Episode 39: Byrne’s Methodology for Discovering Animal Insight (part 3)

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Transcript

[00:00:10]  Blue: Welcome to the third of anything podcast. Hello everybody.

[00:00:13]  Red: Hi

[00:00:14]  Blue: Bruce. Hi Bruce. Hi Bruce We’ve got everybody today cameo Sade and Tracy We’re continuing talking about animal intelligence today and today. We’re gonna talk about Richard Burns methodology in trying to determine Which animals are intelligent? I’ll have to explain what I even mean by which animals are intelligent because that’s so many loaded terms right there And so I’m kind of excited about today because I really am impressed with how Richard Burn goes about this He is I don’t think he knows anything about Karl Popper, but Karl Popper would be proud Good example of how if you’re a good scientist, you are a paparian. You may just not know it Richard Burn Who just as a reminder from the last couple episodes Richard? I discovered Richard Burn through David Deutch’s book the beginning of infinity David Deutch used Richard Burn’s studies to show that animals didn’t understand anything and really Emphasized their lack of explanatory knowledge when I actually read Richard Burns books. I I Discovered that Richard Burn Interprets his own theories very differently than David Deutch does and Started to become interested in what Richard Burns point of view was so Richard Burn is he’s specifically like his whole career Is that he wants to figure out when animals started to think, you know He believes that it was sometime before maybe not too long before humans Now what do we mean by think? Richard Burn does not mean human level explanations.

[00:01:41]  Blue: So we’re not disagreeing with the central thesis of Deutch’s position that animals His the most important part of Deutch’s position is animals don’t have explanatory knowledge like humans human level explanatory knowledge Burn does not disagree with that, but burn does believe that a Few animals do have the ability to think and he’s trying to figure out which ones do and this is a difficult thing to come up with because it’s possible to get false positives because of genetic pre -programming that looks intelligent to us But in fact is just automatic behavior and also because as we’ve discussed the last two episodes Animals have trial and error learning. They can actually create knowledge on the fly Knowledge in the sense of adaptive information not necessarily in other senses of the term This isn’t in and of itself a kind of intelligence So trial and error learning is a form of intelligence and you know, almost all animals have it I don’t know which animals don’t have it. I’m not sure single -celled animals have it It may be that certainly animals with a brainstem and above all do classical conditioning or trial and error learning But I’m not sure how many before brain stems do it if any Now I’ve been saying single -celled animals don’t do trial and error learning But it occurred to me after the last episode that in episode 21 evolution outside the genome We talked about Michael Levin’s or Levine’s I don’t know how to pronounce his name work where he created some bots out of frog cells and that these cells learned new

[00:03:16]  Blue: Exploratory behavior they they would start doing things that frog cells don’t do and they would explore their environment And they would look around and things like that Trying to find food sources So I know I don’t know if that would count as trial and error learning or not that Maybe maybe not So let’s let’s just say that I don’t know for sure that single -celled animals don’t do trial and error learning But I’m assuming they don’t for our purposes. We’re going to assume they don’t That it was later animals that developed that ability and therefore would be considered somewhat intelligent Whereas a single -celled animal would not be

[00:03:54]  Green: just to kind of be a little fair to I guess to be fair to do it like he might say that that you know those frog cells They are actually that the what they’re doing has actually been like we have actually programmed to do that In the sense that what they’re doing is just like with our programs. We have evolutionary programs, too But having said that I guess Yeah, I mean, I guess we do understand that there is a type of learning at the genetic level like we’re not I mean If we don’t restrict ourselves to the single organism, but overall You know overall the evolution of an organism is the sort of

[00:04:33]  Blue: you know

[00:04:34]  Green: Evolution of life is the sort of learning I guess

[00:04:38]  Blue: But you’re

[00:04:38]  Green: saying but you’re specifically pointing out here that it’s not just at the genetic level, right? That’s that’s a point or

[00:04:45]  Blue: So we know that we know that most animals that we think of which would not be single -celled animals Do trial and error learning? We know that that was what the last two episodes were about particularly the last episode And that is a kind of intelligence and is learning. That’s entirely outside of the genome I don’t know. I’m not claiming that single -celled Animals do that In fact, I would have thought they didn’t the only type of learning that I thought they were capable of was habituation That’s certainly the classical kind of learning that a single -celled Organism does but some of Michael 11’s work does question that a little bit Like you said, it could be that maybe the cells had ancient programming in there that was in fact Just genetic automatic behavior that to us looks like Exploratory behavior trial and error type behavior. It’s really hard to tell at this point So I’m going to start with the assumption That single -celled animals don’t do trial and error learning and therefore we can consider them non intelligent even in that sense Does that make sense?

[00:05:49]  Green: Oh, yeah

[00:05:50]  Blue: Okay, however trial and error learning even though it is a form of intelligence Is not the type of intelligence burn is looking for he would consider trial and error learning to be unintelligent The way he would use the term in fact, he really doesn’t use the word intelligent Or understanding at all that is kind of what he’s looking for his books called like the thinking ape He’s trying to figure out the evolutionary origins of intelligence. That’s the subtitle But when you actually look at how he goes about it, he dispenses with terms popular terms like thinking And intelligence pretty quickly and he gets way more specific about what he’s looking for and you would have to do that Right. I mean because the word intelligence is so vague and could include trial and error learning Then like all animals are intelligent and that that’s not really what he’s looking for He’s trying to figure out when they develop something more meaningful than that So he’s upfront discounting trial and error learning as a as the kind of intelligence that he’s looking for Even though that may count as intelligence in the layman sense. It’s not the sense. He’s looking for it. Does that make sense? Yeah So then he looks into okay, what what kinds of intelligence What we know, what does the word intelligent mean to other people? And he points out that there’s been various Scientists who have attempted to define intelligence in various ways So he looks at some of their definitions of intelligence And then he says okay, can animals do this or not? So one of the ones he gives an example of is the learning set So a learning set I’ll describe that in just a second.

[00:07:28]  Blue: It’s It requires seeing the logical connection between different problems and generalizing So as bern puts this from his book by thinking a Generalizing across the details of individual problems realizing that the rule is the same to notice such rules animals must characterize the rewarded stimuli In abstract terms and then it goes on to say this is page 151 and 152 Learning sets therefore test the ability of the animal to make somewhat abstract generalizations So he gives the example of an experiment that’s been done with a lot of different kinds of animals Called picking the odd one out So in this case you you They’re able to be trained to get a reward by picking the odd one out But can they do it on a novel set of items? They’re not just simply trained on a specific set of items, but can they generalize to a novel set of items? And he says according to experiments many animals can do a learning set Um all the way down to rats and squirrels he says So we talked about David Deutsch gave the example of squirrel automatic behavior and suggesting that they don’t really understand anything They could actually do learning sets, right? They can abstract in this really kind of Very vague at level abstract or certainly not a deep level of abstraction, but they can do something like this Now here’s the thing that’s interesting though. They’re not necessarily great at it And when you get to like primates The primates get better or better than other animals at it And in fact the closer the primate is to a human in the evolutionary tree the better they are at learning sets It’s it’s a graduated improvement according to Byrne With like apes, you

[00:09:06]  Blue: know chimpanzees, which is the closest to humans being the best at it And then like lemurs being somewhere down there better than a rat or a squirrel But you know nowhere near the level of a chimpanzee animals do have at least that much ability to abstract You know all the way down to like rats and squirrels. This isn’t the kind of intelligence. He’s looking for either though Okay, so when we talk about you know, when did animals what which animals are intelligent? He’s not including this concept of intelligence either He also talks about another possible definition that scientists have used the ability to concatenate desperate facts So he he asked the question like this He says can an animal concatenate this is a quote from page 152 concatenate knowledge Learned in two previous circumstances in order to deal with a third novel circumstance Now this this sounds like when I put it like that this sounds pretty convincing. Oh, yeah, that would be that would really require intelligence But he points out that rats easily qualify because in fact any any animal that can do classical conditioning easily qualifies Because if you really think about it a rat you give it some food it gets sick So it tries to avoid that food in the future. You’re never giving it the exact same food, right? It’s it has to somehow generalize its knowledge from one one point in time to another point in time If that’s all you’re looking for then that hey, that’s classical conditioning all all animals, you know When I say all again, I

[00:10:27]  Blue: mean from brain stems on up are able to do that So that’s not really that impressive either if that’s all you’re looking for And so that’s not what he’s looking for in terms of intelligence either However, he does go on to say that he would actually as a side note Considered though that this is actually somewhat impressive We we kind of downplay classical conditioning. We treat it like it’s some mechanical rule But we don’t know how to really do it with AI. It’s like really hard to do something like classical conditioning It certainly we can’t do it with the level of generality that an animal can do it, right? We would require either thousands of human labeled examples through supervised learning Or we would have to have a human program the world space into it for a reinforcement learner We have no idea how to make A robot that can do dog level classical conditioning With and you don’t get told in advance exactly which problem it’s going to have to solve, right?

