Stupendous intelligence of honey badgers

PHILOSOPHY

IAN GROUND

Species solipsism has long been the default position of our philosophical tradition. Until very recently in our intellectual history, philosophical and (to a large extent) scientific inquiry into the nature of mind has proceeded as if we humans were the only minded species on the planet. We have sought to uncover the nature of our own minds and left as an afterthought the question of what other kinds of mind there might be. It is true that ethical concerns about our treatment of other animals have seemed to offer an acknowledgement of the reality of other minded animals. But such accounts tend to stress lowest common denominators, such as the capacity to feel pain and suffer, and thus have tended to underplay the diversity of mindedness.

It is also true that, historically, philosophers have been keen to contribute to debates about what uniquely distinguishes human mentality from that of the animal: from having a soul, being aware of ourselves, time or death, through being rational, linguistic or conceptual beings, to being jokers, tool-users, self-recognizers, other-recognizers, inhabitants of an objective world, truth trackers, capable of meta-cognition, pursuers of moral, aesthetic or epistemic goals for their own sake – and so on. This long history of attempts to identify “the essential difference” between ourselves and other animals sometimes involved an implicit acknowledgement that other animals do have minds. But even here, other animals, insofar as they entered into the philosophical discussion of mind at all, were just that: animals. Not badger or beaver, bee or bull. Not geladas or gerenuk, chevrotain or fossa. But just generically animal. Which meant not us. Univocally other. So either other animals are minded like us only less so; or, if different from us, they cannot be truly minded. What we seem unable to do is to give weight to both the reality and the diversity of minds other than our own.

So, of course, hardly anyone actually thinks that we are the only minded species. But the philosophy of mind has gone on as if we were. As the ethologist Frans de Waal charges in this admirable new book, we have in effect been Darwinists about the animal kingdom but Creationists about the human head. This outcome has many causes, including a long and cross-cultural history of deep-seated attitudes towards our place in nature, cross-cut by our pathological denial of our exploitation of other animals. Such attitudes have been structured both by human vanity – with which the evolutionary process has perhaps too generously endowed us – but also by the genuine sense that we occupy a very interesting branch indeed on Darwin’s tree of life.

For these reasons and others, it has remained normal for philosophical accounts of mind and language to be completely ignorant of empirical discoveries about animals. And it is not uncommon for philosophers to deny that any non-linguistic animals “really” have beliefs, are conscious or even perceive the world. Empirical evidence and testimony to the contrary are treated as mere curiosities.

The result is that our philosophical thinking is deeply conflicted about other animal minds. Thus, for a time in the last century, when the computational revolution in psychology was on the way in and behaviourism on its way out, it seemed to some to be the height of philosophical sophistication to hold that while software might think one day, elephants certainly don’t. Even today there is a mainstream preference for “simpler” mechanistic explanation of animal behaviour combined with optimism about building thinking machines. We talk down animal behaviour and talk up machine behaviour. We regard anthropomorphism as a cause of failure in the one case, but make it the criterion of success in the other.

De Waal has long championed a saner vision. This latest work offers intimate knowledge of the history of the field together with a vision of its prospects. He skilfully weaves together intellectual history, anecdote about leading figures, accounts of empirical discoveries, philosophical critique, and the occasional well-aimed and perfectly weighted slap. Combining wisdom, lightly worn expertise and an undiminished capacity for wonder, De Waal is not afraid to let a shard of temper show now and again. He rightly chides and mocks experimentalists and philosophers alike for smuggling in anthropocentric assumptions in the guise of scientific rigour or conceptual propriety. He justly celebrates the work of imaginative and courageous colleagues who have challenged received opinion and moved the field forward. His reflections over a long and distinguished career will both enlighten the general reader and discomfort those who deserve, in their presuppositions, to be much less comfortable.

De Waal’s thesis is that our attitudes and ideas about other animal minds are at last changing. In the past twenty years or so, largely as a result of exhausting ourselves trying to defend philosophical presuppositions against the empirical discoveries of those who have taken a genuinely scientific perspective, the sense that we are the only genuinely minded creatures on the planet has begun to fade. We have moved from an age in which it was taboo for scientists to name their animals to one in which we recognize that dolphins use something akin to names among themselves. The answer to the question of the book’s mischievous title is: Yes. We are smart enough to learn how smart animals are. But you wouldn’t think so from looking at our history of trying.

Across chapters examining communication, problem solving, the experience of time and social skills, De Waal documents the ways in which we systematically underestimate animal complexity. Primates are an obvious central example, and attention is also given to the more recent stars of animal studies, especially corvids and parrots. But there are plenty of less familiar examples: from zebra fish and moray eels to the stupendous intelligence of the honey badger.

Why do gibbons, but not chimps, “fail” a tool-using test where they must use a stick to move a banana closer? Well, because gibbons are arboreal and neither their hands nor their minds are built to cope with ground-lying sticks. Present an out-of-reach task using shoulder-level strings, as later researchers did, and they have no difficulty. Elephants do not like using the sticks in standard intelligence tests. But then you would not try to eat by holding the fork with your teeth. Still, among their many extraordinary accomplishments, elephants will move a box from a great distance so they can stand on it to reach food and, in the wild, adjust their routes for thunderstorms heard at enormous distance through infrasound. When De Waal asked colleagues why primate face recognition tests used human faces as the target data, he was told it was thought to be an easier test for primates to pass, since human faces differ so much. It was only fifteen years ago that it was thought a good idea to see if they could instead recognize other chimps. In this of course, they excelled, able to recognize kinship between chimps they had never met.

