Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans

Do you see an animal that is optimistic? The question is genuine, and in the answer lies a lot about our attitudes to other minds, that is, that are not human. We don't know how to think about other minds except in relation to our own.

The way to spot an optimistic pig is to train the pig to associate a sound with a treat. An apple falls through a hatch into a pig's mouth. A dog-clicker sounds like nothing so nice. The pig will only get a plastic bag if it approaches the hatch.

If the pig hears neither of these sounds, what will happen? There is a chance that this is a sign of an apple delivery. A pig thinks it will get the treatment. A pig is optimistic. The pigs were reared in a pleasant, stimulating environment with room to roam and plenty of straw, and they showed an optimistic response to the squeak more often than pigs in a small enclosure. If you want an optimistic pig, you need to treat it as a being with a mind, deserving of the resources for a well-rounded life.

It is not possible for us to know what it feels like to be optimistic. There is no reason to suppose that it is like being a pig. Philosophers and scientists used to be reluctant to grant a mind to non human entities. The attributes that separated us from the rest of the living world were feelings and emotions, hope and pain, and a sense of self. Other animals lacked an inner life and could not be trained to respond to stimuli. It was not possible to give animals "minds" in any meaningful way.

Caution was necessary. It is not possible to assume that other animals do the same things as we do because of the same experiences and mental representations of the world. There is a point where it looks more contrived to suppose that pigs just happen to look like us in a variety of ways while differing in their explanation. They might have minds that are not so different. Frans de Waal warns that sometimes great apes actions make little sense if we don't assume intentions and feelings.

After all, as Charles Darwin pointed out, we all share an evolutionary heritage, and there is nothing in the evolutionary record to suggest that minds were sudden innovations. There is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties.

Finding a way to think about animal minds that are less intelligent, less conscious, and less distant from the top of mentation is a challenge. Mind is not a single thing that beings have. The space of possible minds is a concept that has multiple coordinates and a cluster of data points. We are at the center of the universe, not at the centre of the mind. What other things are out there?

Some birds will design custom-made hooks for foraging, and even make tools with multiple parts 

The bird brain is often called a bad one. Humans are not as diverse as birds. Birds have a wide range of specialities and differences in mind space. Some birds are better at navigation and others are better at learning songs. The scrub jay is an expert food storer, able to store hundreds of cache around their habitat and find them all in one go. cache thieving is common, and the birds may use deceptive measures such as returning soon after depositing a store to move it to another location, but only if they know they were observed while caching it. The ability to acknowledge the existence of other agents with motives and knowledge different from their own is called a "theory of mind". Humans only get this around the age of three or four. When placed in a cage that the birds know is likely to contain no food tomorrow, scrub jays will store food in anticipation of the circumstances they are likely to face later.

Pride of place is given to corvids in the hierarchy of bird minds. The New Caledonian crow of the south Pacific is the most masterful of them because it can make tools with multiple parts. Elephants and dolphins are the only animals that use tools. Which qualities of mind corvids bring to bear on the task is the challenge. Young children understand that objects don't just disappear, that they have properties like hard and brittleness, and that cups that are tilted or precariously balanced can topple. They can execute multi-step tasks if they keep the end in mind.

It isn't clear what the rules are for a bird's ability to use a tool. There is a difference betweenritualistic andmechanistic thinking; if I move the stick like this, bugs appear. The latter view is needed to adapt tools. A basic understanding of cause and effect is required.

We tease out what bird behavior reveals about the way they represent the world internally, to what extent they can deduce the possibilities and affordances it offers for achieving goals. It is hard to know how this feels for the bird. It has been assumed for a long time that the bird brain is different from ours in that it lacks a neocortex. How do you determine if an animal has a sense of self? Is it possible for a bird to look into its own mind and acknowledge what it doesn't know? Experiments with crows show they can.

Birds, bees and other insects were often seen as the epitome of mindless automata following programmes if we had sometimes been ungenerous to birds. The idea of bees executing the perfect geometry of comb-building by "divine guidance and command" was suggested in the 18th century. Hive-building is no more a sign of advanced rationality than chess-playing is in humans.

