A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test

https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-self-aware-fish-raises-doubts-about-a-cognitive-test-20181212/

162 156 8 years ago

eksemplar• 8 years ago

I’m completely out of my field, but I never understood why it was so hard for us to imagine that other animals were capable of having rich inner lives or even being self-aware.

To me it seem obvious that other animals would also possess various degrees of cognitive ability, I mean, we do.

uhtred5• 8 years ago

Because it makes it easier for us to abuse, exploit and murder them.

ozzmotik4• 8 years ago

just a minor nitpick: the technical definition of murder is the unlawful killing of another. in most cases, the killing of animals is not unlawful and therefore can't really be called murder. also depending on the source of the definition, murder more specifically refers to the unlawful killing of a human, specifically. if you remove the need for it to be a human then there certainly can be cases of killing animals that count as murder, for instance killing endangered species, or hunting without a permit/hunting a species out of season, or the killing of an animal with clear malice (eg animal abuse). but still, for most intents and purposes, the killing of animals can't really be called murder because the majority of animal death is merely to provide food and as such is most certainly not unlawful.

hirundo3• 8 years ago

It's hard for humans to understand that people not in their tribe have rich inner lives or can be self-aware, let alone animals. We're wired to believe almost anything if our interest depends on it. We have an interest in pillaging other tribes and eating other animals, so it's easy to convince ourselves that they are non-player characters. It makes doing those things more pleasant.

wincy2• 8 years ago

Perhaps too off topic, but I’ve often wondered how the descendants of Vikings, once considered the most terrifying raiders of the sea, are now some of the most egalitarian and nonviolent nation states.

castle-bravo• 8 years ago

I suspect that it's cultural and derives from our economic relationship to animals. I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer; attributing intelligence and identity to the deer would predispose a hunter to pay close attention to the animal's behaviour and give him an edge in hunting it. In cultures with domestcated animals bred for compliance with human will, it is less advantageous to view the animal as another mind. Instead, we see them as tools to be used and discarded. To do otherwise would compromise our ability to extract maximum economic advantage from use of the animal.

wincy2• 8 years ago

I’m not so sure that’s the case though, as for example Talmudic law prohibits castrating animals. A gelded oxen is much calmer and easier to work with than a bull. I think it certainly varies from society to society, but ancient agrarian traditions also respect animals in ways you might not expect.

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer

I’m guessing it was The Last Of The Mohicans?

SubiculumCode2• 8 years ago

The issue (today) is not whether animals have cognition, but the extent and nature of that cognition.

In the present case, the research question is whether animals have a conception of self. This is necessarily a fuzzy concept.

The test that has been used many times and with many variations basically involves providing a mirror and a condition that is only noticeable as applying to oneself by relating the image in the mirror as representing one's own body.

However, the test probe is merely an instrument used to measure an underlying construct. That is, there is an assumption that to solve the test particular cognitive processes are invoked.

But a test probe may be solved using processes or strategies other than those for which the probe was designed to measure.

Cleaner Wrasse fish have many instincts that reflect school behaviors, especially in young fish. School like behavior: One fish turns, then it turns, suggest strong control over behavior by the sight of other fish..including those seen in a mirror.

I suspect this mirroring system is having an influence on the fish's behavior here. It sees another fish with a skin condition (a mark), which may have activated cleaning behavior in itself.

luxuryballs• 8 years ago

I think it’s not hard to imagine at all and that’s exactly why they’re making time and effort to find some scientific proof.

EliRivers2• 8 years ago

There is a poster here somewhere who maintains that because animals don't have a language, they cannot think; presumably extrapolating from noticing that they themselves think in words (edit: found it - "Animals don't think, because thinking requires language...").

From what I can tell in the animal research game, it's like AI; every so often someone posits some qualitative property that only humans do as the difference twixt animals and humans, and then an observer sees that qualitative behaviour in an animal (or sometime has seen it years or decades before).

