One group of questions includes: What are the ranges and important categories of mental states/processes/abilities? What counts as having some mental state like belief or fear? What does it take to “have a mind” in general, that is, to have any of those states/processes/abilities? Do minds just inhere in our physical brains? or do they involve some kind of non-physical soul? These are called metaphysical questions about the mind. We’ll discuss this label more later. In this course, we’ll be engaging with many of these questions.
At the moment, though, we’re engaging more with a second group of questions, including: What creatures/entities have particular mental states/processes/abilities? Later, we’ll ask more generally what creatures have any minds at all? And when trying to answer these questions, how can we tell or know?
When we ask how we can know something, there’s a question of how high to understand the standards to be. As I said in class, we’ll never get certain proof that some non-human animal has a given mental state/process/ability. But neither can you get certain proofs that other humans have those (or any) mental states. Still we do think it is pretty reasonable to think other humans have minds and mental lives like our own, and we can ask, what would make it also reasonable to think such-and-such animals have these? It doesn’t necessarily have to be as reasonable to think so, as to think that other humans do. But it’s interesting to sort out what kinds of evidence would make it more reasonable, and how much more reasonable they’d make it. These are called epistemological questions about the mind. (“Episteme” was a Greek word that translates roughly as “knowing.”) We’ll discuss this label more later too.
Note that when we discuss these questions, sometimes we’ll start by specifying some inner mental stuff, and then imagining or discussing what the outer evidence for that inner stuff might look like. Other times we’ll start by describing outer behavior and other kinds of bodily responses, and then have to imagine or discuss which inner mental stuff it’s evidence that the animals possess. In each case, try to keep track of when you’re describing something “inside” a creature’s mind or part of their mental life, and when you’re instead describing outer signs/evidence.
The third group of questions is why does it matter which creatures have which mental states/processes/abilities? Our readings will suggest connections between some mental capacities (it’s controversial which) and the status of “being a person.” What does this mean?
These three groups of questions obviously bear on each other. But they’re not the same questions.
Our early readings in the course don’t doubt whether animals like chimps and parrots have feelings like pain. (Some later reading will raise and discuss such doubts about animals, and then much moreso about AIs.) Our early readings instead focus on what cognitive abilities animals have, suggesting intelligence/reasoning/thought, and explore what concepts animals can understand. In class I sketched a list of these abilities (not claimed to be exhaustive):
Reasoning and problem-solving; ability to make and use tools
Many animals especially those in the “core group” I mentioned in class have demonstrated these abilities to some extent. Jumping spiders have also shown some surprising problem-solving abilities, and leafcutter ants and some fish have shown some abilities to make and use tools. Other tool-users beyond the “core group” seem to include sea otters, bears, mongooses, vultures, and seagulls.
Self-awareness
One kind of experiment here is called the mirror test, which you can read more about, or may already have heard of. Only a few groups of animals have passed this test, including apes, dolphins and orcas, magpies, and a single elephant. Surprisingly, manta rays and one fish species have also passed it.
Other kinds of experiment aim to test which animals are able to recognize their own limits (such as lack of knowledge), and compensate for them. Apes, some monkeys, and dolphins have demonstrated these abilities to some extent, and rats may also have done so.
Complex emotions, including social emotions; and social intelligence/cognition
The kinds of emotions we’re talking about here include sympathy, envy, blame, resentment, and grief. Some animals are claimed to demonstrate a “sense of fairness” (dogs, ravens, and Capuchin monkeys).
Plenty of animals have complex social relationships: sometimes cooperating, other times not, keeping track of and responding to the social status of themselves and others. What’s more unusual is for animals to show evidence of understanding that others aren’t just sources of behavior they like/dislike, but that other animals also have minds of some kind.
For more discussion of this, see these optional notes.
Language and communication, and transmitting skills/knowledge
Some of the behavior animals display is a matter of instinct (like possums playing dead, or caterpillars building a cocoon); other behavior can be learned (such as squirrels figuring out how to get into your “squirrel-proof” bird feeder). In a variety of documented cases, animals can sometimes pass on skills or knowledge they learn to their communities and offspring. Examples include elephants teaching their young about migration routes and where water holes can be found, and snow monkeys who figured out how to wash sweet potatos before eating them.
For more discussion of animal teaching/communication, and discussion of when we should count it as “language,” see these optional notes.
Abstract concepts
The kinds of things experimenters look for here include: can we show the animals stimuli of say, red red blue, then loud loud quiet, and expect them to transfer familiarity with these patterns also to bright bright dark? And can they recognize similarities that have to do with how one uses or relate to things, and not just to the things’ intrinsic properties? (For example, humans can recognize ways in which a cup is similar to a spoon and a plate.)
Animals that have demonstrated the most ability of this sort include: rats, sea lions, pigeons, and African gray parrots.
For more discussion of animals’ understanding of numberlike concepts, see these optional notes.
After spending time learning details about animals possessing the kinds of mental states/processes/abilities discussed above, some lessons naturally suggest themselves. In one class, I said “three lessons,” but on reflection I think it’s better to list four.
One lesson, that you can see developed in the optional notes linked above, is that many abilities we might think of in our case as being a single unit, are actually a complex package. Human children don’t acquire the whole package all at once, but stepwise over the course of years. And similarly, different animals often have some elements of the package but lack others.
A second lesson, that I encourage you to pay special attention to: More useful to our discussion than details about which animals can do what, are the ways that one can effectively argue that so-and-so animals have such-and-such an ability, and argue that so-and-so other animals don’t. What do good arguments look like, from premises about behavior and other responses to conclusions about the presence or absence of inner mental states/processes/abilities?
A third lesson that surveys like these can teach us: it’s less clear that humans are special in kind from other animals than we might have thought, and many in the past did think. (As opposed to merely special in degree.)
Fourth lesson: It’s not clear where the sharpest and deepest lines are in the list of states/processes/abilities we’re surveying. What should we think about animals who have some mental abilities but lack others? Do some of the abilities count as fundamentally most important, for whether the animal should be counted as a “person” and have the rights that go with that? If so which ones, and why?