[00:11:22]  Red: It’s interesting because I think especially um in the artificial intelligence world sometimes we’re dismissive of Natural intelligence without really acknowledging just how impressive it is.

[00:11:37]  Blue: Yes Yes And and you have to actually be in the field of artificial intelligence and be trying to code it To know how little you actually know, right? We take it so much for granted that a dog can do classical conditioning or trial and error learning And that that’s unintelligent when in fact we don’t have a clue how to go program either of those, right? So it’s well I think it also

[00:12:01]  Red: illustrates some of the problem with the words that we’re using to describe The emerging technology that that is things like machine learning

[00:12:10]  Blue: Yeah,

[00:12:10]  Red: because the the phrase artificial intelligence implies a level Of of sophistication that isn’t there like if you if people people like this isn’t even close to As simplistic as what your dog does when he realizes when that you get the leash He should respond by getting excited because you’re right walk, right? Like if you said there is no ml in the world that can do that on the fly With new sets of circumstances without being programmed to do them. I think a lot of people would be surprised

[00:12:45]  Blue: Yes, I agree. And I think From having talked with a lot of kind of paparians, doigians on the internet I don’t think they even realize this is the case, right? They kind of downplay animal intelligence is stupid Which is somewhat true, especially I’ll be honest with me

[00:13:01]  Green: I don’t understand like I would love if there was a way for you to do a show because me not being in that field You know, I I do wonder like what is What is it that we can’t do there like with AI? Why is it not possible to have an AI where to certain responses? It says hey, I’m excited, you know, or some sort of response like that

[00:13:22]  Blue: We can it just it would be very specific, right? So First of all, I did do shows on this so you can go back and you look at the reinforcement learning episode For example, where I’ve actually given the mathematics behind how reinforcement learning works in machine Intelligence machine learning, I should say you have to program in the world space So like If I know that what I need is for the dog to respond Excitedly because it’s going to get its leash. Yes, rl or supervised learning could do it But if I don’t know in advance, that’s what the rewards are going to be based on There’s just no way to get the machine learning to do it, right? I mean, it’s Dogs are on the fly programming the world space from a To use the terms of reinforcement learning, right? And we don’t know how to do that

[00:14:13]  Red: Right because we you have a little A little organism that in one situation sees sees you getting the leash and gets excited because that means it’s going on On a walk and then in the next minute Sees you opening the fridge and realizes you get meat out of the fridge when you open the fridge

[00:14:28]  Green: So we’re talking about, you know Semantics like meaning here, right? It seems like dogs do understand meaning to a certain extent I

[00:14:37]  Red: don’t think we’re talking about it from a semantic standpoint. We’re talking about it from a As new things are presented to the dog It has the ability to learn a new reaction set based on that new learning whereas for a machine learning Program you would need to go in and tell it about the new situation and train it to respond to the new situation Versus it being a machine that can do it itself

[00:15:05]  Blue: So it isn’t necessarily about meaning and this is actually an important point like we don’t know how Dogs do trial and error learning But there’s no particular reason to believe that it’s about meaning It could be for all we know, right But what it really is is that a dog can be introduced to a leash and it can figure out what a leash is Conceptually as an abstraction and you can pull in a different leash that looks different. It’ll still know it’s a leash It somehow abstracts the concept of a leash And if I knew I needed to abstract specifically the concept of a leash I could do that via supervised learning But the dog no one knew that leashes were going to be invented Right and the dog had to have had some intelligence that existed evolutionarily before leashes And so it has been able to learn and it’s not just leashes refrigerators Right You open the refrigerator and now it knows. Oh, we went to the refrigerator. That means it’s going to get meat Oh, you’re going to the door you putting your coat on that means it’s going to get to go on a walk Right. It’s it’s abstracting concepts That never got labeled for it in the first place It’s doing it through what we would call in machine learning terms Unsupervised learning of course that’s I guess I guess in the case of a machine We’re always supervising it but in the case of the dog.

[00:16:19]  Green: It’s just You know something naturally within is taking it to the next level Whereas, you know, like nothing in its evolution Ever helped dog recognize a leash, but it’s actually now recognizing a leach

[00:16:33]  Blue: I mean, I guess in a way

[00:16:35]  Green: Yeah, we were kind of training them, but still the recognition has to come from within them, right? That’s right.

[00:16:42]  Blue: They have But in that

[00:16:44]  Green: sense aren’t they actually creating meaning then right so leash means something to them If

[00:16:49]  Blue: that’s what you mean by meaning then yes, then yes, they’re creating some kind of meaning I wasn’t thinking of meaning in that sense. But yes, I guess in that in a very loose sense we could call that meaning

[00:16:59]  Red: You know not not to keep us too long on on this this Side note, but I was thinking about my dogs just the other day because Sometimes I haven’t even gone to get the leash or fill up the water bottle But I’ve decided that I’m going to take the dogs for a walk And they start getting excited And I I tried to think like how can I keep from showing any of the things that might indicate that I’m going to be taking them on a walk Because once they start getting excited, I find it really irritating Because they like bounce around and the one pause on me So I’ve I’ve been trying to suppress the indicators that they might use To decide that I’m about to take them on a walk But I must be doing things. I’m not even conscious of or a change in my posture, I tried to change the order. I would get my shoes up and I’m giving them signals that I can’t even control

[00:17:54]  Green: Actually, I’ve noticed the exact same thing with my cat. It’s kind of annoying and sometimes I feel like he Overreads me and then, you know, you’ll kind of but but it is weird that how at certain times You’ll pick up if I’m kind of pretending that I’m going to my laundry room and looking for something else Whereas actually I’m looking for something he doesn’t like which is to put that flea medication on him He right away somehow he just picks up on my language there how I’m kind of you know, it gets suspicious It is weird like it’s annoying and it’s weird that yeah

[00:18:27]  Red: Yeah, that’s and that’s a type of of learning that artificial intelligence As as we currently define it isn’t capable of

[00:18:41]  Blue: So just to make the distinction clear if we wanted to train an artificial intelligence specifically to know when you were going on a walk We probably could But if we hadn’t specifically put in some sort of world space, you know Reward system based on going on a walk Then there’s no way whenever ai’s would figure this out, right? It’s just way too narrow to do that Okay, dogs are doing that They’re doing something that we can’t even conceive in terms of ai algorithms right now This is what i’m trying to emphasize. This is why I say trial and error learning which all animals have is a kind of intelligence We should just accept that it just isn’t the kind of intelligence that burns looking for right to him He’s still counting that as more or less unintelligent behavior. He accepts that animals are able to do this He’s accepting that that’s a kind of abstraction. He’s not denying any of that He’s just really saying this is not what i’m looking for. I’m looking for something more impressive than that. Okay so um Having now acknowledged that animals are intelligent at least in the sense of trial and error learning, which is very impressive by ai standards Um burn says, okay, let’s let’s talk about abstraction.

