Class PP for Friday March 12 (Cl. #20)

What is Cognitive Ethology?

"Cognitive science can be taken to be a collection of approaches to psychological explanation that share a commitment to the explanation of behavior in information-processing terms and mentalistic notions such as "concepts" and "knowledge." (Colin Allen)

Cognitive science has generally focused on laboratory type investigations of these subjects. Cognitive ethology instead tends to look at the processes as they occur in animal populations in nature (although this is not always the case).

What are "Mentalistic" Notions?

Concept or Idea

ThoughtConsciousness or awareness

All of these have been assumed to either be illusions, unworthy of study, or as existing on in humans.

Questions for Cognitive Ethology

Where and when (phylogenetically) did our (human) mental faculties arise?

Can animals think?

The big enchilada -- Are animals conscious?-- It might seem that the above must

be true for animals to be conscious.

-- Do they have concepts, do they use symbols, do they plan their activities?

-- If any of these are true, do they do these things in a manner similar to humans?

Animal Consciousness -- A Detour

Consciousness and Animals

Source: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

Undisputed notions: • Awake rather

than asleep, or in a coma.

• Able to perceive and thereby respond.Human-like notions:• Able to create mental representations for use in the rational control of action (Block, 1995)

This and following illustrations are from Marc Hauser's Wild Minds

Let’s look at some further definitions

Self-Consciousness

Defined: "an organism's capacity for second-order representation of the organism's own mental states."

• Because of the so-called second-order character (“thought about thought”) of this, "the capacity for self consciousness is closely related to questions about “theory of mind” in nonhuman animals — whether any animals are capable of attributing mental states to others."• This notion is actively being investigated, as we will see.

• Is this a fruitful line of investigation?

• Nagel, T. (1974) “What is it like to be a bat?”, Philosophical Review 83: 435-450

Phenomenal Consciousness

Defined as the qualitative, subjective, experiential, or phenomenological aspects of conscious experience.

• These definitions are encapsulated in the notion that there might be “something it is like” to be a member of another species -- qualia. (see Nagel reference).

Nagel, T. (1974) “What is it like to be a bat?”, Philosophical Review 83: 435-450

• Most behavioral scientists would state that this notion is properly one of philosophy and not science

I bring this notion up because it is both interesting and commonly supposed.

Thinking , Consciousness,

and the Turing Test

What is the Turing Test?

How might this test be useful with animals?.

http://www.turing.org.uk/

The Great Danger

It is possible we will get into a few of the next slides

Griffin's Speculative Attacks On The

Remnants of Behavioristic Notions

Two books and a series of articles in the late 1980s and early 1990s

Griffin's NotionsWhat suggests thinking / consciousness?

• Complexity

• Novelty

• "versatile adaptability of behavior to changing circumstances and challenges"

• Communication -- "empathy" in social environments

Examples that could be used to infer consciousness

• Tool making

The Communication Portal. Starlings As an Example:

Dangers and Rewards

Dr. Meredith West