Self-Awareness -- Is the Mirror Test a Fair Test?

[Kaylee]

A question in another thread: "What is the worst idea in philosophy?" found in the Religion and Philosophy Forum caught my attention. The question was -- how do we know what species are self-aware? I didn't want to hijack the other thread, so I'm opening up another one here.

Apparently one test for self-awareness is the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror, often called the Mirror or Gallup Test. new drkitten provided an interesting link (http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/TCA/Ch/Gallup/gallup-final.pdf) on that.

Also per new drkitten:

Posted Originally by new drkitten
As a minor note, so far, self-awareness appears to be confined to humans, other great apes and cetaceans (specifically dolphins).

I think the Gallup experiment is very clever, but the conclusions bug me just a bit. I'm not sure that it’s a fair test for self-awareness.

This experiment correlates self-awareness to being able to recognize oneself in a mirror. The assumptions are:
If A of species type A recognizes himself in a mirror he is self-aware.
If B of species type B doesn't recognize himself in a mirror he is not self-aware.

Depending upon the species being tested, I suspect there is a lot of room for a logical fallacy.

What if we were told that species B's visual acuity is much worse than species A's and that they rely far more than species A does on their sense of smell and /or hearing to perceive what is happening in the world?

Also, what if we were told that species B visual pattern recognition ability is not as good as species A's partially because their vision is not as acute, they see far fewer colors, and perhaps also because that's just the way the species brains are designed? I suspect that it's a skill to be able to relate a 3 dimensional object to a 2 dimensional object whether it's on paper or in the mirror. If a species happens to lack that particular pattern recognition skill, I don't think it necessarily follows that the species also lacks self-awareness. I think that could be a logical fallacy.

To sum up -- whether or not a species recognizes itself in a mirror may have a lot more to do with:
* whether its vision works differently than ours do and
* whether their pattern recognition skills are as good as ours

and not whether they are actually self-aware.

Just a thought. ( Caveat Emptor: I never heard a word any of my teachers said while I was in school. :) )

So perhaps if anyone figured out a way to make a 3 dimensional mirror and have the 3D mirror image smell like the viewer also, the self-awareness test results might provide different and more favorable results for some species. ;) (Just joking.)

Seriously, I'd like to know what others think, do you think the Gallup aka the Mirror Test is a fair test for self-awareness? And if not, do you have any suggestions for what test would be a fair one?

BTW, here are some websites that gives a quick overview of some of a dog's and cat's senses. I added some underlines for emphasis. BTW, note that both dogs and cats eyes are more sensitive to movements than ours, but apparently they don't or can't rely on their vision to the same degree that we do when looking at still objects.

<a href=http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/pds/dog/sense_e.htm>Overview on Dog's Senses </a>
-- some cut and pastes:


…

Smell is the dog's most developed sense, far superior to that of the human. It is not based on the discrimination of flavours or odours, but on the general classification of smells, useful and useless, friendly and dangerous

…

Experimental evidence supports the opinion that to dogs the world looks like a black and white photograph. Perception of movement is the type of visual stimulation to which dogs seem very sensitive. If an object is moved, ever so slightly, most dogs will detect it and respond to the movement. Dogs make little use of their eyes in learning except for their perception of movements.


<a href=http://petplace.netscape.com/articles/artShow.asp?artID=2038> Overview on Cat's Senses </a>
-- some cut and pastes:


Your cat's sense of smell is superior to your own and one of the most important ways in which he receives feedback about his environment. Sense of smell helps him communicate with others of his own kind and assess the potential risks and pleasures associated with every waking moment. . Cats have 200 million odor-sensitive cells in their noses compared to about 5 million for humans. Because of astonishing olfactory acuity, your cat can detect the presence of other cats even outside the home and can identify any strange animals you've contacted simply by smelling your clothing. Your cat will deposit its own odor by urine marking and deposition of skin secretions to mark its territory and important objects in its environments.

...

Although your cat's ability to distinguish separate objects (visual acuity) is only one-tenth that of yours, he can discern movement at a much faster rate than you can. This ability to see movement, even where there is very little, is what attracts cats to television screens.

[Earthborn]

Good question. I have often thought about this and I think the answer is "no, it is not a fair test".

One of the reasons is that gorillas often fail the test, even though they are every bit as intelligent as other great apes. This is because they consider looking eachother straight in the eyes as a threat. So they'll try to avoid looking at their mirror image and not recognise it as themselves. Using a video camera filming the side of their head that they can on a monitor in front of them does work: they will be curious and seem to be able to recognise themselves. It shows that for many animals the experiment must be adjusted.

Dolphins seem to be able to recognise themselves in mirrors and monitors, even though this is a bit harder to interpret since they have very different body language for obvious reasons.
But their recognition is not unproblematic. Their sense of preference is echolocation, and they can get quite frustrated when they can see themselves in the mirror, but cannot echolocate themselves. Even for them the experiment must be adjusted, as keeping mirrors that are too big in the water for too long can really upset them.

I have cats, and I performed mirror tests several times. If the mirror is standing upright, the typical animal behaviour towards mirrors: trying to look behind it to see 'where the other cat is'. Both my cats seem baffled by a mirror. However: if the mirror is flat on the floor, their attitude towards it changes dramatically. One seems disinterested in it, while the really loves to sit on top of it and groom herself. Something about the mirror seems to be completely familiar and non-threatening to her, and this is a bit strange because if she was completely unable to recognise herself in the mirror, the mirror would look like a strange hole in the ground which may not look so non-threatening.

I have not marked them on their foreheads to see whether they are able to recognise whether there is something on their own head by looking in the mirror. That should be tricky to do, even when they are asleep, because cats have very sensitive facial hair and they would probably notice when something is applied to them. And I also don't know whether not trying to immediately rub it off should necessarily mean little self-awareness. An animal that doesn't may not know that the mark shouldn't be there, or maybe more interested in trying to figure out how the mirror works.

I have never noticed my cats treat their mirror image as other cats that need to be chased away. They seem to be fairly cool about it: they seem interested in trying to figure out why they can't see themselves if they look behind the mirror than thinking there are other cats in it. I know my cat (who likes mirrors lying on the floor) would be very upset if she knew there was another around: she once saw my neighbours' cat through the open front door and was totally freaked out for two days. She appeared to think that this strange cat had entered the house and was so scared that she didn't even dare to look at my other cat to see that it wasn't the stranger. One glance at a cat she never knew caused her to be very upset, but half an hour studying herself in the upright mirror did not appear her to think there was another cat in the house. I'm inclined to think that they are able to recognise themselves in a mirror, even if they don't know how to behave appropriately around another version of themselves.

I also like to know from the people who believe the mirror test is a measurement of 'self-awareness' what they mean exactly withthat word.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
I have cats, and I performed mirror tests several times.

That's convenient! :)

...However: if the mirror is flat on the floor, their attitude towards it changes dramatically. One seems disinterested in it, while the really loves to sit on top of it and groom herself. Something about the mirror seems to be completely familiar and non-threatening to her, and this is a bit strange because if she was completely unable to recognise herself in the mirror, the mirror would look like a strange hole in the ground which may not look so non-threatening.

Interesting. [Start Warning -- putting on devil's advocate hat] But is it possible that she just likes the cool smooth surface? Just out of curiosity -- does she look at her image in the mirror while she is sitting on it? [End Warning]


I also like to know from the people who believe the mirror test is a measurement of 'self-awareness' what they mean exactly withthat word.
Interesting question. It's been spinning around in my brain too.
But I'd also like to know what the people who don't think that the mirror test is a good test mean by that term.

Perhaps the bare minimum level of self-awareness begins when behavior becomes more complicated than a combination of reflexes and the very simple (vs. complex) instincts. Because at that point I think the animal is complicated enough that they are making choices and displaying preferences, and I suspect that the ability to do this goes along with self-awareness, at least on a minimal level.

Obviously there is a wide range of animals that would qualify to be called self-aware using that definition. I suspect the harder and more meaningful awareness to achieve is the awareness of others. Awareness of others as beings who are more than mere props in a background and capable of having their own abilities and interests that may be very different than our own.

I think the Gallup test is interesting but I'm sure it does not succeed in identifying all the animals that are self-aware. I feel that way even more so after reading your post. For the scientists conducting these tests seem to be expecting animals of all species to either prove or disprove their self-awareness by using senses that work best for humans, but not necessarily for other species. This just doesn't seem logical to me. Perhaps this test inadvertently indicated a limitation on the abilities of the testers to be "other-aware"… ;)

What if scientists tested various humans and animals to see if they could recognize their scent? Humans would do poorly but many other species would do well. In fact the family dog and tomcat usually mark their territory that way. I realize that the reason they do so may be from instinct, but they can still recognize their scents and others and use that information for more complicated behavior -- so doesn't that indicate self-awareness?

Just in case anyone is wondering, I enjoy my hamburgers and leather shoes (thank you very much :)) and plain on continuing to do so. But that doesn't prevent me from thinking that animals' consciousness and mental abilities are sometimes considerably underrated, perhaps for cultural reasons.

--

Extras ---

For anyone interested here are some web sites below. I was looking in general for web sites that would compare other species visual acuity to humans. My luck was mixed.

* http://www.uwyo.edu/bioanth/1100/Pages/15-02_14c.pdf on pages 6 - 8 implies that all primates (including humans) have equally good vision and that it's our primary sense.

* I tried to find similar sites for dolphins. I had no luck. For some reason many of the more promising hits for dolphins required a paid subscription. The best info I got was that the dolphin's vision was "good", even out of the water (which is where the mirror test takes place) but the articles did not compare it to people's visions.

http://www.adoptadolphin.com/dan/publishing.nsf/allweb/0611BA7F08CF496280256A02003886BD

and

http://grimpeur.tamu.edu/~colin/TheCognitiveAnimal/Ch/Herman/herman-final.pdf (see top of pg 5)

* The two web sites I posted yesterday in this thread said that dogs' and cats' visual acuity is not as good as humans for non-moving objects.

Just as an fyi, I also attempted to find studies that compared different animals visual pattern recognition skills to humans but had no luck. (I admit I was running out of time :(. )

[Skeptic Ginger]

Well I guess it depends on your definition of self awareness. If my dog recognizes his scent and pees on every other thing that smells like another dog, he is clearly territorial. But I can imagine one of those animals that doesn't recognize the reflection in the mirror is themselves could still easily be territorial. Marking the dog's territory was certainly never taught to him, he doesn't see me pee on anything ;) , so it has to be genetically encoded behavior. But I can't see that such behavior equates to recognition of one's self in a mirror.

So I would not use the term "self aware" since it is somewhat meaningless if you think about it. Does an animal that isn't self aware attack its own body part if you isolate that body part from its connection by sight. In other words, if you make it look like the leg isn't connected, will the animal attack its own leg? I saw a dog do this on America's funniest videos but I doubt any animals do this subsequent to their normal brain function level.

The problem here is the term "self aware". What should really be said is exactly what you have. An animal does or doesn't recognize itself in a mirror. Then it makes sense that the animal that recognizes itself is functioning at a higher intellectual level that the animal that doesn't.

[Earthborn]

But is it possible that she just likes the cool smooth surface?Entirely possible. It just seems that they usually prefer soft and warm surfaces though.Just out of curiosity -- does she look at her image in the mirror while she is sitting on it?She seems to. What it is she thinks she sees when looking in the mirror is of course pure speculation. All I know is: she does not treat it like a hole in the ground. She does not treat it as something strange. Under no circumstance does she treat her mirror image as an unknown cat. I make no other claims.But I'd also like to know what the people who don't think that the mirror test is a good test mean by that term.Personally I think it is a meaningless concept, just like all those other words that are used to differentiate between animal and human abilities: conciousness, insight, intelligence. I think other animals have all these too in varying degrees. If you test these abilities, all you do is test how similar an animal is to a human. It should surprise no one that the great apes are doing fairly well.Perhaps the bare minimum level of self-awareness begins when behavior becomes more complicated than a combination of reflexes and the very simple (vs. complex) instincts.I think what you are saying is meaningless. All behaviour is a combination of 'reflexes' and 'instincts'. And there is no absolute distinction between 'simple' and 'complex': there is a lot in between.Awareness of others as beings who are more than mere props in a background and capable of having their own abilities and interests that may be very different than our own.Of course you'll have to show that humans are capable of this before passing any judgement on animals. My cats seem to be able to recognise eachother as something different than mere props in a background. They also seem to have great difficulty understanding eachother's wants and needs. I think that's not so different from humans.I think the Gallup test is interesting but I'm sure it does not succeed in identifying all the animals that are self-aware.Correct. It proves that some animals are self-aware (however you want to define it), but it does not prove the absence of self-awareness in animals that fail the test. Unfortunately that is how the test is often used.What if scientists tested various humans and animals to see if they could recognize their scent?The people who like to believe in the superiority of humans will dismiss it as mere 'reacting to stimuli' and claim that in order for an animal to be 'self-aware' it must be able to 'internalise' the information gathered from its senses, to make a 'mental model' of their environment and use its 'insight' to understand what is going on. In no way must it be allowed to react directly, automatically and instinctively to stimuli in the environment.

In this thread (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=42859&perpage=40&pagenumber=2) Kodiak links to an article (http://www.intellectualloafing.com/discussionsfolder/myessaysfolder/vegetarianismfolder/righttolifeessay.htm) that argues that animals can't have 'natural rights' (whatever that means) and it briefly mentions an experiment whereby a dog must empathise with another dog in pain, without being able to hear it. Experiments like this try to exclude automatic reaction to stimuli. But as a result they end up being experiments that just happen to test the senses that are best in humans and completely ignore that other animals have other senses may be much better than those of humans. A dog has a very good sense of smell and good hearing, but compared to humans poor vision. To demand that it reacts to nothing more than sight is just setting the poor animal up to fail. Another problem with experiments like that is that it is simply assumed that humans are able to empathise with another if they can only see them being in pain. There is no attempt to actually prove this. I think it is reasonable to assume that humans too will react much more strongly if they are able to hear someone scream in pain than when they only see them.

Anyone who wants to argue that humans have rights because they 'internalise', make 'mental models' use 'insight' and 'intelligence' instead of 'instinctively reacting to stimuli like animals' has the burden to define those terms and to prove humans actually do these things. Unfortunately it is often simply assumed that they do.I enjoy my hamburgers and leather shoes and plain on continuing to do so.I also have no problem feeding my cats with chopped up pieces of animals that I know are far more intelligent and self-aware then they are. And I never mistake my cats for being particularly intelligent. They're not.But that doesn't prevent me from thinking that animals' consciousness and mental abilities are sometimes considerably underrated, perhaps for cultural reasons.Perhaps it is the other way around. Perhaps human mental abilities are for cultural reasons overrated. We're likely among the smarter species, but I don't think there is any fundamental difference between animal and human intelligence. A cheetah is a bit faster than a leopard, but that does not mean they have a fundamentally different form of locomotion. Similarly, just because we can outsmart most animals (outsmarting apes is tougher than you think) it does not mean our mental capacity is of a fundamentally different kind as that of animals.

[Kumar]

Btw, how different animals & humans take senses & process these in brain? Vision, I know by reflected wave lengths, hearing by mechnical waves, touch by heat or cold. What about smell & taste? Are quantum elementary particles & fundamental forces are sensed released from anything tasted or smelled or atomic/molecular structures are sensed? If quantum based senses are there, how & in what form, these are released from any substance smelled or tasted? How these senses are not distorted/interfered, eg; as smell by dogs, vison by some birds, may be hearing by elephants(Tsu....), Dolphins, cats etc, when sensed from long & very long distance?

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn
Personally I think it is a meaningless concept, just like all those other words that are used to differentiate between animal and human abilities: conciousness, insight, intelligence. I think other animals have all these too in varying degrees. If you test these abilities, all you do is test how similar an animal is to a human.

I think you're selling the test short.

You're correct that failure on the test does not by itself demonstrate a lack of self-awareness; as a simple example, one would not expect a blind individual to see, let alone recognize, its image in a mirror. Similarly, animals that as a species are congenitally blind, or animals that as a species rely primarily on senses other than the visual would not be appropriate subjects for the mirror test as Gallup performed it.

But, on the other hand, we know that apes' primary senses are visual. As are monkeys, both Old and New World. We also know that monkeys (both Old and New World) will interact with their reflections, but not recognize them as "self." So there's a demonstrable difference in the capacities of monkeys and apes. It's not a sensory difference (as far as we can tell, or as far as anyone has seriously proposed). If it's not a cognitive difference, what is it?

And it's also demonstrably not merely "closeness to humans." Dolphins are not at all close to humans, biologically, evolutionarily, or in terms of sensory suite and capacity. But they can pass the Gallup test, while spider monkeys, which are much closer to humans, cannot.



We're likely among the smarter species, but I don't think there is any fundamental difference between animal and human intelligence. A cheetah is a bit faster than a leopard, but that does not mean they have a fundamentally different form of locomotion. Similarly, just because we can outsmart most animals (outsmarting apes is tougher than you think) it does not mean our mental capacity is of a fundamentally different kind as that of animals.

Again, you're selling the test short. Cheetahs are faster than leopards, but the distinction is almost purely quantitative, an arbitrary line on a scale of speed. On the other hand, the capacity of self-recognition is an entirely new ability; it does not appear in graduated measure, and it doesn't even seem logical to discuss the concept of "halfway to self-awareness." There is no graduated scale upon which we can draw these lines -- an animal is either self-aware or it isn't.

[Earthborn]

And it's also demonstrably not merely "closeness to humans." Dolphins are not at all close to humans, biologically, evolutionarily, or in terms of sensory suite and capacity. But they can pass the Gallup test, while spider monkeys, which are much closer to humans, cannot.With 'closeness to humans' I of course mean how similar an organism is mentally to humans.On the other hand, the capacity of self-recognition is an entirely new ability; it does not appear in graduated measure, and it doesn't even seem logical to discuss the concept of "halfway to self-awareness." There is no graduated scale upon which we can draw these lines -- an animal is either self-aware or it isn't.I disagree. I don't believe any biological phenomenon can be like that. I also once had a lovebird and I give him a mirror once too. He treated his mirror image as a rival and tried to attack it. None of the cats I confronted with a mirror ever behaved like their mirror image was another cat, even though their behaviour towards it would not have appropriate if they realised their mirror image was a depiction of themselves. As evidenced by several America's Funniest Home Videos, some cats do treat their mirror image as another cat, but this may be playful behaviour too. People sometimes pretend to box with their mirror image as well.

I think it is possible that some animals are completely unable to distinguish their mirror image from another animal, while others are able to understand that their mirror image is familiar and not another individual animal, without necessarily realising that it is a depiction of themselves. If self-awareness is defined as the ability to recognise oneself in the mirror, they are then halfway self-aware.
Humans are just better at recognising themselves in a mirror, not in the least because they are learning to know themselves in an environment where they are much more often confronted with mirrors than any other animal.

If you believe that an animal is either self-aware or it isn't, the first thing you'll have to do is explain how you define 'self-awareness'. Because I don't understand what you mean with it.

[Kaylee]

I have trouble with the concept that the determination as to whether a species is self-aware depends on whether it can recognize itself in a mirror. As of now, I'm inclined to agree with Earthborn: if a species passes the mirror test they are self-aware, but if they don't pass the mirror test it does not necessarily mean that they aren't self-ware.

Even if we are limiting this test to primates because:

* all primates use vision as the main sense
* all primates have the same visual acuity.

(I saw those two statements on a web site, I don't know if it's true or not.)

Do all primates share the same degree of pattern recognition skills? Has this been tested? The mirror reflection is a flat 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional object, and it doesn't stimulate the other senses, or at least not in the same way as the original self would (smell, it's silent, and the image reflects off the glass covered metal which of course will feel differently than the "self") Perhaps some primates depend more on the sense of smell or hearing than humans do? Have tests been done to prove it either way? Or are a lot of assumptions being made because they are part of the primate family?

Even if all the above questions have answers that indicate that the playing field for all primates species is the same as far as the 5 senses go.. and if a particular primate species still can't make the leap from its 3D self to a 2D symbol -- well OK I would say its obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I still don't see why that conclusively proves that the primate species is not self-aware. The inability in one area -- to recognize its image in the mirror -- may not mean it has an inability in the other area -- to be self-aware.

And I am also curious by what lab scientists mean when they say a species is not self-aware.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Shera

Do all primates share the same degree of pattern recognition skills? Has this been tested? The mirror reflection is a flat 2 dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional object,


I think the mark is being missed here as well. Visually speaking, the mirror surface is NOT a flat two-dimensional representation; it has all the same visual cues as a three-dimensional object. It actually requires a much higher degree of mental development (at least in humans) to identify a mirrored surface as a two-dimensional picture than it does to confuse it with the full 3-D image it purports to represent.


and it doesn't stimulate the other senses, or at least not in the same way as the original self would (smell, it's silent, and the image reflects off the glass covered metal which of course will feel differently than the "self").


All these are of course true, which is why the fact that primates are visual-primary is of such importance in evaluating their response to the mirror test. As you point out, if primates did not, in fact, rely on vision as their primary sense, then interpreting the mirror test would be much more problematic, but fortunately other experiments have been done (for example, showing monkeys pictures of other monkeys vs. playing them recordings of monkey calls) to see what senses they primarily attend to.

However, beyond that, there are still the fundamental facts to explain.

Infants do not pass the mirror test.
Toddlers do.
Chimpanzees and gorillas pass the mirror test.
Spider monkeys do not.
Dolphins, however, which are not visual-primary (and don't even have color vision) can still pass the mirror test.

Earthborn's suggestion that the test measures only "how similar an organism is mentally to humans" is unfortunately rather vacuous. Based on this interpretation, we find that chimpanzees are more similar (mentally) to humans than human infants and that bottlenose dolphins are more similar (mentally) to humans than are spider monkeys. But what does this really [i[mean[/i]?

Obviously, if something is "mentally similar to humans," then that means that humans and the animal under study share similar capacities, and possibly even similar processes. What is the capacity shared by toddlers, dolphins, and chimps? What is the underlying structural similarity that makes that capacity possible? What are the other capacities that structural similarity makes possible? Etc.

Simply saying that "other animals may be self-aware, except in a different way" is simply willful blindness. There is a definite difference in cognitive capacity between the animals that "pass" the mirror test and the animals that don'tt, a qualitative difference that will not be airbrushed away by wishful anthropomorphization.

[Earthborn]

Visually speaking, the mirror surface is NOT a flat two-dimensional representation; it has all the same visual cues as a three-dimensional object.Correct. That bothered me too about Shera's post.Chimpanzees and gorillas pass the mirror test.As you can read in the article about the Gallup test Shera linked to, gorillas do not pass the standard mirror test. They consistently fail. The test must be adjusted substantially to make them pass, which means other animals might also pass if the test is adapted to them.

Chimpanzees do not immediately pass, they require a substantial learning period.Infants do not pass the mirror test.
Toddlers do.Correct. Infants have not learned how to interpret the image they see in a mirror. In fact, they have not yet learned to see anything like adults do.Dolphins, however, which are not visual-primary (and don't even have color vision) can still pass the mirror test.It is true that dolphins seem to pass the mirror test to most researchers who performed it on them. There is a bit more doubt about it though, as it is not as easy to interpret whether they do pass or not. They certainly don't behave the same way towards their mirror image as chimps and humans do.Based on this interpretation, we find that chimpanzees are more similar (mentally) to humans than human infants and that bottlenose dolphins are more similar (mentally) to humans than are spider monkeys.It may be a matter of learning. An infant has not yet learned to recognise him/herself in the mirror and neither have chimps at first. Dolphins need some learning time as well.

What if we raise labrats from birth in a cage that has mirrors as walls? I think they will learn to ignore their mirror images and not consider them different rats. I think they will also learn that they can see in the mirror whether another rat is sneaking up behind them. Since they have never been in an environment without mirrors, their body image will include their reflections. Perhaps rats are not able to learn to understand mirrors at a later age, and the similarity between chimps, humans and dolphins is simply that they can learn more easily later in life.There is a definite difference in cognitive capacity between the animals that "pass" the mirror test and the animals that don'tt, a qualitative difference that will not be airbrushed away by wishful anthropomorphization.Define that difference, prove that it exists in animals that pass the mirror test and that it does not exist in those that don't.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn

What if we raise labrats from birth in a cage that has mirrors as walls? I think they will learn to ignore their mirror images and not consider them different rats.

That's a very good suggestion, and I hope that something like that comes up next time I'm asked to review grants. Or alternatively, if you have a child doing a science fair, that would be a (rule-8) awesome project.

However, even if they "ignore" their mirror images, that's not the same as passing the mirror test -- the mirror test is specifically a test of personal recognition (specifically grooming behavior, which of course rats do). Of course, it would be easy enough to carry out the full mirror test on such adapted-from-birth rats and see whether they use the mirrors as cues to grooming behavior.


I think they will also learn that they can see in the mirror whether another rat is sneaking up behind them.


Well, that's certainly an experimental hypothesis.

More generally, however, let's just think about the possibility of running a full Gallup test on such mirror-adapted rats. As I see it, there are three possibilities, all of them interesting.

First, we have the possibility that mirror-adapted rats have no significant behavioral differences from control rats.

The second is that the adapted rats have different (learned) behaviors, but don't use their images as cues to grooming behavior, and thus haven't learned that the image in the mirror reflects properties of the "self" out here.

The third, of course, is that mirror-adapted rats pass the test.

I think any of these three facts would be fascinating to establish. But also in either of these three cases, the underlying question of "why" remains.


Perhaps rats are not able to learn to understand mirrors at a later age, and the similarity between chimps, humans and dolphins is simply that they can learn more easily later in life.


This isn't a problem. Cognition in humans is obviously somewhat developmental. If what you suggest above is true, then one key part of "human-like" cognition is the presence of the ability to continue to learn at child-like rates later in life, which can be tied to a lot of other developmental hypotheses about the human brain. I'm perfectly willing to accept that mental plasticity is one of the key things about human (or human-like) cognition that distinguishes it.

Alternatively, perhaps the difference is genetic and structural, and in this case rats couldn't learn to recognize their mirror image no matter how much time they have or how young they started. This is also compatible with a lot of other developmental hypotheses. Running this experiment would let us sort out these competing hypotheses.



Define that difference, prove that it exists in animals that pass the mirror test and that it does not exist in those that don't.

That's exactly my point. The proof that it exists has already been given in that some animals pass the mirror test, and others don't. You cannot airbrush this difference away. This difference itself is proof of a difference in cognitive capacity among various animals.

[Mosquito]

Take

Originally posted by new drkitten There is no graduated scale upon which we can draw these lines -- an animal is either self-aware or it isn't.

together with...

Originally posted by new drkitten
Infants do not pass the mirror test.
Toddlers do.

and we get that as humans grow from infant to toddler, at some specific (though probably different for each person) point in time, they go from "not self aware" to "self aware". How could this be possible? By the "insertion" of a soul?


Mosquito (fan of the gradual theory)

[Kaylee]

new drkitten
Visually speaking, the mirror surface is NOT a flat two-dimensional representation; it has all the same visual cues as a three-dimensional object.
Earthborn
Correct. That bothered me too about Shera's post.
I concede the point. I should have looked in the mirror before I wrote my posts. :) I wrote quickly and just assumed that living in a society with mirrors all my life that I saw a 3D effect that was not actually there, but it is.


new drkitten
There is a definite difference in cognitive capacity between the animals that "pass" the mirror test and the animals that don't, a qualitative difference that will not be airbrushed away by wishful anthropomorphization.
It makes sense to me that a primate species that passes the mirror test is more intelligent than a primate species that doesn't, as long as both species sensory perceptions are essentially the same.

new drkitten
Simply saying that "other animals may be self-aware, except in a different way" is simply willful blindness.
How about saying they are self-aware, except in a lesser way? (How much lesser to vary by species). Surely they do their best to stay alive. And spider monkeys live and interact within a social group, doesn't that involve some self-awareness on some level?

new drkitten
…we find that chimpanzees are more similar (mentally) to humans than human infants and that bottlenose dolphins are more similar (mentally) to humans than are spider monkeys. But what does this really [i[mean[/i]?
… Obviously, if something is "mentally similar to humans," then that means that humans and the animal under study share similar capacities, and possibly even similar processes. What is the capacity shared by toddlers, dolphins, and chimps? What is the underlying structural similarity that makes that capacity possible? What are the other capacities that structural similarity makes possible? Etc.
OK, I'll guess: For those animals listed above and others that could pass a modified mirror test or the equivalent appropriate for their senses -- perhaps it's the ability to learn a wide range of things and be very adaptable and not limited to a fixed rigid path. Keeping in mind that a lot of species limitations are not just due to intelligence but also to the limits imposed by each species form or body.**

But what would a research psychologist have to say about this? What does it mean when a research psychologist says that this species is self-aware and that one isn't (besides recognizing oneself in a mirror)?

I'm inclined to think that self-awareness is not like an on-off switch but more like a range of awareness that comes with associated abilities. Lower abilities and a narrower range of behavior with lower self-awareness, higher abilities with a wider range of possible behaviors with higher self-awareness.