[00:19:52]  Blue: Oh, by the way, he points out that um all animals can abstract in another sense um When every time I say all animals assume I mean brainstem and up not literally all animals Like birds if you teach them to get a reward for clicking a red button They will also abstract that to an orange button, but not a white button They they seem to be able to abstract In term, you know a human would do that too. We kind of just know orange and red are similar And so we can abstract that well birds can do that. Okay. All animals can do that in fact So that’s another sense in which animals can abstract. That’s actually kind of impressive Again, he doesn’t count that as the type of thinking or the type of intelligence that he’s looking for Now he says now I find these examples of abstractions more convincing If you couldn’t explain them with classical conditioning So um, he says we’ve not we’ve not yet come up with any examples in the lab Where we’ve shown animals able to do abstractions That we couldn’t explain with classical conditioning So he says but in the wild we see examples of it where where it just seems really obvious You couldn’t explain it with classical conditioning And yet it happens So he gives the example in the book the thinking ape he gives the example of border patrol behavior of chimps so chimps They have this behavior where they go out on raiding parties and they attack other plans of chimps and Kill the males and try to steal the females They don’t do so first of all you can’t explain that behavior As a pre -program because they don’t do it on regular basis.

[00:21:29]  Blue: Let’s say they did it like every spring or something Then we might make a case for oh, this is genetically pre -programmed behavior Also, it’s very complicated behavior So it’s it’s difficult to explain it as genetically pre -programmed behavior Just because of the complexity that’s involved of getting a group together going out and Everything you have to do to make it successful things like that So you’re generally eliminating pre -programmed behavior with a border patrol behavior Now could it be learned? Okay. Well border patrol behavior is learned. So, um, yes And we would then consider that trial and error learning so we wouldn’t consider it kind of a deep insight However, here’s the thing that he points out While the chimps are on a border patrol If one of the chimps starts to become too noisy the other chimps in the group will threaten it To get it to shut up now. He points out that this behavior Can’t have been learned by regular reinforcement learning because border patrols are really rare They don’t happen very often and if they do it wrong the the feedback mechanism You do it wrong and you get a negative reward that’d be dead, right? so Here’s these chimps doing this behavior while on a border patrol And it’s really hard to come up with a good explanation of how they understand the concept of Oh, that chimp is being too noisy.

[00:22:51]  Blue: I better threaten him to shut him up They’re somehow making a connection between noise and potential danger that can’t be explained through classical conditioning Can’t be explained through genetic pre -programming so he thinks this is Probably an example of where the chimps are actually abstracting things in a way that isn’t explainable Just through classical conditioning and we’re going to use examples like this as we go along to kind of explain why He believes chimps do in fact are the kind of thinking animal he’s looking for Okay, I guess noise in some cases might be beneficial as warning others, right? But in this particular case they understand that that’s right. That’s right. It’s like the opposite of what it would normally be It’s just not like there’s a specific program that always equates noise with that. It’s more circumstantial That’s correct. That’s correct. So the chimps are showing a kind of thinking abstraction That can’t be explained through trial and error learning or classical condition or genetic pre -program So what bern is looking for is this deeper sort of understanding or thinking or intelligence Not any possible use of the term So he to differentiate he coined the term insight now I’ve been using that term in the last two and I need to explain it better What I’ve been saying is is this the ability to use mental models But of course even this I’m being a little abstract and I’m not explaining myself well You really have to get into examples to truly understand what he’s talking about Which is what we’re going to do today and then in the future episodes. So

[00:24:24]  Blue: bern describes this as insight remains the term insight as used in everyday usage Is used as a down -to -earth lay term for deep fruit and discerning kind of understanding So he feels like that term in lay usage Comes really close to what he’s looking for scientifically. So that’s why he’s co -opting the term insight to Be what he’s looking for when did so his book evolving insight now? You know what that means he’s saying when did insight evolve in animals And which animals have it in which ones don’t have it So and that’s what he’s trying to discover. This is like his whole career is to try to work this out So bern does believe this is a bit of a spoiler. He does believe that it’s quite rare in animals So he basically believes that only great apes have it and then like in the thinking ape, which is one of his older books He says well actually probably cetacean so like dolphins and whales have it He gives some examples of that and then in his later book involving insight. He goes well actually maybe elephants and some birds have it But it’s not a lot of animals. Okay, it’s by the way some birds Are the smartest animals on earth. So that’s that’s more impressive. You know, it’s not all birds It would be specifically the ones that are particularly intelligent

[00:25:40]  Blue: So there are these groups of animals a few animals That he thinks have insight now He still waits that though like we haven’t done anywhere near as many studies with dolphins as we have with chips So he’s a lot more Sure that chips have insight than he is the dolphins, but he thinks dolphins do and we haven’t done a ton of stuff with Elephants say I mean that’s a lot harder to maintain elephants Um, so we just don’t have the data and there could be other animals that he doesn’t know about Just because we’ve never studied them, right? I mean for all we know, maybe hippopotamuses have insight or something like that. Okay Um, but that’s not the way bern goes about this. He’s he’s basically saying, you know I’m kind of assuming no animal has insight unless they actually demonstrate it in some way. Okay So he’s saying we really really only have strong evidence for the great apes The ones that are the closest to the human family And if you count dolphins, then we can see that there may have been some convergence Evolutionary convergence towards intelligence in that case. Okay Now I need to do a little bit of an aside for this next because I’m going to now describe bern’s methodology Why it’s so awesomely paparian to understand this though. I need to do A quick explanation of popper’s epistemology now We’ve done that in the first four episodes and we’ve talked about that extensively But there are numerous misunderstandings of popper’s epistemology I’ve talked to a lot of paparians out on the internet and I would say that in general They don’t usually understand it that well.

[00:27:14]  Blue: There are certain common misunderstandings that come up So I want to explain those quickly so that and this will help understand why I’m so impressed with what bern is doing So here’s some common misunderstandings that kind of come up just from talking to people on the internet Even amongst people who like popper and have read popper and consider themselves paparians. So one of them is You label any theory that you like that you have a preference for as a best theory And then claim we need to embrace best theories. So basically a best theory becomes Means a little more than this is the theory. I prefer that’s not what a best theory is supposed to be A best theory is supposed to be a theory that has strong empirical content That’s been highly corroborated. We attempted to falsify and we couldn’t and it has no competitors Okay, things like the paradigm theories like quantum mechanics and general relativity theories like that are best theories Your pet theory is not a best theory. Okay, that is that is a misunderstanding of the term Okay, another one is this idea of refutation. Everybody knows that popper is about Conjecture and refutation is kind of the his own summary of his epistemology So one thing that commonly happens is that people will simply word their arguments in terms of a reputation they’ll use the language of a refutation And typically their their arguments are actually just appeals to intuition. That’s what most people do I’d say probably 80 90 percent of arguments of someone you’re having on the internet somewhere You’re probably not doing poppers epistemology.

[00:28:44]  Blue: You’re probably just talking about intuitions Oh, it feels like this is the truth to me or something along those lines Or you’re using an intuition pump as we call them something where you use an example And it pumps your intuition to seeing things a certain way. It’s well known that intuitive arguments like this They’re super common. We buy them. They’re often very convincing, but they’re not what popper was looking for And they are not examples of hopperian refutations so popper What to him a refutation was was something far more concrete. Okay It was That you have a theory that has actual empirical content So it can be tested and you use deductive logic to work out the consequences of your theory And then you show that there is a contradiction a logical contradiction Preferably the logical contradiction is empirical It’s an experiment that doesn’t do what the theory said it was supposed to do Although he’ll also accept a contradiction against another theory So let’s say you had a theory that showed that you could violate The law of conservation of energy, but it only took place inside of black holes So there’s no way to actually empirically test it The fact that popper would probably still accept Well, actually The very fact that it violates the laws of the the law of conservation of energy He’s in and of itself a contradiction that refutes the theory So in a case like that, he would still consider that a refuting contradiction. Okay, but There’s concreteness to what a popperian refutation is It is not an an appeal to one’s intuition.

[00:30:19]  Blue: The other thing that comes up is the idea of an ad hoc save people tend to To do ad hoc save to their pet theories and then they call that a counter reputation So you try to refute their theory and then they Save their theory through an ad hoc Explanation and then say no, I just countered your refutation. That’s not what a counter refutation is Under paparian epistemology. In fact poppers epistemology rules out all ad hoc explanations period It never allows them. Now. What is an ad hoc explanation? It is something concrete It is any explanation that does not increase the empirical content of the theory Okay, let’s say it again. It’s any explanation that does not increase the empirical content of the theory So if you are going to use an explanation to save your theory The explanation you’re using has to have itself new testable consequences that the original theory didn’t have on its own That can then be tested if it doesn’t have that Popper rules out the ad hoc save altogether Now I want to do a little bit of a defensive ad hoc saves I do think they have a purpose I think that they they work very well as starting points for research programs Where you say, okay, I think that um, you know, this problem could be resolved by the discovering a new kind of Particle which uses uses this as an example in one of his papers When you just say I’m gonna say there’s a new kind of particle. It’s an ad hoc save.