Frans de Waal's books on this are very readable. The big ones of previous years - empathy, planning, tool-using and so on - all fall pretty easily.

rsynnott• 8 years ago

That’s... a weird argument. Humans can think without words (and indeed without words or images).

crooked-v• 8 years ago

There are a lot of people who think that it's literally impossible for someone else to have a different inner experience than they do. As someone who's mostly aphantasic and only has an 'inner voice' when communicating or using it as a tool to focus, I quite like this article on the subject: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-exper...

techiferous• 8 years ago

Because we view animals as resources to be used for our ends. Cognitive dissonance is at play.

randyrand2• 8 years ago

Throughout history humans have treated humans like dirt as well. There must be more to the answer.

blhack• 8 years ago

Because they don't act as though they have rich inner lives (especially fish and birds).

If you're actually interested in this topic, I highly recommend the book "On Intelligence" by Jeff Hawkins.

zaq_xsw2• 8 years ago

I'm not so sure about that. Certain species pf crows and parrots have long been understood (even by non-scientists) to have general/abstract reasoning abilities. And people who actually study them seem to think that we often underestimate them [0] - probably because of widely held myths like the 5 second memory one.

I haven't read Hawkins' book yet, but he and the vicarious crew tend to conflate "neocortex" with "general intelligence" in their public talks. Birds and, it seems, the vast majority of animal species rely on predictive models of the world to navigate it - even if their "model-builder" doesn't look exactly like the mammalian one.[1] It makes complete sense to me - if a lizard loses a leg, it quickly learns how to walk with just 3 legs. If a finch is born with slightly larger wings than normal, and it also loses some of its tail feathers at some point, it quickly learns to adjust its motor patterns to suit the new conditions. You solve problems like these with sensory-motor models, not with hard-coded algorithms.

[0] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528836-200-animals-...

[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121001151953.h...

vbuwivbiu• 8 years ago

nor do most humans

amanaplanacanal2• 8 years ago

Birds are a lot smarter than most people give them credit for. I think most people just have more experience dealing with mammals.

nineteen9992• 8 years ago

There is a massive segment of the movie market (primarily aimed at children) where the starring characters are anthropomorphised animals which live rich inner lives and are self-aware. This is almost Pixar/Disney and Dreamworks entire very successful business model.

So I don't think it is really so hard for most of us to imagine ...

Varcht2• 8 years ago

Chicken or the egg? Definitely some feedback loop going on, not sure which is which.

Falling34• 8 years ago

I think imagine is probably not the best word to convey what the parent is talking about. Maybe "take seriously". We also have plenty of movies involved anthropomorphized inanimate objects, but (almost) no one believes they have any kind of inner lives or self-awareness.

roywiggins• 8 years ago

For the first half of the 20th century, scientists didn't believe that human babies felt pain. What's obvious isn't universal.

http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html

perl4ever8• 8 years ago

Setting circumcision aside, AFAIK anesthesia is not possible when doing surgery on infants, so with serious conditions, it's either operate without it or nothing.

Therefore, believing they don't feel pain is a matter of expediency allowing doctors to save lives.

goatlover• 8 years ago

Part of it has involved controversies over language, culture and consciousness, and part of it has been not wanting to anthropomorphize animals as having human personalities, since being human has a lot to do with thinking in language derived from culture, and that we're apes with vision as our dominant sense instead of smell.

swayvil• 8 years ago

Ignoring 99% of your reality frees up tons of attention for attention-demanding tasks like engineering and officework. Not to mention somewhat insulating you from the toxicity of urban life.

It's an attention-management-strategy that's popular and efficient for cultures like ours.

Of course it's evil as hell too. So we compensate with an appropriately self-serving "well they're just dumb animals" narrative.

JauntyHatAngle• 8 years ago

I don't follow you.

People have been imagining animals have complex inner lives for thousands of years. It's a natural thing for us to do in our want to relate to things.

People disagree with each other, sure, but I think that's fair that people disagree on a contentious topic. There is hardly an answer to whether fish have complex inner worlds yet.

