What do animals think?

[lpetrich]

Can we know what animals are thinking? – The Economist - showing a chimpanzee in the "Thinker" pose

In 1992, at Tangalooma, off the coast of Queensland, people began to throw fish into the water for the local wild dolphins to eat. In 1998, the dolphins began to feed the humans, throwing fish up onto the jetty for them. The humans thought they were having a bit of fun feeding the animals. What, if anything, did the dolphins think?

Charles Darwin thought that our mental capabilities differ only in degree from other species' capabilities, and he even wrote a book, "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals". But many of his predecessors and contemporaries disagreed, believing that only human beings have mental states. According to Nicolas Malebranche, a follower of René Descartes, animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it: they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” This approach continued into the 20th cy., with behaviorism being a major school of psychology. From 1996, “attributing conscious thought to animals should be strenuously avoided in any serious attempt to understand their behaviour, since it is untestable [and] empty…”.

From the article, "In the past 40 years a wide range of work both in the field and the lab has pushed the consensus away from strict behaviourism and towards that Darwin-friendly view. ... Nevertheless, most scientists now feel they can say with confidence that some animals process information and express emotions in ways that are accompanied by conscious mental experience." Such things as making tools, using names, and even having cultural traditions. "No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other."

Then self-recognition. We get it at 18 - 24 months of age, and severe dementia makes us lose it. Only a few other species are known to have that ability: (other) great apes, elephants, dolphins, and European magpies. Monkeys don't, dogs don't, cats don't -- though dogs recognize each other by smell.

Then a chimp named Santino in Furuvik zoo in Sweden. He collected stones and put them in piles so he'd know where to go to have a stone to throw at some disliked visitor. Santino knew that his keepers disapproved of this action, so he made himself seem calm as he collected stones.

Some animals seem to display pity, or at least concern, for diseased and injured members of their group. Stronger chimps help weaker ones to cross roads in the wild. Elephants mourn their dead (see “The grieving elephant”). In a famous experiment, Hal Markowitz, later director of the San Francisco zoo, trained Diana monkeys to get food by putting a token in a slot. When the oldest female could not get the hang of it, a younger unrelated male put her tokens in the slot for her and stood back to let her eat.

There have also been observations of animals going out of their way to help creatures of a different species. In March 2008, Moko, a bottlenose dolphin, guided two pygmy sperm whales out of a maze of sandbars off the coast of New Zealand. The whales had seemed hopelessly disoriented and had stranded themselves four times. There are also well-attested cases of humpback whales rescuing seals from attack by killer whales and dolphins rescuing people from similar attacks. On the face of it, this sort of concern for others looks moral — or at least sentimental.

Then noted some cases of animals paying a price for helping others, like elephants slowing down to avoid getting ahead of a slowly-walking fellow elephant. Also, rats and monkeys depriving themselves of food rather than give electric shocks to fellow rats and monkeys.

 

[lpetrich]

Then the question of language. Animals communicate with each other all the time, but their communications' semantics is very limited. Most of the time, it is roughly equivalent to single words or canned phrases in human languages. Bee dances communicate two items at once: direction and distance, but most animal language is very short on syntax, arrangements of simple symbols to convey further meaning. Some birds and whales sing elaborate songs, but those songs seem short on semantic content.

It is true that dolphins in captivity can distinguish between “put the ball in the hoop” and “bring the hoop to the ball”. Alex, an African grey parrot, combined words to make up new ones: he called an apple a “bannery”, for example, a mixture of banana and cherry (see “The chatterbox parrot”). But these are exceptional cases and the result of intense collaboration with humans.

This makes the origin of human language a mystery. Even the dumbest things that some of us say are said using grammar and syntax far beyond what any other present-day species is known to make. Like "Evolution doesn't happen because dogs don't give birth to cats and cows don't give birth to horses."

That has not kept many people from speculating about its origins, and some linguists have thought of whimsical names for many of these theories.