[00:31:53]  Blue: It does not remove the problem Once you’ve actually come up with here’s what the particle is and here’s the testable consequences of the particle Then it’s no longer an ad hoc save So an ad hoc theory or an explanation can grow into a good paparian theory And no longer be considered ad hoc But so long as it’s ad hoc as long as it has no testable consequences It it can never be considered as having solved the problem Okay, this is something that a lot of paparians that I talked to do not understand They think that the moment they’ve given you some sort of response No matter how out of hoc it was that they have now saved their theory Um, this actually came up with an interesting example We were talking about I was some of us online were talking about face blindness Now, I don’t know if you guys know about face blindness But there’s a module somewhere in the brain that recognize that’s set aside specifically to recognize faces and it can get damaged And if it gets damaged, you won’t be able to recognize people’s faces anymore You’ll you’ll have to I mean you like there’s a guy who had some people are born with this But you can house will happen from specific brain damage There’s a guy who had face blindness He had to tell his wife to wear a bow in her hair so that he could find her at the party Now it doesn’t stop them from recognizing male and female It doesn’t stop them from recognizing a beautiful face from an unbeautiful face They just can’t seem to recognize if this is You know their wife’s face or not.

[00:33:18]  Blue: Okay, and it seems so strange to us that There could be a module for this, right? So I In the discussion I pointed out that this is an example of where Uh, the brain seems to have very specific modules that seem to have nothing to do with the universal explainer Modules where we use explanations to explain things And because if it was then if it just got damaged, it would just be a damaged explanation You could just rebuild it as an explanation But and yet this never happens when a person gets their face module destroyed They never rebuild it ever So I pointed this out and I said this is a refutation of your view It’s clear that there are some non -explanatory modules in the brain, which that’s not really that big of a shock This is something that paparians should have known from the outset was probably the case. Okay How it actually works? I don’t know. This is a mystery. I was suggesting. Maybe it’s like machine learning That’s just a wild guess on my part. Okay, that might work and this person I was arguing with he said, oh, no I’ll bet you that Just for some reason Children can learn explanations about faces that adults can’t I’m like, okay, wait What is that a part of your universal explanation? A universal explainer theory. It’s not right. I mean you’re you’re completely doing an ad hoc save here And it has no testable consequences. This is well, okay. Well, maybe Maybe um, what happens is is that a lot of times it does get rebuilt But it does happen so fast that they’re not noticing it.

[00:34:45]  Blue: Okay Well, now you’re making an ad hoc save where you’re saying it either gets rebuilt really fast or never How’s that a part of your theory? How does that have testable consequences? So this would be an example of where I’m sure he very sincerely thought He was countering my my paparian reputation. But in fact, he was just doing an ad hoc save. Okay Now the last one is That often I’ve seen people label non -testable theories as best theories This one surprises me a little because I would have thought most of the others I could understand the misunderstanding this one surprises me We’ve kind of talked about the buggy animal behavior So then it’s hack of all who’s been on this podcast in the past He keeps kind of a list of buggy Animal behavior and we’re gonna actually talk about that today and then he actually put out A post about why he feels animals aren’t sentient. They feel nothing. He thinks they’re just meat robots Based on lot on his list of buggy animal behavior Now i’m not getting into animal sentience animal intelligence may exist without animal sentience. And so, you know, who knows? Maybe he’s right. Okay. Here’s the thing that’s surprising. It’s not whether he’s right or he’s wrong that matters His theory is a 100 percent non -testable theory. Okay. It is a zombie theory. He’s just to explain zombie theories I know I feel things. I know I feel pain. I know that I feel excitement or pleasure or curiosity And cameo acts like she does but maybe she doesn’t maybe she’s behaving like she’s seeing those things But she’s not really feeling any of them and she is therefore what we call a philosophical zombie.

[00:36:21]  Blue: Okay, and Have you guys heard of philosophical zombies before? Are you familiar with that or is this something new to you guys?

[00:36:29]  Red: Yeah, I’m familiar with it.

[00:36:31]  Blue: Okay So zombie theories are made up by philosophers. Nobody worries about them except philosophers And they are specifically used by philosophers to show skepticism Okay, they’re they’re trying to say see you can’t ever disprove this theory They’re meant to be untestable theories. Okay Now doychians would agree that in the case of humans, they’re silly that they get eliminated upfront from the discussion because they’re untestable And yet they will use them for animals for some reason. Okay without realizing that actually Poppers epistemology eliminates all non -testable theories like that right upfront They do not get to be part of the critical discussion Now Dennis for some reason doesn’t seem to realize that and he thinks that he has a best theory about animal sentience when really There’s two, you know, let’s for the sake of argument say two competing theories I’ll actually show later that the idea that animals have sentience is actually the better theory But for the sake of argument, that’s not a great theory. I admit. We don’t really know for sure And I don’t want to make statements that are too strong But the idea that We know that that is a best theory that animals don’t feel things That is a non -testable theory. It is not even allowed as a popperian theory into the discussion at this point Now what would Dennis need to do to make it such he would need to come up with consequences of that theory He would need to say okay if an animal is a zombie and isn’t actually feeling pain or feeling things What would what predictions would that theory make that are different than if the animal was just feeling things? Okay, well, of course That’s not the point.

[00:38:09]  Blue: He’s trying to come up with a theory that Eliminates any way to test it and can’t be refuted But you never want non refutable theories under poppers epistemology. Okay Does this make sense? Do you see where I’m coming with this that these are common misunderstandings That come out of popper that we want to correct for this rest for this next discussion here Absolutely.

[00:38:30]  Red: Yeah,

[00:38:30]  Blue: okay All right. So now why did I say all this? Okay, let’s go back to the buggy animal behavior So doigt uses the example of a squirrel that tries to bury nuts on concrete to show what well He’s trying to show the animals don’t understand things and he’s trying to show that That all the animals maybe he’s trying to show some people will say that all the animals knowledge is in its genes Okay, and Dennis has collected this very large list of buggy animal behavior that’s similar to that where You can see the animal doesn’t understand now one of these examples really demonstrate from a paparian standpoint What they’re trying to do is they’re trying to take a specific example Squirrel tries to bury its nuts and doesn’t understand it’s on concrete and they’re trying to generalize Okay, they’re trying to say okay That means the squirrel is entirely automatic behavior just like this automatic behavior. Okay Well, can you do that? Can you take a specific example and generalize from it? What what is that called when you try to take a specific example and generalize from it?

[00:39:28]  Green: I mean, isn’t that kind of like In what induction is supposed to be that

[00:39:33]  Blue: is induction. Yes. That is the word induction means To generalize from specifics when you’re trying to do an argument like that you’re doing induction. Okay now I think there is something to this a little bit. It does sort of demonstrate something to our intuitions. We say, oh, wow A squirrel behaving in that way a human wouldn’t make that mistake At least not that many times in a row or something along those lines. There may be something valid there that’s that’s getting lost, right? But they’re attempting to generalize from a specific and that is induction It doesn’t matter how many buggy animal behaviors you collect, right? For the same reason it doesn’t matter how many white swans you collect If you have five billion buggy animal behaviors on your list Then that’s the same as having five billion white swans. You still can’t generalize to all swans or white Okay, it simply does not mean that this is why the buggy animal behaviors list don’t really prove anything You might argue here. Okay. No, wait a minute Um, what if someone were claiming that animals have human level intelligence? Well, no one’s claiming that at least no scientist is claiming that everyone knows animals don’t have explanatory knowledge like humans Okay, but let’s say somebody was now. This is why I say that seems like there’s something a little bit valid about it The fact that I see in a squirrel doing automatic behavior for trying to bury a nut I pretty much I feel like I can intuitively say oh that shows That the that the animal the squirrel doesn’t have explanatory knowledge And I think this is really what they’re trying to do.