** [Warning!!! Outrageous Thought Experiment] If a wizard from Planet X came to Earth and transported a newborn octopus's brain into a human body what would that new hybrid creature be able to accomplish? Chances are a lot more than the average octopus. The more flexible body would allow the octopus to do more and be exposed to more areas literally -- and therefore learn more. (Assume for the sake of this thought experiment that the wizard made whatever adjustments were necessary so that the octopus brain transplant would be successful and able to control the human body. See links in the active thread, "Walking octopi" in the Science Forum, that show how clever they are. Examples include:
*They can learn how to open up jars of food.
*They have been known to escape out of a lab tank, go for a midnight snack in the crab tank and then return to their home tank. Coincidentally they also happen to see very well. ) )
[End Warning!!! Outrageous Thought Experiment]

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mosquito
and we get that as humans grow from infant to toddler, at some specific (though probably different for each person) point in time, they go from "not self aware" to "self aware". How could this be possible? By the "insertion" of a soul?


Mosquito (fan of the gradual theory)

Mosquito -- I vote for the simple explanation. Babies learn from their family and neighbors.

[Mosquito]

Originally posted by Shera
Mosquito -- I vote for the simple explanation. Babies learn from their family and neighbors.

Does this suggest that "self awareness" is cultural? I am no expert (and I don't play one on TV) so to me it seems that it could be cultural, though I have never heard about any collaborating evidence.

Or are you just saying that they learn to cope with mirrors from their parents?

Either way, we seem to be supporting the gradual idea :)

Mosquito

[Earthborn]

That's a very good suggestion, and I hope that something like that comes up next time I'm asked to review grants. Or alternatively, if you have a child doing a science fair, that would be a (rule-8) awesome project.I doubt such an experiment would make it passed the ethics comities. Raising animals people can identify with in an Picassoesque environment where they can see all their sides all the time and making them completely unable to make sense of a more normal environment ever again, for no other reason than to convince a few anti-behaviourists that there is no fundamental difference between human and animal behaviour, is not going to be non-controversial in a world where scientists must make sure nematode worms do not suffer needlessly.Of course, it would be easy enough to carry out the full mirror test on such adapted-from-birth rats and see whether they use the mirrors as cues to grooming behavior.I can't see any reason why they wouldn't use the mirrors for grooming.First, we have the possibility that mirror-adapted rats have no significant behavioral differences from control rats.I think we can exclude that possibility. The control rats will have never seen a mirror before and will probably display the normal animal behaviour towards mirrors: trying to look behind it or treating their mirror image as a different individual. The mirror-adapted rats at the very least will have learned to ignore their mirror image as irrelevant. If they both display the same behaviour it would be very surprising.Alternatively, perhaps the difference is genetic and structural, and in this case rats couldn't learn to recognize their mirror image no matter how much time they have or how young they started. This is also compatible with a lot of other developmental hypotheses.Which ones?This difference itself is proof of a difference in cognitive capacity among various animals.Obviously there are differences. But I say that the differences are all gradual and even self-awareness (however defined) is not something that is or isn't.

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

How do we know if a cat "recognizes itself" in the mirror or simply gets used to the fact that there doesn't appear to be a live cat on the other side?

~~ Paul

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Earthborn said:
Obviously there are differences. But I say that the differences are all gradual and even self-awareness (however defined) is not something that is or isn't.
I think we can say with absolute assurity that this is the case. Consider people with "split brains" who perform an action with one hand, only to have the other hand attempt to undo it.

~~ Paul

[Kumar]

Self-Awareness -- Is the Mirror Test a Fair Test?

We get back somewhat similar reflected wavelentgths & their similar patterns from mirror, as we emit/release from our bodies. Is it self awareness or not, scientifically, we can think?:)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mosquito
Does this suggest that "self awareness" is cultural? I am no expert (and I don't play one on TV) so to me it seems that it could be cultural, though I have never heard about any collaborating evidence.

Or are you just saying that they learn to cope with mirrors from their parents?



I think the only way to seriously answer that question (is self-awareness cultural) is to read the case histories of feral children.

I tried to see what was available on line. While some information is available, I didn't see anything that would indicate whether they would have passed a mirror test, if that is the criteria you want to use to define self-awareness. To rephrase and slightly expand upon another possible definition I had offered earlier in the thread to define which species are self-aware, -- they must have the ability to learn with minimal help and be adaptable and flexible to and within their environment. I don't think the feral children described at some of the web sites available on line would be able to do that either.(Feral children is probably a misleading name, most of the children documented were abused and confined to rooms in isolation.) Actually I think very few children would be able to learn anything without receiving a great deal of help while very young.

Octopuses on the other hand receive no help from the parents, their parents die before they are hatched. Yet they manage to display a great deal of intelligence (see the "Walking octopi" thread for links) and have the ability to grow up successfully in very different environments regardless of where they happen to drift to.

So unassisted octopuses can succeed more easily on their own than unassisted human babies; they can end up learning more without outside intervention …. Does this mean they have a higher level of innate self-awareness? Seriously, I don't think so, so my defintion offered earlier needs to be changed. Perhaps self-awareness is cultural or at least learned behavior for humans but (depending upon how its defined) pre-wired for octopuses. On a pragmatic level, once we are comparing adults of the species, does that matter? Anyway, I do think that while researchers evaluate species' self-awareness it should be kept in mind how much help human babies need to get there.

Another thing to consider -- how meaningful is it in the real world if an individual animal:

*is determined to be self-aware based on passing a test that doesn't relate to anything is his natural environment
*only passes the test if he receives a great deal of help from the researchers
* the rest of his species when in the natural environment does nothing similar when left to their own devices?

I'm sure there's a lot to be learned from this, but I don't know if it answers the question about self-awareness.

In regard to the mirror test, I think it would be interesting to know if animals that do well with that test also tend to look at their reflections in bodies of water in their natural environment.

(Just as a reminder, I'm one of the people not convinced that the mirror test is a definitive test for self-awareness, although I agree it makes a great IQ test.)

Hmm, I tend to ramble when I get tired. I hope this post made sense.

Shera

Extras:

Some links on feral children that I just skimmed:

http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php
http://www.answers.com/topic/feral-child

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
How do we know if a cat "recognizes itself" in the mirror or simply gets used to the fact that there doesn't appear to be a live cat on the other side?

~~ Paul

Good question, the link in the first post explains how the mirror test works. Bascially the animals are marked on their faces by researchers while unconscious. If when they wake up they use the mirror to touch the marks, then they prove that they have recognized themselves.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Paul C. Anagnostopoulos
I think we can say with absolute assurity that this is the case. Consider people with "split brains" who perform an action with one hand, only to have the other hand attempt to undo it.


I think we can say with absolute assurity that this is complete (rule 8). The people of whom you speak are by definition pathological cases who can't really be used to illustrate anything.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Shera

How about saying they are self-aware, except in a lesser way? (How much lesser to vary by species). Surely they do their best to stay alive. And spider monkeys live and interact within a social group, doesn't that involve some self-awareness on some level?

The problem with this approach is that it essentially bleaches all the meaning out of the phrase "self-awareness," and turns an essentially cognitive capacity into a meaningless social description.

Let me turn this around. Suppose I say "no, living and interacting within a social group does not necessarily involve self-awareness at any level." (As it happens, I do say that and point to ant and termite colonies as an example). What possible evidence could you use to refute me? And more importantly, what kind of meaning are you really using for "self-aware" in order to make this discussion make sense?



OK, I'll guess: For those animals listed above and others that could pass a modified mirror test or the equivalent appropriate for their senses -- perhaps it's the ability to learn a wide range of things and be very adaptable and not limited to a fixed rigid path. Keeping in mind that a lot of species limitations are not just due to intelligence but also to the limits imposed by each species form or body.**

But what would a research psychologist have to say about this? What does it mean when a research psychologist says that this species is self-aware and that one isn't (besides recognizing oneself in a mirror)?

From a cognitive standpoint, the general meaning of "self-aware" is awareness of self, as a concept separate from direct sensory perception. We cannot directly see ourselves the way we can see others; what we see in a mirror is an externalize representation of something that we identify with ourselves. At a somewhat more philosophical level, it's obviously tied deeply with the ability to have a physical object or sensation represent a purely mental and counterfactual object or sensation.

In the case of the mirror's image, what we see "out there" represents what we are "in here" -- but it's counterfactual precisely because it is "out there." And similarly, if I see a smudge on my face in the mirror, the location of the image-smudge is physically counterfactual -- it's in a different location than the actual smudge.

Again, it's hard to see how the ability to represent counerfactuals is anything but an all-or-nothing capacity. Either the smudge is in the right spot or it isn't, but it's not going to be "kind-of" in the right spot. There's no obvious shading that stretches from a true representation to a representation five feet away and with a different orientation.

Starting from this analysis of self-awareness, there are a lot of other related abilities that fall under the heading of purely mental manipulations. For example, once I've recognized the purely mental concept of "self," I can also recognize that other people also have purely mental concepts, such as their own self-awareness, or their own personal beliefs (that may be different from other peoples'). If I know that other people have beliefs, this allows for the possibility of deception, where I actively attempt to produce wrong beliefs in them. Ths kind of active deception has been reliably observed in chimps and similar great apes (the same animals that pass the mirror test),but not typically in non-primate animals (and the evidence for non-ape primates is strongly disputed).

There are a number of other cognitive abilities, including language, representations, learning, etc. that at least superficially appear to require the ability to manipulate purely mental objects. Perhaps most interesting is to compare the development of these capacities in the human child with their evolutionary counterparts.

But the central point is that these capacities need a name. There is obviously something going on beyond the mere ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. If you don't want to call it "self-awareness," then presumably (a) you have something else you want to call it, and (b) you have something else useful that you want to call "self-awareness."

If so, what?

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Kumar
Self-Awareness -- Is the Mirror Test a Fair Test?

We get back somewhat similar reflected wavelentgths & their similar patterns from mirror, as we emit/release from our bodies. Is it self awareness or not, scientifically, we can think?:)
Kumar, what does this contribute except to show you have no understanding of basic physics? All you have done is re-asked the original question. Our bodies do not "emit" or "release" light, they reflect it...

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Shera
-- they must have the ability to learn with minimal help and be adaptable and flexible to and within their environment. I don't think the feral children described at some of the web sites available on line would be able to do that either.
I quite disagree. Feral children show highly expanded capacities in non-social areas, which arguably, mirror-image recognition is. I think this could be cleared up by contacting someone who has worked with feral children, as my expectation would be that they pass the test easily.
However, while I don't have any more support for this than you do, I still think you are greatly underestimating the human mind.

So unassisted octopuses can succeed more easily on their own than unassisted human babies; they can end up learning more without outside intervention...

I definitely don't think you have provided nearly sufficient evidence of this, and so I don't think your definition should be affected by it yet.


Another thing to consider -- how meaningful is it in the real world if an individual animal:

*is determined to be self-aware based on passing a test that doesn't relate to anything is his natural environment
Why is this such a concern to people, that a mirror reflection is not "natural"? Surely an accurate reflection can be seen in still water. Myself, I know I have seen them in lakes.

*only passes the test if he receives a great deal of help from the researchers
Arguably, passing the mirror test requires a cognitive capacity that a species either has or doesn't have. If it takes effort for the researchers to get a gorilla to pass the mirror test, it still means the gorilla has, at least, the capacity to pass the test, whereas other less intelligent species will never recognize themselves with any amount of familiarization. Whether that capacity is what determines awareness is the key question.

* the rest of his species when in the natural environment does nothing similar when left to their own devices?
Fallacy of ignorance? Just because animals in the wild lack the opportunity to demonstrate their self-awareness doesn't mean it's not there.

In regard to the mirror test, I think it would be interesting to know if animals that do well with that test also tend to look at their reflections in bodies of water in their natural environment.
Oh, I see you did eventually mention it. Most people don't seem to think of this, though.

I'm going to try to find someone to ask that knows more about feral children...

[Kaylee]

Thanks, I think I understand what research psychologists mean by the term "self-awareness" now. :)

Originally posted by new drkitten

But the central point is that these capacities need a name. There is obviously something going on beyond the mere ability to recognize oneself in a mirror. If you don't want to call it "self-awareness," then presumably (a) you have something else you want to call it, and (b) you have something else useful that you want to call "self-awareness."

If so, what?

OK, I'll bite. :) For clarity's sake, I would like to call it something else. How about this?

externalized self-recognition: the ability to recognize oneself from an external point of view and because of observed correlated behaviors demonstrated by animals with this ability, most likely includes the ability to conceptualize oneself in an abstract way.

( To be nitpicky ;) -- I think externalized self-recognition is still a state that covers a wide cognitive range and isn't simply an on-off switch (i.e.,"you either have it or don't"). The apes will never produce a Descartes. )

Self-awareness seems to be too general a term to capture the meaning of what you just described in this post. I believe most people think of awareness as a condition that can range from fuzzy to sharp, from barely there to fully cognizant.

I would vote for reserving the term self-awareness for the possibility of a wider range of cognition of which the lower ranges would still presume self-awareness although not on an abstract level. I think most people would agree that many animals show preferences among other animals and people. A dog for example will often be loyal to its owner and will prefer to play with some dogs and avoid or fight others. Perhaps to the degree it can be cognitively aware of other beings it is cognitively aware of itself. That wouldn't require that it think of itself in an abstract way, and ruminate over the fact that it existed yesterday and will probably still be around tomorrow. :) Seriously, that wouldn't require the ability to deceive.

Observing the wide range of behavior variations, abilities, degree of playfulness, even "personalities" if you will, both between and within the species, it's hard for me to think that this is not correlated with a wide range of self-awareness. I don't know how to prove it though.

Just out of curiosity, would you happen to know if there is a term used in the pyschology profession to capture the awareness level of animals as smart as a cat but not as smart as a chimp?

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Shera

OK, I'll bite. :) For clarity's sake, I would like to call it something else. How about this?

externalized self-recognition: the ability to recognize oneself from an external point of view and because of observed correlated behaviors demonstrated by animals with this ability, most likely includes the ability to conceptualize oneself in an abstract way.

( To be nitpicky ;) -- I think externalized self-recognition is still a state that covers a wide cognitive range and isn't simply an on-off switch (i.e.,"you either have it or don't"). The apes will never produce a Descartes. )


Well, as phrased, it clearly is something you either have or you don't. The apes will never produce a Descartes -- but that's not because Descartes has this ability "at a higher level" or something, but because he has other abilities beyond this.



Self-awareness seems to be too general a term to capture the meaning of what you just described in this post. I believe most people think of awareness as a condition that can range from fuzzy to sharp, from barely there to fully cognizant.

I would vote for reserving the term self-awareness for the possibility of a wider range of cognition of which the lower ranges would still presume self-awareness although not on an abstract level.


What does this mean, though?

What does "self-awareness although not at an abstract level" actually say? You're definitely right that dogs can distinguish between one person and another (or one dog and another, or even between a dog and a person). But where does the concept of "self" come into this kind of cognition?

It's also obvious that dogs have at least a rudimentary ability to respond to stimuli -- if you poke a dog with a sharp object, it will yelp, run away, or possibly attack. But where's the notion of "cognition" in this? I could easily explain a dog's "pain" response without any reference to cognition whatsoever, simply on the basis of simple behaviourist stimulus/response.

The problem with statements like "perhaps to the degree it can be cognitively aware of other beings it is cognitively aware of itself." is that they're essentially random musings without any actual evidence to support them.


I think most people would agree that many animals show preferences among other animals and people. A dog for example will often be loyal to its owner and will prefer to play with some dogs and avoid or fight others. Perhaps to the degree it can be cognitively aware of other beings it is cognitively aware of itself. That wouldn't require that it think of itself in an abstract way, and ruminate over the fact that it existed yesterday and will probably still be around tomorrow. :) Seriously, that wouldn't require the ability to deceive.


Just out of curiosity, would you happen to know if there is a term used in the pyschology profession to capture the awareness level of animals as smart as a cat but not as smart as a chimp?

I'm not aware of any, partly because there aren't any well-defined milestones or behavioral/conceptual demarcations that are widely known and understood. I think you would have a hard time defining what "as smart as a cat" means either in terms of conceptual/cognitive abilities, or behaviourally, in terms of what cats can do that other, "dumber" animals cannot.

[bluess]

Warning - I did not read all the posts prior to adding my two cents...

Re cats and mirrors - I have one cat who uses the mirror as a stalking tool. He will wait in an angle until he sees the reflection of his victim (my other cat) and then corner her. So - assumes the crouched stalking position, stares fixedly at the mirror, and just when her image appears in the mirror darts out into the next room.

It seems that he can understand the difference between his image and hers. What bearing this has on his classification as self-aware, I've no idea.

(Ends my two cents)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by ReFLeX
I quite disagree. Feral children show highly expanded capacities in non-social areas, which arguably, mirror-image recognition is. I think this could be cleared up by contacting someone who has worked with feral children, as my expectation would be that they pass the test easily.
However, while I don't have any more support for this than you do, I still think you are greatly underestimating the human mind.


Oh no, I think we are very smart. :) I brought this up because Mosquito was asking for opinions as to whether "self-awareness" is cultural or not. I think feral children prove that for humans the ability to be self-aware depends on receiving very good care by parents until at least the age of two or three. After that if they were abandoned in the woods (e.g. some 19th century examples) or thrown into an abusive situation where they were locked up isolated in a room (what happens more commonly now), assuming that they survive, I think they would prove to be self-aware. If either of those situations happened before they became the age of 2 or 3, and they somehow managed to survive, I'm not sure if they would be able to pass the mirror test.
I suspect that they would be so pyschologically damaged it almost wouldn't matter.

Shera
So unassisted octopuses can succeed more easily on their own than unassisted human babies; they can end up learning more without outside intervention...

I definitely don't think you have provided nearly sufficient evidence of this, and so I don't think your definition should be affected by it yet.

Evidence provided in an earlier post in this thread and also in the Walking octopi thread. Did you read them?

Why is this such a concern to people, that a mirror reflection is not "natural"? Surely an accurate reflection can be seen in still water. Myself, I know I have seen them in lakes.

Uh, why didn't you edit this sentence out? Just curious as you mentioned later on in your post that you saw I addressed this.

Arguably, passing the mirror test requires a cognitive capacity that a species either has or doesn't have. If it takes effort for the researchers to get a gorilla to pass the mirror test, it still means the gorilla has, at least, the capacity to pass the test, whereas other less intelligent species will never recognize themselves with any amount of familiarization. Whether that capacity is what determines awareness is the key question.
...
Fallacy of ignorance? Just because animals in the wild lack the opportunity to demonstrate their self-awareness doesn't mean it's not there.

Depends. Did the animals learn to pass the trick without this actually meaning anything because the researchers were just really really good at manipulating them? Or does they're passing the test actually mean something? If the latter, than there should be something similar that the researchers can point to that the animals do in their natural environment. (e.g., look at reflection in lakes, use as grooming aid or just to be playful)

edited to add clarity

[Earthborn]

The problem with this approach is that it essentially bleaches all the meaning out of the phrase "self-awareness," and turns an essentially cognitive capacity into a meaningless social description.I think you have yet to show that it is anything but a meaningless social description.From a cognitive standpoint, the general meaning of "self-aware" is awareness of self, as a concept separate from direct sensory perception.Do concepts separate from direct sensory perception even exist?it's obviously tied deeply with the ability to have a physical object or sensation represent a purely mental and counterfactual object or sensation.I don't know what that means. Am I supposed to have this ability?Ths kind of active deception has been reliably observed in chimps and similar great apes, but not typically in non-primate animals.I remember reading an account of a dog owner who once had a dog with a broken leg and pampered it until the leg was healed. A while after the leg was healed, the dog started limping again and the owner was worried that the dog was injured again. Turns out that it wasn't. The dog just pretended to be injured apperently because it wanted the attention again. Is this not active deception? I think you'll find that many animal owners can provide similar stories of animals apperently deliberately deceiving them.There is obviously something going on beyond the mere ability to recognize oneself in a mirror.I don't think that is obvious at all. In fact it is questionable whether humans recognise themselves in a mirror. More likely they just learn to recognise their mirror image, learn that it doesn't mean there is another person in the room and learn how to coordinate their movements by looking at their mirror image instead of directly looking at their body parts. I certainly never mistake my mirror image with myself.If you don't want to call it "self-awareness," then presumably (a) you have something else you want to call it,How about calling it simple association of what you see with what you do?I could easily explain a dog's "pain" response without any reference to cognition whatsoever, simply on the basis of simple behaviourist stimulus/response.You could do the same when you poke a human. There is no objective difference between cognition and stimulus/response as far as I know.The problem with statements like "perhaps to the degree it can be cognitively aware of other beings it is cognitively aware of itself." is that they're essentially random musings without any actual evidence to support them.I think they don't require evidence. I think the burden of proof lies on the people who believe that there is such a thing as 'cognitive awareness'.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by new drkitten
Well, as phrased, it clearly is something you either have or you don't. The apes will never produce a Descartes -- but that's not because Descartes has this ability "at a higher level" or something, but because he has other abilities beyond this.

When Descartes wrote "I think, therefore I am" didn't he prove that he could conceptualize about himself on a very high level? I doubt that apes conceptualize about themselves on such a high level. That's why I think the state of "externalized self-recognition" is one of a range and not just a demarcation point.

The problem with statements like "perhaps to the degree it can be cognitively aware of other beings it is cognitively aware of itself." is that they're essentially random musings without any actual evidence to support them.

Designing an experiment to support this would be very difficult, I agree. But the increasing sophistication of animal behavior as one rises through the hierarchical levels of the scientific classification system leads me to believe that their mental processes must get increasingly sophisticated as well. Wouldn't increasingly more complex behavior require more complex mental processes to support it? And as the mental processes gets increasingly complex, wouldn't a sense of self-awareness be realized and become increasingly more sophisticated? To think otherwise to me seems to defy everything we know about the graduality and small incremental changes in most of nature's systems.

I'm not aware of any, partly because there aren't any well-defined milestones or behavioral/conceptual demarcations that are widely known and understood. I think you would have a hard time defining what "as smart as a cat" means either in terms of conceptual/cognitive abilities, or behaviourally, in terms of what cats can do that other, "dumber" animals cannot. .

Since I can't have a conversation with a cat I agree with you about the former :) , but I think it would be doable to differentiate what a cat can and can't do behaviorally compared to other animals. Extremely tedious, but doable. Comparing an exhaustive list of a cat's behavior to let's say a goldfish would naturally lead one to speculative conclusions about the comparative states of their mental abilities and psychologies (or lack of one in some species :) ). How to conclusively prove that is another story. Perhaps some of the answers will be found with more sophisticated EEG machines along with well thought out experiments.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Shera
They do? Which one of them was abandoned before that time? Unless one of them actually experienced isolation before that age, how can you infer that? Admittedly, they would likely die without being supported, until much later. But I haven't seen enough support for self-awareness as a cultural circumstance.
[B]"So unassisted octopuses can succeed more easily on their own than unassisted human babies; they can end up learning more without outside intervention...",
This is what I have the greatest objection to. I figured out what bothers me about this comparison. With feral children, especially those locked up in a room, they are not in their natural environments, regardless of their age at the time of isolation. But an octopus, once born, is in its natural environment and thus has the opportunities to learn what it can about its world. Obviously they can survive on their own, because their species evolved in a way such that they don't have to be "raised". What I'm saying is, feral children aren't isolated in the same ways as newborn octopuses are, and aren't a fair comparison.
Uh, why didn't you edit this sentence out? Just curious as you mentioned later on in your post that you saw I addressed this.
For the benefit of other people reading the thread, such as those who raised the point in the original thread.
Depends. Did the animals learn to pass the trick without this actually meaning anything because the researchers were just really really good at manipulating them? Well I hope that the researchers were objective enough to only look for real self-awareness, but not having actually witnessed the tests, I couldn't tell you. But it would be bad science if they were merely manipulating the animals/results to get them to say what they wanted. Again, I can't vouch for any scientist's honesty, we just have to presume it or wait for replication. But it occurs to me that it has been mentioned that these studies have been often replicated. So would you charge that all the studies "manipulated" the animals?
Or does they're passing the test actually mean something? If the latter, than there should be something similar that the researchers can point to that the animals do in their natural environment. (e.g., look at reflection in lakes, use as grooming aid or just to be playful)
Should be? I don't see why this is a requirement. There might be a so-called artificial way of verifying their self-awareness, but that doesn't entail there is a purely observational method as well. Evidently it is an area that needs further examination, and maybe we will discover one. But to assume the mirror test works, doesn't mean there must be a similarly observable phenomenon in their natural environment.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by bluess
Warning - I did not read all the posts prior to adding my two cents...

Re cats and mirrors - I have one cat who uses the mirror as a stalking tool. He will wait in an angle until he sees the reflection of his victim (my other cat) and then corner her. So - assumes the crouched stalking position, stares fixedly at the mirror, and just when her image appears in the mirror darts out into the next room.

It seems that he can understand the difference between his image and hers. What bearing this has on his classification as self-aware, I've no idea.

(Ends my two cents)

LOL! I love your cat! I'm not sure what bearing his hunting tactics has his classification as self-aware either, but he sounds very aware to me!

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
new drkitten: "it's obviously tied deeply with the ability to have a physical object or sensation represent a purely mental and counterfactual object or sensation."
I don't know what that means. Am I supposed to have this ability? According to Piaget, you develop this ability around 12 (I'm pretty sure) in what he called the formal operational stage, the fourth and final stage in child development. Reasoning counterfactually means you understand and could provide an answer to a hypothetical question like, "Imagine pigs can fly. Then could your dog Fido fly?" I'm sure there are much better examples, but Piaget said, before the formal operational stage, the child will not be able to reason from the first counterfactual statement ("But pigs CAN'T fly!").

I remember reading an account of a dog owner who once had a dog with a broken leg and pampered it until the leg was healed. A while after the leg was healed, the dog started limping again and the owner was worried that the dog was injured again. Turns out that it wasn't. The dog just pretended to be injured apperently because it wanted the attention again. Is this not active deception?
Err... that seems to be operant conditioning (http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/behsys/operant.html), which occurs in rats and fish also.
There is no objective difference between cognition and stimulus/response as far as I know. There is plenty of differences. For one, a response can occur without cognition, using only your peripheral nervous system (which excludes your brain). For example, when you touch your foot to something hot, the withdrawal reflex occurs before information about the stimulus reaches your brain (the reflex comes from the spinal cord). So I suppose you wish to differ reflexes from responses. Which means we have to first define response, and also cognition, since I think new drkitten is using 'cognition' in a different way than you are.

[ReFLeX]

Hmm... I can see I dropped the ball on the counterfactual point... unfortunately I have to go pick up someone right now or they are going to be very mad.
Hopefully new drkitten can clarify much better...

[Kaylee]

Earthborn 04-04-2005 01:40 PM GMT
All behaviour is a combination of 'reflexes' and 'instincts'.

Earthborn 04-05-2005 11:21 PM GMT
There is no objective difference between cognition and stimulus/response as far as I know.

Earthborn, I meant to ask you this earlier. Surely you believe that some behavior is a result of learning? If not, could you explain your ability to write your last post as a combination of reflexes and instincts?

Also do you believe that any behavior is a result of an emotional response or emotionally driven?

Just curious. :) I find your posts on this subject very original and enjoy reading them.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn
Do concepts separate from direct sensory perception even exist?


Absolutely. See Chomsky's response to Skinner in his review of Verbal Behavior for a discussion of this point at length.

But you don't need to re-read the literature to see proof of that. The proof is in the mirror test itself. What you "see" in the mirror, perceptually, is a human being standing a few meters away from you. If that person has a smudge on her face, then you see a person with a smudge on her face.

On the other hand, you are demonstrably able to conceptualize that some particular human being whom you perceive is a few meters away is actually you and that if you wipe a part of your body that you can't even see, the smudge will go away. On the other hand, if you attempt to clean the face of "the person in the mirror," it won't work.

Somehow, you are able to distinguish between the sensed "person in the mirror" who is actually you, and a sensed person, possibly in a mirror, who is not you. And the difference is purely conceptual, as there is no difference at the sensory level.


I remember reading an account of a dog owner who once had a dog with a broken leg and pampered it until the leg was healed. A while after the leg was healed, the dog started limping again and the owner was worried that the dog was injured again. Turns out that it wasn't. The dog just pretended to be injured apperently because it wanted the attention again. Is this not active deception?

Not according to the standard definitions (although it comes close). The difference is that the dog wants you to do something (that perhaps you wouldn't ordinarily do), but the dog doesn't [necessarily] want you to believe something that is false (or that you ordinarily wouldn't). In fact, theres a simple S/R explanation where the dog has simply "learned" (in behaviourist terminology, "been conditioned") that if it walks in a particular way, it will receive pleasurable stimuli. There's nothing about this explanation that requires the assumption of mental states on the part of the dog, and certainly no necessary assumption that the dog is attributing mental states to you.

On the other hand, if I try to instill a false belief in you (active deception), then I obviously am assuming that you have mental states of some sort. (If you had no mental states, you by definition would not be able to hold beliefs.)



In fact it is questionable whether humans recognise themselves in a mirror.
This is simply ludicrous and requires no response.

There is no objective difference between cognition and stimulus/response as far as I know.I think they don't require evidence. I think the burden of proof lies on the people who believe that there is such a thing as 'cognitive awareness'.

Yes, it does. And it's a burden that has been easily met since the downfall of Skinner and behaviorism. Pick up any textbook on the history of psychology.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by ReFLeX
According to Piaget, you develop this ability around 12 (I'm pretty sure) in what he called the formal operational stage, the fourth and final stage in child development. Reasoning counterfactually means you understand and could provide an answer to a hypothetical question like, "Imagine pigs can fly. Then could your dog Fido fly?" I'm sure there are much better examples, but Piaget said, before the formal operational stage, the child will not be able to reason from the first counterfactual statement ("But pigs CAN'T fly!").