Are you talking about scientific thought about it?

possess various degrees of cognitive ability

I can't say I agree with this. I agree with you that perhaps people failed to recognise and test for variances within the species. (Im not in this field either so I can't say for sure...) but again, the majority of people would know that different animals of the same type don't have different quirks and differing intelligence. Anyone who has had some pet fish has recognised some as being more shy or more aggressive than the other. Cow farmers know some of their cows are dumber and smarter than the other.

To take that thought and say "well therefore some fish have rich inner lives and others dont" is a bit of a stretch to me. I would suppose that there is a limit to their capacity and variance.

Sure, Chimps, Dolphins, Elephants - very easy to convince people they do and I'd believe it easily.

Convince me that a trout does? I'm not so sure, and would need to be convinced in some way. I can imagine it, but I won't believe something just because of my want to anthropomorphise.

While I can understand that many people are too dismissive of animals as being basic or unfeeling, that doesn't invalidate the idea that animals have a more limited mental capacity for what we perceive to be conciousness, and that includes sense of self at least somewhere along the line of complexity.

nobody271• 8 years ago

I too am outside of my very (very very very) narrow five things that I can do BUT I've had the same question as you so allow me to throw some of my thoughts your way.

It starts off with a rough guess about something hard to define and because it's so hard to define no one ever changes it but it's not as though the rough guess was ever correct. That's the part we forget. I think it's similar to the Turing test which to some people has become like a blindly dogmatic rule for machine intelligence. I don't think the Turing test was ever meant to be used how it's used today. I think it was just a rough guess. More like a "yeah, something like that" kind of thing than a definition.

kyllo• 8 years ago

It's because it causes an uncomfortable degree of cognitive dissonance to imagine that animals have self-awareness and rich inner lives, and also justify killing and eating them.

I'm not a vegan, I eat a lot of meat--I just feel uncomfortable when I think about it this way.

zachguo• 8 years ago

Anthropomorphism is what you described. It's not a falsifiable scientific theory.

tsherr• 8 years ago

We're still in the "earth is the centre of the universe" stage when it comes to other life forms.

gnulinux6• 8 years ago

2018 Ig Nobel Prize in Anthropology winner: Spontaneous Cross-Species Imitation in Interaction Between Chimpanzees and Zoo Visitors [1] "[...] for collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often, and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees." I think this is evidence towards your point that we understand very little of cognition of other species.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-017-0624-9

PacifyFish2• 8 years ago

I'm sure this work was groundbreaking , but let's not kid ourselves that imitation is some high and misunderstood form of intelligence.

Nor should we kid ourselves that this is new information. The adage "monkey see, monkey do" has been around for, what, centuries? Is it really that surprising that apes imitate things they see? Does it really reveal a paltry understanding of monkey cognition?

Varcht2• 8 years ago

Oh hey, Apes ape, what a concept!

randyrand2• 8 years ago

I'm excited for AI to take over and treat us like pets. That will be a real wakeup call for a lot of folks.

Imagine trying to believe "God created humans in his image"in this future.

noonespecial• 8 years ago

Right up until the super-AI creates a pet human or two in its own image and a little garden for them to live in.

ars3• 8 years ago

Just so you know that phrase means with the ability to recognize right from wrong, and the free will to use that knowledge. (And it does not mean intelligence.)

And so far so I am aware animals are not able to recognize right from wrong. They can be trained not to do certain things, but it doesn't come from inside them.

jvagner2• 8 years ago

I've been doing a 30 day vegetarian challenge this month. It hasn't even been hard. Pizza is already not working for me. You can guess where I'm going in January.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going back.

uhtred5• 8 years ago

Going vegan is also easy, so many amazing recipe books and blogs, off the shelf goods, restaurants.