[00:41:10]  Blue: Okay, they’re they’re trying to find this intuitive example Like this Now it’s tempting to say that this is okay, but really it’s not not under poppers epistemology Let’s let’s be honest poppers epistemology is a harsh mistress Okay, it does not allow even examples like this Into the critical discussion. No, no, why would that be? um consider The the idea that popper always requires that things are done in terms of constraints or universal laws that can therefore be contradicted So let’s take the universal law all animals have human like intelligence Okay, that that would be what they’re trying to refute. All right And so the refutation is to show a lack of understanding Again, I can see why they’re doing this. This this makes sense to me, too I find it somewhat convincing. All right, but it is not valid under poppers epistemology Um, and the reason why is because an intelligent person may show a lack of understanding whereas And that would be a very verification isn’t okay But an unintelligence here’s what you the thing you really have to realize an unintelligent animal can’t show intelligence But an intelligent animal might show a lack of intelligence in some cases That’s why you want to get away from trying to use inductive arguments And there is a way to still go about it. It still accomplishes the purpose that they want to and burn does it well And that’s what i’m trying to build up towards is how how would you really go about doing this? Not with buggy animal verificationist type arguments, but with paparian style arguments This is what burn does really well. So first of all

[00:42:41]  Blue: He starts with best theories So he’s he’s not trying to do vague things like when do animals think and are they intelligent and oh I call that behavior intelligence. He’s not doing any of that Okay, he starts with the idea of trial and error learning He says look, I know animals can do trial and error learning and I am upfront counting that as unintelligent for our purposes Okay, no matter how impressive it is. I’m counting it as unintelligent because we know they can do that So any behavior That I see an animal do that can either be explained as pre -programmed genetic behavior Or can be explained via trial and error learning I’m going to assume That that is the explanation even if it’s not I’m going to assume that it is So if I see an animal doing something that looks intelligent and then I say, okay Well, we could explain that through trial and error learning.

[00:43:34]  Blue: I don’t know if we don’t know its actual history So we don’t know if it actually was trial and error learning But reasonably it could have come from trial and error learning that I’m going to assume it was trial and error learning And he’s very harsh this way with his own experiments He he enforces this idea if it can be explained by trial and error learning then it will be I am going to count it as trial and error learning Okay, or if I can explain it through genetic pre -programming that I’m going to count it as genetic pre -program And this is the reason why this is so paparian is because he’s starting with he’s effectively starting with universal law Animals have no insight Okay, and then he’s looking for experiments That refute that universal law. He’s trying to find examples of where animals behavior can’t be explained by genetic pre -programming or by Trial and error learning I got to give one example the example of the border patrols and the chimps quieting each other Okay, this seems like an example where you can’t explain it by one of those two means Therefore we’re left with the idea that animals have insight. Okay, even then he’s super guarded. That’s why he says Well, that’s only in nature. We really want to come up with an experiment that shows it so that it’s replicable Okay, so you can’t replicate something that’s in nature. He never discounts observations in nature But he counts them as not as strong evidence. Okay Now This is why I say if this is perfect.

[00:45:02]  Blue: You’re basically saying look I’m saying all animals are unintelligent and then I’m looking for counter examples That is the correct paparian way to go about it Because an animal that is unintelligent can’t ever behave as if it’s intelligent Okay, but an animal that is intelligent can behave as if it’s unintelligent So he’s figured out the correct paparian universal law that is actually refutable. That’s what he’s done And he’s got him. He’s going about this the right way now. There is one more issue Which is you can actually explain all animal behavior without Referencing insight if you call it a coincidence you could say oh the animal just happened to try something He’s never tried it before happened. That was the first time it was trying it and it happened to work Okay, if you’re going to explain it like that, that’s an ad hoc same. So he discounts up front. He says I’m any if you’re just going to use coincidence to try to explain it You know, that does not count. I’m you’re not allowed to save the theory through referencing to coincidence Now apparently a lot of his peers actually do use coincidences like that to try to show the animals aren’t Intelligent, so he’s discounting that again. That’s a proper paparian epistemology. You do not count ad hoc saves They do not enter into the equation So Bern’s methodology is the correct paparian epistemology.

[00:46:23]  Blue: You start with the idea animals have no insight They’re unintelligent and then you try to you try to refute that you try to come up with examples Where the animal behavior can’t be explained using that universal law, okay um This is what I love about Burn, okay, is that he really is going about this in the right way and coming up with some fairly impressive results, I think So um one other thing he he avoids terms like understanding and uses insight instead and he gives an example of why He does that so he gives an example of a cat So he had there was a cat that um had learned that if its owner was Sitting in its favorite chair that it could pretend like it needed to go outside to relieve itself And the owner would get up out of the chair to open the door and it could then take the chair So We would say oh that cat was being deceptive Now Burn’s not necessarily denying that The word deception might include this cat’s behavior, but he would point out that the word deception usually in the human mind Includes the concept of some sort of theory of mind where um if i’m being deceptive to sodia Then i’m thinking about what she’s thinking about i’m thinking of her as a mind separate from mine i’m thinking about Okay, I need to act this way and that will cause sodia to think this way.

[00:47:45]  Blue: Okay The cat’s probably not doing that from burn’s point of view the cat’s not doing it has no theory of mind for its owner What it actually did is it learned it through trial and error line So you can imagine a cat that it one day was it was one to sit in its chair But it couldn’t because the owner was there and then it thought well I should relieve myself, but I that wasn’t what it really wanted to do So it goes to the door and meows the owner gets up it sees the chair is available That’s actually it’s it’s true intention is to take the chair. That’s the pop intention So it runs over and it and it takes the chair at this point It has learned if owner is in chair and i’m meow at door Then owner will let me have chair it doesn’t is not thinking of itself As intentionally deceptive and yet the act is a learned deception Do you understand that the difference here what i’m trying to get at?

[00:48:34]  Green: Yeah

[00:48:34]  Blue: So he talks about this is zero already in zero order intentionality So like a hawk moth with a pre -program flick of its wings to show eyes when a predator is near So a hawk moth looks like it has eyes. It looks like it might be an owl or something like that So if a predator is near it flicks its wings the predator sees the eyes and it deceives the predator That’d be zero order intentionality. Really the hawk moth is just a program doing something Okay, then there’s got first order intentionality. That would be the cat the cat doesn’t know that its Owner has a it’s deceiving its owner doesn’t have any concept of deception But it does have an intention to Accomplish a goal which is taking the chair. So that’d be first order intentionality Then there’s second order intentionality Which would be mentally representing the mental states of others. I want him to think x Second order intentionality requires actual insight the other two don’t So from burn’s point of view The first two are unintelligent or don’t show insight and the last one shows insight. Okay Okay, now I talked about how the cat could learn to deceive. So let’s give some examples from experiments.

[00:49:43]  Blue: So, um Let’s say a monkey Is given a tube with food in it And it has to learn to use a tool to get the food out of the tube Okay, now monkeys can use tools chimps can use tools apes can use tools a lot of birds can use tools Tool use is actually far more common amongst animals and you might think So the monkey grabs this tool and it just shoves the tool in And it tries all sorts of stuff and it gets the the food out So that would be we would assume that that is trial and error learning because that Conceivably could be done through trial and error learning. That’s therefore we assume it is Now they want to test this further though. So they try putting a trap on the tube So if the monkey pushes the food one way the food falls into the trap and then it can’t get it at all Where if it pushes it the other way it can get the food. Okay So the monkey then Tries all sorts of different things very quickly as the monkeys are fast And it figures out. Oh, I have to push from the left side to get the food out Okay, so that it doesn’t fall into the trap now. We want to test to see if it understands the concept of the trap and It’s because the food’s falling into it. So they switch the the tube to be upside down So that the trap is upside down. So now they can’t track the food anymore And then they then they wait to see what the book he does. Well, the monkey continues to push from the left side

[00:51:08]  Blue: So it has learned the rule I’m going to push from the left side and that’s how I get the food out And that that’s the way that works.