Depending upon how you do the test (and exactly how you describe the capacity), it occurs much earlier, around four years old in a typical child. A standard test runs something like this:

Play with the child and show it a puppet of some sort. Most children of the appropriate age are sufficiently verbal and have no problem anthropomorphizing puppets to the point that they can answer questions about the puppet as though it was a real person. They also usually have a notion of object permanence, etc., so the following sequence of steps makes sense.

In the course of play, show the child (and "show" the puppet) the contents of a box. In an obvious manner, put an apple or something in the box. Ask the child what is in the box ("an apple"). Ask the child what Tigger thinks is in the box (again, "an apple").

Then turn TIgger around, so the puppet can't "see" the contents of the box. Again, obviously, take the apple out and put something else in (like a book).

Then turn Tigger around and "show" him the closed box. Ask the child what is in the box and what Tigger thinks is in the box.

A child at the appropriate developmental stage will recognize, first, that the box contains a book, but that Tigger "thinks" that there is an apple in the box (because TIgger didn't "see" you change stuff around). Before this developmental stage, the child will correctly recognize that there is a book in the box (object permanence is much, much earlier), but will not realize that, although the child knows that the apple was switched, Tigger was not exposed to the switch. So the less-developed child will typically say that Tigger thinks there is a book in the box.

The central point, of course, is that the more developed child's belief is known, by the child, to be counterfactual. He not only attributes beliefs (mental states) to the puppet, but also attributes beliefs with propositional content that he himself knows to be false. At some level, he therefore shows mastery of the concept of purely mental events that are not related to direct sensory impressions and even contradict the "real world."

This is also a good response to Earthborn's request for a demonstration of cognitive awareness. Offhand, I can't produce a strictly behaviorist explanation for the child's behavior that does not involve, first, that the child has mental states that extend beyond simple "reflexes and instincts," and second, that the child's mental states have propositional content, thirdly, that the child's mental states also include assigning mental states with propositional content to external entities (such as Tigger). Tigger can't "think" something is in the box if it doesn't have mental states. And Tigger can't hold a different belief than the child unless TIgger's mental states are separate from the child's own.

Is that enough detail for you?

[Earthborn]

Surely you believe that some behavior is a result of learning? If not, could you explain your ability to write your last post as a combination of reflexes and instincts?Of course I do. I just think that there is no real difference between reflexes and instincts and learned behaviour. Reflexes and instincts are also learned.Also do you believe that any behavior is a result of an emotional response or emotionally driven?Yes, I do. I make no real distinction between 'emotionally driven' behaviour, 'intellectually driven' behaviour and 'instinctual' behaviour. I think it is all pretty much the same thing.On the other hand, you are demonstrably able to conceptualize that some particular human being whom you perceive is a few meters away is actually youReally? Or have I just learned through experience that whatever is true of my mirror image is also true of me?On the other hand, if you attempt to clean the face of "the person in the mirror," it won't work.It's fairly obvious why: she behind the glass and therefore I can't reach her. But since she always does exactly as I do, I can make her wipe the smudge of her face by wiping my own. :)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
Of course I do. I just think that there is no real difference between reflexes and instincts and learned behaviour. Reflexes and instincts are also learned. ... I make no real distinction between 'emotionally driven' behaviour, 'intellectually driven' behaviour and 'instinctual' behaviour. I think it is all pretty much the same thing.
Perhaps we define reflexes and instincts differently?

On this web page Wikipedia lists reflexes for human adults -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex

They seem to be prewired and involve no learning. Upon the right stimulus, the reflex happens automatically. Some examples are the gag reflex and the sneeze -- no learning required. :)

Wikipedia has a page on instincts also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instinct
Here's a cut and paste:

Instinct is the word used to describe inherent dispositions towards particular actions. Instincts are generally an inherited pattern of responses or reactions to certain kinds of situations. In humans, they are most easily observed in responses to emotions. Instincts generally serve to set in motion mechanisms that evoke an organism to action. The particular actions performed may be influenced by learning, environments, and natural principles. ...
Emphasis added.

It's not as thorough an explanation as I would like. :( I assume that this explains the flight or fight response in humans, for example. Maybe someone else has more info or a better web site on this.

Most human behavior though I'm sure has to be learned -- either from other people or experience.

Or have I just learned through experience that whatever is true of my mirror image is also true of me?It's fairly obvious why: she behind the glass and therefore I can't reach her. But since she always does exactly as I do, I can make her wipe the smudge of her face by wiping my own. :)
LOL! :D

[Roboramma]

I've only skimmed the thread, so appologies if these points have already been made...

Concerning the mirror test - I can remember occasions when I have walked down a dim hall with a mirror at the end and tried to avoid the person coming toward me, only to be annoyed that they were making the same movements and staying in my way, and finally making a frantic jerking movement at the end - sometimes leading to walking right into the mirror, though usually when this happens (maybe once every few years in my life I've experienced this) I'll stop before walking into the "other person". The same sort of thing happens with real people in crowded streets, with the same result - either avoid (impossible with the mirror person) bump into, or stop and let the other person pass.
I can remember feeling quite silly after those times.
The point I have of bringing up this example (I'm guessing others will have had similar experiences, though my own lack of awareness of my surroundings at times might lead to a higher incidence - like when I've got my head down reading a book and am navigating my periferal vision - don't you hate it when people do that! ;) ). Anyway, I bring this up because if I can sometimes fail the mirror test - in dark hallways, when I don't know there is a mirror there, when I'm not looking right at it, then we have to ask, how do I pass it, when I do?

I think it's based on some observations of the mirror, and reasoning about it. We look at a mirror. We see someone inside of it. Initially (if you have no previous experience with mirrors) you might think it's someone else. After interacting with this other person long enough you notice that it mimics all of your actions, including the movements of your mouth - but no sounds come out. You then (unconciously perhaps) look at two or more alternate theories of what's going on here:
1. This is someone else who is so adept at mimicing my actions that I can't see any time lag. Yet at the same time I can't hear or smell anything from this other person either - possibly because he/she is behind a wall of glass.
2. This is a visual reflection of me.
Because the second is most parsimonious, we accept it.
You might say, well I've never even concidered the first option - but then can you remember the first time you realised that your reflection was yourself?
Also, you might say, well, surely niether I, nor a gorilla works out the probabilities of whether or not someone else of similar size to my/itself would be able/willing to mimic me so well, and compare them to the chance that this is a visual reflection of my/itself.
Well, not conciously, but computing probabilities (however inaccuratly at times) is something that our and most animals brains seem quite adept at.

So, what am I saying? Maybe there is a problem with dismissing other animals self-awareness due to failure in the mirror test - the mirror test requires not only self awareness, but also an awareness that a mimic (or any other explanation) is unlikely. It may seem obvious that a monkey or dog would know this, but just because it seems obvious doesn't mean it isn't true. I can't see that it would necessily be instictively known that a mimic isn't likely, as there is no selective advantage to this knowledge, and thus if it was instinctive it would have to be a biproduct of some other mental faculty that did offer selective advantage.
Yet if the monkey cannot say "A mimic is unlikely" then it also cannot say "that's probably me."
In short - the mirror test shows that unless there is a problem with perception it's mental faculties are less than ours, but not with certainty in what ways.

[Placebo]

Has everyone actually agreed about the gradual range of self awareness? It seems to have been dropped as a discussion point :)
I'm going to assume it isn't cleared up in this post.

The mirror test also requires awareness of one's surroundings, and it's relation to oneself.
Enter lucid dreams (a dream wherein one is conscious that it is a dream, and able to make decisions that appear to be 'thought out').
(EDIT: Lucid dreaming has a fair amount of evidence to support it, in the scientific setting)

Someone who has experienced a lucid dream will likely have found that consciousness and awareness of one's surroundings is not an on/off switch. In a dream, many ridiculous things will usually be considered as 'normal'. In a lucid dream, some of those ridiculous aspects are taken for granted, while you may find others amusing - you are aware to some extent, but not fully. You're left a little 'stupid'.

A high level lucid reveals more awareness than what I call a 'semi-lucid' (one wherein you 'kind of' know you're dreaming, but are too fuzzy in the head to think about the consequences fully)

What I'm saying is that my personal, subjective experience of lucid dreaming supports a gradual awareness range and consciousness. And I venture that self-awareness is the same, based on my memory of my thoughts and reflection upon them.
Of course, this still depends on the actual understanding of 'self-awareness'.

I've heard that surveys reveal 50% of the population experiencing lucid dreams, and I'd bet my wallet on the vast majority of them more or less agreeing with this range of awareness.

Personal experience may not count for much in the scientific community, but it means a lot to the 50% of the population who experience it.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Placebo
Has everyone actually agreed about the gradual range of self awareness? It seems to have been dropped as a discussion point
I'm going to assume it isn't cleared up in this post.
Several people have posted that is what they think (including me :) ). However, I believe that new drkitten has said its an either/or state. Between the other posts I've read and the ones in this thread, my guess is that new drkitten teaches psychology at the college level. So I'm particularly interested in his/her(?) opinion because I'd still like to understand the idea behind self-awareness as an either/or thing, and not a gradual range of awareness. Perhaps its as simple as that the PTB in the field decided to assume the lowest common denominator of consciousness in absence of hard evidence to the contrary.

But how could one get the evidence? How do you have a conversation with a goldfish, dog or cheetah? :) And they have no use for mirrors… ;) I would think that since gradual ranges seems to be the rule of thumb in most areas of nature that I have observed, that the burden of proof would be the other way. But I am still wrestling with these concepts.

I'm also curious as to whether all areas of psychology agree on this concept of "self-awareness" or if there are different hypotheses. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that psychology has different schools of thought?

What I'm saying is that my personal, subjective experience of lucid dreaming supports a gradual awareness range and consciousness.
Good observation and yet another example of how nature seems to work more with ranges vs. either/ors. (I have lucid dreams also.)

I've heard that surveys reveal 50% of the population experiencing lucid dreams,
Yep, one article that said that was a Susan Blackmore article (http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91ld.html) published in the Skeptical Inquirer.

BTW, I just found out that Wikipedia has books on line! And they have one (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lucid_Dreaming) on lucid dreaming, in addition to an article (""). I haven't read the online book yet, but probably will as time permits.

Personal experience may not count for much in the scientific community, but it means a lot to the 50% of the population who experience it.

Yes, some personal experiences are very compelling and very hard to discount… (Paraphrasing another JREF poster very badly, but don’t' remember who ATM…) But, like you also said earlier, this is one of the areas that scientific research has succeeded in finding evidence for.

[Placebo]

Originally posted by Shera
I'm also curious as to whether all areas of psychology agree on this concept of "self-awareness" or if there are different hypotheses. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that psychology has different schools of thought?
Yep, I think so.
I've always considered self-awareness to be the ability to reason on your own thoughts and actions.
I wouldn't be suprised if I'm far off the track...

[EDIT]
Just for the record, the dictionaries define the following:
- Aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors
- Realization of oneself as an individual entity or personality

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Shera

I'm also curious as to whether all areas of psychology agree on this concept of "self-awareness" or if there are different hypotheses. If I'm not mistaken, I believe that psychology has different schools of thought?


I rather doubt that "all areas of psychology" could be found to agree on anything. There are still, for example, a few unreconstructed behaviorists lying around who hold (as Earthborn apparently does) that there is no such thing as cognition and that mental processes are purely conditioned responses to stimuli. As may be apparently, I do not believe that pure behaviorism can explain the experimental evidence (such as our ability to recognize ourselves in a mirror, our demonstrated tendence to infer mental states in other people, etc.), but at the same time, I tam also deeply suspicious of the tendency of introspective analysis to infer properties of cognition without any supporting experimental evidence whatsoever.

The idea of "a gradual range of awareness" is one such. What, exactly, does that mean? I can, for example, submit that there is a clearly defined capacity of being able to look at a mirror image and see "oneself" (i.e. to recognize the image as being a self-image). I similarly submit that there is a clearly defined capacity of seeing "another" -- another member of my species with whom I must compete. But what possible intermediate capacity could there be?

We can approach this in two ways. Behaviourally, I can point to (self)-grooming behavior as evidence that a creature recognizes the image as itself. I can point to hostility, domination, submission -- essentially social behaviors -- as evidence that a creature sees "another" in the mirror. But what kind of behavior could I point to as evidence that a creature is at an intermediate level?

We get the same point more introspectively, however. What would the creature actually be "thinking" that would be in the mid-range between "that creature I see in the middle is someone other than me" "that creature I see in the middle is actually me"? What would it really mean in terms of the creature's cognitive content to be at an intermediate stage?

So since I don't believe there is a well-defined intermediate state at all, I don't think the idea of a continuous gradation of consciousness makes sense. You can't leap a chasm in two bounds.

There are actually a lot of areas where nature does, in fact, show such sharp variations, especially when we're talking about a system of capacities. An example of this is in human language. One of the key marks of human language is the ability to use "recursive" productions, which basically means that sentences can talk about other sentences -- "John believed that Suzie liked Tom." No animal has the capacity to talk about sentences at all, while no human has a limited capacity to talk about sentences. The ability to talk about sentences -- to represent grammatical constructions themselves as objects of discourse -- appears to be an all-or-nothing proposition.

This also shows up in child language learning; children appear to master individual semantic/syntactic concepts one by one. They start with simple one-word "sentences," chiefly individual nouns, verbs, or adjectives. They progress by mastering methods of linking, for example, a verb with its object ("drink milk"), or a modifier with its noun ("dirty hand") (the so-called two word stage). Psychologists can trace syntactic/semantic development in terms of the number of words children string together but there is not really a well-defined three-word (or greater) stage. Once children can put three words together grammatically, they can usually put together fourth, five, six, etc. words -- there appears to be no length limit. So there's no continous range between two and infinity, just an all-or-nothing capacity. (What children typically have not mastered at this stage are the grammatical words such as prepositions, articles, etc. -- but those are separate capacities which are themselves usually acquired as all-or-nothing abilities.)

And, of course, it may not entirely be coincidence that children acquire the ability to produce infinitely long sentences (recursive grammar operating on purely mental entities) at about the same time that they start to be able to recognize themselves in the mirror....

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Placebo
Just for the record, the dictionaries define the following:
- Aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors
- Realization of oneself as an individual entity or personality
Don't you still have these in a lucid dream? Why do you think that points to an intermediary between self-awareness and non-awareness. When I dream, I am always very aware that I am a self that is having experiences.

[Earthborn]

They seem to be prewired and involve no learning.From your own link: "Reflexes can be built-in or learned."
Since most of us (there are exceptions (http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/index.html), I guess) are not screwed and soldered together by technicians, I think 'built-in' probably means: learned before you were born. During development in the womb reflexes form by strengthening some neural pathways and weakening others, so I think it is fair to say that it is a learning process.

Something similar is true of 'instincts'.LOL! :DIt is funny, but it raises a serious question: do we really, honestly, conceptualise our mirror image as 'ourselves' and if so what exactly does that mean? Or have we simply learned to avoid thinking of our mirror image as another human? Perhaps we have not really solved the paradox of seeing someone else and understanding it is ourselves but instead we just ignore this apperent contradiction.

A lot of fairy tales and magical stories involve magical mirrors you can walk through to get to the other side or that have mirror images in them that don't always do exactly what we do. Perhaps these stories are a reflection (ha!) that we have not solved the mirror paradox and are still mystified by those things.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by bluess
Re cats and mirrors - I have one cat who uses the mirror as a stalking tool. He will wait in an angle until he sees the reflection of his victim (my other cat) and then corner her. So - assumes the crouched stalking position, stares fixedly at the mirror, and just when her image appears in the mirror darts out into the next room.

It seems that he can understand the difference between his image and hers. What bearing this has on his classification as self-aware, I've no idea.

I've been thinking about your post. (Your cat really made an impression with me. :) ) This is new drkitten's explanation of what self-awareness means:

Originally posted by new drkitten 04-05-2005 4:42 PM GMT
From a cognitive standpoint, the general meaning of "self-aware" is awareness of self, as a concept separate from direct sensory perception. We cannot directly see ourselves the way we can see others; what we see in a mirror is an externalize representation of something that we identify with ourselves. At a somewhat more philosophical level, it's obviously tied deeply with the ability to have a physical object or sensation represent a purely mental and counterfactual object or sensation.

A cat does not see still objects as well as a human does. If I recall correctly, their vision is better for moving objects. Obviously your cat proved that he used a mirror as a tool to track prey (your other cat anyway :) ), prey in a situation that he wouldn't have been able to track otherwise. He certainly demonstrated great problem solving skills. :) (I suspect that he is unusually smart for a cat :) ).

I think he also demonstrated that he was able to prove that he knew the mirror reflection was an "externalized representation" of your other cat. I'm not sure that I agree with drkitten that the mirror test, as conventionally used, proves that the test animal is relating a purely physical object (himself) to a purely mental object. I think its possible that the animal may simply be relating two separate physical objects (himself and his reflected image) with no purely mental object involved. Definitely test animals who pass the mirror test are proving that they know their mirrored reflection image and movements corresponds to their own. Your cat came very close to doing almost the same thing. He just didn't do it with his body and his mirror image, he did it with your other cat's body and mirror image.

Given that cats have apparently shown no interest in using the mirror to look at or groom themselves (perhaps because of the way cats see still objects, more poorly than primates do), this may be as close as testers can come to proving that cats can make this kind of mental leap. I don't know if a psychologist would consider the two mental leaps equivalent -- but I think it's pretty damn impressive regardless. I suspect it is extremely close, but I also suspect that most researchers would not be willing to make any assumptions. Hard evidence only! (And I can't say I blame them. People are good at talking themselves into almost everything, so hard empirical evidence is of course best.) Perhaps soon, researchers will be clever enough to think of an experiment that will motivate a cat to prove decisively that he knows that the moving image in a mirror is his own.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
During development in the womb reflexes form by strengthening some neural pathways and weakening others, so I think it is fair to say that it is a learning process.
I'm highly skeptical. Soon after birth, babies have a walking reflex, I can't remember what it is called. When you hold their hands and try to move them along the floor, they automatically put one foot in front of the other, similar to walking. How could this neural pathway be strengthened in the womb? What's more, this reflex is not related to further learning, it actually disappears with age until the infant learns to walk again later.

...haha, the reflex has no fancy name apparently:
http://www.keepkidshealthy.com/newborn/newborn_reflexes.html

[Earthborn]

Behaviourally, I can point to (self)-grooming behavior as evidence that a creature recognizes the image as itself. I can point to hostility, domination, submission -- essentially social behaviors -- as evidence that a creature sees "another" in the mirror. But what kind of behavior could I point to as evidence that a creature is at an intermediate level?Both behaviours or neither behaviour.

An example of both behaviours: first grooming behaviour (combing your hair) and a moment later social behaviour ("Are you talking to me?")

An example of neither behaviour: simply ignoring the mirror image as irrelevant as it never does anything surprising or anything affecting you anyway.

There might also be mixtures between the two. An animal might behave socially to its mirror image but to a much lesser degree than an actual other animal, making it a mixture between social behaviour and ignoring. And what about a mixture between grooming behaviour and ignoring: quickly looking in the mirror to see whether your hair is still in shape but not paying much attention to the rest.What would the creature actually be "thinking" that would be in the mid-range between "that creature I see in the middle is someone other than me" "that creature I see in the middle is actually me"?"That creature in the mirror always does the same thing as me."
"Others tell me that creature in the mirror is me."
"Others sometimes confuse that creature in the mirror with me."So since I don't believe there is a well-defined intermediate state at all, I don't think the idea of a continuous gradation of consciousness makes sense.Then how do you think the ability to self-recognise in the mirror develops in children? Do get that ability from one second to the next?You can't leap a chasm in two bounds.You also can't leap a chasm without ever occupying any of the points in space in between the two sides. While leaping the chasm there will be a moment in time when you are exactly at the midpoint. The leap may happen fast, but it is still happening gradually.There are actually a lot of areas where nature does, in fact, show such sharp variations, especially when we're talking about a system of capacities. An example of this is in human language.Just because something happens quickly and just because you don't yet understand how it develops step by step, does not mean it is all-or-nothing.

[Earthborn]

This is also a good response to Earthborn's request for a demonstration of cognitive awareness.It is an interesting experiment but I don't think that attributing 'mental states' to Tigger is necessary to get a similar reaction. The child need only to associate the period of time until Tigger left with the apple being in the box and the period of time Tigger was away with the book being in the box. When Tigger returns the child remembers that when a similar situation existed there was an apple in the box.

Here is some pseudocode for a computer program that can solve the problem in the same way as the child does:

Box = Apple
OldBoxSituation = Box

TiggerLeaves

Box = Book

TiggerReturns

PresentBoxSituation = Box

IF ASKED("What does Tigger think is in the box?") THEN SAY OldBoxSituation

IF ASKED("What is really in the box?") THEN SAY PresentBoxSituationIf I make this program and run it, does it prove that it attributes 'mental states' to Tigger? I don't think so. The fact that the child does, does not mean it solves the problem by doing so.

If you mean with 'mental states' and 'cognitive awareness' that a child can remember things, then I obviously agree that people have them. But so do other animals.

[Earthborn]

Soon after birth, babies have a walking reflex, I can't remember what it is called. When you hold their hands and try to move them along the floor, they automatically put one foot in front of the other, similar to walking.I know. How does the fact that a baby has this reflex after birth prove that it hasn't learned it before birth?What's more, this reflex is not related to further learning, it actually disappears with age until the infant learns to walk again later.If it dissappears then perhaps it is not a walking reflex. It may be a 'kick-mummy-on-the-inside-of-her-tummy' reflex, perhaps to adjust its position with its feet. The motion necessary for doing that just may be similar to walking. Or the other way around: perhaps our way of locomotion develops from our way to move in the womb. I guess it has to come from somewhere.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn
If I make this program and run it, does it prove that it attributes 'mental states' to Tigger? I don't think so.


The program isn't a valid analogy, for the simple reason that in order to write the program, you need to know beforehand what the questions that will be asked are. The child is demonstrably producing a much more general cognitive structure that permits it to answer (correctly) the question, among its other sets of possible behaviors.

In particular, why should the question "What does Tigger think is in the box?" trigger recall of that particular time period as opposed to any other? The only reason in a general cognitive context is that Tigger must have state information of some sort that controls whether or not his capacites are temporally frozen (and must be remembered) or whether he is kept current. But, of course, this is exactly what "memory" is all about. It's not the child's memory that is relevant, but Tigger's "memory."


If you can actually come up with a computer program that correctly models the semantics of the false-belief experiment without the attribution of state information attributed to Tigger, please write it up. I can suggest a number of journals that would be interested.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn
If it dissappears then perhaps it is not a walking reflex. It may bea 'kick-mummy-on-the-inside-of-her-tummy' reflex, perhaps to adjust its position with its feet. The motion necessary for doing that just may be similar to walking. Or the other way around: perhaps our way of locomotion develops from our way to move in the womb. I guess it has to come from somewhere.

In other words, you have absolutely no evidence that any statement in the immediately previous paragraph is remotely true.

I'm noticing this in a number of your other posts on this thread:



I can't see any reason why they wouldn't use the mirrors for grooming.

The control rats will have never seen a mirror before and will probably display the normal animal behaviour towards mirrors.

More likely they just learn to recognise their mirror image,

Perhaps we have not really solved the paradox of seeing someone else and understanding it is ourselves but instead we just ignore this apperent contradiction.

Perhaps these stories are a reflection (ha!) that we have not solved the mirror paradox.


Not to seem too harsh, but these theories that you are proposing are in many cases contradicted by about fifty years of operational psychological experimentation and replicatable data. Do you have any reason at all why I (or anyone) should take these fairy tales seriously?

[Earthborn]

The program isn't a valid analogy, for the simple reason that in order to write the program, you need to know beforehand what the questions that will be asked are.The computer doesn't know what question it will be asked until it gets to the line where it is asked the question. Whether I know beforehand what questions will be asked is irrelevant: the experimenter also knows them before the child does.In particular, why should the question "What does Tigger think is in the box?" trigger recall of that particular time period as opposed to any other?Because asking what Tigger thinks triggers the association of the time when Tigger was around to think anything.If you can actually come up with a computer program that correctly models the semantics of the false-belief experiment without the attribution of state information attributed to Tigger, please write it up.I don't know what that means.In other words, you have absolutely no evidence that any statement in the immediately previous paragraph is remotely true.Correct.Not to seem too harsh, but these theories that you are proposing are in many cases contradicted by about fifty years of operational psychological experimentation and replicatable data.Perhaps you can present some of that data.Do you have any reason at all why I (or anyone) should take these fairy tales seriously?You can take them seriously by showing them to be wrong. Or you can decide not to take them seriously and ignore them. I'm not telling you what you should do, it is your own choice.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn

"That creature in the mirror always does the same thing as me."
"Others tell me that creature in the mirror is me."
"Others sometimes confuse that creature in the mirror with me."

The first and third statements are compatible with non-self-awareness. The second requires that the subject is capable of understanding that others are trying to tell it something about it specifically, which is a high level of cognition and would presumably imply that the subject is self-aware or incapable of understanding that statement.
The leap may happen fast, but it is still happening gradually.Just because something happens quickly and just because you don't yet understand how it develops step by step, does not mean it is all-or-nothing. Ok... so if something can happen fast but gradually, the only alternative is instantaneous. I don't think much of anything happens instantaneously. How fast does something need to be for you to not consider it "gradual"?

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Earthborn
The computer doesn't know what question it will be asked until it gets to the line where it is asked the question.


But the programmer has to know, to build the capacity into the program.

Who builds the capacity into the child to answer the questions?


Perhaps you can present some of that data.You can take them seriously by showing them to be wrong.


Objected to as "already asked and answered."


Or you can decide not to take them seriously and ignore them. I'm not telling you what you should do, it is your own choice.

Fair enough. If anyone wants to discuss evidence-based psychology, please let me know.

[Earthborn]

The first and third statements are compatible with non-self-awareness. The second requires that the subject is capable of understanding that others are trying to tell it something about it specifically, which is a high level of cognition and would presumably imply that the subject is self-aware or incapable of understanding that statement.No, in all there is some self-concept ("me"). The first involves an ability to pass the mirror test without having to equate one's mirror image with oneself. The second and third do not necessarily mean having an ability to pass the mirror test.Ok... so if something can happen fast but gradually, the only alternative is instantaneous. I don't think much of anything happens instantaneously. How fast does something need to be for you to not consider it "gradual"?Something must be instantaneous for it to be "all or nothing". If it is not instantaneous than there is midpoint in time and thus not all or nothing.

[Earthborn]

But the programmer has to know, to build the capacity into the program.I don't see why.Who builds the capacity into the child to answer the questions?It is not my claim that the capacity has to be programmed, just that it can be explained in fairly simple terms.Fair enough. If anyone wants to discuss evidence-based psychology, please let me know.Since I have repeatedly asked you to provide evidence and clear definitions of the terms you use, you should be able to deduce that I am. You can't blame me for not being convinced by your arguments or for thinking up alternative explanations for the things you present as evidence.

[voidx]

Posted by Earthborn
The computer doesn't know what question it will be asked until it gets to the line where it is asked the question. Whether I know beforehand what questions will be asked is irrelevant: the experimenter also knows them before the child does.

The computer has no capacity built into it, in this situation to want to "know" what question it will be asked. It has no predictive capacity, it merely has canned responses. If as a statement is sometimes misleading. It is sometimes more appropriate to term it as When. When asked X reply Z. That's it, that's the limit of any capacity for the program. Unless you restrict a child's brain to the same degree its obviously an illogical comparison.

I think there is a small but crucial difference here that those disagreeing with new drkitten are missing. Brain and cognitive ability perhaps are gradual and have different levels based upon different brain structures. The example that a human child is not self-aware, and then magically becomes self-aware is also to miss the point somewhat. That human child's brain has by default, the physical make up to allow the "potential" for cognitive awareness. It is not a guarantee, nor is it necessarily there upon birth. Cognitive self awareness as drkitten describes it is a higher level of cognition, and so its appropriate to say that either a particular subject has reached that level or not. While the child has the potential capacity, it has not yet reached that level. Whether or not the mirror test is a foolproof way of evaluating or identifying this level of congition in all animals is a different question.

Cognitive self-awareness would presumably be tied to a highly complex level of consciousness. Consciousness more than likely being a product of the brain is developed over time. To say you have almost reached a particular level of cognitive development is still to not have reached that level. I think, and feel free to correce me if I'm wrong, this is more what new drkitten meant.

To me those that can pass the mirror test even with modifications are obviously displaying cognitive self-awareness. However I would put in a caveat that yes, those failing are not necessarily not self-aware, as its possible the mirror test does not fit appropriately with the sensory inputs and how they relate to all animals cognitive self-awareness.

[Kaylee]

Originally Posted by new drkitten
The idea of "a gradual range of awareness" is one such. What, exactly, does that mean? I can, for example, submit that there is a clearly defined capacity of being able to look at a mirror image and see "oneself" (i.e. to recognize the image as being a self-image). I similarly submit that there is a clearly defined capacity of seeing "another" -- another member of my species with whom I must compete. But what possible intermediate capacity could there be?

We can approach this in two ways. Behaviourally, I can point to (self)-grooming behavior as evidence that a creature recognizes the image as itself. I can point to hostility, domination, submission -- essentially social behaviors -- as evidence that a creature sees "another" in the mirror. But what kind of behavior could I point to as evidence that a creature is at an intermediate level?