gnulinux6• 8 years ago

Going vegan isn't easy at all, I even doubt it's possible if you care about your protein intake. Plant sources are very carb rich and more and more evidence suggests high carb, low fat diets aren't good for humans. There is simply no way to get enough protein from plant sources unless you wanna eat highly processed tofu every day. A full vegan, high protein diet would require eating low carb tofu at least 2 meals a day. Otherwise you need to accept taking exorbitant amounts of carb to get enough protein (basically, from beans). Seeing that how popular weightlifting in young Americans (especially males) today, suggesting "vegan diet is easy" is intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not arguing anything about ethics or availability or cost of vegan diet. There is simply no evidence suggesting full vegan diet is healthy. The most alarming thing about vegan diet is that you'll have absolutely no source of Omega 3 except expensive açai berry and walnut (all other plant sources have trace amount of Omega 3). So in a vegan diet you get excess amount of carbs (especially sugars) and Omega 6 which causes inflammatory diseases. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113095430.h...

If I were vegan I would eat Trader Joes low carb tofu, avacado, açai berries and walnut every day, all day and supplement it with high fiber veggies like broccoli, and brussel sprouts. This is simply not feasible and practical from a cost and social aspect. Eat too much fruits to get cheap, and widely available calories and you'll get bizarre amounts of fructose. Good luck with that.

jvagner2• 8 years ago

i'm a certified personal trainer, a competitive strength athlete, best friend is a nutritionist and doctor, and we can look at a selective subset of science and studies all day long but i'll go with the research i've selected and believe in, the cohorts i know and socialize with and whose examples i can see, and the actions i've decided on.

even if we take inactive, S.A.D. eaters out of the mix, there are healthy and unhealthy examples of most eating modalities. ultimately, i'm of the belief that paining over any "healthy" modality will increase harm, and not-paining over any "healthy" modality won't.

in the end, we meet our end. until then...

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 8 years ago

Going vegan isn't easy at all, I even doubt it's possible if you care about your protein intake.

Literally millions of people are proving you wrong every day.

There is simply no way to get enough protein from plant sources unless you wanna eat highly processed tofu every day.

Tofu isn't even highly processed. It's essentially a cheese made from water that's had soybeans soaked in it.

Djvacto• 8 years ago

A vegan diet is easy if you're coming from an already health-conscious diet, meat or no meat. Before going vegetarian/vegan, I was already paying attention to what I ate, cooking at home for almost all of my meals, and generally educating myself about nutrition and diet.

Going cold turkey from the kind of person who eats out for most of their meals, or generally doesn't cook much from scratch, to the kind of person who cooks their own meals using plant-based ingredients is going to be difficult, no matter what. Not only do you have to learn about what kinds of ingredients and recipes are at your disposal, you also have to get good at cooking (which is not just some skill you are either blessed with or aren't).

My wife & I live in a medium COL city, and eat a vegan diet for 2 with plenty of splurging (both w.r.t. $ and health) and very good nutrition, without breaking the bank. I'd say including our spending on treats or non-homemade convenience ingredients like Beyond Burgers and the like, we spend around $100 a week for 2 people and eat like royalty.

With a little bit of effort, I could probably reduce that spending by about half, and still have a variety of meals (ranging from asian stir fries and thai curries to BBQ and healthy pasta).

To anyone trying to get started, I'd say the main things to look into are: * Legumes. Beans and Lentils are versatile and dirt cheap if you buy dried. We have an instant pot that makes cooking them even easier, but you can get by with just soaking and a pot on a stove. * Vital Wheat Gluten & Seitan. I don't mean store-bought Seitan (though it's good, it's very expensive). Buy some vital wheat gluten at a health store or on the internet, and make some seitan meatballs, sausages, anything. It's an excellent source of protein, and you can do so much with it. * Tofu. There are a few different kinds of Tofu, as well as other soy products like Tempeh (fermented soy). Tofu comes in such varieties as silken (very soft, used to make stuff like vegan cottage cheese, or in baking), firm/extra-firm (used for stuff like stir fries or baking), and if you hit up your nearest asian market, you'll find a bunch of others like already fried tofu, tofu skins (yuba), etc. * Nutritional Yeast. I use it in a lot of ways, but it's basically a cheesy/nutty seasoning. It's definitely a staple. Try it on avocado toast. * Veggies. Figure out which veggies you like and how you like them cooked. Roasting is a good go-to for most. Get a variety of color, and check out your local farmer's markets, CSA/Crop-Shares, or local farms for cheaper produce. * Cheese made from nuts. You can make homemade cheeses using cashews. This is more on the "I miss cheese" side of things than health, but I mean, it's cashews, it's not artificial or anything.