[00:51:16]  Red: It doesn’t have any real concept of Because there’s a trap there or the food might fall in Okay, so

[00:51:23]  Blue: by experiment we’ve now shown that this monkey is actually just doing trial and error learning that there’s no insight Now great apes can be given the exact same experiment and they understand what the trap is and once you twist Twist the trap around it will now know it can Come from either side and it can get the food out so Byrne would say that this experiment is evidence that apes do have Insight whereas the monkeys don’t so he would make a cut off now. He would say great apes have insight and monkeys don’t have insight Um, so that would be an example of how we do with an experiment Um, he gives other examples a lot of them come from nature And in fact, I’m going to give you several examples here just to kind of build an intuition for what it is Byrne’s looking for So he gives an example of Pedagogy so there are animals that will teach their young. This is actually I don’t think it’s super common, but there are many animals that do it So cheetah mothers they will bring prey back to their cubs and they’ll disable the prey So that it can’t escape easily and then they’ll let the Initially it might be dead and they let the the let the cub play with the dead prey When it’s particularly young later, it’ll be still alive But it’ll be injured so that it can’t escape easily so the cub has to use its you know Its bigger skills to try to kill the the prey Okay, and then um, it will slowly make the prey less disabled over time So that the cub gains skills uh in a linear fashion.

[00:52:51]  Blue: Okay, pretty impressive really right So what they wanted to know is is the is the animal? Is this just pre -programmed behavior from genetics? Or is this actual insight is the is the cheetah mother actually understand the concept of oh, I need to disable this prey so that I can Get my Baby to learn slowly Well in this case they said, okay Reasonably if the mother is doing it based on age Then it could be biological programming However, if it’s doing it based on competence Biological programming is not a good explanation anymore So all we really have to do is we have to assess if the cheetah mother is doing it based on age We’re doing it based on competence. Okay. Well, the answer is it’s by age So burn based on his harsh paparian rules says that means we’re going to say it’s biological programming Whether it is or not, we’re now going to assume it is Okay, we rule it out because it can be ruled out Now he gives another example with apes. He says there was an ape mother that this actually happened twice Um that saw that its child was not learning how to crack a nut with the stone. So apes will Take a nut and they’ll put like a One stone down as a hammer or as an anvil and one as a hammer and then they’ll we’ll crack the nut. Okay, this is actually Um, George talks about this in beginning of infinity as one of his examples The child maybe at first isn’t very good at it.

[00:54:19]  Blue: It hits it in the nut goes away It might be hard to find there’s some risks involved there So the mother took the stone showed it to the the child And then rotated it very very slowly Over several minutes so that it was in the right position that it could crack the nut And then showed the child how to crack the nut and from that the child Learned to crack the nut by positioning that stone in the right way. Now, obviously this would be stone specific So this is different than the cheetah mother example So that’s one point in favor of inside right off the bat Okay, furthermore. He’s only ever seen chimps do mothers do this like twice Um, so it can’t be pre -programmed behavior because then it all chip mothers would do it. Okay Um, so it really looks like in this case the mother actually had a concept of pedagogy In mind where it was trying to teach.

[00:55:16]  Blue: Oh, I need to teach my child How to crack this nut so it had to rotate it the right way very specific to a specific stone And then the child got the point and learned to do it Now here’s the here’s the weird thing about that that that would require insight So that would be another example of apes showing insight that can’t be explained by one of the other two methods But he’s never seen a mother then suddenly have it click Oh, you know what this concept of pedagogy and teaching it’s generally valuable I ought to use it in lots of different cases apes don’t do that Okay, so on the one hand, they actually have enough insight to understand Pedagogy, but they don’t understand the concept of pedagogy And how to then try to reuse the abstraction of pedagogy in other circumstances. Does that make sense?

[00:56:02]  Green: Yeah

[00:56:02]  Blue: Now based on experiments like this, you wouldn’t ever make a conclusion based on a single experiment Okay, that’s that’s the other part of burns methodology. That’s important So, um, if you if you any individual case, there’s always room for doubt because it might be a coincidence Okay, but imagine you you repeat this approach across time So you go and you you look for deceptive circumstances, you know where cats and dogs use deception you look for where apes use deception and um, let’s say that by the way, let’s say that let’s say that the cat Didn’t use deception only in one case when you’re in your in the chair and it meows at the door But let’s say that it’s constantly coming up with novel sorts of deceptions Okay At that point we would have to say oh that has to be insight because it’s not trial and error learning and it can’t be genetically preprogrammed behavior Okay Cats anytime they show deception cats and dogs anytime they show deception If it is always explainable through trial and error learning they they went through and they tried to find counter examples They could not find any counter examples that is not true for apes Apes they’ll take a bunch of examples. They’ll explain away as many as they can as trial and error learning And they’ll always have some left where they’ll go. Oh, yeah, we can’t explain those with trial and error learning Okay, so he would then tentatively conclude That apes have insight and cats and dogs do not and this is how burn goes about Experimenting for when animals have which animals have insight which one’s done Okay, does this make sense? Do you have any questions or criticisms of burn’s? uh approach

[00:57:37]  Red: I don’t I he I agree. He seems very paparian in in his reasoning.

[00:57:42]  Blue: Yeah, same here

[00:57:44]  Red: Okay

[00:57:45]  Blue: I got several of these, but let’s just end this with a bunch of examples I’m just going to give you a whole bunch of examples that kind of show different animals showing insight Most of which are the great apes, but I’m going to give you a couple other Examples that are outside of the great apes just to kind of mix things up a little

[00:57:59]  Green: okay

[00:58:01]  Blue: So um chimps will grab a tool and modify it now They don’t do anything super complicated when I when I what I mean by that they They will like remove branches from a stick so they can use it as a poker And they’ll use a stick as a poker to stick it into a termite mounds. They can pull the termites out beneath the termites Now a lot of animals use tools not very many modify the tools So right off the bat. This is suggested of chimps having insight What’s more impressive though Is that the chimp will grab a tool in one location modify it for the use What it needs it to as a poker that it’ll walk to some location that isn’t in its view And then use it on the termite now This how would an ape do that right? I mean first of all fishing for termites can’t be genetically pre -programmed behavior We know basically that apes learn that through trial and error learning or through learning Mechanisms because it’s specific to whatever their environment is. Okay It literally must have some sort of mental representation of a what the tool must look like to be useful And then it has to modify it to match and then it it also must have some sort of mental representation of I’m going to now use this tool in a different location. I’m not currently in and I’m going to accomplish the following Okay, how else would you explain this example?

[00:59:21]  Blue: Except by attributing to chimps insight An ape with another example an ape was shown a picture of humans There were apes that were shown pictures of humans with problems and they were rewarded if they could select the item that human needed So an example would be they’d show a picture of a man shivering From cold and he has a heater, but he has no matches So then the ape would have to select out from a list of pictures that the matches is what the human needs And then he’d get a reward for selecting that the ape can do this the apes can actually learn Things like this they can put together. Oh, that man needs the matches and pick it correctly It can’t be genetic or trial or error error learning because of the novelty of the circumstances It seems like it’s showing a theory of mind. Oh, that guy is shivering However, you might explain it still as well There’s association between matches fire heat Being cold something along those lines So it does show a kind of insight, but it doesn’t necessarily show a theory of mind But but it might we’ll get to that do does insight include like a theory of mind In theory of mind meaning that you have a theory that other beings have minds separate from your own Now monkeys, this is one from monkeys. Now remember burn does not attribute insight to monkeys So it’s kind of interesting that he does have some examples even for monkeys He gives an example of where the monkeys were They would like A human was weren’t research.

[01:00:44]  Blue: It was in the wild with these monkeys and the monkeys would disappear And then suddenly suddenly reappear later and the future researcher wouldn’t know where they had come from Well, what the monkeys they realized later what the monkey was doing is it was hiding behind a tree and then it was Keeping itself in the cone of invisibility the tree afforded it until the human was in a different position And then it would leap out and surprise the human Now is this show theory of mind maybe But it may show something a little bit more basic It may just show that the monkey has enough insight to understand the concept If I can’t see the human the human can’t see me Okay, most animals can’t do this by the way most animals have no ability to know something like that So monkeys, which we would not attribute burn would not attribute insight to Do in least in this case show something like a very limited form of insight Now this is one of the things that comes up from reading burns books That’s a little bit frustrating Is that he will give examples of he’ll kind of say the only animals that I think have insight are You know great apes maybe dolphins and you know, maybe elephants and some birds And then he’ll give examples in other animals that don’t fall into into that And he doesn’t necessarily have a better explanation Animals are weird like this, right?

