often used against machine intelligence.

But what about other anima

that now they do have a central nervous system. They do have brains.

They have bodies, they perceive the world, likely they have emotions,

all that kind of stuff.

Maybe they're a better place to look instead of machines.

We have these animals that live with us, some of them like dogs and cats.

And then we have really smart

um and clever creatures like dolphins and chimps.

So maybe maybe that's a better place to look for non human intelligence.

So that's what we're going to be thinking about and that's

what the andrews chapter that we read is all about.

So um speaking of dechert. So um let's see.

Speaking of Deckard, sorry,

I'm trying to make sure that the president is able to be seen at certain points.

So I want to make sure you can see this text. So dechert, if you recall um

he actually talks about the problem of understanding other minds besides our own.

So when we look out into the world and

we see other creatures like humans and other animals,

um they move and talk and act like they have a mind often.

Um but there's not proof positive for Deckard that they do.

They could be um fictitious elements. I mean they could just be

part of our own dreams, right, that we're not, we're just making them up there,

We're having a hallucination.

But even if those creatures exist beyond our minds, as Deckard says,

they could just be mere automata, as he calls them.

An automata, of course, a self moving machine.

Um That's interesting cause we just talked

about machine intelligence and now we've got

this idea that maybe maybe that's what animals are too um that they don't,

they behave in ways that look intelligent because they

eat and they sleep and they poop and they,

you know, procreate and they do all the things that we do,

like in terms of physiological functioning,

but what they don't have is what he calls this universal instrument of reason

or rationality.

Um, so that's the big question for us. Now.

I think nowadays Deckert has been mostly rejected on

this point and it's like we don't we don't take

him very seriously anymore in terms of assuming that

humans are the only ones that possess a rational,

what he calls a rational soul.

We have a mind, we have rationality.

Who knows if we have a soul as we talked about, that maybe is not easy to prove. Um, but

other animals also have rationality and show intelligence in various ways.

And so Decker has mostly been rejected on that point.

Um, but it is an open question,

how much of what other animals do mimics our own intelligence?

And like is there a sliding scale? Is it a matter of degrees?

Are there just are there certain mental things that we do that animals just can't do?

Um And you probably have some intuitions about this.

You probably if you're like,

most people think something like this chimp here or this bonobo,

the baby bonobo there, and then there's the chimp,

those are two closest genetic relatives.

Um and it makes sense that they probably do something similar to us

in terms of their intelligence and maybe they fall short a little bit,

but they're probably like way up there as are dolphins and elephants.

We know that elephants, for example,

have a high capacity for emotional reasoning and things like that.

Um And maybe down below elephants and dolphins,

you might have like your dogs and your cats and way way down.

You might have things like bugs and

other insects, right?

Um That that's the typical view of animals is almost like a hierarchy of like,

humans at the top and then all the way down to amoeba or something.

Um I'm gonna challenge that picture this week because it doesn't always hold up as,

you know, I've worked a lot on dogs and I think that dogs, for example,

have some intelligence that supersedes even chimps and a lot of domains.

This doesn't mean that dogs are smarter than chimps on the whole,

just that they have certain things they can do that chimps can't do?

Um And dogs have things they can do,

that little babies can't do like even little one year old, two year old toddlers.

Um

So we need to think about what we what we mean by intelligence,

What does it even mean to be an intelligent

being to have a mind to have consciousness?

Those things are still not,

they're not entirely understood by philosophers generally.

Um And then we're gonna go into the world of animals and

we're going to look and see if we can find those things,

but we don't even know what we're looking for.

100%. Right? So

That's something that Andrews mentioned in the Chapter two,

that we need to think about.

What are we even measuring here? When we say, does this creature have a mind?

It's so vague.

The question we need to pinpoint more specifically,

are we looking for evidence of linguistic reasoning, of mathematical reasoning?

Are we looking for spatial reasoning?

There's a lot of ways that we can measure quote unquote intelligence.

So that's what we're going to think about as we go through this particular chapter.

Um So like I said,

what defines human thinking um in humans at least some of the

hallmarks are being able to do rational thought processes or you know,

to possess rationality, as Deckard says that the sort of universal measure of

um having a mind for him and that's for him,

you go around and you look in the world

and you see what beings exhibit rational thought.

And it seems to be only humans, he he thinks um And that's what we, you know,

I think we're going to challenge that pretty well this week.

Another question is of course about language.

If you think for example,

that language is something that's required for intelligence,

um that's gonna beg a bunch of questions, right?

Because so for instance,

having let's just think about what it even

means to have a language that's already a questionable

um topic, right?

Like it's it's contentious because language

maybe something just like communication capacity,

which lots of species have if we limit it to human language with like, you know,

the symbolic structure of grammar and all that.

Um Okay, that's maybe a little more precise.

And now we can really see why only humans would count. Perhaps.

Although I'll talk about dolphins in a second and what they can do. Um

But then what about like little kids that are not linguistic yet?

