Theory of Mind
Animal cognition seems to be in the air this month. I read a review by Frans de Waal of two books on the subject a few days ago, and today find that one along with two more at SciTech. Each is about one of the books that de Waal reviews, so the three together make an interesting comparative package, and they’re all interesting in themselves.
This one on Clive D.L. Wynne’s Do Animals Think? is not only interesting but also quite amusing.
Students in the first-year university philosophy classes that I teach often believe that their dogs, cats, budgies, and goldfish are thinking pretty much the same thoughts they are. Unfortunately, some of them are right, I point out – but I point it out only when I’m in a grumpy mood…Ditto for tales about dolphins using “an elaborate language among themselves that we are not smart enough to decode,” to say nothing of whale songs, weeping elephants, and loyal hounds.
The weeping elephant item is of course a sly reference to Masson’s book When Elephants Weep. I especially like the dig because I had a similar one in the Fashionable Dictionary, but had to take it out on grounds of obscurity. Masson and the book are not well known enough, so the joke would have fallen flat. But I can put it in the FD on the site. I’ll have to do that one of these days.
And another item.
Do Animals Think? contains a series of intermittent chapters in which Wynne describes and enthusiastically marvels over honeybee hive life, bat echolocation techniques, and pigeon homing methods.
That word ‘echolocation’ appears in one of the FD definitions – one of the original ones, so it’s already on the site. My colleague wondered if it was a real word – it looked like something to do with virtual chocolate. Well, see, that’s the difference between sociologists and zookeepers. He is familiar with words like functionalism and Durkheim, and I’m familiar with words like echolocation and shovel. Anyway, there is the word, big as life, and used by someone other than me, which I take to be pretty good evidence that it’s a real word.
The other review, of Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings, is not particularly amusing, but it is interesting.
Robin Dunbar was on Start the Week last week, and he was so interesting that I was inspired to re-read his excellent book The Trouble With Science. (There is a paragraph on the book In the Library.) He talks about social cognition, and whether animals have a theory of mind – chimpanzees have some, the equivalent of a five-year-old child’s, but they are left in the dust by a child of six, and dolphins have none at all. Then he discusses what an elaborate theory of mind humans actually do have, that we can actually go five levels (she thinks that he thinks that they think that you think that I think), and that doing that takes an enormous amount of brain power, which seems wasteful. What is it for? (Wasteful things seem to need explaining, of course, because it seems as if they would be selected against.) He has a suggestion – Andrew Marr thought it was ‘religion’ but Dunbar corrected him: not quite. Imagination, is what he thinks it’s useful for: imagination which makes two things possible: religion and story-telling. Both of those, he thinks, make social cohesion possible. Humans live in groups, with an implicit social contract, which means they have to sacrifice immediate benefits for long-term ones, at times, which is a situation exploitable by cheaters (you know: Prisoner’s Dilemma, game theory, all that). So religion works to discourage cheaters – if Dunbar is right, at least. At any rate it makes for a very interesting discussion. Marr asks if he thinks that that means religion will always be with us. ‘I hope not!’ says Dunbar, and everyone laughs a good deal. And they talk about the way that religion makes small group cohesion possible and by the same token makes people want to kill people who believe differently. Yes doesn’t it though. Well now I’ve told you nearly all of what was said, but never mind, listen anyway.
Ever read The origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes? Interesting book that, and a bit frightening (if you are an atheist; if you believe this must be a truly terrifying read…)
Anyway, Jaynes gives a very narrow definition of consciousness as the capacity we have of imagining ourselves (as what he calls an “analog I”) in an inner space. He also makes a link between consciousness and language and that’s when his theories become a bit scary (basically for Jaynes, human consciousness is a very recent phenomenon, he dates it from around 1300/1100 B.C. the time of the Illiad)
Anyway he had quite a lot to say about the importance of imagination and storytelling for the human ape and also about religion (what he calls the quest for authorisation) as a leftover of this time before consciousness when we were in a state somewhat akin to schizophrenia. Which reminds me of the “meaning” thread of yesterday.
To think that our religious friends could be pining for a time when the whole human race was more or less insane…
Of course the problem of these animal cognition experiments is trying not to get skewered on the prong of excessively anthropomorphic anecdote while avoiding the prong of highly artifical experiments, where the animal neither knows nor cares what you are trying to make them do. And yes, of course echolocation is a word, at the risk of echolalia.
Nope, haven’t read the Jaynes book. The notion about the recentness of human consciousness sounds similar to Bruno Snell’s The Discovery of the Mind – which was fairly sharply criticised by reviewers, I think. If I remember correctly, there was a lot of skepticism about the idea that consciousness is new.
“To think that our religious friends could be pining for a time when the whole human race was more or less insane…”
Well, exactly! At the very least they seem to pine for a situation in which the whole human race is delusional.
“And yes, of course echolocation is a word, at the risk of echolalia.”
Yeah but see echolalia doesn’t look like anything to do with chocolate whereas echolocation does. So you see the problem…
“And yes, of course echolocation is a word”
It wasn’t that I didn’t know it was a word. After all, I’ve read Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker, where he misunderstands the point of Thomas Nagel, and goes on at great length about bats (and it’s interesting stuff).
It was more that I was reading it – as e-cholocation. I spend so much time worrying about the internet that I was reading it as e something.
Perceptual sets, I blame.
Whaddya mean ‘after all’? Am I supposed to know what you’ve read?
snicker
(Mind you, I think you did say, when we were first working on the FD, ‘Is that a word?’ But of course I knew you were joking.)
Anyway I’ve remembered that the word in question is actually echolocate, not echolocation. Obviously echolocate does look quite a lot like internet chocolate!
It’s no good blaming perceptual sex though. Just close your eyes.
Oh, about our theory of mind (though off the topic of animals, I’m afraid), you might be interested by an insightful article which discusses why the human animal is so prone to religious belief (short answer: the misapplication of pre-existing mental modules).
For example, the notion of ‘God’ seems to have arisen from personifying nature, and then applying our “theory of mind” to try to understand the workings of this invented entity. It kind of explains people’s tendency to create God in their own image ;)
Anyway, I won’t babble on. More comments on my blog, if anyone’s interested.
“It’s no good blaming perceptual sex though. Just close your eyes.”
I would, but it’s always over too quickly.
“I would, but it’s always over too quickly.”
Zip zip zip. What is it with sheep today…
Thanks, Richard, that is interesting. I like this bit in Table 1 for example –
“Religion allays anxiety
versus
It generates as much anxiety as it allays: vengeful ghosts, nasty spirits and aggressive gods are as common as protective deities”
This is what I keep saying. Defenders argue (among other things) that religion is consoling – which of course is the case – but it is also the case that religion is terrifying.