[01:01:58]  Blue: It it may be that they do that some of them do have a kind of limited narrow insight That is genetically channeled or something along those lines So when he’s looking for insight He’ll admit animals do sometimes show it that don’t fall into his group of animals that have insight But he’s looking for ones that have a more general ability to do it Okay, so he still discounts the monkeys even though in some circumstances they show some insight chimps the use of rocks as hammer and anvil They’ll actually pick out an appropriate rock to be at the anvil and an appropriate rock to be the hammer Which is very suggestive that they have some sort of insight into I need my rock my tool to look like this to be useful Then another one that’s really interesting is one chimp was trying to do that trying to do the blow On the on the anvil stone and it wasn’t working because it was wobbling So he went down and he picked a sliver wedge to put underneath the um the anvil to level it And then was able to break the nuts with the stone Okay, again, this this is very suggestive That uh that this chimp has some sort of insight it understood enough of the physical concepts to go Oh, I need to put this wedge and again, how would you explain that as genetically preprogrammed? This isn’t normal chimp behavior. This was very specific to a specific circumstance and problem another example of where bern would say yeah, that that is evidence Uh, uh,

[01:03:22]  Blue: corroboration of the idea that chimps have insight another one that’s interesting That suggests at least a limited theory of mind is there was a chimp there again This is a human researcher in the wild and this baby chimp wanted to groom the human And the humans weren’t supposed to touch the chimps. So First of all, it might be dangerous for the human, but it’s actually even more dangerous for the chimps They might pick a get a disease from the humans. So the humans were supposed to stay away from the chimps And here’s this chimp come baby chimp, you know infant chimp. I should say coming up and wanting to um groom him So to to get out of that he used deception. This is a human using deception So, you know, of course humans have theories in mind So he pretended to see something in the distance And so the infant got up and went to go look And stopped grooming the human and moved away from the human, which is what the human wanted Okay, so he’d used deception to get what he wanted out of this this infant chimp Once the chimp could see that there was nothing there He came back over to the researcher hit him over the head with his hand Then ignored him for the rest of the

[01:04:22]  Blue: day because he was angry angry at them So it’s hard to understand this behavior if you’re not going to attribute apes with enough insight to understand Both the fact that it had been deceived And had some sort of theory of mind about What the human was thinking compared to it Okay, now later we’re gonna see apes don’t have a great theory of mind It seems to be fairly limited But this is an example of where it does seem to actually have one Another one that’s interesting was that there was a chimp that wanted to so Chimps like to look at babies because they think they’re cute just like we do Chimps if there’s a baby chimp the chimps will want to come over and see it and the mother doesn’t want the other chimps To be near the baby because it’s dangerous So and the mother in this case was like an alpha mother And so the chimp knew he’d be in trouble if he tried to go look at the baby So he Pretends he built a nest he pretended to build a nest which is you know normal chimp behavior And then when he was done he decided he didn’t want that or acted like he didn’t want it And he built one that was closer to the baby then he looked like that one He built one that was even closer to the baby The final nest he built was so close to the baby He could sit in the nest and stare at the baby, which is what he wanted to do And because it had happened very slowly And the mother had thought he was just trying to build a nest and wasn’t actually trying to interfere with her baby She didn’t stop him like she normally would do So this is another example where how do you explain this behavior?

[01:05:50]  Blue: um If you’re not going to attribute to to the chimp some sort of insight into hey, I can I can deceive this mother by building nests and getting slowly closer and at least having some sort of concept of limited theory of mind That this will deceive the other chimp

[01:06:08]  Red: And can that be it can it be argued that coincidence is is causing that?

[01:06:15]  Blue: You know you can argue anything as coincidence And that’s why um burn eliminates coincidence is up front But that’s also why he wants to see multiple examples before he really concludes that the animal has this species of animal has insights Because any one example can be explained away via coincidence

[01:06:35]  Red: Yeah, I agree

[01:06:36]  Blue: interesting Okay, here’s another one about deception He points out that if we were to ever see an arm race of deception which humans do That would suggest a theory of mind with deception Okay, the second second level of intentionality with deception which requires insight So we have a female chimp named bell and um alpha male named rock and they’re they’re in captivity And bell is shown where food is inside of a maze and then put back with the other apes And then the apes go look for the food together and bell knows where it is already Okay, now bell knows from experience from trial and error learning we’re going to assume That rock will steal the food if He gets the food before her or if he gets to it right after her Okay So bell learned that rock would go to where she was sitting And then search for the food So she started to sit further away from the food so he would have to search further And uh over time he got to where he was used to searching further and further away Well bell then used this and she and um she waited for rock to Be really far away in the wrong direction and she would run to the food um So up to this point this to me. This is very suggestive of theory of mind deception, but Bern would say look you could explain this through trial and error

[01:08:00]  Blue: learning up this point So we’re going to explain it as trial and error learning Okay, now here’s what happened rock then started to pretend to look away And then look to see and then would look back suddenly and look to see where bell was running to and then try to run there first Okay, well suddenly turning around Is not native behavior So it can’t be genetically preprogrammed and for him to suddenly start doing it like this And not have learned it by a tribe where they’re watching him do it He didn’t learn it by trial and error. This is now suggestive of insight that rock actually had some sort of Concept of deception and how to overcome it and had come from the strategy to overcome it So she started to intentionally lead him to the wrong spot So that he would search in the wrong spot and then try to Run over to the right spot. She also learned to take rock to Where one piece so maybe there would be multiple pieces of food There’s one place where there’s one piece of food another place where there’s two pieces of food She would take rock to where the one piece of food was let him steal it And then she’d run off to where the two pieces of food were Okay So now we’re talking about an arms race of deception We’re talking about something that really would require insight to explain because you can’t explain it via trial and error learning anymore Okay, yes,

[01:09:17]  Green: one of the things just to interject here that i’m seeing to all these examples is that That you know in all these studies or these observations, there seems to be an element of surprise Uh, because the thing is that if there was something that was genetically Programmed and obviously you would see more of that thing You know a repetitive thing But and and then you know, how many of these elements of surprise Do we need to say that there is some novel behavior here that can’t really just be explained, you know Yes,

[01:09:51]  Blue: and you know what the answer is you’re guessing Okay, that’s the correct paparian answer. Yeah.

[01:09:56]  Green: Yeah

[01:09:57]  Blue: So the fact that you can always explain it as trial and error learning with cats and dogs, but you can’t with chimps That’s really what he’s going on

[01:10:05]  Green: Right

[01:10:05]  Blue: and the fact that it gets reconfirmed over multiple experiments Or multiple observations. Okay another one. That’s interesting. Vicki is a chimp That would pretend to pull a toy on a string So it doesn’t really have a toy on the string that was pretending And then she would pretend that the string got entangled on a real object And even pretended to be upset that she couldn’t get it untangled So This is chimps do stuff like this. Does that suggest you know, what does that suggest?