Football is something else. A group of people, including a professor at Queen Mary University of London, have trained bees to manipulate a small ball into a hole in the ground for a reward. The bees can find better solutions than their demonstrator because they don't follow rules but adapt them to the circumstances.

It is thought that no animal besides a human uses symbolic communication, where one idea is represented by another, as it is in writing. The honeybee dances to inform its hive members about a distant food source. It seems like a strange problem in a geometry exam, requiring protractors and conversion of units. Regional dialects may take into account the local terrain. Each bee's internal map of the surroundings is used to interpret the instructions. The bee brain is about the size of a grain of sand.

An optimistic bee is a possibility. The equivalent of the pig experiment uses flowers: blue ones carry a sugar reward, green ones don't, but will a bee interpret an ambiguously blue-green flower optimistically or pessimistically. The bees that just received a sugar treat seem to be more optimistic than the bees that didn't. We don't know if the behavior is accompanied by a feeling or not.

It's time to travel further out in the world. The closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien is probably the octopus, according to a philosopher. The creatures interact with us without fear or aggressiveness. It is hard to imagine what the agenda would be compared to a dog or a chimp. They are great problem-solvers, for example, they can navigate mazes in the murky gloom of the sea, and they can light up laboratories with water. Who knows what the antics are for.

We shouldn't be surprised if this is puzzling. Around the dawn of complex multicellular life, our ancestors were a flatworm, not a mollusc. The evolutionary path to making a mind is represented by octopuses. The number of cells in the body is similar to that of a dog, but instead of being collected in a central brain, they are spread throughout the body. Half of the nervous system is in the arms, and the arms do things of their own accord while the brain watches.

Thanks to the advocacy of marine biologists and other experts they were recently admitted into the category of sentient beings under UK law. According to some researchers, the individual creatures of the octopuses may be a community of minds. I find myself in a hallucinogenic place when I try to think of this.

This may sound tame compared to the idea that plants have minds. You can find that proposition discussed in august scientific journals, even if you don't believe in new-age belief. It's called "plant neurobiology" or "biopsychism" and it's thought that every living being frombacteria up has sentience of a sort.

Plants don't have a nervous system Many non-neural cells communicate with one another and there is evidence that cellular channels in plants can transport sugars and electrical impulses. The Venus flytrap shows a primitive ability to count the number of impulses it senses before closing on an insect.

When flower heads move to track the progress of the sun, plants can sense and respond. A member of the pea family, the South American Mimosa pudica folds its leaves when touched and displays a kind of learning called habituation, where it eventually ignores a repetition that proves harmless. Pea plants can be trained to associate neutral signals with positive ones such as light.

A view of plant behavior as "cognitive" is justified by this. There are suggestions that the plant behaviors are accompanied by feelings. Arguments are still raging.

It is advisable to consider the rights and dignity of other beings, even if it is on the side of generosity. It makes it possible to see what other minds could be. A club with strict entry rules isn't mindedness. Plants, fungi, andbacteria show enough attributes of cognitive function to warrant a place in this space, even if we don't agree about whether or not they have sentience. A calmer appraisal of artificial intelligence is promoted by this perspective. There is no reason to think that today's artificial intelligence has more experience than the rocks from which it is made. It also has the ability to learn and predict.

There are a lot of books about listening to nature.

To think that artificial consciousness will emerge by making computer circuits bigger and faster is like thinking that if an airplane flies fast enough, it will lay an egg. The trajectory of computers and artificial intelligence is not towards us, but somewhere else entirely, as they are taking off in the "intelligence" direction of mind-space. Many experts believe we will need to build human qualities into the machine in order to be more human-like.

Most of the time we think advanced alien intelligence is like us but with better tech. The scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence assumes that aliens recognise the same laws of mathematics and physics as we do. The more we know about minds, the more we realize that they have the ability to sense and intervene in the world. We need to be more imaginative about what we can do, and less focused on what we can't. The universe is not only queerer than we think, but it is also queerer than we can imagine. The only hope of understanding the universe is to look at it from many different points of view. We might need more than one mind.