As far as health, nutritional science changes it's mind about certain things every so often. You can see the general consensus flip from "Eggs are bad" to "Eggs are amazing", and this happens with all sorts of things. People used to avoid fats, now they try to eat fats. I personally try to limit my carb intake, but I'm not gonna feel bad if I eat a certain amount of carbs through legumes or non-starchy vegetables. I have a protein target I try to hit (which is pretty easy to do especially using seitan, peanut butter, nutritional yeast, and other such protein-packed goodies), and I don't go over a calorie limit, and that's all I track when I track. The mix of carbs to fats varies day to day and it's been working for me. You might feel better with extremely low carbs, or you might not ever get many fats.

It's also not a requirement that no one eat any meat or animal products ever. Before going vegetarian I was "flexitarian" and would occasionally eat meat when I was out and about. Now I eat mostly vegan at home, but when I'm out I sometimes get something with eggs or cheese. The current rate of meat consumption is not sustainable on an environmental level, even if you don't care about the ethics.

But it looks like I've rambled on for long enough. I just wanted to point out some of the ways a vegan diet is accessible both from a cost and a nutrition stand-point.

gamblor9562• 8 years ago

Plant and legume sources are also very fiber-rich, which offsets most of the carbs, even in fruits. While fruits have lots of sugars, the fibers also slow the digestion of the sugars.

Kelp is high in Omega 3s, as are Brussels sprouts. They're not as high as meat sources but they're still sufficient.

The vegan diet is extremely low in Omega 6s...not sure why you would think it's high, since grain-fed meat is the primary source of Omega 6 in the Western diet and dwarfs any source you'd find in the vegan world by many order of magnitude.

aschearer• 8 years ago

Not sure why you're speaking with so much authority. I regularly bike 50-100 miles per day. I rock climb 2-3 times weekly. I follow StrongLifts. I'm vegan and don't obsess over my diet. I simply make an effort to eat a lot of healthy, whole foods. I feel great. I have tons of energy. It's been five years without issue.

Further, from my reading on the topic the evidence supports the healthfulness of a WFPB diet. Eating this way isn't hard nor expensive. It can be socially inconvenient. It can take time to learn the ropes if you're transitioning to cooking and eating healthier. But it's worth it!

the_gastropod• 8 years ago

Going vegan isn't easy at all, I even doubt it's possible if you care about your protein intake

Virtually nobody who eats enough calories per day is protein deficient. Even eating just one relatively low-protein source of food, like brown rice, for all your daily calories will get you over a sedentary protein requirement.

Plant sources are very carb rich and more and more evidence suggests high carb, low fat diets aren't good for humans

This is also just not true. [1]

There is simply no way to get enough protein from plant sources unless you wanna eat highly processed tofu every day. A full vegan, high protein diet would require eating low carb tofu at least 2 meals a day.

Addressed above. False. Beans, peanuts, peas, hemp, spinach, soy (of all kinds: tempeh, edamame, and tofu) are all packed with protein

Seeing that how popular weightlifting in young Americans (especially males) today, suggesting "vegan diet is easy" is intellectual dishonesty.

Veganism in the general population is pretty uncommon. So it's not surprising that it's also uncommon in the world of weightlifting. But just to provide a counter-example: Patrik Baboumian. Patrik, a vegan, holds several heavyweight lifting records [2].

There is simply no evidence suggesting full vegan diet is healthy

False [3][4]

The most alarming thing about vegan diet is that you'll have absolutely no source of Omega 3 except expensive açai berry and walnut (all other plant sources have trace amount of Omega 3) So in a vegan diet you get excess amount of carbs (especially sugars) and Omega 6 which causes inflammatory diseases.