• ma-ma -- attaching the easiest syllables to significant objects (?)
• ta-ta -- imitation of body movements like gestures (Sir Richard Paget 1930)
• bow-wow -- imitation of sounds (?, Max Müller 1861)
• pooh-pooh -- interjections, instinctive emotive cries (?, Max Müller 1861)
• ding-dong -- sounds and meanings corresponding, like sound symbolism (?, Max Müller 1861)
• yo-he-ho -- rhythmic chants, like when coordinating efforts in heavy work (?, Max Müller 1861)
• la-la, sing-song -- pleasant audio doodling (Otto Jespersen 1921)
• hey-you -- assertion of identity and calling to others (Géza Révész 1956)
• uh-oh -- warnings (?)
• hocus-pocus -- magical / religious acts (C. George Boeree)
• eureka -- consciously invented (?)
• watch-the-birdie -- lying (Edgar A. Sturtevant 1922)
• pop -- language popped into existence as an evolutionary byproduct (Stephen Jay Gould)

My favorite theory is that human language evolved from singing, a version of the la-la theory. This singing would originally have no semantic content, like the songs of birds and whales. But it would require high-quality control of the sounds that one makes, including making sequences of sounds. Once that is present, then it can be used to carry meaning.

In “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins”, Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, argue that all cultures have five distinctive features: a characteristic technology; teaching and learning; a moral component, with rules that buttress “the way we do things” and punishments for infraction; an acquired, not innate, distinction between insiders and outsiders; and a cumulative character that builds up over time. These attributes together allow individuals in a group to do things that they would not be able to achieve by themselves.

For the first four of these features, one can find some animals that do them. Chimps and New Caledonian crows make tools, some social animals do not like being cheated, and orcas live in pods that live separately, that seldom interbreed, that have their own sounds, and that sometimes fight each other. The fifth one is exclusively human, as far as we can tell.

Next, animals’ abilities are patchy compared with those of humans. Dogs can learn words but do not recognise their reflections. Clark’s nutcracker, a member of the crow family, buries up to 100,000 seeds in a season and remembers where it put them months later — but does not make tools, as other corvids do. These specific, focused abilities fit with some modern thinking about human minds, which sees them less as engines of pure reason that can be applied in much the same way to all aspects of life as bundles of subroutines for specific tasks. On this analysis a human mind might be a Swiss army knife, an animal mind a corkscrew or pair of tweezers.

Then a chimp that does better than most of us in a memory task -- some animals may be ahead of us in some cognitive tasks. Dolphins are likely far ahead of us in their ability to interpret sounds, like echoes of sounds that they make.

All that said, the third general truth seems to be that there is a link between mind and society which animals display. The wild animals with the highest levels of cognition (primates, cetaceans, elephants, parrots) are, like people, long-lived species that live in complex societies, in which knowledge, social interaction and communication are at a premium. It seems reasonable to speculate that their minds — like human ones — may well have evolved in response to their social environment (see “The lonely orca”). And this may be what allows minds on the two sides of the inter-species gulf to bridge it.

Among those four groups is the one which we emerged from. So our mental abilities did not come out of nowhere.

 

[rousseau]

I'd assume the 'image'-ination of many mammals plays a big part, in an associative way. In certain social contexts animals remember things that are pertinent to them (danger, food, mating.. etc). The differentiation between them and humans is the lack of complex language. So it's more one of degree. Humans are capable of abstraction, many animals not so much.

Social skill equaling status is also a cultural universal among humans, and so our ability for language may actually be less about ipso facto 'thinking' and more a social tool to get what we want. Because those with a greater language capacity have greater reproductive success it creates a kind of arms race where we become increasingly socially adept. Where the instinctive part of our minds that are similar to that of animals are actually the core driver, and dictate the language we use.

 

[steve_bank]

They seem to think primarily of food and sex, unlike us rational humans.

 

[DBT]

Also, position in the pecking order, social status.