So since I don't believe there is a well-defined intermediate state at all, I don't think the idea of a continuous gradation of consciousness makes sense. You can't leap a chasm in two bounds.
Ah. OK. Well other behaviors that an animal could demonstrate towards its image in the mirror could include indifference, a brief mild interest, or to keep repeatedly checking the front and back of the mirror. If you want to say that these behaviors don't tell us conclusively what is going on in their brains, I agree. (But I'm willing to bet the last one may indicate confusion. :) ).

I haven't eaten dinner yet today -- so I'll relate the rest of my post to food. Here's a purely speculative range of awareness relating between animals at different stages of complexity in the science classification system and their food. I won't relate every stage to a specific animal, because I want to discuss this in a general way.

1. Eats on a reflexive level, if it sees appropriate food nearby it will eat it. May not have hunger pangs.

2. Eats when it has hunger pangs. When that occurs it may just get flooded with an overwhelming urge to eat. No thoughts as such, just instinctual urges and perhaps some emotions.

3. Eats when hungry, and is aware that it is hungry -- on a certain level it conceptualizes "I am hungry".
It is also be able to react to food as a reward (relates to the rewarder on a social level, and perhaps even attaches emotional value (e.g., feels security when sees its food) to the food) and alters its behavior to get food as a reward.

Stage 1 may be where the household goldfish is at. It does not stop eating when it has enough food, and it can overeat itself to death. I have heard of cases where that happened (anecdotal evidence).
I would assume it's likely that a goldfish doesn't have hunger pangs if he constantly eats anyway.

Stage 3 may relate to the family dog. Let's change the scenario to water and let's say a family has two dogs -- Buddy and Rusty. Buddy sees Rusty drinking water out of his bowl and he's leaving him alone and not going to his own bowl of water either.
Buddy mental capabilities might be strong enough to:
* Know what the water is for.
* Know that if Rusty is drinking water he is thirsty.

It's possible that on a certain level Buddy knows Rusty is thirsty and that he is not. On a certain level he may be able to conceptualize (even though dogs don't have a spoken language like humans do) "I am not thirsty." Even if a replacement mirror test could be devised to fit Buddy's senses and particular interests -- and he still failed, I would argue that a level of self-awareness can exist below the cognitive level of being able to recognize oneself from a different angle.

This is all pure speculation. I don't have a clue on how to gather evidence for it. We can't have conversations with animals so how can we really know at what level they are thinking? We can deduce some things, if we have cleverly designed tests. However, I think there is a limitation on how much we can deduce from various tests, and because there is a limitation I'm not willing to conclude that for every animal we can't come up with a test for that their mental capacity is therefore at the lowest level.

I agree that it's possible that there may be no animal below the intelligence level of a chimp that has a sense of self-awareness, but I also think it's possible that there may be.


There are actually a lot of areas where nature does, in fact, show such sharp variations, especially when we're talking about a system of capacities. An example of this is in human language.

That’s a great example. Another one may be a limited ability to count (or be able to judge if small quantities are equivalent). I vaguely recall that there were some experiments that showed that some primates can tell if they are receiving more or less bananas then their fellow primates.

I still am inclined towards the idea of continuous graduation vs. demarcation points, but I now understand a little better your point of view. To switch to a different analogy -- a species can either count (in a fashion) up to 3 or 4 or it can't. So that's a demarcation point. But after that of course, humans have proven that there can grasp the additional complexity in arithmetic and mathematics.

Just to ramble a bit more before I finish this post -- I tend to think of Koko (the gorilla that is reported to know about a 1000 signs of Gorilla Sign Language) as a lost opportunity. Yes, I think its great that the researchers that work with her proved that a gorilla has this capacity to learn sign. However, if somehow they could teach a gorilla reared in the wild some GSL, and then try to use him as a translator to find out exactly how complex the gorillas' natural communication system is (if any)-- I think that would be far more valuable and interesting to know. (There may have been some work in this area that I don't know about).

BTW, which school of thought in psychology do you subscribe to?

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
From your own link: "Reflexes can be built-in or learned."
… During development in the womb reflexes form by strengthening some neural pathways and weakening others, so I think it is fair to say that it is a learning process.

I missed that statement and admit to being mystified as to how reflexes can be learned, particularly the ones listed on the wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex), such as the gag reflex and patellar reflex.

I have always thought of learning as a process that required that we be conscious and actively involved in the process. It’s a startling thought to me to think that this is something that could occur in the womb. Just out of curiosity, is this a hypothesis shared by any other school of thought in psychology?

It is funny, but it raises a serious question: do we really, honestly, conceptualise our mirror image as 'ourselves' and if so what exactly does that mean? Or have we simply learned to avoid thinking of our mirror image as another human? Perhaps we have not really solved the paradox of seeing someone else and understanding it is ourselves but instead we just ignore this apperent contradiction.

I don't think I honestly ever met a baby who had a chance to reason it out for herself. Their families/neighbors/etc. just tell them over and over again -- see that's you! look at your nose! or the like.

A lot of fairy tales and magical stories involve magical mirrors you can walk through to get to the other side or that have mirror images in them that don't always do exactly what we do. Perhaps these stories are a reflection (ha!) that we have not solved the mirror paradox and are still mystified by those things.
Heh. I intellectually understand mirror writing. But deep down … it disturbs me a little … :p

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by voidx
The computer has no capacity built into it, in this situation to want to "know" what question it will be asked. It has no predictive capacity, it merely has canned responses. If as a statement is sometimes misleading. It is sometimes more appropriate to term it as When. When asked X reply Z. That's it, that's the limit of any capacity for the program. Unless you restrict a child's brain to the same degree its obviously an illogical comparison.

True, but one might be able to code a closer model using OOP (object oriented programming). You would need objects representing the child, Tigger, the psychologist and the box. The child and Tigger could have states (field values) that would represent what they know and when they knew it. The psychologist states could be the current question (that she asks the child) and the current item (put in the box) along with their respective timestamps. The box could have states that would represent what item it holds and when it received it. There could be a GUI screen to allow input for the psychologist's questions and items she puts in the box. This design would make the program fairly flexible IMHO.

…
That human child's brain has by default, the physical make up to allow the "potential" for cognitive awareness. It is not a guarantee, nor is it necessarily there upon birth. Cognitive self awareness as drkitten describes it is a higher level of cognition, and so its appropriate to say that either a particular subject has reached that level or not. While the child has the potential capacity, it has not yet reached that level. Whether or not the mirror test is a foolproof way of evaluating or identifying this level of congition in all animals is a different question.
…
To me those that can pass the mirror test even with modifications are obviously displaying cognitive self-awareness. However I would put in a caveat that yes, those failing are not necessarily not self-aware, as its possible the mirror test does not fit appropriately with the sensory inputs and how they relate to all animals cognitive self-awareness.
Nicely rephrased and a nice summary! :)

Cognitive self-awareness would presumably be tied to a highly complex level of consciousness. Consciousness more than likely being a product of the brain is developed over time. To say you have almost reached a particular level of cognitive development is still to not have reached that level. I think, and feel free to correce me if I'm wrong, this is more what new drkitten meant.
I suspect that a less rich level of self-awareness also exists in some animals that don't have the cognitive ability to recognize themselves from a different angle. (I went into this more in my 04-07-2005 02:40 AM GMT post.)

I admit that I can't think of a way to gather evidence for this idea. :( Some of us may not get any closer to agreement, but I think this has been a fun thread, and I enjoyed getting to understand other people's points of view. :) And now I know what one school of thought in psychology means by self-awareness also. :)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Shera

That’s a great example [human language]. Another one may be a limited ability to count (or be able to judge if small quantities are equivalent). I vaguely recall that there were some experiments that showed that some primates can tell if they are receiving more or less bananas then their fellow primates.

I still am inclined towards the idea of continuous graduation vs. demarcation points, but I now understand a little better your point of view. To switch to a different analogy -- a species can either count (in a fashion) up to 3 or 4 or it can't. So that's a demarcation point. But after that of course, humans have proven that there can grasp the additional complexity in arithmetic and mathematics.

Past Edit Deadline, but wanted to add:

Conversely species with lower cognitive abilities may not be able to effectively count small quantities but they can know if they received anything or not. For example, I suspect that the brown goat can't tell that he only got 2 carrots and that the white goat got 3, but he would know if he had received any carrots at all or not.

In regard to language -- yes no other species comes close to having human speech (and that's a great example of a steep increase in cognative capacity). But still, while some species are mute, I believe that others do have a signaling system that varies in complexity. So while its a tremondous leap, it's not a leap from no communication at all to human speech. There are various types of communication that occurs in between (albeit much simpler).

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
No, in all there is some self-concept ("me").

I assumed you meant that the animals behaved as though they were thinking those statements (since we can't know what they are really thinking), because to actually attribute understanding of the "me" concept foregoes the conclusion:

The first involves an ability to pass the mirror test without having to equate one's mirror image with oneself. Tell me, how does knowing "I do things" not equal self-awareness? How can a self know that an image is imitating it without being aware of itself?
The second and third do not necessarily mean having an ability to pass the mirror test.
You didn't address my objection to the second, and in both, the same problem arises. They contain the concept "me" which requires self-awareness.
Something must be instantaneous for it to be "all or nothing". If it is not instantaneous than there is midpoint in time and thus not all or nothing.
You didn't answer my question here, either.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Shera
Stage 1 may be where the household goldfish is at.

I don't have a source for this, since it was explained at a lecture at another university, but fish have been conditioned to pull on a string to get food.

BTW, which school of thought in psychology do you subscribe to? I think new drkitten may have been overstating the point when he said it would be hard to get different schools to agree on anything. Yes, they debate over certain things, but the intention is that all the perspectives of psychology are complementary. I had a text that equated it to one school seeing a circle where another saw a rectangle, which in combination revealed they were looking at a cylinder. So while people may align themselves more with the views of one or two perspectives, that certainly doesn't mean they reject the value of the others. The same text lists these points of view: Neuroscience, Evolutionary, Behaviour Genetics, Psychodynamic (dealing with the unconscious mind), Behavioural, Cognitive, Social-Cultural. You can see that they don't really contrast, but overlap...

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Shera
I missed that statement and admit to being mystified as to how reflexes can be learned
Thank you! It is as if when I linked to that page on newborn reflexes, Earthborn didn't even read it... the walking reflex is only one of many that does not persist after supposedly being "learned", and others, like the sucking reflex, have no referent inside the womb. Or is there a uterine nipple I don't know about? If you persist with reflexes being learned behaviour, then how (again) do you explain the withdrawal reflex that doesn't even involve the brain?!

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Shera
I have always thought of learning as a process that required that we be conscious and actively involved in the process.
Ooo, definitely not. Just wanted to clear that up. However:
It’s a startling thought to me to think that this is something that could occur in the womb. Just out of curiosity, is this a hypothesis shared by any other school of thought in psychology?As seen by the degree of supporting evidence, Earthborn was purely speculating, which was new drkitten's complaint...

[voidx]

Originally posted by Shera
True, but one might be able to code a closer model using OOP (object oriented programming). You would need objects representing the child, Tigger, the psychologist and the box. The child and Tigger could have states (field values) that would represent what they know and when they knew it. The psychologist states could be the current question (that she asks the child) and the current item (put in the box) along with their respective timestamps. The box could have states that would represent what item it holds and when it received it. There could be a GUI screen to allow input for the psychologist's questions and items she puts in the box. This design would make the program fairly flexible IMHO.

True enough. However while fairly flexible, it would still fall short of the processing power of even a childs brain. The original analogy was that the program could answer the question in the same way the child did. However its demonstrable that a simple program does not in fact answer the question by the same process as a child. While the above example gets closer, it only gets closer because of a marked increase of complexity, and even then, its still lacking. So we're left saying that a computer program modelling on the complexity of a child's brain, if possible, could answer the question by the same process. While this is conceivably possible, it really doesn't prove anything one way or the other.


Nicely rephrased and a nice summary! :)

Thanks. The benefit sometimes of coming into a thread late and getting to read everything first :D.


I suspect that a less rich level of self-awareness also exists in some animals that don't have the cognitive ability to recognize themselves from a different angle. (I went into this more in my 04-07-2005 02:40 AM GMT post.)

I personally think that the human level of self-awareness is not so far achievable by any other animal. Our complex self-awareness is very directly facilitated by language, which provides us with internal dialogue and the ability to conceptualize and label things. So by default any animal's ability to display self-awareness is likely not as pervasive as ours because of the lack of language.

Because of that we're forced to go on visual behavioural queues. Which admittedly is a little more difficult. That to me is more what the mirror test is trying to achieve. Instead of saying that there is a less rich level of self-awareness for animals, I'd simply say that humans alone have an added ability to quantify or communicate their self-awareness because of language. However, that added ability isn't what is being tested for in the mirror test. I also don't think anyone truly believes it is THE test for self-awareness. It certainly is a reasonable basis for a test though in many respects.

[Placebo]

Originally posted by me

Just for the record, the dictionaries define the following:
- Aware of oneself, including one's traits, feelings, and behaviors
- Realization of oneself as an individual entity or personality

Originally posted by ReFLeX
Don't you still have these in a lucid dream? Why do you think that points to an intermediary between self-awareness and non-awareness. When I dream, I am always very aware that I am a self that is having experiences.

After having motivated myself to perform some particular exercise in a dream, I may have a 'semi- lucid' as described earlier I find myself saying 'oh well, I'm just dreaming'

So yes, on a level I'm realising myself.
However it is stunted in that I will continue to follow the dream and not fully realise the situation and recall my previous purposes.
(ie unable to fully reflect on thoughts)

I feel that those who do not agree with the gradual self-awareness in this thread are attributing a particular test result as being a yes/no answer and thus an on/off attribute.
I see that as a logical fallacy.

The mirror test by it's definition is very limited in responses that can be measured. Having the animal TELL us what he thinks would be far more helpful and granular as an answer to 'How much are you really aware of yourself'.
However full accuracy is elusive even with toddlers.
We have no 'self awareness scale' because we have no accurate way to measure an animal on that scale.

The mirror can only tell us if the animal has passed a POINT along the possible slope to full self consciousness (which I believe not even all humans possess to full capacity)

Good discussion all ;)

BTW, new drkitten, do you have any good links on evidence based psychology?
I often ponder about machine learning systems and evidence based psychology could greatly help my understanding.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by voidx
computer program modelling on the complexity of a child's brain...
My bad. This thread has gotten long and I had forgotten that the entire point of the first post on this scenario (Child, Tigger, mystery box and Researcher) was to show evidence for the child's cognitive awareness and ability to "know" Tigger's mental state, even when it's counterfactual. I agree with that point, and I did from the beginning.

Unfortunately I demonstrated my reflexive tendency to draft out programs at the drop of the hat. :D So I suspect that I have just provided evidence for one of Earthborn's beliefs, that all behavior is a combination of reflexes and instincts -- even though I don't agree with that. ;)

==

I second Placebo's comment: good discussion all! :)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by ReFLeX
I don't have a source for this, since it was explained at a lecture at another university, but fish have been conditioned to pull on a string to get food.
I liked to know more about this before I develop any new conclusions :). I suspect that the different fish species' intelligence vary widely.

I think new drkitten may have been overstating the point when he said it would be hard to get different schools to agree on anything. Yes, they debate over certain things, but the intention is that all the perspectives of psychology are complementary. I had a text that equated it to one school seeing a circle where another saw a rectangle, which in combination revealed they were looking at a cylinder. So while people may align themselves more with the views of one or two perspectives, that certainly doesn't mean they reject the value of the others. The same text lists these points of view: Neuroscience, Evolutionary, Behaviour Genetics, Psychodynamic (dealing with the unconscious mind), Behavioural, Cognitive, Social-Cultural. You can see that they don't really contrast, but overlap...
That's interesting to know, thanks. But it does seem that drkitten is not a fan of Dr. B.F. Skinner or behaviorism… And I do suspect that some schools of thought in psychology are discredited by some people. For example, not everyone agrees with Jung's concept of collective unconscious and many people think that Freud was nuts. :D

If you persist with reflexes being learned behaviour, then how (again) do you explain the withdrawal reflex that doesn't even involve the brain?!
I now suspect that Wikipedia got a little sloppy there, and when saying that reflexes could be learned was referring to conditional reflexes -- a concept studied by Pavlov. Further down the Wikipedia Reflex page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflex) under the Mechanism section is this sentence:

Ivan Pavlov unintentionally launched the study of conditioning by establishing a way of producing what he called "conditional reflexes", i.e. reflexes that would only be seen conditional on previous experiences of the subject.

Click on conditioning and scroll down to the section under Pavlov's Dogs:

The most famous example of conditioning involves the development of conditional salivary responses in Pavlov's dogs. If a tone was reliably sounded before the dogs were fed, the dogs would eventually start salivating when they heard the tone, even if no food was present. The dog's responses (salivation) to the tone are said to be conditional upon the dogs' experience with the pairings of the tone and food. Dogs that have not experienced this condition do not salivate when they hear tones. Pavlov's dogs are therefore said to have been conditioned. Their reactions to the tone have been changed through experience.

Anyway I agree that conditional reflexes are learned -- but if regular reflexes are also learned, then I would like to see the studies that say so. (For example, I don't think its learned behavior when people (or dogs) salivate while eating -- I think that is how our bodies are designed, in this case its an important part of our digestive system.)

In regard to "doesn't even involve the brain", some people don't believe that every aspect of learning involves the brain. For example, athletes when training aim for muscle memorization. Can't find a good web site on this -- but my understanding is that some cells are affected locally which improves speed and accuracy, and not just because of increased muscle strength and/or flexibility. There is literally learning occurring at the local level outside the brain. (If someone can give a better explanation -- please do.)

Shera
I have always thought of learning as a process that required that we be conscious and actively involved in the process.
Ooo, definitely not. Just wanted to clear that up.
Do you have any examples of when learning takes place when we are not conscious and not actively involved?

[Jeff Corey]

Originally posted by Shera
I liked to know more about this before I develop any new conclusions :). I suspect that the different fish species' intelligence vary widely.
...Do you have any examples of when learning takes place when we are not conscious and not actively involved?
I have trained common goldfish and tilapia to press an illuminated lever for food. Goldfish seem to condition more readily, but they have been domesticated for almost 2000 years.
I wonder if we could call these fish "conscious", even though they clearly demonstrate learning.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Jeff Corey
I have trained common goldfish and tilapia to press an illuminated lever for food. Goldfish seem to condition more readily, but they have been domesticated for almost 2000 years.
I wonder if we could call these fish "conscious", even though they clearly demonstrate learning.
Wow, I have to say I'm very surprised. I've always suspected that goldfish were just some form of animated seaweed. Just joking, but they sure do seem dumb.

So I don't know, do you think it was (classical) conditioning? And is that really at the same level as learning? I not sure we could call them conscious either. ;)

[Mercutio]

We ran goldfish on concurrent VI schedules in our lab, and found that their behavior was explained by the matching law...as seen in rats & pigeons...and of course, people. (edited to add: this is, of course, operant conditioning, and not classical.)

I have also seen character-recognition tests in chickens, which almost exactly match human reaction-time studies in support of the pandemonium model of character recognition in people.

We had a behaviorist here for decades who had a standard question at any colloquium--a cognitive psychologist would present something, and Dr. Baum would ask "If I could train a pigeon to do that--and I could--would you say that the pigeon also has these cognitive mechanisms?" His point, invariably, was that he could explain the same phenomena through learning history and shaping of a complex behavior.

"Unreconstructed Behaviorists"? Are there non-behavioral cognitive psychologists around, still relying on introspection?

[Jeff Corey]

Shera,
Operant conditioning is a form of learning - a change in behavior as a function of experience. And people have been shown to learn various responses without being able to describe the behavior or contingencies that controlled them.
And I recall seeing a video of some of Robert Epstein's Columban studies where he trained a pigeon to pass the mirror test as well as solve "insight" problems.

[Darat]

Originally posted by Jeff Corey
I have trained common goldfish and tilapia to press an illuminated lever for food. Goldfish seem to condition more readily, but they have been domesticated for almost 2000 years.
I wonder if we could call these fish "conscious", even though they clearly demonstrate learning.

You are really lazy, why couldn’t you just get up and press the lever yourself if you wanted food.

Seriously how does this tie in with the often quoted "you've the memory of a goldfish" and the often heard "goldfish only have a 10 second memory"? Or is that just akin to "we only use 10% of our brain"?


(Edited because "submit" does not mean the same as "preview".)

[Jeff Corey]

Originally posted by Darat
You are really lazy, why couldn’t you just get up and press the lever yourself if you wanted food.

Seriously how does this tie in with the often quoted "you've the memory of a goldfish" and the often heard "goldfish only have a 10 second memory"? Or is that just akin to "we only use 10% of our brain"?


(Edited because "submit" does not mean the same as "preview".)
I never heard the "goldfish only have a 10 second memory". Anyone who has fed goldfish on a daily basis has probably observed them swimming up to get food when a person walks over to the tank.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Darat
You are really lazy, why couldn’t you just get up and press the lever yourself if you wanted food.
I'm so lazy, I trained my dog to drool on my behalf...

Seriously how does this tie in with the often quoted "you've the memory of a goldfish" and the often heard "goldfish only have a 10 second memory"? Or is that just akin to "we only use 10% of our brain"?
I think you got it in one. These goldfish certainly "remembered". They responded to the changed contingencies, anyway--if you wish to infer a stored memory from that, it would be consistent with cognitive psychology.


(Edited because "submit" does not mean the same as "preview".) did you learn to do that, or was it reflexive? See? This lever-pressing, button-pushing behavioral research is quite appropriate for humans...

[Placebo]

Operant conditioning sounds quite a bit like reinforcement learning in machine intelligence applications.
It is able to learn from experiences of reward/punishment and is able to determine which particular action caused the reward/punishment

[Darat]

Originally posted by Mercutio

I think you got it in one. These goldfish certainly "remembered". They responded to the changed contingencies, anyway--if you wish to infer a stored memory from that, it would be consistent with cognitive psychology.


did you learn to do that, or was it reflexive? See? This lever-pressing, button-pushing behavioural research is quite appropriate for humans...

Doesn't it just show how we (alright me at least) don't engage "the thinking machine" ;) unless something pushes our buttons ;).

Of course I know goldfish have longer memories then 10 seconds, my grandmother had a pond in her garden (well it was a sunken bath) in which she kept goldfish, they seemed to remember when feeding time was.

But it is something I've often heard; this article mentions it as well: http://nootropics.com/intelligence/smartfish.html

[Placebo]

Mythbusters on Discovery channel 'busted the myth' of the goldfish memory too, btw :)
They consulted an expert on cognition to confirm their findings.

(Out of interest, they taught goldfish to find their way through a maze)

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Placebo

BTW, new drkitten, do you have any good links on evidence based psychology?
I often ponder about machine learning systems and evidence based psychology could greatly help my understanding.

I should like to think that all (properly done) psychology is based upon evidence, since psychology is a subcategory of science, which in turn is a sub-category of evidence-based philosophy.

In context, my point is simply to study what subjects do, instead of to speculate from one's comfortable armchair about what might be going on. For example, Earthborn had an extremely good suggestion for an experiment involving rats, raising them from birth to be familiar with mirrors, and to see how this affects their interaction with mirrors. Unfortunately, Earthborn is apparently sufficiently familiar with rat behavior (or something) to be able to tell me without bothering to run the experiment what the results would be.

That's not psychology. That's theology.

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Shera

That's interesting to know, thanks. But it does seem that drkitten is not a fan of Dr. B.F. Skinner or behaviorism…


Dr. Skinner is (or more accurately was) an absolutely top-flight scientist and experimental designer. Unfortunately, the theoretical paradigm that has been associated with his name (behaviorism) is in my opinion, and as far as I can tell in the opinion of almost every practicing cogntive scientist, untrue.

A good description of "behaviorism," from the web, is as follows :
"A [s]chool of psychological thought founded by John B. Watson that regards only measurable and observable behavior as the appropriate subject matter for human psychology; in its strictest form, behaviorism holds that human behavior can be described in terms of principles that do not require consideration of unobservable mental events, such as ideas and emotions."

Unfortunately, the highlighted sentence has been proven false, both theoretically and experimentally. Ideas and emotions have observable consequences, which in the strict sense means that the idea of "unobservable mental events" is rather questionable, but more broadly means that descriptions of human behavior need to take into account mental events. One of the strongest pieces of evidence to support this is the utter inadequacy of the non-generative grammar approaches to language acquisition that were proposed prior to Chomsky. If behaviorism were true, humans couldn't produce "grammatical" sentences. Similarly, it's very difficult to produce a meaningful interpretation of the false-belief experiment that does not require that the child have an "idea." Active deception is another example -- and of course, one of the most convincing examples is our shared introspection, supported by evidence that we have ideas and emotions and that they have behavioral impact. Common sense reasoning is always suspect, but reasoning that violates commen sense is even more suspect.....

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Mercutio


"Unreconstructed Behaviorists"? Are there non-behavioral cognitive psychologists around, still relying on introspection?

Not very many. But there are also very few cognitive psychologists around who deny the explanatory capacity (or existence) of ideas and emotions.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by new drkitten

A good description of "behaviorism," from the web, is as follows :
"A [s]chool of psychological thought founded by John B. Watson that regards only measurable and observable behavior as the appropriate subject matter for human psychology; in its strictest form, behaviorism holds that human behavior can be described in terms of principles that do not require consideration of unobservable mental events, such as ideas and emotions." You will be happy to know that Skinner would disagree with this definition as much as you would. In fact it is a "good description of behaviorism" in the same sense as a definition of alchemy would be a good description of chemistry. Watson's behaviorism was "methodological behaviorism", and has supplanted by Skinner's "radical behaviorism" (yes, and a few other schools, but Skinner's is the most popular) which includes private behaviors (you would call them "mental", but Skinner would not say they are qualitatively different from public behaviors, rather they differ only in the number of potential observers) as well as public behaviors.

Bottom line: if you are basing your arguments about behaviorism on your definition above, you are fighting a strawman.

[ReFLeX]

Two behaviourists are in bed, afterwards...
The man turns to the woman and says, "It was good for you, was it good for me?"

[drkitten]

Originally posted by Mercutio
You will be happy to know that Skinner would disagree with this definition as much as you would.

Really? I would indeed be happy to know that if it were, in fact, true. But most of the sources I've been able to find in the course of my researches are at best ambiguous or contradictory on this subject : for example, from laborlaw's on-line encyclopedia:

"B.F Skinner was influential in defining radical behaviorism, a philosophy codifying the basis of his school of research (named the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, or EAB.) While EAB differs from other approaches to behavioral research on numerous methodological and theoretical points, radical behaviorism departs from methodological behaviorism most notably in accepting treatment of feelings, states of mind and introspection as existent and scientifically treatable. This is done by identifying them as something non-dualistic, and here Skinner takes a divide-and-conquer approach, with some instances being identified with bodily conditions or behavior, and others getting a more extended 'analysis' in terms of behavior. However, radical behaviorism stops short of identifying feelings as causes of behavior."

Or more briefly from W. W. Norton, "Radical behaviorism : An approach usually associated with BF Skinner which asserts that the subject matter of psychology is overt behavior, without reference to inferred, internal processes such as wishes, traits, or expectations."

From Skinner's own words, as quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "The third reason for behaviorism's appeal, popular at least historically, is related to its disdain for reference to inner mental or information processing as a means to explain behavior. The disdain is most vigorously exemplified in the work of Skinner. Skinner's skepticism about explanatory references to mental innerness may be expressed as follows.

"Behavior must be explained in terms which do not themselves presuppose the very thing that is explained. This is behavior. The outside (public) behavior of a person is not accounted for by referring to the inside (inner processing) behavior of the person (say, his or her internal problem solving or thinking) if, therein, the behavior of the person is unexplained. "The objection," wrote Skinner, "to inner states is not that they do not exist, but that they are not relevant in a functional analysis" (Skinner 1953, p. 35)."


and later from the same source, "So, Skinner pictures inner events as follows.[...] Inner events are those about which we may make introspective reports (and thus they are private, observationally), but their causal explanatory force is idle. Because inner events are private observationally, their patterns of reinforcement are more elusive, less easy to deliberately regulate, than overt behavior. However, inner events are responses, ultimately, to environmental stimuli."

Perhaps needless to say given my distate for Skinner's theories, I have few of his writings on my shelf. (I only have Walden Two, and it's in my "Utopian fiction" collection, between More and Wells.) I read Verbal Behavior a number of years ago and found Chomsky's comments absolutely on-target, one of the few time I found myself in agreement with Chomsky.

If "private" events are, in fact, not relevant for the explanation of human behavior, then any explanation of human behavior must be given in terms of external environmental stimuli. This seems to accord rather well with the central claim of behaviorism I previously posted that "human behavior can be described in terms of principles that do not require consideration of unobservable mental events, such as ideas and emotions."

I guess I don't see that an admission that mental events might exist, but have not explanatory capacity, is a substantial enough difference from the purely positivist claim that they don't exist. I believe that "private" or "mental" events can be causally efficacious and explanatory.

I think the bottom line is : what of Skinner's writings should I check out to understand more fully his opinions on the causal role of private events?