Flax, which is extremely cheap, is an excellent source of Omega 3s.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-study-find...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrik_Baboumian

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288/

[4] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/89/5/1627S/4596952

vibrato3• 8 years ago

Hate facts

PerfectElement• 8 years ago

There is simply no evidence suggesting full vegan diet is healthy.

It looks like you've been living in the low-carb bubble, like many others here on HN. I find it weird when people who identify with being rational drink the kool-aid promoted by anti-vaxxers like Dr. Mercola and ignore the positions of the ADA[1] and the BDA[2].

You should really look into where your information is coming from.

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19562864 [2]https://www.bda.uk.com/news/view?id=179

Yaggo• 8 years ago

You know that there are vegan athletics, even bodybuilders? Just google for e.g. "famous vegan bodybuilders".

uhtred5• 8 years ago

lol, what? You can get all the protein you need from lentils, beans, whole grains - none of which are processed. And before you go all, oh but they are not complete proteins, quinoa is a complete protein, and all you have to do is mix legumes and whole grains in a meal and you have complete protein.

Sohcahtoa82• 8 years ago

What's this have to do with potentially self-aware fish? Did I miss something in the article?

bradbeattie• 8 years ago

I think the implication is that unnecessarily killing sentient creatures is immoral. The link is between potentially discovered sentience and abstinence from an industry that inflicts upon them suffering and death.

miltondts• 8 years ago

The value of these types of tests has been called into question long before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHSbvjq1nm4

The above video had a tremendous effect on how I view intelligence and creativity. Seeing pigeons "talking" and solving problems really puts in perspective the power of the context/environment.

That is why I think we already have the algorithms for AGI.(i.e. reinforcement learning is probably all you need) We just don't have the processing and/or the right context for it to develop. But I also think the result will have all the downsides of animals/humans. That is, it will be as hard to get the desired behavior from an AI as it is to get it out of an animal/human because the predicting the behavior out of the cost function+environment will remain extremely hard. In fact you can see this mentioned in the video. Getting the right repertoire even for seemingly "simple" behaviors is hard.

joe_the_user• 8 years ago

Indeed, that's BF Skinner and associates talking about how creative behavior arises naturally from learned behavior.

And key here is that things like "the mirror test" are about testing animals for what humans naively believe are their unique traits. And this seems like it could be easily faulty if these naively human beliefs are false, which seems quite likely actually.

And also I'd view the focus on consciousness as a naive belief even if psychologists and philosophers have attempted to systematize it. At the same time, Skinner in particular as "behaviorist" seems to go from a lab where he's seeing most behavior mediated by stimulus to a position that seems to imply behavior coming mechanically from stimulus.

b_tterc_p2• 8 years ago

Unless I’m reading this incorrectly, their sample size is 4 fish, 3 of which sort of passed.

Buldak• 8 years ago

I don't know if the usual caveats about sample size should be salient when we're investigating something like self-awareness. If I found a fish who could talk, I wouldn't demur, " ... but it's a small sample."

b_tterc_p2• 8 years ago

Point taken, but we’re a far cry from evidence as strong as talking. The article itself mentions refuted studies which were later proven to not be reproduceable. It’s more likely to find three weird fish than three fish that have self awareness unlike the rest of their species. Also unclear how many chances these fish were given, and I am guessing it was very generous.

adrianN• 8 years ago

Effect size is pretty important too. If the effect is strong enough you don't need huge sample sizes. Talking fish certainly is a strong effect.

orky56• 8 years ago

That was just the sample size when they first tried to publish. It seems like it's been retested since and only now has been accepted into publication. No hard numbers on that in the article though.

godelski3• 8 years ago

This is an anecdotal story, but has made me feel weird about this test in general.

I have a cat (who do not pass the mirror test) who loves mirrors. She just likes looking at herself in them. It is weird. She also frequently walks in on me in the bathroom and frequently looks at me through the mirror. And I know she looks at that one because it is the one I look at her with. So it always has made me feel like this test may be doing something else, because she clearly recognizes that I'm not in the mirror, but that she can see me with it. So it seems like she understands what a reflection is, but not her self in the reflection.