You've got babies up to like the age age 2.5 3

before they can really comprehensively grasp their language and use it?

Right. So do they not count as having a mind? Um

And furthermore, as we just talked about robots,

machines that process language sometimes even better than we do

as humans because they can correct our grammar for us and

they can process words and meanings and translate for us

and do all the stuff that we can't even do.

So, would they count them?

Because if language is the thing that makes us intelligent,

then maybe we have lots of examples of it.

Um One of the things that andrews of course talked about in this chapter that

she proposes that I think we should consider

is um flexibility of thought and adaptability.

In other words,

the capacity to change in response to one's environment

and to meet challenges that that environment poses.

Um in ways that solve problems right to to

solve to basically have problem solving skills on the fly

to like not just pre program like this is how

I'm going to solve this problem every single time.

But this is a new problem.

I've never seen it before and I'm gonna use a little

bit of ingenuity and creativity maybe to get around the problem.

And if we think about the example that she brings

up in the chapter of the gray lag goose.

Um and it engages in this egg rolling

behavior. It's a it's a very like hardwired um

inflexible behavior that this goose engages in and

it does it presumably to keep the egg

warm evenly warmed and so it will um it will hatch properly and all of that.

But there's nothing about that behavior that seems to be

flexible or adaptable and we know this because if you take

the egg away from the goose as you see in

the picture here and you replace it with another object.

Um

Something that looks roughly like an egg or shaped like an egg.

The goose will continue to roll that object around nonstop.

It'll even do this with an object that doesn't look like an egg at all.

Um I'll post a video of this on blackboard for you.

So you can see an action that's happening.

But this is a case where I wouldn't say that the

goose has a lot of intelligence about what it's doing.

I mean it might be perceiving the world, it might have consciousness.

It might be like having conscious experiences, but it's certainly not reckon

using any pattern differential there in the egg, it's not solving any problems.

I mean it's not freaking out looking for its egg,

it doesn't even realize its eggs been replaced.

So this is kind of a good indication that

that goose isn't the brightest bulb in the box,

at least not in this particular instance.

Um But you contrast that with

this other case of like what dolphins are capable of doing.

They have all sorts of flexible behaviors.

They use echolocation to communicate with one another

about the locations of food in the ocean.

Um I'll post a video of this also that they've

been shown to be able to comprehend what symbolic um

images stand for.

In other words, if you show them like an image of something that is like, I don't know,

it just looks like a dolphin in the air.

That means to the dolphin go jump so that you can

train dolphins to go do these tricks basically based on um

um an image that doesn't necessarily mean jump. It's almost like reading right?

You might think that the dolphin is actually reading

in this case because it sees a symbol.

It knows that that symbol means go do a jump or go do a

tail flip or something like that and that tells the dolphin to do it.

So the dolphin reads that sign with me, no verbal cues whatsoever. And does it?

I mean that seems like a little bit more higher level intelligence.

But we might argue that the dolphin has been trained to do this

and it's not learning from the environment so much as just being conditioned

with food.

Um and the behaviorist that we talked about behaviorism a little bit, you know,

a couple of weeks ago and that's exactly how behaviorism operates.

It's like assuming that the dolphin can

be ultimately controlled through positive reinforcement.

And does that count then as actual intelligent,

flexible learning is it's doing something that counts as having

cognition and rationality the way day kurt would have thought.

So the dolphins are actually, it's a questionable case whether dolphins

capacity to potentially read counts

if you contrast that though with like what we know crows to be able to do.

I think this is where we start to see some

seriously flexible learning and crows are birds just like geese,

but they are in a different family there

in the corvidae family and corvids like crows,

Ravens, scrub jays, steller jays, they are all like in

um incredibly intelligent birds compared to geese. I think.

I mean overall in terms of testing,

we know that they can do some pretty impressive

stuff compared to geese and crows for example,

can be um taught to pick up trash and bring it in exchange for treats.

Um Now again, this is positive reinforcement,

but the thing that crows do that's interesting

is they will adapt and learn on their own

new strategies for getting treats like on there

without humans having to interfere in other words.

So,

crows in japan have been observed to take nuts um that they

can't crack on their own and they will drop them into traffic

um and get the traffic to run over the nuts and open them for them.

So this um we're gonna stop the video here and think for

a second about how the crow's behavior that I just described would

really indicate that there's something going on there that they're able to

develop new strategies on their own without the help of humans.

And that's gonna be one of the hallmarks for

the study of animal cognition is whether or not humans

get in and interfere with the process.

Does that change whether we want to consider the animal intelligent or not.

Usually, researchers think, yes it does.

That's one of the things we don't want to do is take an animal

and pull it into the lab and do all this stuff with it.

Because then you've like,

you've meddled with the animal's natural environment so much

that we can't say it naturally has this intelligence,

It's been trained up like a circus monkey, right?

So we're gonna think about that and look at what andrews

has to say about all that in the next video.

Animal Minds Virtual Part 1

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