The iconic Clever Hans case, in which a horse apparently able to count numbers was eventually shown to be sensitive to the unconscious signals of its owner, tells us, of course, that controlled experiments are crucial. But, much more importantly, the famous story reveals the structure of our own insensitivities. We see the debunking of claims that horses can count, but we don’t see the complexity of equine cognition needed to recognize the slightest movements of a member of a quite different species.

De Waal is confident that our approach to animals is, at last, moving in the right direction. But the dangers of anthropocentrism remain. For example, much recent work has attempted to investigate whether animals are aware that others of the same species are agents who are also capable of having a perspective on the world. Experiments have sought to determine whether (say) chimps or crows approach hidden food depending on whether their conspecifics are present. The very strange way in which philosophers and cognitive scientists characterize this problem to is to ask whether these animals have a “theory of mind” which enables them to “infer” the conspecific’s psychological states from their behaviour (i.e. whether they are able to see the food store and believe it to be unattended).

Hidden here is a lesson that De Waal might have drawn out. For the most part, we human beings only ever interact with members of our own species. But for many other species, their lives depend on and are shaped by correct interpretation of the agency of other animals. Research into animals’ “theory of mind” has tended to focus on the conspecific, rather than interspecific case. But if animals respond to all other animals by having a theory of their minds, they are going to need an awful lot of theories.

De Waal is rightly suspicious of the term “theory of mind”, but he mostly goes along with its use, only lightly mocking it by observing that the way animals understand one another is less a matter of “mind-reading” than of body reading. This implies that animals experience the behaviour of others in their species as intrinsically significant. So a wolf does not “read” another wolf as a behaviourist scientist would – that is, by looking at the neutral behavioural facts and drawing inferences licensed by a theory. The wolf’s understanding, made manifest through its responses, is of another wolf as a living embodied being. It was surely egregious enough to think of ourselves as split between externally objective bits of body movements and internal psychological states. But why project such lab-coat Cartesianism onto other animals as a default epistemological orientation towards others? Beasts are not behaviourists and there are no Cartesian critters. It is surely anthropocentric to think otherwise.

Even more philosophically contentious is the long and sometimes acrimonious dispute about whether animals recognize themselves in mirrors and have, it is inferred, something like a sense of themselves. The working assumption is that there is one thing called self-consciousness, that the criterion for its existence is self-recognition, and that the self-recognition is best made manifest through competence with mirrors. As De Waal notes, such tests reveal “only one of many ways to find out about the conscious self”. But, despite a nod towards the distributed nervous system – and perhaps distributed awareness – of the octopus, even he seems to have imported the idea that a univocal conception of “self-awareness” and “the conscious self” should inform our conception of diverse animal minds rather than the reverse.

Still, for the most part De Waal is not afraid to object to widely accepted shibboleths. His objections are underpinned by an impeccably empiricist principle, Hume’s Touchstone: “When any hypothesis . . . is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both”. That is, continuity, not difference, should be the default – and properly objective – scientific position. We do not require, before we start doing cognitive ethology, proof that a raccoon is not a rock and that zebras are not zombies.

It is perhaps a pity that De Waal does not bring his empirical wisdom to bear on the problem that most bothers most philosophers: consciousness and its contents. Minded creatures are conscious of their world. A common doctrine in cognitive science is that for an organism to be conscious of its world is for it to be capable of representing the world to itself. But complex content requires a representational medium with enough structure to carry that complexity. The problem is that any medium with that much structure looks to be like a language. And other animals are not language ­users. So what can carry the complex content? The struggle to answer this question shapes the shared interests of philosophy and the cognitive sciences.

Perhaps the question cannot be answered unless we take in account De Waal’s radical and profound thesis: that what is fundamentally wrong with our thinking about animals is the very idea that there is a territory to be sharply separated between the human and everything else. Why, from a point of view claiming to be objective, should we think that the difference between humans and everything else is more profound than say between herd animals and everything else? Of course, there is a profound difference between ourselves and other animals. But there are profound differences between other species too.

As De Waal suggests, the underlying problem is an anti-Darwinian commitment to a single criterion of complexity as the boundary between “us” and “them”. For De Waal, “there is no single form of cognition and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex”. There is not, as Friedrich Max Müller – a contemporary and sometime opponent of Darwin – held, a “Rubicon” between ourselves and the rest of minded nature that “no brute will dare to cross”. It is much more of a boggy marsh divided by rivulets and streams and the occasional floodplain in which different kinds of minded species find themselves more or less connected and more or less isolated, shaped in unique ways by processes which arise out of the landscape as a whole. Instead of looking for a general theory that covers all cognition on the planet, a genuine science of evolutionary cognition should treat everything as a case study. Such a science will seek connections but, will also, perhaps even more importantly, in a phrase from King Lear that Ludwig Wittgenstein liked, “teach us differences”. We need overlapping concepts of mind with multiple directions of difference and similarity which allow for the continuity, gradation and enormous diversity that we see in the natural world. The idea that philosophy should seek to offer a univocal account of mindedness that will account or discount for the orang-utan and the octopus, the bee and the bear, the cat and the coelacanth, may well be a metaphysical prejudice of which systematic empirical investigation, perhaps aided by judicious philosophical therapy, will cure us.

The hope, to which this remarkable book gives support, is that, once we have freed it from confounding pictures of mind and meaning, the gaining and systemization of ethological insights into the varieties of mindedness in the natural world – which should strike us as sublime, a source of wonder – will be one of the great philosophical and scientific adventures of this century. The fear is that, if current trends continue, such diversity will be lost before we have truly begun to acknowledge it.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/stupendous-intelligence-of-honey-badgers/