So it seems that animals can understand reflections, but does that really mean they recognize a self if they recognize themselves in it? IDK, I'm not a biologist and may be missing a lot from this test.

IAmGraydon• 8 years ago

I have two Siamese cats, one of which does exactly what you describe. So I started testing this a bit and noticed that if she’s facing away from me and looking at me in the mirror and I reach for her from behind like I’m going to scratch her, she will stand up to meet my hand. This seems to mean that she understands that what she’s seeing in the mirror is just a reflection and that when the guy in the mirror is about to scratch the cat in the mirror, it’s actually me that’s about to scratch her.

godelski3• 8 years ago

Yes! She does exactly that too. And I do have to mention that my cat is deathly afraid of anyone that isn't me. So it wound stand to reason that she recognizes that it is the "me" that she knows.

That being said, cats don't have excellent eyesight. But it is hard to do the mirror test with a creature that is so sensitive to feels and smells. I wonder how they test it for cats. Because surely a little dot isn't good enough. Maybe a laser dot?

namlem2• 8 years ago

Cats have been observed passing the mirror test. One popular hypothesis is that they can recognize themselves, they just don't care. That or some cats are capable of recognizing themselves and some aren't.

godelski3• 8 years ago

Wait, really? Is there scientific documentation of this too?

porpoisely2• 8 years ago

The mirror test is very flawed because it assumes other animals think ( or recognize ) like we do. We are mostly visual creatures so we create visual tests. But animals like cats are predominantly olfactory creatures. So if you planted smells of the cat, the cat would immediately recognize the smell as itself.

Imagine if cat psychologists created a test for humans. They would probably put your scent on one shirt and 9 other scents of other people on 9 different shirts and have you "recognize" yourself by picking out the shirt with your scent. Since we are visual creatures, we would fail such a test and the cat psychologists would claim that humans obviously have no self-aware. After all, how could a self-aware creature not recognize it's own scent.

That's how absurd the mirror test is. A mirror test for most animals would be like a smell test for humans. A cat might not recognize it's own reflection, but it will recognize its own scent. A human might not recognize our own scent, but we'll recognize our own reflection.

jerrre• 8 years ago

Interesting point, but not a great analogy. A reflection is a "live" copy, you can move your arm, and see your reflection move its arm. Your scent experiment is more like recognizing from photos.

Svettie2• 8 years ago

Don't think this is grounded in reality, but if I imagine the perspective of a cat, there are a lot of other concepts that we could be taking for granted. Kind of related to object permanence, we have a strong grasp that what we see a copy of in the mirror is the same object. But for a cat, this probably doesn't hold true. I can imagine a cat modeling a mirror as a window, beyond which for some reason there lives another copy of you, and another cat (her copy) as well. But since she's checked that she can't go over there, it's not important to her, and no glaring contradictions to this view would arise to require adjusting this model. The overarching principle could simply be that a cat doesn't really concern itself with something not immediately actionable.

clubm82• 8 years ago

Reminds me of this article from 2009 where a dead salmon "reacted" to ""a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations."

https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/

thanatropism3• 8 years ago

The irreplaceable Alone, the pirate doctor, thus reacted to the dead salmon fMRIs:

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/the_problem_with_sci...

perl4ever8• 8 years ago

"behavior is, in large part, genetically determined"

I disagree with the qualification "in large part", which implies there is behavior that is not genetically determined.

Suppose you do an experiment to test. Disrupt the genetic code in a fertilized mammalian egg completely. You will find there is no subsequent behavior of the organism. Hence, it is clear that all behavior is dependent on genetics.

On the other hand, if you place that egg in a box for several years, you will likewise find that there is no ensuing behavior. Therefore, it is clear that all behavior is dependent on the environment.

wpietri• 8 years ago

Do we know what happened to him? I really miss his work.