[voidx]

Originally posted by Placebo
After having motivated myself to perform some particular exercise in a dream, I may have a 'semi- lucid' as described earlier I find myself saying 'oh well, I'm just dreaming'

So yes, on a level I'm realising myself.
However it is stunted in that I will continue to follow the dream and not fully realise the situation and recall my previous purposes.
(ie unable to fully reflect on thoughts)

I think the pandemonium model of thought and the multiple drafts model clarifies many of these questions of dreams. What does it actually mean to be fully "alert" or "awake"? To me the simplest answer is how active the brain itself is in the various regions. When "awake" our brain is more active, its more completely dealing with external stimuli where when we are resting, generally it is doing this less completely. Now if you take the pandemonium concept, it would seem that when the brain is alert and moreso focusing on stimuli, it is more likely that stronger and more coherent ideas and thoughts from the pandemonium model take precedence, or exert control. When it is at rest it is unfocused, and so weaker, or more disjointed pandemonium concepts get through. However its possible even at rest for the brain to suddenly seize on something or suddenly focus the pandemonium model on something specific, therefore giving you a heightened sense of "alertness" or "awakeness". To me its more of a case of how focused is the pandemonium model of thought, and as related to that, how coherent are the thoughts and "awareness" that come through. I don't know that your more or less "aware" of something, its just that its perhaps more or less "coherent" to the experiencing consciousness. You are obviously aware of something, what the consciousness can comprehend about that awareness is where I think the variability comes in.


I feel that those who do not agree with the gradual self-awareness in this thread are attributing a particular test result as being a yes/no answer and thus an on/off attribute.
I see that as a logical fallacy.

I see self-awareness on pretty much the same level of awareness in general. What does it mean to only be partially self-aware? Or what does it mean to only be somewhat aware of some external thing. Again, I'd argue either you were aware of it, or you weren't. If you were aware of it, then what level of comprehension were you able to achieve based on that awareness. While obviously if you focus on something more it seems as though you are more aware of it. But is it actually that you are "more" aware of it, or merely that the resulting consciousness has had more time to analyze and comprehend that which you have become aware of. I don't think I become more aware of something the longer I look at or focus on it. Its just that the brain has more time, the pandemonium model, has more time to run and build scenario's upon that thing of which I'm aware.


The mirror test by it's definition is very limited in responses that can be measured. Having the animal TELL us what he thinks would be far more helpful and granular as an answer to 'How much are you really aware of yourself'.
However full accuracy is elusive even with toddlers.
We have no 'self awareness scale' because we have no accurate way to measure an animal on that scale.

Obviously its a dumbed down test for self-awareness by the very fact that no other animal can communicate with language how self-aware it is, so again, we're forced to rely on observed behaviour. Again, language allows us to conceptualize to ourselves how much we THINK we are aware of ourselves. It so far is a level of conceptual awareness reserved solely for humans because we have language. Does being able to quantify to oneself or to communicate to others how self-aware they are, increase that self-awareness fundamentally? Or is it merely that we understand our awareness on a different level because we have language with which to describe it to ourselves?

So is there in fact degree's of self-awareness, or rather are there just varying degree's to how competently any animal can be at quantifing/conceptualizing/describing that awareness to itself, and to others.

The mirror test is an attempt, I think, to measure that competency. And if not perfect, its still valid.


The mirror can only tell us if the animal has passed a POINT along the possible slope to full self consciousness (which I believe not even all humans possess to full capacity)

I don't believe there is a stream of consciousness. Consciousness is rather spotty and intermittent. We are completely unconsicous of all manner of things all the time I'd argue. When you sleep and remember nothing....no consciousness I'd argue. I see consciousness as a tool utilized by the brain to aid in analysis of experience. As such consciousness is always prompted by the brain, or brain activity, and never vice versa. Something kicks consciousness into action, it is then able to start conceptualizing and querying with the brain processes in order to do analysis. I don't think consciousness can kick start the brain into action. I'd argue strongly that whatever it was in the brain that queued consciousness to start is merely not part of the conscious experience and so it merely seems that you decided all on your own to start thinking about something.

So to that degree I don't think its a slope to full self consciousness. Either its conscious of the self or not at any particular point in time. However, what it can conceptualize and understand and communicate about the "self" to itself, or to others is dependant on the complexity of the brain. Its not more or less aware of its "self" it just might be that its conceptual idea of what its "self" is, is less complex.

Anyway I'm rambling now, so I'll stop :).

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by Shera
I have always thought of learning as a process that required that we be conscious and actively involved in the process.Obviously the thing that learns has to be actively involved in the process. Whether it needs to be concious depends on your definition of conciousness.

Learning at its most simple level can be thought of neural pathways strengthening themselves if they are successful and weakening themselves when they are not. Nerves are not just wires to connect body parts with the brain, they have a lot of processing power themselves. Even animals with no brain such as starfish or anemones are able to learn.

A foetus in the womb has to build its entire nervous system, so there is lots of strengthening of neural pathways there. Some neural circuits will grow in ineffective ways so they need to be destroyed. Therefore it is also weakening neural pathways. It is therefore learning and this should not really surprise anyone.Just out of curiosity, is this a hypothesis shared by any other school of thought in psychology?Probably. :) It is obviously happening, whether it is called 'learning' probably depends on the taste of people in those schools of psychology.I don't think I honestly ever met a baby who had a chance to reason it out for herself. Their families/neighbors/etc. just tell them over and over again -- see that's you! look at your nose! or the like.Good point. It shows that the idea that one's mirror image represents oneself could be something that is learned in a social environment. It would mean that an animal can pass the mirror test but not necessarily believe its mirror image is a representation of itself if it was not told to think of it that way.Anyway I agree that conditional reflexes are learned -- but if regular reflexes are also learned, then I would like to see the studies that say so.If they are not learned, you'll have to explain where else they come from. Soldered in by cyberneticists? Created by God?In regard to "doesn't even involve the brain", some people don't believe that every aspect of learning involves the brain.Not every aspect of learning involves the brain. I don't think that is even in dispute. You can take some nerves from a chicken embryo, put it in a petry dish and teach them stuff by feeding them electrical signals. Learning is what nerve cells do, and they don't exist only in the brain.

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by ReFLeX
Tell me, how does knowing "I do things" not equal self-awareness?It does equal self-awareness (which is my point) but self-awareness does not equal being able to pass the mirror test. Since the mirror test is a test of one aspect of self-awareness, it shows that if an animal can be self-aware without passing the mirror test then self-awareness if not an all-or-nothing, on-or-off thing. It means it can happen in different forms and nuances.You didn't address my objection to the second, and in both, the same problem arises. They contain the concept "me" which requires self-awareness.I don't see how that is a problem for what I am trying to argue.You didn't answer my question here, either.That's because the question is not relevant. It is not about how quick something must be for me not to consider it 'gradual'. It is about whether self-awareness is an all-or-nothing phenomenon without the possibility of there anything existing in between.

Whether I consider something gradual depends on what it is and not just how quick it changes. Graduality is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon either. Things can gradually go from 'sharp' to 'gradual' without there being an obvious distinction between the two.It is as if when I linked to that page on newborn reflexes, Earthborn didn't even read it...I've read it. I again ask: how does the fact that something exists after birth prove that it hasn't been learned before birth?like the sucking reflex, have no referent inside the womb. Or is there a uterine nipple I don't know about?Apperently. Surely you have seen those photos of babies in the womb sucking on their thumb?If you persist with reflexes being learned behaviour, then how (again) do you explain the withdrawal reflex that doesn't even involve the brain?!Learning does not necessarily necessitate a brain. If it did, animals without a brain could not learn and that is demonstratebly untrue.

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by voidx
However while fairly flexible, it would still fall short of the processing power of even a childs brain.True, but that is the point. DrKitten claimed that the reaction the child displays can only be understood with complex mental states and being able to attribute such mental states to others. If a machine can display the same reaction with much simpler machinery than the experiment is not able to differentiate between a complex mind and a simple machine.

It is not the point that the computer program has the same processing power as a child. The point is that the same problem can be solved with much less processing power.I personally think that the human level of self-awareness is not so far achievable by any other animal.That may be true. But could an experiment be designed to prove it?

[voidx]

Originally posted by Earthborn
True, but that is the point. DrKitten claimed that the reaction the child displays can only be understood with complex mental states and being able to attribute such mental states to others.

Technically he said he could not think of a strictly behaviourist explanation for it that did not invoke complex mental states, or assigning complex mental states to external objects, in the context of the child.


If a machine can display the same reaction with much simpler machinery than the experiment is not able to differentiate between a complex mind and a simple machine.

Its not trying to differentiate between a complex mind and a simple machine. Unless you think a childs behaviour actually has a possibility of working in the purely hard-wired analogy of the computer, then it really doesn't gain us much to posit it. It would mean assuming that its possible that a childs brain has all and every possible reaction hard-wired into it. I think this would be quite demonstrably false.


It is not the point that the computer program has the same processing power as a child. The point is that the same problem can be solved with much less processing power.

Any problem can be solved with less processing power if we know what the finite answers are. We can then merely hard-code them in on a condition, because we know that only those questions will be asked. Change the question slightly in the process of the experiment, and the computer will fail. Unless you believe its possible that our behaviour actually works this way, I'd argue that while technically true, its rather pointless to bring up.


That may be true. But could an experiment be designed to prove it?
Actually I'd like to rephrase that too "no animal has as complex a conceptual description of self because no other animal possess' the ability of language"

[Earthborn]

So I suspect that I have just provided evidence for one of Earthborn's beliefs, that all behavior is a combination of reflexes and instincts -- even though I don't agree with that. ;)Do you agree that everything a computer does is a combination of on/off switches? Even the most complex things such as playing movies, music or 3d games?

If so, do you consider it possible that hundreds of thousands of millions of nerve cells behaving reflexively can collectively form a complex mental life?Wow, I have to say I'm very surprised. I've always suspected that goldfish were just some form of animated seaweed. Just joking, but they sure do seem dumb.Putting any organism in a non-stimulating environment and giving them enough food to survive without having to do anything for it may make any organism seem stupid. Put a few bacteria in some rich nutrient and look how stupid they are. They do nothing but swim around randomly and eat a bit... How stupid! Now put them in a situation where they have to fight for their survival: very different behaviour.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by new drkitten
Really? I would indeed be happy to know that if it were, in fact, true. But most of the sources I've been able to find in the course of my researches are at best ambiguous or contradictory on this subject : for example, from laborlaw's on-line encyclopedia:

"[snip] However, radical behaviorism stops short of identifying feelings as causes of behavior."
True. That would be because it is impossible to directly manipulate feelings or thoughts, in order to establish causality. Unless you have figured out how to manipulate a feeling directly, without manipulating the environment. Skinner argues that both the feelings and the overt behaviors exist, and that both are behaviors (feelings being covert behavior) which are controlled by their environmental antecedents and consequences.

[snip]

If "private" events are, in fact, not relevant for the explanation of human behavior, then any explanation of human behavior must be given in terms of external environmental stimuli. This seems to accord rather well with the central claim of behaviorism I previously posted that "human behavior can be described in terms of principles that do not require consideration of unobservable mental events, such as ideas and emotions."
But of course, Skinner does look at "unobservable" (observable by only one person, actually) private events (again I would quibble with "mental"--the word has too much baggage), whereas Watson denies them. Human behavior includes these private behaviors; they are every bit of interest as overt behaviors. But suggesting that they are, themselves, causal, is to do our science an injustice. It is an answer like "because". A child will ask "because why?", and we should all ask "if this feeling influenced your behavior, well then what influenced the feeling?"

I guess I don't see that an admission that mental events might exist, but have not explanatory capacity, is a substantial enough difference from the purely positivist claim that they don't exist. I believe that "private" or "mental" events can be causally efficacious and explanatory.
Can you demonstrate causality? Manipulate mental events directly, without the environment? I must have missed some really big events in psychology if this is the case! I always thought that these mental events were inferred circularly from their alleged effects, as measured in reaction times or some other behavioral indication...This is why Skinner refers to them not as explanatory, but as "explanatory fictions".

I think the bottom line is : what of Skinner's writings should I check out to understand more fully his opinions on the causal role of private events? I have been looking for one I can link to online--I found a possibility, but not a favorite. One to read is "Why I am not a cognitive psychologist" (1977, Behaviorism, 5, 1-10); another is "The operational analysis of psychological terms" (1945, Psych Review, 52, 270-277).
One paper available online is The Origins of Cognitive Thought (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/skinner.htm) (1989). In particular, the sections toward the bottom, on "thinking" and "mind" will inform and (probably) infuriate you. In addition, there is an excellent behaviorism tutorial (http://psych.athabascau.ca/html/Behaviorism/) available, which will explain the different schools of behavioral thought, and why Watson's behaviorism is not at all what current behaviorism is. The tutorial is fairly lengthy, but worth it; even hammegk (in another thread, quite some time ago) found it useful in understanding my view.

[Jeff Corey]

Originally posted by new drkitten
...I read Verbal Behavior a number of years ago and found Chomsky's comments absolutely on-target, one of the few time I found myself in agreement with Chomsky...
That's funny. I read Verbal Behavior and Chomsky's review. I concluded that Chomsky couldn't have read it. How else can one explain Chomsky's critique of Skinner's S - R approach.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Jeff Corey
That's funny. I read Verbal Behavior and Chomsky's review. I concluded that Chomsky couldn't have read it. How else can one explain Chomsky's critique of Skinner's S - R approach. I have to run right now--do you, Corey, know if Kenneth McWhatsisname's response to Chomsky is available anywhere? Or have a citation for it, for interested parties?

[Jeff Corey]

Ken MacCorquodale's review of Chomsky's review was published in JEAB in 1970. I've a copy, but can't find it online.

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by new drkitten
Unfortunately, Earthborn is apparently sufficiently familiar with rat behavior (or something) to be able to tell me without bothering to run the experiment what the results would be.No, I told you what I expect the results to be. I don't think it is wrong to present predictions for the outcome of an experiment meant to prove a hypothesis.That's not psychology. That's theology.If you think 'theology' means 'dogma', then I guess your understanding of theology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theology) is similarly strawmanic as your understanding of behaviourism.

[Kaylee]

Between Jeff' Corey's & Mercutio's Thursday morning posts I spent almost an hour at the Google search engine… but it was worth it after I got done translating. :)

So we have goldfish that can press levers and swim mazes, chickens that can recognize letters almost as quickly as humans, and pigeons that can pass the same classic tests (mirror & insight tests) that the chimps did (does that mean I can't call my idiot neighbor a bird brain anymore unless I want to uh... compliment her???)….talk about paradigm shifts. My head is spinning. So either animals are a lot smarter than we think they are, or Nature is a truly excellent programmer and animals can do really nifty things with very little to work with….

[Kiless]

Originally posted by Jeff Corey
Ken MacCorquodale's review of Chomsky's review was published in JEAB in 1970. I've a copy, but can't find it online.

http://www.behavior.org/computer-modeling/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/computer-modeling/maccorquodale/maccorquodale-1970.cfm

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by new drkitten
my point is simply to study what subjects do, instead of to speculate from one's comfortable armchair about what might be going on.

I happened to see this earlier today in an iidb thread (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=94556&page=8&pp=25). An owner makes a convincing case on why she thinks her dog can recognize herself in the mirror. She just needed to be motivated...

I have a suspicion that those test results have been over-interpreted. It may be that dogs recognise from their reflections that they have a dot on them, and simply don't care.

The reason for my suspicion is this: I have a four-year-old labrador retriever bitch and a living-room with full-length windows along one side. At night, the entire living-room is duplicated in dim reflection in the windows. My dog spends a lot of time staring at the reflections in the windows: she doesn't treat her reflection as another dog, and she does treat my reflection as me--for instance, she directs pleading looks at my reflection when she wants me to open the door etc. I often notice that her reflection is watching me (and therefore that she is watching my reflection). That much is inconclusion. But a couple of months ago the dog was staring at my reflection to ask for the door to be opened as my mother walked by carrying a piece of furniture. Mum could not see the dog below the chair, and was on a course to tread on the dog. The dog was looking off in the opposite direction (at the window). And seeing Mum's reflection about to tread on her reflection, the dog got up hurriedly and got out of the way.

Anecdotal, uncontrolled, series of one etc. etc. etc. But I believe that my dog does identify with her own reflection. And it think that it would be worth re-designing the spot test to depend on something that we can be sure that dogs care about: their failure to remove dots could result either from lack of recognition or lack of motivation.

Emphasis added.

A gentler, kinder way of motivating a dog to move could be found other than threatening to trample her ... but someone could use this scenario as a starting point to try to create a more appropriate mirror test for dogs and then see if they could successfully replicate the results.

Putting on my devil's advocate hat, it would be hard to rule out the sense of smell and sound as other clues that the dog was using. But perhaps the owner was right and the dog moved based solely on what she saw in the mirror.

The post is on page 8 of a very long thread and timestamped September 15, 2004, 11:47 PM. If you have the time, the first half or so of the thread is pretty interesting -- it talks about Koko the gorilla who knows sign, dolphins, etc. .

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Shera
Between Jeff' Corey's & Mercutio's Thursday morning posts I spent almost an hour at the Google search engine… but it was worth it after I got done translating. :)

So we have goldfish that can press levers and swim mazes, chickens that can recognize letters almost as quickly as humans, and pigeons that can pass the same classic tests (mirror & insight tests) that the chimps did (does that mean I can't call my idiot neighbor a bird brain anymore unless I want to uh... compliment her???)….talk about paradigm shifts. My head is spinning. So either animals are a lot smarter than we think they are, or Nature is a truly excellent programmer and animals can do really nifty things with very little to work with…. :D Just a rough guess, but my guess is that with this day's work, you now understand behaviorism better than 99.9% of the population. That certainly includes academicians. You might want, if you have access to it (sorry, my link only has the abstract), to look at the article Case histories in the great power of steady misrepresentation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1482006&dopt=Abstract) to get a bit of a sense of the extent to which behaviorism is misunderstood.

(percentage freely acknowledged to be a wild guess, and more of a rant than a serious claim.)

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Kiless
http://www.behavior.org/computer-modeling/index.cfm?page=http%3A//www.behavior.org/computer-modeling/maccorquodale/maccorquodale-1970.cfm Oh, my Ed.


Kiless, you do indeed kick arse and do science.



Thanks.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
Obviously the thing that learns has to be actively involved in the process. Whether it needs to be concious depends on your definition of conciousness.
Just curious -- what's your definition of conciousness? I would define it as a state where one is aware of one's self and one's environment -- and yes, I would say that it covers a gradual range. :)

However since you tell me that both animals without brains and fertilized eggs can learn … that definition doesn't work. Assuming that brainless animals and fetilized eggs can learn, how would you adjust the definition?

Learning at its most simple level can be thought of neural pathways strengthening themselves if they are successful and weakening themselves when they are not. Nerves are not just wires to connect body parts with the brain, they have a lot of processing power themselves. Even animals with no brain such as starfish or anemones are able to learn.

A foetus in the womb has to build its entire nervous system, so there is lots of strengthening of neural pathways there. Some neural circuits will grow in ineffective ways so they need to be destroyed. Therefore it is also weakening neural pathways. It is therefore learning and this should not really surprise anyone.


Shera
I don't think I honestly ever met a baby who had a chance to reason it out for herself. Their families/neighbors/etc. just tell them over and over again -- see that's you! look at your nose! or the like.

It shows that the idea that one's mirror image represents oneself could be something that is learned in a social environment. .
I agree.

It would mean that an animal can pass the mirror test but not necessarily believe its mirror image is a representation of itself if it was not told to think of it that way. .

If an animal that passed the mirror test was not taught to think of it that way, I think it would have ended up teaching himself to see it that way. That belief just seems much simpler than any possible alternative. But of course this is speculative, no one can step into an animal's head and ask him what he is thinking.

Shera
Anyway I agree that conditional reflexes are learned -- but if regular reflexes are also learned, then I would like to see the studies that say so.

If they are not learned, you'll have to explain where else they come from. Soldered in by cyberneticists? Created by God?
I never thought of the growth process from a fertilized egg through a newborn baby as one that involved learning. Especially since it seems to happen so effortlessly from the fertilized egg's point of view and doesn't appear to involve awareness at least not during a considerable part of the growth stage -- so this is certainly a paradigm shift for me. Just out of curiosity -- are you saying that this is just another stimulus -> response situation? And that the DNA/RNA chemical reaction is the stimulus?

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Shera
Just curious -- what's your definition of conciousness? I would define it as a state where one is aware of one's self and one's environment -- and yes, I would say that it covers a gradual range. :)
Great--now what is your definition of "aware" and "self"? I think we are ok with "environment".

Earthborn seems to take an extreme stance in defining "learning" to include reflexes. There is another perspective which reaches the same end but does not say that such learning takes place in utero in each individual...at least, not explicity.

"Learning" is often defined (within behaviorism) as a relatively permanent change in behavior brought about by interaction with the environment (or words to that effect). As such, the learning of reflexes is sometimes termed "phylogenetic learning"--that is, learning that takes place not over the lifespan of an individual organism, but which takes place over the history of a species (or longer). Natural selection is, after all, looking at changes (in both physiology and behavior) as a result of interaction with the environment (selection pressures). Same process as operant conditioning (more or less--essentially, the rule "what works sticks around, what does not work gets dropped"--applies to both), but a vastly different time span.

In that sense, instincts (which term, by the way, behaviorists don't tend to like, but I won't go into that) are indeed the result of learning... but at the species level rather than the organismic.

Not sayin' it's the last word, just a different perspective on the issue.

[Kaylee]

Earthborn
Do you agree that everything a computer does is a combination of on/off switches? Even the most complex things such as playing movies, music or 3d games?

If so, do you consider it possible that hundreds of thousands of millions of nerve cells behaving reflexively can collectively form a complex mental life?

( Warning -- this isn't my field -- wrong terms may be used!)

Since you put it that way, and since you have also offered a definition of learning as strengthening neural pathways (as opposed to defining it as altering behavior or gaining information - -- yes I consider it possible.

The reason is because I now realize (or rather assume) that you are expressing yourself on this subject in a micro way, and I am thinking about this subject (awareness and behavior) in a macro way. It almost makes me wonder if the subject should be divided into micro and macro-behavior. :)

I prefer to break down behavior into 4 categories:
* reflexes
* instincts
* learned behavior
* emotionally driven behavior

And I also think there is value in using other abstract terms like cognitive awareness and mental states.

Its easier for me to think about what is happening in any given situation using the more descriptive and abstract terms, instead of just reflexes and instincts. To make an analogy, I prefer to speak about behavior and awareness on a more abstract level for the same reason that I would prefer to code a program in a higher level programming language than in assembly language (a low level machine code).

However, I do realize that on a mechanical level, ultimately it's my subconscious that is implementing my behavior (all 4 subcategories of it ) on a micro level, which I believe you like to think of as reflexive. (I'm not entirely comfortable with that, because to me reflexes mean very specific things like the gag reflex or the knee-jerk reflex.) But now my question to you is, why do you choose to recognize instincts? Why not describe all behavior as reflexes?

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
It does equal self-awareness (which is my point) but self-awareness does not equal being able to pass the mirror test. This is still your unsupported opinion.
Since the mirror test is a test of one aspect of self-awareness, it shows that if an animal can be self-aware without passing the mirror test then self-awareness if not an all-or-nothing, on-or-off thing. If, If, If!
It means it can happen in different forms and nuances. Still if... still your unsupported opinion.
I don't see how that is a problem for what I am trying to argue. You're begging the question, that's how. If they don't pass the mirror test then you can't just assume they are self-aware as you please. Until you establish that an animal is self-aware, you cannot attribute a self-concept to it.
Graduality is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon either. The crux of my point. Supposing that you are either self-aware or you're not, that doesn't entail that while you gradually gain awareness there is a medium degree of awareness at that time.
how does the fact that something exists after birth prove that it hasn't been learned before birth?
This is not even close to anything I've ever said.

Apperently. Surely you have seen those photos of babies in the womb sucking on their thumb?Learning does not necessarily necessitate a brain. If it did, animals without a brain could not learn and that is demonstratebly untrue. Really... and they get nutrients from that thumb? But fine. What about the other reflex mentioned in the previous sentence, the rooting reflex. Brush the infant's cheek and it searches for the nipple. That comes from the thumb, too? And your explanation for the walking reflex, that it comes from kicking, is extremely weak. You would have to explain how the other five reflexes present at birth are "learned" before I would even give an inch of credence to your suppositions. And what exactly do these non-brains learn, pray tell?

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mercutio
:D Just a rough guess, but my guess is that with this day's work, you now understand behaviorism better than 99.9% of the population. That certainly includes academicians. You might want, if you have access to it (sorry, my link only has the abstract), to look at the article Case histories in the great power of steady misrepresentation (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=1482006&dopt=Abstract) to get a bit of a sense of the extent to which behaviorism is misunderstood.

(percentage freely acknowledged to be a wild guess, and more of a rant than a serious claim.)

LOL! Well I doubt that's true, but thanks anyway even if it's more of a rant than a claim. Thanks for the link also. :D

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mercutio
Great--now what is your definition of "aware" and "self"? I think we are ok with "environment".

LOL! I'm sure that within this thread we can come up with at least two opinions... Seriously, you did not challenge the phrase "gradual range", so does that mean that behaviorists believe in a range of awareness?

Not sayin' it's the last word, just a different perspective on the issue.

I appreciate it, it helps. And I like the concept that reflexes and instincts apply on the species level rather than to the individual -- that makes a lot of sense to me.

[Earthborn]

Just curious -- what's your definition of conciousness? I would define it as a state where one is aware of one's self and one's environment -- and yes, I would say that it covers a gradual range. :)Sounds like a good definition to me.However since you tell me that both animals without brains and fertilized eggs can learn ... that definition doesn't work.I don't see why it doesn't work. It just means that those are 'concious' (if you insist on using that term) too, in their own way.If an animal that passed the mirror test was not taught to think of it that way, I think it would have ended up teaching himself to see it that way. That belief just seems much simpler than any possible alternative. But of course this is speculative, no one can step into an animal's head and ask him what he is thinking.I think if an animal is smart enough to pass the mirror test on its own, it is also smart enough to think up a whole range of explanations. I don't think it will necessarily chose the simplest explanation. It might attribute the behaviour of its mirror image to magic, or self-awareness or any other similarly vague notion. :)Especially since it seems to happen so effortlessly from the fertilized egg's point of viewI don't think the people who have studied the process would describe it as effortless. I think of it more as a struggle for survival all the way through and the embryo or fetus might lose that struggle at any moment.Just out of curiosity -- are you saying that this is just another stimulus -> response situation?Think of 'stimulus -> response' as 'cause -> effect' in a neurological sense.And that the DNA/RNA chemical reaction is the stimulus?Well, if we are going to talk about chemical reactions we are no longer speaking about neurology but instead about the chemistry that underlies it. We are then talking about an even smaller scale so the word 'stimulus' may not be useful there.

[Earthborn]

The reason is because I now realize (or rather assume) that you are expressing yourself on this subject in a micro way, and I am thinking about this subject (awareness and behavior) in a macro way.I'm just saying that anything that happens on a macro way is reducible to the micro way. It is obvious that it is often impossible to meaningfully talk about things at a macro level by describing things in terms of the micro level. So we invent words like 'awareness' and 'will' and 'conciousness'. Those are vague words because we can't describe what at the micro level causes them. That's far too complicated.

I have no problem with using such words as long as they are used in the proper context. But when people start saying that only humans display them and animals do not, I protest. At the micro level those animals work the same as we do. And at the macro level they are not all that different from us. So if a particular behaviour is described as 'awareness' in humans and an animal displays similar behaviour, why not consider it 'awareness' as well? It may not be the exact same thing as that of humans, but then again the term is not rigorously defined anyway.

Some people are willing to expand those terms to animals that seem close enough to us in intelligence but for some reason refuse to acknowledge them in animals we can often outsmart. I don't see the point in that.But now my question to you is, why do you choose to recognize instincts? Why not describe all behavior as reflexes?I might describe all behaviour as reflexes or instincts. I think it is just a matter of scale. To use another computer analogy (they are handy but should not be taken too literally) think of reflexes as series of logic ports and instincts as logarithms. Instincts can be reduced to reflexes, which can be reduced to individual neurons.

Whether it is useful to describe behaviour in such reductionist terms depends on what it is. If someone hasn't eaten for a while and is searching for food, it is more useful to use macro terms: he is hungry and wants food. It is possible to understand this in reductionist terms, but it is not useful usually.

But some people allow the use of such terms when applied to humans, but they consider the use of such terms applied to less intelligent animals as 'anthropomorphising' and insist that we use reductionist terms. I think that is ridiculous.

[Earthborn]

If they don't pass the mirror test then you can't just assume they are self-aware as you please.If they do pass the mirror test I also can't assume they are self-aware as I please. 'Self-awareness' is too vague a term to do that. The only solution is to define self-awareness as the ability to pass the mirror test, but that is obviously problematic.Until you establish that an animal is self-aware, you cannot attribute a self-concept to it.Indeed. My statements are hypothetical thoughts a hypothetical animal might have if it does have some self-concept/self-awareness but does not pass a test for self-awareness the same way a human does. New DrKitten asked: "What would the creature actually be 'thinking' that would be in the mid-range between 'that creature I see in the middle is someone other than me' 'that creature I see in the middle is actually me'?"

Of course I can't imagine an answer for an animal that is not thinking.Supposing that you are either self-aware or you're not, that doesn't entail that while you gradually gain awareness there is a medium degree of awareness at that time.That is like saying "If you leap from point A to point B that doesn't entail there is a midpoint between A and B." I think it does mean that, but what do I know...This is not even close to anything I've ever said.Indeed. It is a question I ask.Really... and they get nutrients from that thumb?No, of course not.Brush the infant's cheek and it searches for the nipple. That comes from the thumb, too?Could be.And your explanation for the walking reflex, that it comes from kicking, is extremely weak.You may be right. If you can think of a different way it develops, propose it. My explanation was just one possible hypothesis about how it develops, but if there is another explanation I'm more interested in that.You would have to explain how the other five reflexes present at birth are "learned" before I would even give an inch of credence to your suppositions.I have to do no such thing. I'm sure you can come up with a whole list of reflexes and I don't have the person to invent all the hypotheses on how they develop. My point does not depend on my ability to do that.

