The debate about whether (and, if so, how) animals think is an ancient one. Aristotle considered it important enough to write on the question extensively, and it’s a safe bet people were debating it long before we have written records. Unsurprisingly, it’s a major topic of research today, but one that tends to defy easy answers.
A big part of the story of zoology over the last 60 years has been learning that we have been underestimating animals’ intelligence. In the 17th century, René Descartes alleged that animals were mere machines, incapable of sensations, let alone feelings or thoughts. This view is now so outdated that the debate is usually not about whether animals think, but how much, and whether this meets certain definitions.
For example, we’ve gone from defining humans by our tool use – which we assumed was beyond other species – to learning some birds shape remarkably sophisticated tools, and appear to plan their use. Nevertheless, debate continues as to whether this reveals what we call consciousness or sentience, and how intelligent an animal needs to be to do what we have seen.
Are animals conscious?
“There are lots of different answers” to asking what it even means for animals to have consciousness, Dr Alecia Carter of University College London, an expert in animal behavior, told IFLScience. “A philosopher would argue that consciousness is being able to experience the world.” On this basis, “Some philosophers, building on the work of neuroscientists, argue that […] all animals are conscious because they have the ability to experience the world and react to it.”
I don’t think it’s helpful to say that chimpanzees are more intelligent than gorillas (or sunfish, or Komodo dragons, etc). Intelligent in what way?
Dr Alecia Carter
A recent declaration signed by 40 researchers stated that “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates … and many invertebrates,” – including insects.
Looked at this way, consciousness may be so widespread that the more interesting issue to consider is sentience, which is defined as “An animal’s ability to have subjective experiences.”
Being subjective, sentience is harder to measure. It was only in 2021 that octopuses and squid were legally recognized as sentient beings in the UK, despite decades of evidence, and the US is still debating it.
As an animal behaviorist, Carter added that she thinks neuroscientists are closer to determining how animals think than members of her own discipline, adding: “I wish there was more discourse between these fields.”
Another angle on the topic – one that greatly interested ancient Greek philosophers – was whether animals could reason, specifically make logical deductions. More than two millennia later, Carter says the existence of animal logic remains debated. “The problem is always that minds are black boxes that we don’t have access to, and all we can do is observe animals’ behavior in response to stimuli. We have to guess what’s going on inside a brain, and often two different hypotheses are possible from the same behavioral data.”
Does measuring animal intelligence make sense?
The popular view of animal intelligence tends to be very hierarchical. Naturally, we place ourselves at the top. Chimpanzees, cetaceans, elephants, and a few birds tend to get praised for their intellect, while other animals are considered steps below.
However, Carter disputes the usefulness of such hierarchies. “I think many researchers understand that ‘intelligence’ is a difficult concept to define and even more difficult to test ‘fairly’,” she said. “There is such a fraught history with even making tests within one species (humans) that I don’t think it’s helpful to say that, e.g., chimpanzees are more intelligent than gorillas (or sunfish, or Komodo dragons, etc.). Intelligent in what way?”
We also don’t understand how other people think, so it isn’t a difficulty that is specific to non-human species.
Dr Corina Logan
Considering a few of the species she has studied closely, Carter added: “Meerkats and lizards and baboons have to navigate their worlds. But, for the most part, it doesn’t matter that they have different intelligences. They’re intelligent enough in different respects to survive and, hopefully, thrive in the world, which is what matters. We focus a lot on the kinds of intelligence that we value, but animals have some pretty impressive intelligences that we don’t have access to at all.”
“I think we are getting a better idea of the richness of how other species experience the world and process information about it, but I don’t think we will ever really understand how they think,” Dr Corina Logan of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology told IFLScience.
Perhaps that is not surprising, when, as Logan notes: “We also don’t understand how other people think, so it isn’t a difficulty that is specific to non-human species.”
“We have to have something to measure to be able to quantitatively evaluate cognitive abilities, we generally measure proxies of cognition using behaviors or phenomena that we can see and interpret,” Logan continued. “This means that we can never really know how another individual thinks because we can only measure proxies of their thought processes – regardless of whether they are an individual of the same or a different species.”
It’s hard to witness certain acts of planning or tool use and conclude that animals don’t think. However, we’re much less likely to extend that generosity to animals lower down the hierarchy. This is a major contributor to differences in the way species get treated ethically, for example, the widespread outrage when chimpanzees are kept in small cages for scientific research, even among people who will happily eat chickens from cages too small for them to turn around.
As Logan points out, “The majority of the research on intelligence has focused on species that are expected to be more intelligent. This means that we don’t actually have evidence that the other species aren’t intelligent. So the ranking is unfair from the start.”
Birds of a different feather
Logan is a specialist in the intelligence of birds, having compared the famously tool-proficient New Caledonian crows with North American grackles, even teaching grackles to use computers. She points out that the different lifestyles her subjects adopt promote different forms of intelligence. For jays, it is about social memory and identifying places where food caches are unlikely to be found, whereas birds that need to dig food out of holes develop tool use that is more recognizable as intelligence to toolmaking humans.
“They might have other cognitive abilities they are able to use, but we just don’t see them expressed in their usual behaviors so we don’t think to look for their other abilities,” Logan said. “This makes it pretty useless to try to compare species’ intelligence. Instead, we should be taking the perspective of ‘Hey, I’m really interested in spatial intelligence, so I’m going to go find species who are good at space use and figure out how they do that.’”
Survival of the smartest reputation
Animal species are dying at probably the highest rate since the dino-killing asteroid. With each extinction, we lose forever the opportunity to understand how it thinks. On the other hand, gaining even a little of that knowledge first may be key to their survival.
Ethicists may argue about whether an animal’s intelligence matters, or only its capacity to suffer, but in the public mind, the animals that are most obviously smart are those most worth saving.
Jane Goodall’s discoveries about chimpanzee intelligence, beginning with the first observation of tool use in the wild, were a major step in building enthusiasm to save our nearest relatives. In 2023, the US Department of Agriculture expanded restrictions on the way captive birds can be treated, which Logan considers a response to improved understanding of avian intelligence.
Learning how animals think may be practical, as well as motivational in keeping them alive. We may be a way off figuring out the inner workings of our fellow animals’ minds, but every insight we gain gets us a step closer to understanding and protecting them.
This article first appeared in Issue 25 of our digital magazine CURIOUS. Subscribe and never miss an issue.
Source Link: Can Animals Think? Understanding Them Could Be Key To Communicating With Aliens One Day
