JITOTM45: Butterfly Mind?
Humans have wondered if animals can think for ages. But here's a new twist on the old question: How do you think you're influenced by speed of movement, and or kind of movement, when it comes to deciding whether an animal has a mind?
That curious question, from Jay to you, is inspired by research that indicated people seem likelier to attribute the quality of "mind" to animals that move at near-human speed.
Anthropomorphism? Egotistical bias? Or just an odd anomaly of data? It's not clear why, for example, turtles might be judged to have "mind" while cows and squirrels make the cut.
Sometimes studying consciousness is more about questions, than answers. Give the questions a listen and then send your responses to this week's episode of JITOTM, Butterfly Mind.
posted by David Newland at 9:03 PM
6 Comments:
For the animals I know, like caribou, seal and beluga whale, they all have minds. I know this because it is not the first time I'm trying to catch one. We eat them. And sometimes, they can outsmart us when we are going after them. For the insects, even when we hit them, and they are lucky to be alive, they come back and still try to get to my blood. Even when I hit them. I don't think they have a mind at all, I think they have is a small one. Just enough to catch a hint that it is hungry.
3:44 PM
I have no idea if a butterfly moves with purpose, but I find it difficult to accept due to the size of a butterfly's brain - not to say bigger is always better, however butterflies do have extremely small brains.
I tend to associate purpose and consciousness with an animal more or less(but not always) based on the predator\prey stance. I have quite a bit of experience with coyotes, and they definitely exhibited intelligence. On the other hand, I cannot claim alligators are smart. I have no experience with them, but from footage I've seen, they seem to react out of instinct alone, but I think that poses another question: Are some animals smarter than they seem, but due to their nature, are these animals forced to react instinctively rather than intelligently? After all, us humans exhibit that exact behaviour all the time. Take losing weight for instance, or any addiction for that matter. We know we shouldn't eat what's bad for us, but it's difficult to prevent ourselves from doing it nonetheless. We're reacting out of instinct or some chemical reaction in our brain telling us to eat what's bad for us.
To help support that claim, I'll use a personal example. Many people believe dogs are far smarter than cats. I'm not claiming one way or the other, as I've never experimented, however, I had a cat that seemed quite intelligent to me. I trained it not to do certain things around the house, like jump up on the counter and hunt through the cupboards for food, and it certainly did not ... when I was paying attention. I would often come out of the bedroom or home from work or school to find the cat in the cupboards. It would then look at me with a guilty look, jump off and sprint over to its bed where it would quickly lay down and pretend nothing ever happened. Perhaps a cat is able to learn beyond what we think it is, but is not able to stop itself from doing something it shouldn't, even though it knows better?
I guess what I'm trying to say is animals can exhibit will power or lack thereof(instincts), and I believe will power can make testing for animal intelligence more difficult in many scenarios as will power can be perhaps categorized as it's own brand of intelligence. Therefore an animal may have higher learning abilities, but terrible will power abilities which would make it seem less bright than it really is.
12:05 AM
I guess we can say safely that "Knowledge is power" and "Lack of knowledge is just instinct".
3:52 PM
No offence, but I disagree. Some 26 years ago my grandmother died of lung cancer caused from smoking. She knew she had cancer from smoking, and she knew she had to quit, but she continued to smoke regardless. She had the knowledge, but couldn't use that knowledge to fight her physiological instinct to smoke.
4:03 PM
In the previous discussions, there is a tendency to conflate "consciousness" with "intelligence". Humans now think in language, almost exclusively-it is how we "self-talk". None of us remembers our first year, and it's clear that we only have the most fragmentary memories from even our first three years on Earth. Yet, 2 year olds are clearly willfully intelligent. What we consider "conscious", I suspect, is this phenomenon of self-talk and detailed language memory. I don't think humans are more rational than other animals on an individual basis, nor are we immune from instinct. I think there is a strong argument that we are the most intelligent animals, but only the top of a gray continuum, with dolphins, chimps, and possibly even parrots and ravens not too terribly far behind. Therefore, in my mind, consciousness is not rationality and logic (which insects demonstrate often to a higher degree than humans) nor intelligence (which babies have in abundance), but advanced language ability.
12:01 AM
gordonglazner, I respect and somewhat agree with your idea about language memory however, I think it runs a little deeper than just that. I think it's the concept of being able to speak; to create words that describe objects and emotions, then to further that by using the concept of writing it down for later use and creating grammar and punctuality.
Other concepts are counting(rudimentary mathematics), being able to make something hot enough that it catches on fire and in fact, training and using animals to do work for us. Without abstract thoguht and concepts, the human race is nothing.
I agree that many creatures are highly intelligent. Many creatures(such as parrots) have decent language abilities as well. My friend has a parrot, and unless you're very late with it's meal it never uses the language to express itself, it instead uses it to immitate only. Though I do admit, I've seen a gorilla express itself quite well with the use of sign language.
I don't agree with your idea that insects show rationality and logic to a higher degree than humans. I'd say most creatures living in the wild show a good amount of rationality. They spend they're entire day just trying to survive; they've evolved to be efficient and perform certain tasks to a tee. I doubt insects know you're a living being, and highly doubt they can do anything outside their genetic programming.
I highly agree that babies are very intelligent. Young humans would have to be intelligent to absorb all the knowledge needed to grow to be as we when we are adults. But again, I think it's the idea of concepts that separates us. I totally agree, I missed the boat on the language memory idea, but I'm still sticking to logic and rationalizing for the most part - the idea of forming language is logical. The idea of carving hieroglyphs into a stone wall so that it can be read later is a logical conclusion.
Pardon the badly structured response :)
11:08 PM
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