My point is simply that these reflexes develop in the womb and they develop through a learning process by strengthening and weakening neural pathways. Everything that exists after birth must have developed before birth in the environment of the womb and therefore must have had a function inside the womb. That function may not be the same as the function it will have after birth. I just don't see how a reflex develops that has a function after birth but not before it.And what exactly do these non-brains learn, pray tell?Whatever is necessary to survive their environment.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
Sounds like a good definition to me.I don't see why it doesn't work.
Of course you do, silly, it agrees with you.
It just means that those are 'concious' (if you insist on using that term) too, in their own way. Ok, now you're just making things up. Or you have been all along.
I think if an animal is smart enough to pass the mirror test on its own, it is also smart enough to think up a whole range of explanations.
And more of the same. Your writing is more akin to philosophy, Earthborn, than science. i.e.:
Well, if we are going to talk about chemical reactions we are no longer speaking about neurology but instead about the chemistry that underlies it. We are then talking about an even smaller scale so the word 'stimulus' may not be useful there. Are you kidding me? Neurology is virtually founded on chemical reactions. Where are you getting this stuff from?

[Earthborn]

Of course you do, silly, it agrees with you.You make it sound like agreement is a bad thing.Ok, now you're just making things up. Or you have been all along.Depends on your definition of 'making things up' :)Your writing is more akin to philosophy, Earthborn, than science.I don't consider that a problem.Neurology is virtually founded on chemical reactions.Yes, and I have even explicitely said so. But do you think it is meaningful to talk about DNA/RNA reactions in terms of 'stimulus -> response' ? I don't mind if you do, I can argue either way if you want.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
If they do pass the mirror test I also can't assume they are self-aware as I please.
Why not? That's what it was designed for.

'Self-awareness' is too vague a term to do that. The only solution is to define self-awareness as the ability to pass the mirror test, but that is obviously problematic.
Err, no. I suggest you actually look at the Gallup paper in the OP to see what they were looking for.
Indeed. My statements are hypothetical thoughts a hypothetical animal might have if it does have some self-concept/self-awareness but does not pass a test for self-awareness the same way a human does.
Your statements are so hypothetical as to fail at relevance, lacking supporting data.
New DrKitten asked: "What would the creature actually be 'thinking' that would be in the mid-range between 'that creature I see in the middle is someone other than me' 'that creature I see in the middle is actually me'?"Of course I can't imagine an answer for an animal that is not thinking. Yeah, because guess what: science isn't done by just imagining things that could be true.

That is like saying "If you leap from point A to point B that doesn't entail there is a midpoint between A and B." I think it does mean that, but what do I know...
Who said anything about there being a space between point A and point B!? Or points, for that matter? You cannot equate self-awareness to a distance!
Indeed. It is a question I ask. Fine. The answer is: it doesn't. Your question is so vague it need not even apply to behaviour only.
Could be. Could be, then, that determinism is so pervasively true that your every behaviour is a built-in reflex inherited from a distant ancester. But, I'm just inventing theories that are basically contrary to known principles...

You may be right. If you can think of a different way it develops, propose it. My explanation was just one possible hypothesis about how it develops, but if there is another explanation I'm more interested in that.You are the one who says it develops. You have no evidence. I don't claim to know where reflexes come from, though I suspect genes have a lot to do with it. But I wouldn't assert it to be true without any corroboration.

I have to do no such thing. I'm sure you can come up with a whole list of reflexes and I don't have the person to invent all the hypotheses on how they develop. My point does not depend on my ability to do that.I never said you had to... unless you want me to believe you. You are "inventing hypotheses" based on your prior assumption, for which you have provided no support! Which renders your inventions irrelevant until you do so.

My point is simply that these reflexes develop in the womb and they develop through a learning process by strengthening and weakening neural pathways. It's quite clear you've completely made this up.

Everything that exists after birth must have developed before birth in the environment of the womb and therefore must have had a function inside the womb. That function may not be the same as the function it will have after birth. I just don't see how a reflex develops that has a function after birth but not before it.Therefore, it can't work that way, because Earthborn doesn't understand it! I would look up some reference for why reflexes are called "primitive", that is, they date back further than nine months, but at this point I don't think it would change your mind. Ha, no, the real reason is I don't feel like it.

Whatever is necessary to survive their environment. I thought it was obvious I was looking for something more specific.

[Earthborn]

Why not? That's what it was designed for.It was designed to investigate one particular aspect of self-awareness: the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror. It does not investigate anything else.Your statements are so hypothetical as to fail at relevance, lacking supporting data.Just like the statements by new drkitten which supposedly prove there is no middle ground to recognising oneself in a mirror and the total absence of self-awareness. Thank you for proving my point.Yeah, because guess what: science isn't done by just imagining things that could be true.I agree wholeheartedly! That's why drkitten shouldn't claim self-awareness is an all-or-nothing phenomenon without presenting evidence.Who said anything about there being a space between point A and point B!? Or points, for that matter? You cannot equate self-awareness to a distance!I do not equate self-awareness to a distance. I just provide an analogy.

Now if you can explain how a natural phenomenon can develop from not existing to existing without ever half existing, you may have a point.Fine. The answer is: it doesn't.Thank you. I agree.Your question is so vague it need not even apply to behaviour only.I don't see why the fact that it does not apply only to behaviour means that it is vague.Could be, then, that determinism is so pervasively true that your every behaviour is a built-in reflex inherited from a distant ancester.Okay. Interesting hypothesis. Could you explain how the reflexes are 'built-in' and how they are inherited?You are the one who says it develops. You have no evidence.I do have evidence that it develops: an embryo starts out without reflexes or even a nervous system, it grows and nine months later it has a complex nervous system and millions of reflexes. I think that is evidence of development. It is only a question of how it develops.I don't claim to know where reflexes come from, though I suspect genes have a lot to do with it.I also suspect genes have a lot to do with it. In fact I am certain of it. But the genes can only explain where the proteins come from that form the child, not how it forms. That must be explained by the environment of those proteins.You are "inventing hypotheses" based on your prior assumption, for which you have provided no support! Which renders your inventions irrelevant until you do so.But not necessarily my prior assumption, which is all that matter to me.It's quite clear you've completely made this up.True. But is there any alternative? Since it is very similar to how other tissues are known to form, why assume it works differently for nervous tissue?I would look up some reference for why reflexes are called "primitive", that is, they date back further than nine months, but at this point I don't think it would change your mind.I'm fairly certain that my reflexes don't date back further than nine months before my birth, because before that time I didn't even exist. Somehow I obtained them during those nine months. I don't think my mother's nervous system and mine were connected so she couldn't have 'uploaded' them. I don't think God instilled them in me. The idea that they are all 'encoded' in my genome also sounds a bit farfetched. So perhaps I just acquired them during my interaction with my environment, the way I have acquired everything mental and behavioural ever since I was born.

But you are right, I can't prove it.I thought it was obvious I was looking for something more specific.Start here (http://www.vsf.cape.com/~jdale/science/nervous.htm)

[Darat]

Originally posted by Mercutio
Great--now what is your definition of "aware" and "self"? I think we are ok with "environment".

...snip...

Quite seriously are we OK with environment? Where do "I" stop and the "environment" start?

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Darat
Quite seriously are we OK with environment? Where do "I" stop and the "environment" start?

I suspect that there are innumerable ways to answer that question. I'll take a stab at an answer from the perspective of a simple individual animal, to fit in with the original question of this thread.

* The self is that which is always with "me" regardless of where "I "go or what changes around "me". "I" receive a consistent amount of sensory information from and about "myself".
For example sometimes "I" may be cold and sometimes "I" may be hot; hungry or full, thirsty or not -- but "I'm "always receiving the same type of information from "my" body that lets "me" know what "my" status is.

* The environment is that which "I" can leave behind and from which "I" don't always receive a consistent amount of sensory information.
Assume that the "I" now is the family dog, Buddy. Buddy has full access to all the rooms in the house and can go in and outdoors at will (there's a dog door). He won't know what is going on in the family den unless he's there or within in hearing and/or smelling distance of it. The same is true for any other room in the house and the outdoors.

Because Buddy has free movement in and out of the family house, to distinguish between himself and his environment is doable. If he was confined to one small room in the house for his entire life, it would be more difficult (if not impossible) for him to reach this level of awareness.

(FWIW, I'll suggest that a rudimentary sense of sense-awareness begins with the ability to know what is the environment, what are "others" and to also know that they are separate from one's self.)

[Jeff Corey]

Originally posted by Darat
Quite seriously are we OK with environment? Where do "I" stop and the "environment" start?
Our skin is not the boundary between us and our environment. Our internal envronment is part of our whole envronment.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Shera
LOL! I'm sure that within this thread we can come up with at least two opinions... Seriously, you did not challenge the phrase "gradual range", so does that mean that behaviorists believe in a range of awareness? Let me take a stab at this. Ok...first thing... "awareness" as some sort of characteristic that we possess, usually thought of as in some manner causal (as in "awareness allows us to recognize ourselves in the mirror") is--to the extent that it is used in that manner--circularly defined. (See the Power of Will (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52064) thread for a more in-depth discussion of this circularity.) That is, if we infer awareness from our ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror, then claim that it is awareness that causes us to recognize ourselves in the mirror, we have circularly inferred the concept. But that is a minor point, and only explains why it is that behaviorists don't tend to like that word when discussing things technically. Colloquially, of course, we are part of the same language community you are, so we use the word "awareness" in pretty much the same manner.

Which brings us to our next step. A "range of awareness" or an "either/or awareness"? Let us examine how we learn the word "awareness" in the first place. (Again, for a different presentation of a similar explanation, see this thread (http://www.randi.org/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=36948)--in particular, my last post on the first page, on love.) When we learn a word, we do so because our teachers (broadly speaking: parents, friends, siblings...whoever is teaching us language) pair a word and a public referent. We get the word "red" and a bunch of different red things, until we can reliably generalize and appropriately respond "red" when presented with a red object. We get the word "dog" paired with dogs, and may have to be taught not to overgeneralize and call cows "dog" too. Bottom line is, there is a publicly available referent to teach us those words by association. Ah...but what is the public referent for "awareness"? It is a fuzzy concept, and difficult to teach (resulting in things like this thread, in which it is clear that we do not all share the same definition of awareness at all, although we are close enough in our definitions for everyday use). We may hear the phrase "I was not aware that the mail had arrived" or "are you aware you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe?" or any of the phrases in which we use the word...and from these we are supposed to generalize the use of "awareness"? No wonder it is a word that leads to such threads! The mirror test is one operationalization of "awareness", but of course it cannot be the only test (unless, as Earthborn suggests, we wish to limit the concept "awareness" to mean "ability to recognise your reflection in the mirror").

So...back to your question...do we recognize a range of awareness? Well...to the extent that the phrase is useful at all, it seems to me very likely that we will see organisms that display some of the behaviors we associate with "awareness" and not other such behaviors (it is also possible that organisms can either display all of those behaviors or none of them, but if that were the case we would likely not be having this argument on this thread). Does that mean that there is a range of awareness? That is certainly one reasonable conclusion--another is that the term is a bit hazy for use in scientific investigation...

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Darat
Quite seriously are we OK with environment? Where do "I" stop and the "environment" start? Let me give the flip side to Corey's answer. Yes, the environment includes internal...but functionally speaking, our reciprocal influence on one another extends our "I" beyond our skin. (note: I said "functionally", not structurally. I do not claim there is some sort of entity "self" that acts as I describe). In other words, in a very real sense any description of "me" that does not include you (yes, you, Darat) is incomplete, because of the influence you have on me. Anyone who influences us is functionally a part of us. Oh, yes, they are our environment, but as we behaviorists look to the environment to explain behavior, the "I" (which, of course, many will contend is the thing that makes you behave as you do) is in our environment.

Skinner had an interesting take on this, in his lecture "on 'having' a poem" (I think that is the title--I have to check). He equates behavior with childbirth, in the sense that the womb is a locus for the meeting of two genetic histories. The mother does not create the child from nothing, but serves as the place where these genetic histories come together. Skinner suggests that we each serve as loci for the coming together of our genetic histories and reinforcement histories, that our behavior is not to our credit or blame, but simply the result of two types of environmental influence--long-term (genetic) and immediate (environment)

Um...this was not the most popular of his writings.

[Garrette]

Originally posted by Mercutio:

Um...this was not the most popular of his writings.

Because his audience did not like it or because they found legitimate flaws within it?

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by Garrette
Because his audience did not like it or because they found legitimate flaws within it? I suspect the former; I have not seen any analyses of it to support the latter. He basically is telling people they can take no credit for their accomplishments, by way of an analogy telling mothers they really have no reason to feel pride in their accomplishment (no credit for how adorable the little baby is, that is); in both cases, we are merely passing on the influence we received from our environment (in the form of behavior, or in the form of genes). This is so foreign to our world-view, and is easily seen as an insult to mothers. Just my opinion, but I would guess most folk would have had enough problems with the metaphor that they would not even attend to the message.

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by Mercutio
Skinner had an interesting take on this, in his lecture "on 'having' a poem" (I think that is the title--I have to check).That is the title. Anyone interested can listen to it here (http://www.bfskinner.org/audio.asp).

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
It was designed to investigate one particular aspect of self-awareness: the ability to recognise oneself in a mirror.
...It does not investigate anything else.
...Just like the statements by new drkitten which supposedly prove there is no middle ground to recognising oneself in a mirror and the total absence of self-awareness. Thank you for proving my point.
...I agree wholeheartedly! That's why drkitten shouldn't claim self-awareness is an all-or-nothing phenomenon without presenting evidence. Ok, here's the thing. The current evidence supports a hypothesis of self-aware = yes or no. One is at least mildly justified in saying that, until more research is done that has implications to the contrary, we can treat self-awareness as "all-or-nothing" property. With every sentence, though, I'm struck by the fruitlessness of perpetually explaining this...
I do not equate self-awareness to a distance. I just provide an analogy. Just when I thought that's what an analogy was for. But it doesn't matter. Unless you have any reason to believe there is a space between so-called points A and B, it is a BAD ANALOGY.
Now if you can explain how a natural phenomenon can develop from not existing to existing without ever half existing, you may have a point.There are a lot of problems with "half existing." I don't know that you can point to anything that "half exists" without you begging the question yet again. I know what you mean, but it is a result of your misunderstanding. You assume that for something to come into existence, it must exist in intermediate stages. This is a misguided assumption and is simply not true.
I don't see why the fact that it does not apply only to behaviour means that it is vague. Your whole body "exists after birth". Did you learn your arm? No, your question is vague.
Okay. Interesting hypothesis. Could you explain how the reflexes are 'built-in' and how they are inherited?That was rhetoric, not a real hypothesis. I would not be qualified to "explain" it, in any case.
I do have evidence that it develops: an embryo starts out without reflexes or even a nervous system, it grows and nine months later it has a complex nervous system and millions of reflexes. I disagree. An embryo merely doesn't demonstrate reflexes. That doesn't mean the necessary information for them (plus an entire human anatomy) isn't contained in every nucleus of every cell of every healthy human embryo. This is an idea that has considerable support, but it is not worth my time to look up something that only you don't understand.
But the genes can only explain where the proteins come from that form the child, not how it forms.
This is simply wrong. Ignoring the effect of genes on behaviour is indefensible.
But not necessarily my prior assumption, which is all that matter to me.Your weak explanations reveal the implausibility of that assumption.
True. But is there any alternative?
Blatant fallacy of ignorance.
I'm fairly certain that my reflexes don't date back further than nine months before my birth, because before that time I didn't even exist.Gee, I guess then your family tree doesn't date back further than nine months either, because before then you didn't exist. You are Still Assuming Your Conclusion...
The idea that they are all 'encoded' in my genome also sounds a bit farfetched.Time dilation sounds incredibly farfetched to me. But it's been done. Once again, your lack of understanding does not mean it is a wrong explanation. If you were really interested you would go find out just how much of you is explained by your genes. I can't do that for you. I'm glad you posted that starfish link; apparently you are capable of supporting your ideas with real information. So I would suggest you go acquire some more of that, and then see why this idea of yours doesn't scan. new drkitten saw well ahead of me when you said you could just choose not to take scientists seriously and he ceased to respond to this. I will not be criticizing your argument anymore.

[Earthborn]

The current evidence supports a hypothesis of self-aware = yes or no.How does current evidence support this hypothesis?You assume that for something to come into existence, it must exist in intermediate stages. This is a misguided assumption and is simply not true.Give an example, just one, of something that comes into existence without having been through intermediate stages.Your whole body "exists after birth". Did you learn your arm?I did develop my arm. It did not come into existence without having been through intermediate stages. We don't generally use the word learning to describe any development except that of the nervous system, so 'learning an arm' sounds a bit silly. But when we talk about the development of the nervous system, the word learning is appropriate.

Even though we use different words to describe different forms of development, the ways in which arms and nervous tissue develop is very similar. It is an evolutionary process. Successful parts survive and strengthen themselves, parts that are no longer successful in their environment die out. That is also how the nervous system develops and how you learn. It is the same thing.That doesn't mean the necessary information for them (plus an entire human anatomy) isn't contained in every nucleus of every cell of every healthy human embryo. This is an idea that has considerable support, but it is not worth my time to look up something that only you don't understand.It seems you neither understand genetics or morphogenesis. The necessary information for the entire human anatomy is not contained in the genome. It would in fact be very surprising if it was since a human being is considerably more complex than can be 'encoded' in 30 thousand genes. There is no blue print or description of what an organism is going to look like at all. The organism arises from the interaction of all its parts with their environments. Here (http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0201/66.htm) is a fairly good description of how it is thought to work.This is simply wrong. Ignoring the effect of genes on behaviour is indefensible.I am not ignoring the effects of genes on behaviour at all. I am in fact implicitely acknowledging their importance: genes produce the building blocks of the organism, many of those building blocks form nervous tissue.Gee, I guess then your family tree doesn't date back further than nine months either, because before then you didn't exist.It does date back further. Whether it does or doesn't has no relevance to my argument which focuses only on how an individual organism acquires its reflexes.If you were really interested you would go find out just how much of you is explained by your genes.I am interested, and I did. And I found that on some microscopic level everything about me is explained by my genes and the environment they work in. At a higher level everything about me is explained by the structures made by those genes (including my nervous tissue) and the environment those work in.So I would suggest you go acquire some more of that, and then see why this idea of yours doesn't scan.I developed those ideas by doing just that. I too once took the 'blueprint analogy of DNA' far too seriously.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
I'm just saying that anything that happens on a macro way is reducible to the micro way. It is obvious that it is often impossible to meaningfully talk about things at a macro level by describing things in terms of the micro level. So we invent words like 'awareness' and 'will' and 'conciousness'. Those are vague words because we can't describe what at the micro level causes them. That's far too complicated.

I have no problem with using such words as long as they are used in the proper context. But when people start saying that only humans display them and animals do not, I protest. At the micro level those animals work the same as we do. And at the macro level they are not all that different from us. So if a particular behaviour is described as 'awareness' in humans and an animal displays similar behaviour, why not consider it 'awareness' as well? It may not be the exact same thing as that of humans, but then again the term is not rigorously defined anyway.

Some people are willing to expand those terms to animals that seem close enough to us in intelligence but for some reason refuse to acknowledge them in animals we can often outsmart. I don't see the point in that.
I see what you are saying. Perhaps part of the reason people disagree about expanding the use of terminology to apply to other animals is because they are not, as you say, rigorously defined. Even if they were, as Mercutio explained, given that we are not discussing "publicly available referents" it's unlikely that everyone would understand the definition the same way. As Mercutio also said, this thread has made it clear that many of us aren't in agreement with what the term self-awareness means. If more of the terms were more rigorously defined and if we could somehow interpret the definitions exactly the same way -- I suspect that more of us would find ourselves to not actually be that far apart in our positions, or at least more likely to know precisely what we are disagreeing about ;) . (In the real world, I'm not sure that everyone understands other people's postions as well as they think they do -- but thats a topic for another thread... Oh, and I'm not implying that you don't understand other people's positions, I'm sure you do. This is just early Saturday morning rambling musings after a long week... )

I might describe all behaviour as reflexes or instincts. I think it is just a matter of scale.
I've been thinking about the way I understand your use of the word reflexes and I now suspect that you may be using the word the same way others use the phrase synaptic transmission (http://courses.brown.edu/Chi-Ming_Hai-BI0117_F02/materialadd5.doc). What do you think? Is that a possibility?

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
I think if an animal is smart enough to pass the mirror test on its own, it is also smart enough to think up a whole range of explanations. I don't think it will necessarily chose the simplest explanation. It might attribute the behaviour of its mirror image to magic, or self-awareness or any other similarly vague notion. .
That's an interesting thought. It begs a few questions. If people are dumb enough to believe in magic, are animals? ;) Or does the design of their brains keep them grounded firmly in reality? Can animals fantasize? How surreal could their fantasies get? EEG machines tell us that animals dream (http://www.sci-con.org/news/articles/20030402.html). If the findings and machine readings on people who lucid dream can be adapted to animals, we might even be able to find out if the family dog, Buddy, is a lucid dreamer. ;) And who knows, depending upon how sophisticated machines get in the future, we may be able to even detect the content of Buddy's dreams as well. It would be interesting to know if Buddy's dreams don't vary that much from reality (e.g., he dreams he is chasing a bird in the backyard) or if they can get a little surreal ( e.g., he dreams that he is chasing a bird in the sky). Speculation is fun. :D (BTW, I suspect a strong correlation between higher cognition & self-awareness to imagination. Being able to learn and make mental leaps probably correlates highly with fanciful imagining -- and yes, this is more speculation....)

Shera:
I never thought of the growth process from a fertilized egg through a newborn baby as one that involved learning. Especially since it seems to happen so effortlessly from the fertilized egg's point of view

Earthborn:
I don't think the people who have studied the process would describe it as effortless. I think of it more as a struggle for survival all the way through and the embryo or fetus might lose that struggle at any moment.
OK, I agree with you that termination can come at any point for any number of reasons. But for me to give credence to the idea that the embryo/fetus is learning at even a minimal level, I would have to be shown that the embryo/fetuses has the ability to react and to be flexible in how they react to threats/stimuli (and that the reactions were coming from the embryo/fetuses and not the mother). It would be a little more convincing also if the variations in reactions made a difference as to whether they survived or thrived.

Shera:
And that the DNA/RNA chemical reaction is the stimulus?

Earthborn:
Well, if we are going to talk about chemical reactions we are no longer speaking about neurology but instead about the chemistry that underlies it. We are then talking about an even smaller scale so the word 'stimulus' may not be useful there.

OK then , I'm going to assume that you don't think fertilized cells learn because AFAIK they have no neural pathways to be strengthened.

Let me ask you this: would you say that learning occurs when a neural pathway is first built?
Also do you think there is value in distinguishing between neural pathways strengthening due to an external response and neural pathways strengthening due only to the growth of the organism? And I acknowledge that I'm not sure if that is what occurs in the prenatal stage. I don't know if neural pathways can strengthen without use, but just get stronger as part of the prenatal growth process. However, you seem to have strong ideas about this area, so perhaps you know?
Basically I'm curious at what point you believe learning first occurs in the prenatal stage.

Earthborn in another post
My point is simply that these reflexes develop in the womb and they develop through a learning process by strengthening and weakening neural pathways. Everything that exists after birth must have developed before birth in the environment of the womb and therefore must have had a function inside the womb. That function may not be the same as the function it will have after birth. I just don't see how a reflex develops that has a function after birth but not before it.

If we can inherit physical characteristics because of survival advantages, then I think we can inherit reflexes and instincts for the same reasons. After all, that would be a matter of inheriting certain balances of hormones and chemicals placed in certain locations, no? If a reflex or instinct is inherited for survival value, I don't think that it's necessary for it to have a function in the womb also. ( However, certain reflexes are probably active before birth for survival advantages. For example, nursing is so important that it's probably worth it for the fetus to "practice" before she needs to use the skill for real; hence thumb sucking in the womb. Also some babies are born early -- so it would be advantageous to have this reflex in place earlier rather than later. ) Foals can stand and walk within a few hours after birth, and do. Other species have even more urgent reasons to be born with reflexes and instincts in place. One example is the octopus, whose parents die before she is hatched. She has no one to learn from and must be able to know, out of the myriad of things surrounding her, what she can eat and how. Some links are in the "Walking octopi" thread, which is also in the Science Forum. But now I'll put on my devil's advocate hat. One of those links say that it is estimated that only 1 to 2 octopuses survive out of a batch of 200,000 fertizlized eggs. While most of them are probably lost to predators, perhaps some of them die because they think they are suppose to eat sand. {Shrug} Perhaps they aren't actually born with all that many in-built instincts and reflexes. This isn't my field and I don't know how much of this has been carefully observed versus only assumed.

Earthborn in another post to ReFLeX
I am not ignoring the effects of genes on behaviour at all. I am in fact implicitely acknowledging their importance: genes produce the building blocks of the organism, many of those building blocks form nervous tissue.
…
And I found that on some microscopic level everything about me is explained by my genes and the environment they work in. At a higher level everything about me is explained by the structures made by those genes (including my nervous tissue) and the environment those work in.
…
I developed those ideas by doing just that. I too once took the 'blueprint analogy of DNA' far too seriously.
I know I'm missing your point here. From some of your posts I think you believe that inheritance treats nerve tissue treated differently than other tissues (I guess muscle, bone, organs?). Why? What are you referring to by building blocks? The amino acids? Could you elaborate just a little more (particularly on why nerve cells are treated differently than other cells by the inheritance process) or provide some links? Thanks. :)

Edited to fix link.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mercutio
Ah...but what is the public referent for "awareness"?

It is a fuzzy concept, and difficult to teach (resulting in things like this thread, in which it is clear that we do not all share the same definition of awareness at all, although we are close enough in our definitions for everyday use). [emphasis mine]
…
No wonder it is a word that leads to such threads!
Mercutio, first let me just say that I am in awe of your writing and teaching powers! :)

Yes, it had become very clear that many of us use the word self-awareness differently. I think a good example can be shown in some of the posts including voidx and Placebo's. For example, voidx discussed that he did consider self-awareness to be an on/off switch but after one proved self-awareness (shown by passing the mirror test), there was still room to show how well one comprehended the concept of self-awareness. He also agreed that other species may have self-awareness but may not be able to provide evidence for that with this test. Placebo had posted that he saw self-awareness as a gradual range with the ability to pass the mirror test as but one possible (depending upon the species' set of senses) point within that range. I know I'm not doing their posts justice, but I hope I summarized enough of it (albeit badly) to show that the more some of us discussed what we thought the test proved and didn't prove, the more it indicated that some (some, not all!) of the differences of opinion in this thread had to do with nuances, which nuances we wanted to stress, and how we expressed ourselves.
Does that mean that there is a range of awareness? That is certainly one reasonable conclusion--another is that the term is a bit hazy for use in scientific investigation...
I definitely agree with that!

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mercutio
...functionally speaking, our reciprocal influence on one another extends our "I" beyond our skin. (note: I said "functionally", not structurally. I do not claim there is some sort of entity "self" that acts as I describe).

...

Anyone who influences us is functionally a part of us. Oh, yes, they are our environment, but as we behaviorists look to the environment to explain behavior, the "I" (which, of course, many will contend is the thing that makes you behave as you do) is in our environment.

Skinner had an interesting take on this, in his lecture "on 'having' a poem"

...

Skinner suggests that we each serve as loci for the coming together of our genetic histories and reinforcement histories, that our behavior is not to our credit or blame, but simply the result of two types of environmental influence--long-term (genetic) and immediate (environment)

I think this is an interesting concept. But surely we could not have a concept of self-awareness if we didn't understand that we are separate from our environment and others (although, of course, we're influenced by them). Perhaps Behaviorism has another word to use as a substitute for how I'm attempting to use the word environment here.

BTW, if this is addressed in the tape (of Skinner's lecture), my apologies. I don't have a tendency to listen to long tapes probably because I grew up hard of hearing, and while I hear conversations OK now I still don't have the patience to listen to hour long tapes…

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
… understand genetics or morphogenesis. The necessary information for the entire human anatomy is not contained in the genome. It would in fact be very surprising if it was since a human being is considerably more complex than can be 'encoded' in 30 thousand genes. There is no blue print or description of what an organism is going to look like at all. The organism arises from the interaction of all its parts with their environments. Here is a fairly good description of how it is thought to work.

Non-sequitur post here. Rupert Sheldrake (http://www.sheldrake.org), in his various books, also notes as Earthborn puts it: that "the necessary information for the entire human anatomy is not contained in the genome."

Sheldrake describes the hypothesis of morphogenetic fields (http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/Morphic/morphic_intro.html) which was developed by some biologists in the 1920s to deal with this issue. (I admit that I have not taken the time yet to double check Sheldrake's summary and references on this -- some have suggested in this forum that this is a necessity with any of RS's work.)

Sheldrake expanded upon the idea of morphogenetic fields to create his own hypothesis of formative causation which he uses to explain some observations on complex animal behavior and some alleged phenomena that others would describe as "paranormal".

