Minds of Their Own

[katura]

This National Geographic article contains some amazing information about animal cognition. I recommend it to anyone interested in animals, psychology or cognition in general. It seriously blew me away! I bolded my favourite part. Thanks to Lindsey for posting the link first!

Comments

[bizza]

So because history shows us that, any non-human animal that exhibits complex thought is disregarded? The most likely explanation is automatically human error? Obviously you don't just assume the opposite without exploring further either, but what I'm talking about is that it seems like there is a strong resistance against the idea that any non-human animal might be more developed than we previously thought. Instead of wanting to find out more to discover whether it is the case, the scientists have a history of saying, "oh, you're just anthropomorphizing" and dismissing it. Every person I've ever seen or read who worked on studying animal intelligence has spoken of this.

As I said before, I don't think there's as much resistance in cognitive psychologists against the idea that animals are able to do a lot of the things that humans can do as you seem to think there is - I suspect that the articles and TV shows you've read and seen about this stuff have a vested interest in creating a "one scientist battles the ignorant majority" narrative because it makes for a better story. Reality is typically more complicated.

The issue is that people infer from abilities like those of scrub jays that the animals have thought and intelligence. This is a problematic inference. Science is by nature reductive, and Ockham's razor - an important principle in science - suggests that the simpler theory is the better theory. The simpler theory is that the abilities can be explained without saying the animal has intelligence and thought; intelligence and thought are very complex things to need to explain (like I said in my earlier reply, some psychologists have denied that humans have intelligence and thought, and largely for this reason). I really want to emphasise that the presence of intelligence and thought is a really hard thing to prove in general - the only person that anybody conclusively knows has thought and intelligence is themselves - other people could be androids which are programmed to act as if they're thinking. Obviously, they're not, but the reason we can prove that have to do with the presence of certain aspects of abstract thought and ability to synthesise ideas, etc. And I haven't seen incontrivertible proof of that in any of the animal research I've seen.

Therefore, the burden of proof is on people like Dr Pepperberg when they're arguing that animals have abstract thought, intelligence. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - if these animals actually have abstract thought, intelligence, etc, in the same way that humans do, it'll get proven in a scientifically repeatable way.

tim.