SubiculumCode2• 8 years ago

It may have reminded you of that study, but the points were complete different. The dead salmon paper was about the practice of double dipping (selecting for an effect, then testing for a related effect) in some people's fMRI research.

clubm82• 8 years ago

Yes, that's why I said it reminded me, not that it was the exact same topic.

qwerty4561275• 8 years ago

The ink-dot and mirror "self-awareness" always sounded ridiculous to me. Isn't it obvious that a self-aware creature does not necessarily has to care about their appearance and can ignore the dot and that a creature driven by instincts and reflexes only can be programmed to maintain their skin color pattern (as the species has developed the pattern for a reason)? I would rather believe it might be self-aware if the same creature would remove the dot some times, would do it later every now and then and would ignore it occasionally.

In fact I even doubt every human is consciously self-aware, a huge number of people probably live their lives the way we see dreams. So many people have no doubts their bare feelings and judgments are the reality e.g. believing the fact they're upset means a counterpart has done something really wrong and/or hates them while in fact they might just have not slept well or followed a bad diet...

fwip• 8 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, other people have rich inner lives, not just you. I know it's gratifying to think you're in an exclusive club of smart people, but you're really fooling yourself.

You're like a half-step away from the "NPC" meme.

qwerty4561275• 8 years ago

It's not gratifying, it's depressing. And I didn't say anything about "just me" (I meant a portion of people and I don't know how big or small it is) and also didn't say I myself had always been consciously self-aware nor that I easily manage to maintain self-awareness all the time. In fact I wish somebody would explain this idea to me a decade ago so I would wake up and develop the skill&habit of conscious presence and critical perception of subjective reality earlier, my life could have made much more sense and less struggle for me and whoever I've interacted with then.

PavlovsCat3• 8 years ago

Define "rich".

It is unbelievable how blank and devoid of meaning, seen from the outside, and how muffled and unconscious, felt from the inside, the lives of most people flow along. It's a dull desiring and suffering, a dream-like tumbling through the four season towards death, accompanied by a series of trivial thoughts.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer

[..] the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, who also said

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.

Falling34• 8 years ago

You're conflating the philosophical definition of self-awareness and a colloquial usage of the term.

qwerty4561275• 8 years ago

Would you be so kind to specify them if you happen to know? The philosophical definition I've found is "Capacity for introspection and the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals." But I have never thought about "the ability to recognize oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals" (I actually don't feel myself separate, I feel being a part of the collective body, a part equipped with a mind of its own) part and I doubt I have a correct idea of what the colloquial usage of the term is.

What I mean under conscious self-awareness is the difference between the non-lucid dream/daydreaming/flow state and the awake mindfullness state when you consciously observe everything and yourself, don't associate yourself nor the surrounding reality with your emotions and judgement (remember these are just a particularly quirky map rather than the territory) and are capable of conscious non-conditioned reasoning and acting.

There seemingly is a middle option of not-really-conscious basic self-awareness that is when a person neither sleeps nor observes their subjective perception as a distinct object (which neither is their actual self nor does it represent the actual reality around them reliably).

namlem2• 8 years ago

The cleaner wrasse has long been known to be extremely intelligent. The fact that scientists are questioning the mirror test because of this fish is more telling of their credibility than the test's.

The cleaner wrasse even engages in complex economic behavior: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/animal-economics/

colordrops2• 8 years ago

An anecdote here - my wife and I both met a tropical fish in a tank at a restaurant and it was clear to both of us that the fish exhibited significant intelligence. It observed us patiently and even made playful eye contact. It seems that there are different levels of intelligence within fish species and they can't just all be categorized the same. It's only very recently where humans realized the great intelligence found on octopuses. The same may be true of some fish.

ada1981• 8 years ago

If the fish is able to bring up concerns about the test being used, it has to have some degree of intelligence.

rv-de• 8 years ago

The mirror test always seemed flawed to be because of its reliance on visual perception. For many animals eyes and the primary source of environmental information. For some it's the nose. Now how about a special device that synthesizes your body odor and fans it back to you - would you recognize yourself?

A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test

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