OK, so here's my point and why I brought this up: If the hypothesis of morphogens (right name?, the one that Earthborn provided a link to) has more evidence to support it than the older hypothesis of morphogenetic fields does, this certainly does not bode well for Sheldrake's hypothesis (because his hypothesis expanded upon the hypothesis of morphogenetic fields).

BTW, I don’t want to derail this thread to discuss Sheldrake or his ideas. However, if anyone wants to start another one, even after reading several of the threads on Sheldrake at JREF that can be found using the search engine, I'd be happy to participate.

Edited to fix link and grammar.

[Roboramma]

Originally posted by Earthborn
The necessary information for the entire human anatomy is not contained in the genome. It would in fact be very surprising if it was since a human being is considerably more complex than can be 'encoded' in 30 thousand genes.
I'm not sure I agree with that statement. It might seem strange that 30,000 genes could encode a human being, but genes don't function on a 1-to-1 basis, of gene to phenotype. There is a very complex interaction, and looking at the effects of genes, and the diversity that can come from 30,000 genes, we should think more of the diversity in a hand of cards if you were dealt 30,000 cards, each of which is distinct from all the others. There is a lot of information there. The reason for that is that they interact with one another.
Of course, the genome is not a blueprint for a human being. It's a recipe for building a human being. It assumes the existance of a certain type of "oven" - a human womb. With certain nutrients coming into it. But that recipe evolved with those "ovens", adapted it's "code" because of the way they are. In a way our genes "know" what the womb will be like, and so have altered (through evolution) the way they behave and the way they build our bodies based upon that.
Of course there is an interplay between evironment and genes. But the information about the final product comes from the genome.
Why do I think this?
Well, here's one reason, it's the only thing present that's subject to natural selection. Why, is the suckling instinct learned at all in the womb? The baby doesn't know that it's going to need to suckle when it is born. So why does it learn it? The simple reason is that information about that need has been passed down from previous generations to this one.
The conduit through which that information is passed is the genome. It may make use of the enviroment the baby finds itself in to make it capable of dealing with that need, but the reason that it acquires that instinct/reflex, regardless of how in any specific case, is because it's genes "want" it to.
The same would apply to the walking instinct. It's a good thing for a baby to have the instinct to learn to walk. Why does it have this? You might say it learns this instinct in the womb. Why?Natural selection. The genes may help to implement this reflex by causing the baby the kick in the womb, thus strengthening neural connections, but the ultimate reason that it develops this reflex at all is that natural selection has favoured those individuals that do at the expense of those that don't.

In other words? The genes aren't a blueprint, development is the interplay of genes and environment, except for this caveat - the genes know in advance what the environment will be. Usually. More exactly - they know what the environment was for the organism's ancestors.

... my argument which focuses only on how an individual organism acquires its reflexes.
It sounds like the difference of opinion here is that you're talking about proximate causes and I'm talking about ultimate causes. That's cool. :)

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Shera
I know I'm missing your point here. From some of your posts I think you believe that inheritance treats nerve tissue treated differently than other tissues (I guess muscle, bone, organs?). Why? What are you referring to by building blocks? The amino acids? Could you elaborate just a little more (particularly on why nerve cells are treated differently than other cells by the inheritance process) or provide some links? Thanks. :)

Earthborn,

I withdraw these questions. Because of a busy week I lost track of what was and wasn't discussed in this thread -- sorry. :(

I think (hope) I got back on track now... :)

---

Also, at this point, I’m happy to accept the idea of any "learning" (as defined by strengthening of the neural pathways) done by the embryo/fetus during most of the prenatal stage as a poetic description of natural selection. But I am still interested in your views on prenatal learning.

Originally Posted by Roboramma
….the genome is not a blueprint for a human being. It's a recipe for building a human being. It assumes the existance of a certain type of "oven" - a human womb. With certain nutrients coming into it. But that recipe evolved with those "ovens", adapted it's "code" because of the way they are. In a way our genes "know" what the womb will be like, and so have altered (through evolution) the way they behave and the way they build our bodies based upon that.
Of course there is an interplay between evironment and genes. But the information about the final product comes from the genome.
Why do I think this?
Well, here's one reason, it's the only thing present that's subject to natural selection. ….
….
The genes aren't a blueprint, development is the interplay of genes and environment, except for this caveat - the genes know in advance what the environment will be. Usually. More exactly - they know what the environment was for the organism's ancestors.

Originally Posted by Mercutio
Skinner suggests[in his lecture "On Having a Poem"] that we each serve as loci for the coming together of our genetic histories and reinforcement histories, that our behavior is not to our credit or blame, but simply the result of two types of environmental influence--long-term (genetic) and immediate (environment)

Um...this was not the most popular of his writings.

I'm not surprised that this was not the most popular of Skinner's writings. ;) As someone who is inclined to believe in partial free will, his ideas are a little disconcerting. Anyway, in the meantime, I'll be thinking at about what point the human individual can start taking (at least partially) credit for both learning (as defined by altering behavior and acquiring knowledge) and asserting some control over her own destiny.

Radically edited to add a lot more ideas.

[Jeff Corey]

A lot of people feel uncomfortable with the notion of determinism as applied to their own behavior. But as the poet said,
"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose..."

[Mercutio]

I show a movie in one of my classes in which Behavior Modification is used, successfully, to address self-injurious behavior in an institutionalized man. He had, for most of his life, worn arm restraints (and sometimes headgear) because he would hit his face whenever he had the opportunity. In fact, his nose was pretty much gone, broken several times over...I think the movie was filmed over the course of just two days (although 2 weeks apart)--in the course of those treatment days, Harry learned not to hit himself, was free of arm restraints, and was soon able to work at the institution's shop and eventually live in a community house. (The other way to phrase this is that the institutional staff learned to reinforce different behaviors than they had--unintentionally--been reinforcing before.) Anyway, it is quite clear to anyone watching that Harry now has so many more opportunities open for him, now that he no longer wears his restraints and/or bashes his face constantly. How was he given this freedom? Paradoxically, by recognizing that his behavior was not freely chosen, but maintained by environmental contingencies. It is when we recognise that we do *not* have free will that we are able to make constructive change.

[Jeff Corey]

Wasn't the treatment carried out by Richard Fox?

[Kaylee]

Cool. So what was the original stimulus that made the man hit himself and what was the new stimulus that made him stop?

And that is an interesting paradox by the way -- it did make me stop and think. :) FWIW, I never have believed in complete free will -- there's no denying that our genetics and environment shape us. But I always aim to try to shape in some free will too anyway -- whatever approach works! Paradoxically or otherwise... :D

[Mercutio]

Corey--yes, Fox.

Shera--you are thinking stimulus-response, reflexive conditioning; think operant conditioning and it is much easier to explain.

Roughly 80% of kids bang their heads (say, against their cribs, walls, whatever--having worked with self-injurious clients, it really freaked me out when my own kids did it), just as a part of normal growing up. Thing is, most kids also do all sorts of other cute things. For some kids (arguably Harry was one), their behavioral repertoire is fairly limited, so the attention they might receive from banging their heads is a fairly precious commodity. It doesn't take much to start a reinforcement chain in action--just as a parent can inadvertantly reinforce a child's crying by coming into the bedroom to check up on him or her, you can reinforce self-injury with attention, too. Now, I am not saying you should not check on a crying kid--but there are better and worse ways of doing so, based on the schedule of reinforcement. (For example...if you are trying to follow the advice of "letting the kid cry himself to sleep", and cave in after a half an hour, the kid has just learned that it might take half an hour of crying to get what he wants. If you wait 2 hours the next night before caving in, you have just taught the kid that it might take that much. For Harry, a similar process of trying to ignore might have led to more and more aggressive actions.)

When I worked with a self-injurious girl, I watched her attendants offer her coffee (she loved coffee) if she would stop hitting herself. She would hit herself while they made coffee, but stop hitting long enough to drink it. This reinforced the attendant's strategy of giving coffee (because they got a break while she drank it), but only further strengthened her hitting (because she knew that if she hit herself enough, they would giver her coffee to stop). The reciprocal reinforcement became entrenched.

All they would really have to do is tell her she could have her coffee only if she quit hitting for 5 minutes...then gradually lengthen that amount of time. When I got there, I observed her for several hour-long periods over the course of a week, and did not find a 10-second interval when she was not hitting herself. Within a couple of months, she would not hit herself as long as I was there.

[Earthborn]

Perhaps part of the reason people disagree about expanding the use of terminology to apply to other animals is because they are not, as you say, rigorously defined.I doubt that. If they worried about the fact that it was not rigorously defined, then perhaps they would be reluctant to apply the term to animals, but would also not claim with certainty that it does apply to humans. They state with absolute certainty that it applies to humans and that it cannot possibly apply to other animals (some of them are willing to make an exception to apes and maybe dolphins, but that's it). That sounds to me like they think it can somehow be rigorously defined and experimentally determined that it applies to humans and not other animals.If more of the terms were more rigorously defined and if we could somehow interpret the definitions exactly the same wayProblem is, because these things are not publically available referents, they simply cannot be rigorously defined. I now suspect that you may be using the word the same way others use the phrase synaptic transmission . What do you think? Is that a possibility?No. Synaptic transmission is one neuron communicating with another, since they are connected to eachother with synapses. For lack of a better analogy, let's use a computer analogy again: a synaps is like the connection between one transistor and another. A bunch of transistors and their connections together can form a logic gate, which is somewhat similar to a small piece of neural circuitry. Attach a whole bunch of logic gates together and you can make a circuit that can do some useful tasks. That's like a reflex. Now string a whole bunch of those together, add some memory and some circuitry that can inhibit some of those reflexes when they are counterproductive and maybe trigger some others if they are needed and you've got some instincts.If the findings and machine readings on people who lucid dream can be adapted to animals, we might even be able to find out if the family dog, Buddy, is a lucid dreamer.If such machinery was invented, I would not be surprised if we found such things to be true. I would however be very surprised if such machinery were ever invented.It would be interesting to know if Buddy's dreams don't vary that much from reality (e.g., he dreams he is chasing a bird in the backyard) or if they can get a little surreal ( e.g., he dreams that he is chasing a bird in the sky).One thing is for certain: whatever is discovered, some people will use it to argue that humans are still superior. If the dog's dreams are surreal it will be "because dogs can't form a consistent narrative like humans can". If they are mondain it will be "because dogs are unable to think thoughts that transcend their everyday experience." :)Let me ask you this: would you say that learning occurs when a neural pathway is first built?I think that purely depends on how far you are willing to stretch the definition of learning. I think it is fair to say that learning happens when there is at least some neural circuitry, and it also did not happen all at once without any intermediate steps.Also do you think there is value in distinguishing between neural pathways strengthening due to an external response and neural pathways strengthening due only to the growth of the organism?No, I don't. I understand that neurons die if they don't communicate with other neurons. They immediately begin to adapt their 'output' based on the 'input' the receive when they come into existence. So when neurons grow they do so because they get some response internal or external of the entire organism.I don't know if neural pathways can strengthen without use, but just get stronger as part of the prenatal growth process.They are used or they whither away. That's what I have heard.If a reflex or instinct is inherited for survival value, I don't think that it's necessary for it to have a function in the womb also.I don't think the function it may have in the womb is necessary for surival, even if after birth it does become necessary for survival. Perhaps the suckle reflex simply develops because it is pleasureable for the fetus to suck on its thumb and the reflex becomes ingrained because it is rewarding in itself. Only after birth does it become absolutely necessary for survival. But through millions of years of evolution humans developed the feeling that it is pleasureable to suck on your thumb before birth, because those that feel that way got a higher chance of survival after birth.From some of your posts I think you believe that inheritance treats nerve tissue treated differently than other tissuesNo, quite the opposite. I believe that inheritence treats nerve tissue the same as other tissues. And we know that other tissues don't develop from a preset plan, but by reacting to their environment, which they influence strongly themselves.What are you referring to by building blocks?With building blocks, I mean in this context proteins.The amino acids?Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Genes define what proteins are generated, so you can think of DNA as a list of proteins to make (it is obviously a bit more complicated than that: there are more different proteins than genes) so you can see DNA as a list of building materials or an ingredient list.OK, so here's my point and why I brought this up: If the hypothesis of morphogens has more evidence to support it than the older hypothesis of morphogenetic fields does, this certainly does not bode well for Sheldrake's hypothesisI agree. And it is certainly not the only problem with Sheldrake's hypothesis. Another is that his "Seven experiments that could change the world" failed to change the world. :)

There is more evidence to support this morphogen theory. In fact it already has useful applications. Once in a while you hear something in the news about stem cell research and how scientist manage to make undifferenciated cells into any cell type they want. Now how do you think they do that? They can't do that by altering the genome of those cells, because that's the same in all cell types. And if those cells had some sort of blueprint in them to form a whole human being, then they couldn't make any cell type they want in any quantity they want, because those cells would want to follow the blueprint and make a human, not just a specific tissue. And still those scientists manage to do it. They do it by manipulating the chemical environment of those cells, by figuring out what morphogens cause what sort of celltype and giving them to those stem cells.As someone who is inclined to believe in partial free will, his ideas are a little disconcerting.Someone who is inclined to believe that the Earth is the center of the universe, the ideas of Copernicus and Galileo also were a little disconcerting. In our own times, people who were inclined to believe that humans absolutely superior to all other animals, the ideas of Jane Goodall were a little disconcerting. That doesn't make them any less true. You can learn to accept them or you can ignore them and look silly. It's your choice. (But a choice completely dependent on your past conditioning. :) )

[ReFLeX]

Without criticizing, which is admittedly hard:
Originally posted by Earthborn
Give an example, just one, of something that comes into existence without having been through intermediate stages. Happiness. Or how about the learning of a fact?

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Earthborn
You can learn to accept them or you can ignore them and look silly. *screams*

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Mercutio
... Roughly 80% of kids bang their heads ... it really freaked me out when my own kids did it), just as a part of normal growing up. ... For some kids (arguably Harry was one), their behavioral repertoire is fairly limited, so the attention they might receive from banging their heads is a fairly precious commodity. It doesn't take much to start a reinforcement chain in action--just as a parent can inadvertantly reinforce a child's crying by coming into the bedroom to check up on him or her, you can reinforce self-injury with attention, too.

...

When I worked with a self-injurious girl,..
All they would really have to do is tell her she could have her coffee only if she quit hitting for 5 minutes...then gradually lengthen that amount of time. When I got there, I observed her for several hour-long periods over the course of a week, and did not find a 10-second interval when she was not hitting herself. Within a couple of months, she would not hit herself as long as I was there.

Bravo! It's great to know that these kinds of problems are solvable.

Poor Harry though! How do communicate a solution like that to a baby who can't talk? How did you and your wife end up helping Harry? I think I would have had to resort to buying him the world's smallest motorcycle helmet… :D

[Kaylee]

Earthborn
One thing is for certain: whatever is discovered, some people will use it to argue that humans are still superior. If the dog's dreams are surreal it will be "because dogs can't form a consistent narrative like humans can". If they are mondain it will be "because dogs are unable to think thoughts that transcend their everyday experience. :)

Sounds like some of my former employers! I could never win … lol. That type of logic and arguing tactics are a real uh … talent. :rolleyes:

Shera
If the findings and machine readings on people who lucid dream can be adapted to animals, we might even be able to find out if the family dog, Buddy, is a lucid dreamer.

Earthborn
If such machinery was invented, I would not be surprised if we found such things to be true. I would however be very surprised if such machinery were ever invented.

I think researchers are finding that there are measurable physiological differences between the dream and lucid dream states. Once this is fully mapped out in humans then perhaps comparisons can be made in machine readings (e.g. EEG, not sure if PET scans are used in these studies) on animals. It would probably be best to start out with chimps and gorillas because some know variations of sign languages. After that, my guess is it’s a matter of how close the brain structures are as to whether these type of measurements could tell us anything meaningful about other species.

This is a cut and paste from an article (http://www.futurehi.net/docs/Laberge_Lucidity.html) by Steve LeBarge who did some of the field research that provided evidence for lucid dreaming:

EEG mapping of lucid dreaming. In past studies, we have determined that lucid dreams are generally initiated during periods of high autonomic nervous system activity--decreased finger pulse amplitude, increased respiration rate and irregularity, and increased eye-movement activity relative to normal REM sleep (12). These factors indicated that dream lucidity occurs during periods of relatively high brain activation, suggesting that sufficient activation of the CNS is necessary before consciousness can be attained. However, we had little idea what was specifically happening in the brain, whether the activation was general, or localized in some particular areas.

In a pilot study we mapped the distribution of brainwave activity from twenty-eight electrode placements on the scalp, examining different frequency bands of EEG during periods pre and post-onset of lucidity in five lucid dreams from one subject. The most interesting findings in this preliminary analysis were in the alpha band (8-12 Hz), where decreases of alpha activity were seen in the posterior left hemisphere, in the first 30 seconds of lucidity. This finding is in keeping with an earlier analysis we performed on a few of our lucid dreams at Stanford of left/right ratios of alpha activity, finding the only difference at lucidity onset to be a decrease of alpha activity in the left parietal region. Decreased alpha activity is generally considered an indication of increased brain activation. Indeed, lucid dreaming ought to be associated with left hemisphere activation, (where language is localized), since to become lucid one must actually spell out to oneself, "This is a dream."

We plan to add to and check our findings by collecting more data from more subjects. This will give us a larger sample of non-lucid REM for comparison and show what EEG differences are consistent for all lucid dreams. Thus, we will gain a basis for the comparison of lucid dreaming with other states of consciousness. Twenty-eight channels of EEG will be collected, and maps of EEG activity will be computed, allowing the determination of which brain regions are involved in lucid dreaming (and perhaps reflective consciousness in general). Five expert lucid dreamers will be studied.

Shera
As someone who is inclined to believe in partial free will, his [Skinner] ideas [determinism] are a little disconcerting.

Earthborn
That doesn't make them any less true. You can learn to accept them or you can ignore them and look silly. It's your choice. (But a choice completely dependent on your past conditioning. :) )

LOL! But I like looking silly! Seriously, that's a strong statement.

Most likely natural selection allows for some independent choices, some variability in our responses to the stimuli/threats that come up. This flexibility would increase our survival chances. Therefore partial free will is not a partial illusion, but an intrinsic part of determinism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism) Q.E.D. :p

Shera

BTW, Earthborn, thanks for answering all my questions! I obviously don't have much of a background in the sciences, but I found your explanations very understandable. Thanks again!

[Kaylee]

Hey ReFLeX,

Lets backup on the matter of whether the Mirror Test provides evidence that some animals are self-aware if we define that as the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror

versus

the mirror test proves that self-awareness is a yes/no condition; there is no gradual range of self-awareness.

Do you agree with this statement?
Scientific methodology can provide evidence for a hypothesis*, but it can not prove a negative.


Assuming the hypothesis is not about a negative ... ;)

[ReFLeX]

I never said it proves anything. If I did, then I was wrong. But it does support yes/no awareness, since after a reasonable amount of time a pass or fail can be awarded. Until more research is done, there is no reason to assume a gradual scale, especially remembering that as of now, there has been nothing close to a definition of how this continual scale would progress, what properties would increase/decrease etc.

[Jeff Corey]

Originally posted by Shera
...Most likely natural selection allows for some independent choices, some variability in our responses to the stimuli/threats that come up. This flexibility would increase our survival chances. Therefore partial free will is not a partial illusion, but an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism" target=_blank> intrinsic part of determinism...
That doesn't necessarily follow. There is variability in behavior, true. It's called "response generalization" and wihout it, shaping new responses would not be possible. Howerver, that in no way implies any degree of "free will".
(edited to add that I have no idea why this is underlined.)

[Earthborn]

Originally posted by Jeff Corey
(edited to add that I have no idea why this is underlined.)You accidentally removed the [/url] tag from Shera's quote.

[Earthborn]

Happiness.We already know that there are people with all sorts of different levels of happiness. And I can speak from personal experience that I didn't learn how to be happy until well into my twenties, which is not so terribly long ago. So I don't understand what you are trying to argue here.Or how about the learning of a fact?I have already mentioned that learning itself is a gradual process. First you have a few stemcells that we generally don't think of as learning, which slowly differentiate into communicating neurons that are fairly obviously learning. Somewhere in between being a stemcell and a neuron it is sort of half learning.But it does support yes/no awareness, since after a reasonable amount of time a pass or fail can be awarded.A pass or fail can only be awarded on whether the animal is able to recognise itself in the mirror. Whether this constitutes self-awareness depends on your definition of self-awareness.Until more research is done, there is no reason to assume a gradual scaleI think that until more research is done there is no reason to assume it is not a gradual scale. I cannot think of anything in nature that is not, so I see no reason to assume it is not. It would make self-awareness a very special phenomenon, completely different from pretty much everything else we find in nature.there has been nothing close to a definition of how this continual scale would progress, what properties would increase/decrease etc.Here's a simple outline, most of which I have already argued: The first stage of self-awareness is simply proprioceptive signals sent through the nervous system. Starfish probably already have this kind.
A whole bunch of stages later: an animal can recognise that another animal is similar to itself. When confronted with a mirror it will display social or territorial behaviour it only displays towards members of its own species, but it will not recognise that its mirror image is not another individual. This is about where my lovebird was.
Next stage: the animal is able to recognise that its mirror image always does exactly the same thing they do themselves. It will try to look behind the mirror to see how it works, but eventually gets bored with it because its mirror image never does anything surprising. Any social or territorial behaviour it displays towards its mirror image will fade as the animal learns that it is pointless, but it never displays any self-oriented behaviour. This is about what my cats are capable of.
Primitive human stage: the animal still treats its mirror image as something other then itself but learns that it can make its mirror image do whatever it wants. It may make faces to make its mirror image look silly. If the animal has some ink on its forehead, it may point to it in an attempt to tell its mirror image that it has something on its head, but they animal does not yet realise that is has ink on its forehead as well. The animal might pass just the mirror test, but not gloriously. Whether it has passed or not is still debateable. This is perhaps similar to what dolphins can do.
Almost human stage: the animal is able to learn that everything that is true of its mirror image is also true of itself and can deduce that if its mirror image has some ink on its face, it must have itself have ink on its face and will try to wipe it off. It may learn to often use the mirror for grooming. It is able to pass the mirror test consistently, like chimps.
Human stage: through interaction with other individuals who recognise someone else's mirror image as the person itself, the individual has learned to think of its mirror image as a depiction of itself and will adapts its body image to what it sees in the mirror.I think this human ability develops by going through those stages, but the last stages follow fairly rapidly after eachother. Other animals may get stuck in one of the stages because getting to the next requires more image processing then their eyes and brains can handle, or because they are very unlikely to learn them under normal circumstances. In the latter case it should be possible to train them to perform elements of behaviour that are typical of higher stages through conditioning.

And yes, this is all a bit speculative. It also does not take into account that there may be other forms of self-awareness than visual self-recognition.

[Earthborn]

I think researchers are finding that there are measurable physiological differences between the dream and lucid dream states.Interesting!It would probably be best to start out with chimps and gorillas because some know variations of sign languages.I hear Noam Chomsky in the background... "No, they don't! That's not language. Language consists of grammar and syntax and whatever... Those apes can only ape a few seperate words!"Most likely natural selection allows for some independent choicesThe wikipedia article does not mention choices that are independent. In fact it argues the opposite, that according to compatibilism Free Will can be free even if it is dependent on previous states:According to Hume, free will should not be understood as an absolute ability to have chosen differently under exactly the same inner and outer circumstances. Rather, it is a hypothetical ability to have chosen differently if one had been differently psychologically disposed by some different beliefs or desires. Hume also maintains that free acts are not uncaused but caused by our choices as determined by our beliefs, desires, and by our characters. While a decision making process exists in Hume's determinism, this process is governed by a causal chain of events.

[voidx]

Let's look at the word "self-aware" or "self-awareness". What does it mean? The literal sense would obviously be an entities awareness of its concept of "self". Well, what is "self" in the context of any given organism? For many less complex organisms "self" is not a coherent concept, but rather would be some form of physical definition. As already discussed where do "you" end, and the external environment being?

My main point is that it makes no sense to have degree's of awareness, whatever your being aware of. Either your aware of something, or your unaware. The key here is what is "self" in the context of any particular animal. This dictates what its awareness of this concept would then describe. Even simple organisms can differentiate "it" from "everything else". So to me awareness is not a problem. But what conceptual idea is it being aware of at these given times. That varies and is different.

Its also why I believe a gradual idea of self-awareness is rather, well arrogant from our perspective. Earthborns stage list above is defined as a comparison to human "self" awareness (not her words, but its obvious by looking at the descriptions of the stages). Anything not at that stage is at a lower or preceding stage. Not every animal is on an evolutionary track to become a human. So assuming full self-awareness as it exists in humans as the culmination of this gradual process is, I'd argue, conceptually wrong.

I'd argue there are not gradual stages of self-awareness, the peak of which, so far, being human like self-awareness. Rather I'd argue there are simply different and unique conceptual definitions of "self" based on the makeup of any given animal. While some are similiar to us, each is distinct. If a starfish moved along this list of stages to achieve human-like self-awareness. Would it still conceptually be a starfish, or would it be something else? Even we define and label our early human anscestors under different species names. It would perhaps make sense to track how a particular animal species conceptual framework changed over time so that the concept of "self" from "non-self" that they were aware of changed. However, an over-riding concept of "self-awareness" doesn't make much sense. It gives the impression that all animals, all organisms are striving towards a single definitive concept. I highly doubt this is the case.

[Kaylee]

In a bit of a rush, but just wanted to post this --

Self-awareness is a cognitive capacity; it's a type of intelligence. Some things don't have easily recognizable boundaries. Let's take literacy. Is that a yes or no thing? Levels of literacy can include the following:

*Some people don't even know enough to be able to fake literacy (anecdotal evidence suggests that illiterate people often try to hide their inability to read.)

*Others are good actors, and fake reading skills by recognizing food and medicine packaging, they may rely on rides and public transportation

*Some even manage to learn a facsimile of a signature

*Some maybe able to sound out very simple words written in print.

*And so it goes until some reach the level where they can read easily and rapidly in print or cursive. Not only in the easier to read typefaces, but in fonts of the must contorted types.

On a practical basis, society may decide that literacy is attained if one can read well enough to pass a drivers license test or fill out a employment application form. In fact, there's an ability to read before that stage and, of course, its a good thing to be able to read beyond that stage.

I think literacy is a good analogy for self-awareness, and that it is more practical to think of them as graduated capacities rather than either "yes or no" abilities.


Also this --


Here's what Gallup and his research partners had to say about self-awareness in the link's pdf file in the OP (pg 10):

If you are self-aware than you are in a position to use your experience to model the existence of comparable experiences in others.
…
Thus, making inferences about the state of minds in others is a logical extension of your experience with your own mental states.
Knowledge of self is an inductive springboard for an inferential knowledge of others.

Gallup et al goes on in the next page to basically say that the inferred knowledge would allow instances of deception, gratitude, grudging, sympathy and empathy. But I think that demonstrating the ability to show that one knows or infers what normal behavior to expect from one's species may be adequate enough to infer self-awareness.

Dogs are pack animals and the first thing dogs usually establish after meeting with each other is rank. (One will typically go belly up and bare its neck to the dominant dog.). They also have other typical behaviors, for example they like to sniff each other's uh 455… It may look strange to us, but they never seem to be confused by this -- they infer right away what type of behavior to expect from each other. ;)

And of course as I had said in an earlier post, they have the ability to recognize their scent (which they use to mark their territory) -- an ability that plays up to their strongest sense (smell) and not to our strongest sense, vision.

Dogs may be a good example of a species that have self-awareness yet may not have the cognitive capacity to prove that they can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Got to run. I'll try to answer some more posts later.

[Beerina]

Originally posted by Shera
Experimental evidence supports the opinion that to dogs the world looks like a black and white photograph. Perception of movement is the type of visual stimulation to which dogs seem very sensitive. If an object is moved, ever so slightly, most dogs will detect it and respond to the movement. Dogs make little use of their eyes in learning except for their perception of movements.


So what is going on in my Pekingese's brain when I set her down in front of the huge bathroom mirror?

Clearly she sees another dog, but if she thought it was some animal, dog or otherwise, she'd go crazy with barking and fear and try to hide behind me.

And yet her peanut brain can't recognize it as her in the mirror.

So therefore she must not see it anymore than she sees dogs on TV. No smell. More importantly for this part, no sound. Nothing there.

Animals won't react to the lame sounds from the TV either. Probably the sound eqivalent of the TV's lame picture. But when I hooked up my 5.1 surround sound, when the raining and thunder part of the Matrix came on, the dogs went crazy, the cat looked around because rain was "coming from all over", just like in reality.*

Ya, the dog'll sit in the front window and bark at someone at the other house on the other side of the court, easily 200 feet away. All from a little peep of noise made. But visual-only TV and mirror? Forget it!


* Actually, the cat behaved worse than when it rains in reality. She never reacts to rain or thunder. So why react with this rain? It took me awhile** to figure out: Because the movie rain, with 5.1 surround, sounded like rain as heard when you're standing outside. And god knows she's been outside in the rain enough. I assume for a cat it's a miserable experience. Hence when she heard "outside rain" inside, suddenly her anxiety shot up.

** 17 seconds, but for an android, that is an eternity.

[ReFLeX]

Happiness, or pleasure. Why re-interpret my word as the least likely meaning for what I argue? Physical pleasure can occur the same second as the stimulus....
Originally posted by Earthborn
I have already mentioned that learning itself is a gradual process. I'm sorry, but you made this up. Find a definition of learning (obviously, in the psychological sense) that includes "gradual" or stages as such.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by ReFLeX
Happiness, or pleasure. Why re-interpret my word as the least likely meaning for what I argue? Physical pleasure can occur the same second as the stimulus....
No time right now to go into detail, but you might be interested in the behavioral approach to pleasure and to pain--noting that there are two separate things that we mean by pleasure, two different things by pain--both the physiological event (which can be subject to classical conditioning, but will be responded to unconditionally, as you suggest) and the operant behaviors associated with that event (which are subject to environmental contingencies, and are quite separate and distinct from the physiological event), the "expression" of pleasure or pain.

I'm sorry, but you made this up. Find a definition of learning (obviously, in the psychological sense) that includes "gradual" or stages as such. So, in a case of "shaping", in which a behavior is moulded through the systematic reinforcement of successive approximations of the target behavior, you still see this as an either/or situation? If I am learning to shoot a foul shot in basketball, when is it that I have learned the behavior? When I make the very first shot? When I am roughly 20% successful? 50%? 80%? 100%?

[ReFLeX]

Yes, I only mean to point out that certain intangible things that are on the same plane as self-awareness do not come into existence gradually. I note scientists are still having trouble with what exactly the physiological mechanics of pain and pleasure are.
Originally posted by Mercutio
So, in a case of "shaping", in which a behavior is moulded through the systematic reinforcement of successive approximations of the target behavior, you still see this as an either/or situation? If I am learning to shoot a foul shot in basketball, when is it that I have learned the behavior? When I make the very first shot? When I am roughly 20% successful? 50%? 80%? 100%? Certainly not. I never said all learning was not graduated. I do say, though, that traditional definitions of learning do not include any such qualifiers that say all learning occurs gradually or in stages.
...Also, as a basketball player, I would say you have learned the behaviour when you have proper form (a description of hundreds of words can fit here), as opposed to how many times you make a shot. Your coach doesn't care how many you're making if you develop proper form, because he/she knows that if you keep practising it, your percentage will increase. This is a concept that Shaquille O'Neal doesn't seem to be able to grasp, noting his barely flexed knees and lack of follow-through with his wrist, which leads to a flat shot and his dismal free throw percentage. Which is all highly relevant, in case you didn't realize.

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Earthborn
I hear Noam Chomsky in the background... "No, they don't! That's not language. Language consists of grammar and syntax and whatever... Those apes can only ape a few seperate words!"


Koko tells caretakers her tooth hurts. http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20040809/koko.html

Check out this iidb thread (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=94556) also. ( I had posted the link to this thread earlier when I posted the anecdotal story of the dog that recognized herself in the window reflection.)

BTW, most web sites say Koko knows ASL, but per her caretaker in the iidb thread she signs in GSL (about a 1000 signs if I recall correctly in Gorilla Sign Language, which is similar to ASL but not the same). BTW, her caretaker also said that she understands about 2000 words of English.

The caretaker in the iidb thread said that Noam Chomsky was invited to meet Koko, but he never took the foundation up on it. He accussed Chomsky of being an arm chair researcher, vs. going out and getting his own information first hand.

Here's a site with some QuickTime clips of Koko signing. Unfortunately I could not play most of them on my PC, but perhaps others here will have better luck.
http://ali.apple.com/ali_sites/ali/exhibits/1000790/Ambassador_for_Her_Species.html

Lastly, even if Koko's caretakers have been exagerating -- its likely that Koko is still communicating. At a minimum she could be using a gestural communication system to get some basic ideas across. If Koko isn't even capable of that much, then I would be forced to conclude that a lot of people have really gone out of their way to lie outrageously over many years -- this would not just be a simple matter of interpreting some data differently.

Adding couple more things:

* From personal experience I know that not everyone understands ASL grammar -- its very different from spoken languages grammar. Someone who only knew spoken languages and did not know what to look for, could easily think that ASL has no grammar. Transcripts of signed languages into a written language can help get that misinterpretation across also.

Koko's web site: http://www.koko.org

==

The wikipedia article does not mention choices that are independent. In fact it argues the opposite, that according to compatibilism Free Will can be free even if it is dependent on previous states:

Here's some additional definitions of compatibilism.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/supplement.html

The wikipedia article was referring to one interpretation of compatibilism as per Hume, but there are other interpretations as one can see per the Stanford web page. And if it's permitted to combine any definition of free will with soft determinism -- then there would be even more possible definitions. For example here's a definition of free will that is different than many of the definitions of free will considered by Stanford in their disussions of the various forms of compatibilism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will
He [John Locke] believed, however, the defining feature of free will to be that we are free so long as we have the ability to postpone a decision long enough to reflect upon the consequences of a choice.

If I read extensively enough I probably could find an official version of compatibilism that agrees with my own. Is that necessary? I suspect its alright for me to say that I subscribe to compatibilism although I believe in a slightly different combination of determinism and free will than the ones listed in those sources. {Shrug} (The Stanford web site is not light reading though, and when time permits I'll go through it again. Pehaps I missed a defintion that I can accept as my own philosophy ... ;)
I do believe that most of our actions are a result of causality, however I also believe that as a result of people's unique natures that these causality bounds can be quite loose (more relaxed than would be reasonable to expect) and that this quality can be recognized by calling it Free Will. Hmmm, hope that makes sense.... . This may be another case where differences of opionions are not black and white but rather nuanced -- and the definitions and terms used are influenced by which slightly nuanced difference one prefers to stress. )

edited in an attempt to aid clarity while in a fog of exhaustion ...

[Kaylee]

Originally posted by Beerina

Originally Posted by Shera
Hi Beerina!

For clarity's sake I just want to add that the quote actually came from: http://www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca/pds/dog/sense_e.htm ( RCMP Police Dog Service, a Canadian police dog training centre).

I don't doubt the information's accuracy -- I just want to stress (since the thread is getting very long) that the information came from elsewhere -- I don't have the expertise in this area to make the quoted assertions.

I enjoyed reading about your pets' reactions, particularly on how your cat will react differently to rain sounds coming from your television depending upon whether its being piped through the TV's speakers or your 5.1 surround sound. Heh, maybe you can get your cat to be a spokesperson (with you as interpreter) for the stereo manufacturer. (Tigger Recommends UberStereos: "Hey! It fooled me!") :D

[Kaylee]

Catch the <a href=http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/mind/stories/s1185063.htm" target=_blank> link </a> in this thread's (http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55368)OP:

Australian radio show talks about:

Can Fish Remember?

==

Calum Brown: …I was working on Australian rainbow fish during my honours and my PhD year in Queensland and one of the things I was interested in there was just how long could fish remember things—and at that point I was very interested in predator/prey relations and how fish learn to respond to predators.

So I rigged up this—what effectively is a big fishing net that has a hole in it—and you swish it back and forth down a tank and the fish just have to learn where the escape route or where the hole in the net is. And it takes them only about 5 trials—it depends on where they’re from in the environment—and that procedure might take 15 or 20 minutes at the max. But if you then put those fish aside and test them again eleven or twelve months later, they’ve remembered exactly where that escape route is. And in fact, the data that I produced for that showed that they actually slightly improved.

Abbie Thomas: Eleven or twelve months later?

Calum Brown: Eleven or twelve months later ... for a fish that lives maybe two to three years.


Abbie Thomas: After how long?


Calum Brown: Up to 15 to 20 minutes testing.

Abbie Thomas: That’s extraordinary.

Calum Brown: It is, I mean if anyone ever says fish don’t have a memory, I just tell them that story and they’re like, oh, okay.

==

Are Fish Aware? Do They Feel Pain?

Abbie Thomas: A risk-taking personality, a taste for fine music and an excellent memory – it seems that fish have it all. But do these qualities mean that fish are conscious? The deeper question being probed here is how likely is it that fish are aware of themselves? And how do we test this in the first place?

From the University of Wyoming, neurobiologist Professor James Rose.

James Rose: The approach I’ve used is the technique that a clinical neurologist would use in making life or death decisions about whether a person is aware. They have to be able to communicate to you that they’re aware of your presence, that there can be some kind of exchange of information that’s beyond a kind of stereotyped automatic, programmatic sort of interaction.

Abbie Thomas: So what kind of minds does James Rose think fish have?

James Rose: I would characterise the fish as having kind of a Freudian mind, if you will, in the sense that Freud, although he was wrong about many things, was right about the idea of an unconscious mind. That is, processes that regulate our emotion and the things we do that we don’t know anything about.

So the fish is operating basically at that level. They have brain states that result in protective reactions, they have brain states that result in feeding and mating and whatever else they do, but it’s all unconscious.

Abbie Thomas: Professor James Rose. But the matter isn’t that cut and dried. Dr Lynne Sneddon says experiments in her laboratory prove that fish do feel pain, and so they must have some level of consciousness. You may even have heard about Lynne’s rather controversial studies where the lips of live trout were injected with bee venom.

Lynne Sneddon: So I had to give the fish a painful stimulus which was a short term acute stimulus that lasted about three hours. And this had a major effect on behaviour, it adversely effected the behaviour; the fish didn’t feed, they performed quite strange anomalous behaviours—and also their physiology was affected—and these responses were similar to those seen in humans. So since these stimuli are painful to humans, then it’s likely that they’re painful to the fish.

Abbie Thomas: What sort of reactions did they display?

Lynne Sneddon: Well the performed quite strange behaviours where they rocked from side to side so they were situated on the bottom of the tank and they’d rock from side to side on either pectoral fin and that might be similar to stereotypical rocking you see in zoo animals and primates, and that’s thought to be an indicator of poor welfare.

The other thing we did was they rubbed the affected area against the sides of the tank and into the gravel—and that might be similar to rubbing behaviour where an animal rubs an affected area and it helps to reduce the intensity of pain, so when we stub our toe, the first thing you do is you start rubbing it, and that helps to reduce the pain that you’re feeling.

==

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by ReFLeX

...Also, as a basketball player, I would say you have learned the behaviour when you have proper form (a description of hundreds of words can fit here), as opposed to how many times you make a shot. Your coach doesn't care how many you're making if you develop proper form, because he/she knows that if you keep practising it, your percentage will increase. This is a concept that Shaquille O'Neal doesn't seem to be able to grasp, noting his barely flexed knees and lack of follow-through with his wrist, which leads to a flat shot and his dismal free throw percentage. Which is all highly relevant, in case you didn't realize. LOL...and how do you determine "proper form"? Most pros use a version of a 2-handed set shot, but some use one hand only, and the person who holds the world record for consecutive free throws made uses an underhanded shot! Bottom line is, there *is* no "proper form" other than what works. And what works is determined functionally, by how often the ball goes in the net. Even your response here has to refer to your percentage increasing as the final arbiter of what works.

Note that even in the fish story just above, the researchers refer to "some degree of consciousness". As we use the word (which is highly relevant), we do very much think of it as something other than an all-or-nothing event.

[voidx]

Originally posted by Shera
Self-awareness is a cognitive capacity; it's a type of intelligence. Some things don't have easily recognizable boundaries. Let's take literacy. Is that a yes or no thing? Levels of literacy can include the following:

*Some people don't even know enough to be able to fake literacy (anecdotal evidence suggests that illiterate people often try to hide their inability to read.)

*Others are good actors, and fake reading skills by recognizing food and medicine packaging, they may rely on rides and public transportation

*Some even manage to learn a facsimile of a signature

*Some maybe able to sound out very simple words written in print.

*And so it goes until some reach the level where they can read easily and rapidly in print or cursive. Not only in the easier to read typefaces, but in fonts of the must contorted types.

On a practical basis, society may decide that literacy is attained if one can read well enough to pass a drivers license test or fill out a employment application form. In fact, there's an ability to read before that stage and, of course, its a good thing to be able to read beyond that stage.

I think literacy is a good analogy for self-awareness, and that it is more practical to think of them as graduated capacities rather than either "yes or no" abilities.

You miss my point. I tend to dislike analogies in general as they have a way of becoming loaded to whatever point you are trying to make. However, even if we take your analogy of literacy we'd have to take it on the basis of literary-awareness. Literacy is a fairly well defined concept. The ability to read and comprehend written literature. Now while a persons ability to do this effectively may vary the concept of literacy is solid enough that we could test for and determine to a large extent a persons literary competency. A very serious exam of their reading comprehension would very quickly show if they were faking it, or had a very poor or badly formed logical framework for understanding literature.

You are concentrating on the "awareness" aspect and glazing over the "self" aspect in my personal opinion. Self is not nearly so concrete a concept as literacy.

I would personally say what differentiates us from other animals is that we are more complexly verbal, rather than visual. Everything has language labels, especially the things we "see". And so its extremely hard to conceptualize an awareness of self that would not include verbal cues or language. Self, as we would apply the term to ourselves, to humans, doesn't have a conceptual equal in other animals I'd argue, and this is simply because of language.

One could argue that animals have no concept of "self" because "self" is purely a functional concept of language. I think animals can and do have conscious experiences, but they may have no concept of self at all. If they do its in no form as we would understand it because they have no verbal language to frame it in. Which is why we observe behaviour to see if we can recognize anything looking like an awareness of self. But even then I'd argue we're looking for behavioural clues that are distinctly relevant to our own human experiences, and our own human definition of "self" and so are somewhat biased, and perhaps distinctly irrelevant to other animals.

I think a lot of this boils down to what ends up being part of an animals conscious experience. I think a lot goes on in any animal without making it to the level of conscious consideration or experience. Self seems such an easy concept for us because of our ability for language, and hence for our resulting consciousness to use language and experience to query itself. What cognitive framework do animals have firstly for supporting consciousness. Is it the same as the resulting consciousness from human brains? If less complex, in what manner? And within that conscious experience what framework is there for internal prompting and querying, if there is no language. How might that lend itself to an internal concept of self or an external concept of not-self? How important is a cognitive concept of self to analyzing conscious experience? Is it merely a handy tool?

The problem with a gradual concept of awareness of self is that it infers partial awareness, or only a partially formed concept of self. Both of those ideas seem rather pointless to me. What is partial awareness? What is a partially formed concept of self, and in relation to what fully formed concept of self? Sometimes progressions are used as a way of merely attempting to explain something with a universal reference point for us, which is human experience. Its like saying, a dog has these following behaviours which by comparison to human behaviours, sort of resembles the human concept of "self" in ways A, B and D, hence, it is "here" on the progression to human-level self-awareness. While a handy way of attempting to analyze something, it does not mean that the dog has a less complex or sub-awareness of the human concept of "self". Its concept of self, if it in fact has one on a cognitive level, is fully complete and aware within the context of itself.

When we ask ourselves...what does our concept of self do for us...it often ends up being a sense of internal/external labelling using language. "I can differeniate MYSELF from everything else. I can apply MY experiences of losing a lost one to have sympathy for that independent self over there named TIM."

Without that labelling scheme, other animals must have a drastically different concept of self. I think its possible they don't have anything even remotely resembling our own, because language is simply that powerful. We cannot adequately get across our sense of self without it. What other ways can we represent our internal experiences? Drawing, hand motions. Does any other animal have the capacity to draw something that looks like anything on purpose? Left to their own devices do they scribble things in the dirt in the sand in an attempt to communicate to others? This might be another level of cognitive ability that they do not have, the ability to outwardly represent external objects as they see them.

A dog would have only sensory and behavioural cues with which to identify different entities aside from itself. A sense of fear, mingled with a scent and a visual pattern would equate to the dominant leader of the pack. I'd say these to a large degree are far more externally physical, than cognitive, at least in comparison to humans. The dog, or most animals would have almost strictly just behavoural cues because they have no language with which to form cognitive dialogue to themselves. Without that cognitive dialogue their ability to abstractly plan future actions with predicted results or to abstractly infer feelings or states of mind on an external object, would be greatly reduced.

At the end of the day what's the functional difference between having a concept of this is my internal entity, and all that is external, compared to a cognitive, conceptual identity of selfness? I'd argue they are seperate, although closely related.

[ReFLeX]

Originally posted by Mercutio
LOL...and how do you determine "proper form"? Most pros use a version of a 2-handed set shot, but some use one hand only, and the person who holds the world record for consecutive free throws made uses an underhanded shot! Bottom line is, there *is* no "proper form" other than what works. While this is true, the world record holder is also a useless basketball player unless he practises proper form for an in-game situation. He's never ever going to get fouled and thus get to shoot free throws unless he has any offensive competence, something that doesn't come with an underhand shot. I also don't see any pros using 1 hand and not 2. Could you explain that further? The best way to get a good arc and not be blocked in-game is still your basic, square to the basket, release at the height of your jump, elbow starting at 90 degrees and pointing to the basket, follow through straight up with the wrist giving forward momentum. Of course there's more to it than that. But it's the same mechanics as a free throw, and when you practise one you improve at the other, which is why there's no underhand free-throwing pros left.
And what works is determined functionally, by how often the ball goes in the net. Even your response here has to refer to your percentage increasing as the final arbiter of what works. ... I know, I wasn't making a serious point. My relevant point was, there is no definition that says all learning must be gradual.

[voidx]

Regarding Fish.

Fish having memory.

Well this depends greatly on our definition of memory. A fish avoiding a net, in a static environment, then successfully avoiding the net in the future, in the same static environment really isn't all that surprising. Fish are dumb, but their not mindless brainless hunks of meat floating in the water. Its not as though the fish goes, "Hey, remember that time 12 months ago when that a**hole researcher played that trick on us with the net and the hole....well, he's at it again. I totally remember". Its a learned response. I'm a little unsure as to why this seemed so surprising.

Fish feeling pain/being aware/being conscious

Fish obviously feel pain as they shy away from potentially harmful stimulus. They cannot quantify pain as we do, but obviously they have the reflex to avoid pain. Are fish aware? Well...aware of what? That their fish, that their in a fishtank rather than in the ocean or river...I'd argue no. Even the person interviewed was of the opinion that they had freudian minds, that they were essentially unconscious. They would merely have learned behaviours. Fish do not, in my opinion express emotion. Fish show behavioural traits of psysiological stress. Such as rubbing on rocks and wood when they get diseases such as ich. Their not always particularily benefical reactions either as rubbing on rocks and wood often makes the ich infestation worse and potential leads to infecting other fish. When a fishtank is kept well, your fish are not "happy", they are merely not "stressed". That fish stop eating when having their lips injected with bee venom is hardly surprising, especially since its only for a small period of time, 3 hours. I've had fish that have been sick that quit eating...although given enough time, several days, they do attempt to eat, although not very much. Its entirely likely its a behavioural response to a particular type of stress. And at points another type of stress attempts to intervene...hunger. Must eat. But many times, when a fish gets sick enough, or many animals for that matter they'll shut down completely, eating nothing to the point of dying. Its a response to stress, and if that stress does not alleviate, they seem powerless to overcome it. The physical body has its reactions and does what it can, but there is no conscious analysis going...must try something else, this isn't working. To infer that to react to pain is to incur consciousness is pretty weak. Especially with this example.

[Kaylee]

voidx, just want to say that my post yesterday was not in response to yours. I had written it before when I was offline and didn't see your post until right before I cut and pasted mine in. I would have said something -- but I was pressed for time.

Posted Originally by voidx
Not every animal is on an evolutionary track to become a human.
So assuming full self-awareness as it exists in humans as the culmination of this gradual process is, I'd argue, conceptually wrong.

Earthborn described a range of self-awareness that crossed multiple species true. But I don't think she was making the assumptions you have listed above.

I believe our understanding of the world starts with understanding ourselves. It's only natural to compare everything in the world to ourselves on a certain level, because we know ourselves best. I don't think one should read anything more into it than that -- I just see it as a method of organizing one's observations. I don't know if that was Earthborn's intention, but its certainly how I often go about organizing my thoughts. {shrugs}

There was another post (one of mine ;) )that showed how the self-awareness ability could vary within one species. It was about the iidb post on how a dog showed self-recognition in a window's reflection. Even before Beerina's post I think it was acknowledged that most dogs don't show that they have this ability.

So within the past few days we've had posts that describe graduation of self-awareness both across species lines and within one species, and described graduation of a different cognitive ability. And yes, I understand that you didn't like that particular analogy either:

Literacy is a fairly well defined concept. The ability to read and comprehend written literature. Now while a persons ability to do this effectively may vary the concept of literacy is solid enough that we could test for and determine to a large extent a persons literary competency. A very serious exam of their reading comprehension would very quickly show if they were faking it, or had a very poor or badly formed logical framework for understanding literature.

I briefly addressed that point (evaluating literacy ) yesterday. Let me try a different tactic: If there were a team of a dozen advisors to decide how such a serious exam (hopefully one with texts of sufficiently graduated levels of difficulty) could be evaluated, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect at least more than one opinion on what result would be considered functional literacy? I think so.

I would personally say what differentiates us from other animals is that we are more complexly verbal, rather than visual. …One could argue that animals have no concept of "self" because "self" is purely a functional concept of language.

I agree that humans have a much more sophisticated communication system than animals do. However I don't think that the fact that animals don't communicate as sophisticatedly as we do would prevent them from having a sense of self-awareness. I don’t agree that the concept of "self" is "purely a function of language".

Sometimes progressions are used as a way of merely attempting to explain something with a universal reference point for us, which is human experience. Its like saying, a dog has these following behaviours which by comparison to human behaviours, sort of resembles the human concept of "self" in ways A, B and D, hence, it is "here" on the progression to human-level self-awareness. While a handy way of attempting to analyze something, it does not mean that the dog has a less complex or sub-awareness of the human concept of "self". Its concept of self, if it in fact has one on a cognitive level, is fully complete and aware within the context of itself.

I simply believe that self-awareness is a graduated capacity no matter which species' capacity for self-awareness is being evaluated.

Without that labeling scheme [language], other animals must have a drastically different concept of self. I think its possible they don't have anything even remotely resembling our own, because language is simply that powerful. We cannot adequately get across our sense of self without it. What other ways can we represent our internal experiences?

That's an interesting question, but just because we don't have the answer yet does not mean IMHO we should deny convincing behavior that they are demonstrating self-awareness. To summarize and rephrase the points that I cut and pasted from Gallup's paper in my post yesterday:

Gallup believes the following:
* If an organism is self-aware than he can infer knowledge of others.
* The ability to infer knowledge will allow "instances" of deception, gratitude, grudging, sympathy and empathy.

In addition I believe this:
* The ability to infer knowledge will allow "instances" of normal social behavior .
* The successful demonstration of normal social behavior may be adequate enough to infer that the organism is self-aware. Indeed, how else to explain the cognitive capability of the animal to be able to successfully socialize with others of his own kind?


Let me try one more "exercise" (for lack of a better word):

I see each individual organism (even the simplest one) as complex and multifaceted. Since an organism itself is not a binary piece of information (even the simplest animal could not honestly be described as a bit) than the self-awareness of an organism cannot be limited to being binary either.

(Normally I wouldn't write up something like the last paragraph, but I'm searching for other ways to present the idea of self-awareness as a graduated capacity, and not simply as an on/off switch.)


Another point -- as Mercutio noticed:
Posted Originally by Mercutio
Note that even in the fish story just above, the researchers refer to "some degree of consciousness". As we use the word (which is highly relevant), we do very much think of it as something other than an all-or-nothing event.

Posted Originally by voidx
At the end of the day what's the functional difference between having a concept of this is my internal entity, and all that is external, compared to a cognitive, conceptual identity of selfness? I'd argue they are seperate, although closely related.


I don't understand what you are saying in this last paragraph, sorry.

[voidx]

I believe our understanding of the world starts with understanding ourselves. It's only natural to compare everything in the world to ourselves on a certain level, because we know ourselves best. I don't think one should read anything more into it than that -- I just see it as a method of organizing one's observations. I don't know if that was Earthborn's intention, but its certainly how I often go about organizing my thoughts.

Its natural, but is it relevant in all cases? To not read anything into it is to potentially ignore our own biases as too how we experience things, which may not be the same for other animals.


There was another post (one of mine )that showed how the self-awareness ability could vary within one species. It was about the iidb post on how a dog showed self-recognition in a window's reflection. Even before Beerina's post I think it was acknowledged that most dogs don't show that they have this ability.

The problem with this was it was anecdotal, and admittedly so. Entirely possible that the dog could have heard or otherwise sensed the woman approaching it which then prompted it to move. Its also possilbe that the perceived motion in the mirror also triggered a response. Too many other mundane explanations to assume self-recognition of a mirror image.


So within the past few days we've had posts that describe graduation of self-awareness both across species lines and within one species, and described graduation of a different cognitive ability. And yes, I understand that you didn't like that particular analogy either:

What is the measuring stick for the different levels or gradients of self-awareness? I'd argue strongly that it is their resemblance to the human concept of self, which I don't think any other animal has. Perhaps my point is subtle, and perhaps some might think its merely semantic nitpicking, but I do think its important. When using a gradient there must be some common factor to judge each gradient against. It makes sense within a species because you can trace its line back through the spiderweb of its evolutionary anscestors knowing obviously how they are related. However an over-riding concept across species is more difficult. While I suppose judging other animals awareness of self with human awareness of self as the to-date most advanced level seems natural, and is likely useful on some level, you must be careful to identify bias and/or behavioural and cognitive processes that exist only in humans, and refrain from trying to fit them onto all other animals when its possible their incompatible. The feelings of sad, happy, content are some obvious examples.


Let me try a different tactic: If there were a team of a dozen advisors to decide how such a serious exam (hopefully one with texts of sufficiently graduated levels of difficulty) could be evaluated, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect at least more than one opinion on what result would be considered functional literacy? I think so.

Sure. However all humans have a similar framework for the potential of literacy. While there might be a small grey area where people disagree at which exact point one is considered to be funtionally literate, there will be large area's on either side where clearly one is literate or they are not. In one way this sort of gets to my point. Everyone has a different opinion...but what is that opinion? They each have an opinion of a description of what point a person has reached functional literacy.


I agree that humans have a much more sophisticated communication system than animals do. However I don't think that the fact that animals don't communicate as sophisticatedly as we do would prevent them from having a sense of self-awareness. I don’t agree that the concept of "self" is "purely a function of language".

Perhaps I should have phrased that more carefully. The human concept of self, is by and large a function of language. Because of that, I argue its very much different from any other animals cognitive concept of self. So again, we must be careful of taking our own behaviours and applying them to other animals in an effort to try and recognize self-aware behaviour. While Koko is an amazing example of how similar we are to gorilla's, it also in many ways an example of how very different we are at the same time.


I simply believe that self-awareness is a graduated capacity no matter which species' capacity for self-awareness is being evaluated.

Again, graduated in relation to what benchmark? How do we arrive at the gradient capacity for a cats potential for self-awareness? Brain structure in relation to humans? Behaviour in relation to humans? I do like the description you quoted earlier from Gallup:

If you are self-aware than you are in a position to use your experience to model the existence of comparable experiences in others.

However, how we can ever discern that is exceedingly difficult. Your own point about inferring knowledge of normal behaviour with other entities of ones own species, isn't clear enough. It could be behaviourly hard-wired. Is an ant self-aware? It seems to know which ants to attack and which not too. One could argue that's an expected normal behaviour within a species. But does it imply a concept of awareness of self?


I see each individual organism (even the simplest one) as complex and multifaceted. Since an organism itself is not a binary piece of information (even the simplest animal could not honestly be described as a bit) than the self-awareness of an organism cannot be limited to being binary either.

Well if I really wanted to nitpick here I could simply say that even a complex and multifaceted organism is still made up of binary informations if you drill all the way down. Its just on a level of complexity and size and number that its next to impossible to comprehend. Any behaviour could be reduced to an amalgamation of, although rather immense in size and scope, binary combinations.


I don't understand what you are saying in this last paragraph, sorry.

I think its really my main point. And I'll admit to it not being fully formed, or, even in the end correct. However I think its worth trying to grasp. From a physical stand point even simple organisms like bacteria seem to operate on the concepts of this is the internal entity (it) and all that is the external environment (not it). I'm assuming most here think that awareness of self is more than this. The ability to recognize other entities of the same class and makeup as it (external other its). That would mean that it would have to have some concept of the makeup of itself in order to correctly identify external other its. Yet arguably, pretty much every organism has this ability, so it must be something more. The Gallup quote implies that an it must be able to infer or assign states of what it experiences to any external it, whether it matches its class or not. Yet we can only attempt to identify this by resulting externally observable behaviour, which is rather limiting. You would argue that it must be able to predict a common behaviour of an external other it. I think it could be argued that bacteria are self-aware. Its merely that the awareness of self, or rather the awareness of it, only allows it certain functions as a result of that awareness because of the given complexity of the concept of itself. So essentially, where we disagree is that you think there are gradual or variant levels of awareness of self. That it is only so aware of what it actually is. I think that all entities are fully aware, yet the functionality, or say the ability to express to others the internal concept of it-dom is limited by the complexity of the concept of it-dom. Or more simply it is fully aware of what it is, yet how complex the concept of what it is, is what dictates the complexity of its external ability to display or infer it from everything else to an external observer.

[Kaylee]

Voidx, unfortunately, sometimes when threads get very long, I think people may lose track of each other's positions and comments made earlier. Also unfortunately, I think we may have reached the point where we have started talking past each other vs. with each other. Just the nature of the beast I think of a forum. It has its strong points, but it also has its weak points.

If you still want to discuss this, lets try it through an IM service. A more interactive medium might help. If anything comes out of the IMs we can post it to this thread. If interested send me a PM, but if not that’s OK. I think we had some great discussions in this thread. I certainly enjoyed them :) and I learned a lot and got a chance to think about some ideas that I haven't thought about in a while. Not bad! :)

So, to everyone who contributed to this thread, a big thank you!