[01:10:33]  Blue: I don’t know, you know, I mean like it’s it’s hard to imagine this being genetically preprogrammed Like it’s impossible to imagine that behavior being genetically preprogrammed And it’s hard to see how it could be trial and error learning either right because there’s there’s no value in it She’s just having fun basically, right So in a case like this with another example where we would probably attribute it to insight some sort of insight into play another one that’s um interesting that’s kind of related to that is There was a mother so we talked about chimps being taught sign language And I told I told you how I wasn’t really that impressed with coco’s language abilities Um, but there was a chimp that had been taught sign language And they wanted to see if she would teach her baby chimp sign language So they intentionally where she’d been taught by humans They intentionally wouldn’t do signs in front of the baby And then they wanted to see which signs it would pick up from the mother teaching it to it and the mother would actually Mold the hands of the baby just like the humans used to do for her to try to teach the baby signs And the baby picked up like 17 different signs with no human having ever taught it to it and got the meanings correct Just from the mother teaching sign language to the baby Now this is actually Nowhere near as fast as if this is very impressive in terms of an experiment This really does show some sort of insight on the part of chimps to be able to figure this out And to understand the concept of language and things like that even if it’s really basic just basic reference That this symbol represents something else is very impressive

[01:12:06]  Blue: However, this is the that speed 17 signs or whatever it was in the first two years Whatever it was is much slower than if a human is teaching it Sign so they started to realize oh, we better teach this baby sign So they started teaching the baby sign language and from that point forward they She had human teachers and she picked up sign much quicker when the humans were teaching Another one that’s interesting is they had an experiment with the box And so the idea is is that the box is locked But at some point random point the box will unlock and you’ll hear a click So that you know it’s unlocked and at that point the apes have been trained that you can open the box And there’s some sort of prize that they want inside it maybe food or something One example of this experiment that a beta chimp heard the click so he knew the box was open But the alpha chip was nearby and would take the prize from him So he pretended to be disinterested

[01:12:59]  Blue: And the alpha chimp Then walked away and then the alpha chip hid and spied on the beta chip To see what he was going to do and the moment he saw that he was going to open the box He runs out and opens the box and steals the prize This is page 134 of thinking eight by the way So again adult chimps do not have a hide and spy behavior So it can’t be genetically preprogrammed and this is completely novel This is completely novel behavior that solves a problem in a specific circumstance and required no trial and error Okay, it wasn’t learned through trial and error So again, it seems like it’s suggestive of insight Okay, another one that’s fun. This one comes from a dolphin. The only dolphin example I have Is that oh, I do have other dolphin examples The only one I’m going to share is there was a don’t you know how dolphins will be in tanks And they can kind of swim up and interact with you in the aquarium or whatever So this dolphin comes swimming over and there’s a man smoking and he’s doing puffs of smoke And so the baby dolphin Swims off Get some milk from its mother comes back over to the man and puffs out the milk as if it’s a puff of smoke so it could join in

[01:14:11]  Red: Oh, that’s crazy

[01:14:15]  Blue: So, you know First of all, there’s no reason for this behavior in terms of rewards, right? So it can’t be it certainly can’t be genetically preprogrammed and it can’t even be trial and error Because trial and error is based on rewards through valences that you get food and there’s some sort of reward that the that you genetically need Right have been programmed to want This is a dolphin having fun, right? It’s joining in it wants to do what the man is doing So it came up abstracted the concept of a puff of smoke into a puff of milk It’s purely based on the fun criteria there, right? Yes based on the fun criteria Okay,

[01:14:53]  Blue: so that this is a this is a pretty impressive example of how and by the way the other example that I wasn’t going to Share but dolphins can be taught language to the very fact and when I say language none of their language is super impressive They usually have a grammar of like three character three symbols um that both for chimps and for um Dolphins that they’re super limited grammar But the very fact that they can learn symbols that they can learn this symbol means this and that they clearly understand that And then they can then put these into and communicate with them You can give commands to the dolphins that have learned language through symbols You can tell them to do novel behaviors that they’ve never done before Where they’ve understand the parts, but they don’t understand the all the parts together You can link them together and it will do this novel behavior Because it understands the concepts of the language So this is this is very insightful behavior And now we’ve talked about american sign language for apes, but really the best language Um teaching to apes hasn’t been american sign language. It’s actually quite hard for apes.

[01:15:56]  Blue: They can’t form their hands well Okay, so there’s these yurkish symbols that they use and the best experiments in terms of teaching apes language Has been with these yurkish symbols, which they similar to the dolphins They’ll have like three of them in a row and there’s kind of this really super basic grammar um They can’t seem to get beyond like three Three symbols in a row and they have to be in certain orders for the grammar There’s certain types of grammars that they can pick up in certain types They can’t they’ll play a game where a human will will hold food items on its lap And then the ape needs to point to the correct symbol of the item it wants and then both of them will eat the item Okay, so maybe it points to an apple and then the human and the ape get to eat the item the apple And so they will teach this to these to these apes Then they put the apes alone to see if they would play the game on their own without a human And the apes would do it for fun.

[01:16:51]  Blue: They would have these these Items of food which no humans in the room Okay, so they can do whatever they want right and the apes will actually choose to play the game And one of the apes will point to the symbol that it needs and maybe it’ll miss it Maybe it’ll like it points to the right one, but the other ape isn’t paying attention And like neither of them will eat right They’ll refuse to break the rules of the game because they’re they’re having fun playing the game Right, even though this not being enforced by the humans And they’ll actually continue to play the game and there’s other games They give examples of they’ve taught these apes that they’ll then play on their own Okay, which it’s hard to explain this in terms of I mean if it’s just a matter of getting rewards They should just eat the apples right as they shouldn’t stop and play the game So there’s clearly this concept of the game that they’ve learned it’s not just a learned behavior They’re actually playing the game Ensuring self -restraint so that they can enjoy playing the game together Another thing is interesting is they would intentionally withhold the symbol. So like Maybe they don’t give it the symbol for an apple and so the ape wants the apple and it doesn’t have the symbol for an apple It might grab a can or something that has a picture of an apple or something similar to it and it will actually improvise a symbol That then it can communicate with the other ape.

[01:18:08]  Blue: Oh, it wants the apple and it can figure that out So this really does show that apes have the ability to show reference where one thing represents another thing Okay, so wash out the chimp This this one’s really interesting and this is a one -off so you could you could always explain it through coincidence But this one’s super interesting to me. So wash out the chimp lost her baby And she became depressed Okay, because her baby had died and she wasn’t taking care of herself Well, we’ll talk about this in a future episode maybe about animal depression having Mental anguish So this chimp had been taught the yurkish symbol so they could communicate with the chimp So they went to her and they told her through the symbols That they were going to get her a new baby and her depression immediately lifted And she became excited and she ran around super excited That her baby was coming back Then they gave her the baby and of course it’s a different baby because they can’t bring babies back from the dead And she gets super upset and she won’t take the baby and she goes back to being depressed again Um, and then later though, she thought the baby was cute. She ended up accepting the baby and then the depression lifted again It’s really hard to explain this behavior if we’re not going to accept that the chimp actually Had had a understanding but a misunderstanding when it was told we’re getting you a new baby It had thought they meant her baby And that was why the depression lifted and then once she had realized.

[01:19:36]  Blue: Oh, they actually just meant a baby Then she became upset again and went back into depression So this is really showing some level of real language understanding. Okay, even if it’s very limited And then this last one is alex the parrot. So let’s do a parrot example. So for birds They discovered they could train parrots by um They originally thought it was really hard to train parrots And then they discovered that parrots will learn things if you train A human in front of it. So like you have one human train another human like you you have one human say you know If they perform some behavior then they get the reward and if the if if the parrot sees The humans doing that it will learn the concept and then it will start to Train to do the to get the reward also and they started to realize they can substantially train birds to some fairly complicated concepts By using this technique. Okay So alex the parrot could respond in parrots can speak So alex the parrot could could respond correctly in english This is a quote from from burn from thinking ape on page 173 alex can respond correctly in english to questions about objects and their properties what color what shape how are they the same How are they different?

[01:20:54]  Blue: Focusing on shared or what odd one out properties His use of numbers up to six is particularly striking He was not phased by transfer tests with novel arrangements of objects So there is no possibility that he is simply memorizing old arrays of objects or the distinctive patterns that certain objects make He was not even put out by arrays of completely novel objects for which he knew no verbal label When given mixed array objects two hair clips into bobby pins, for example He would be asked the number in each subset and the total and he could get the right answer For those even though this is a novel set of objects. He’s never seen before So it seems that alex has really acquired the concept of numbers as well as the linguistic concept of taking terms and simple syntax Okay, so this is an example where you know, how do you explain you? You can’t be explained by trial and error learning because it requires levels of abstraction that goes beyond simple trial and error learning and it can’t possibly be genetically preprogrammed because it’s uh Completely novel behaviors for for parrots Okay I’ve kind of thrown a whole bunch of examples here at you and this is actually the end of what I had planned for today any thoughts or concepts on burns burns methodology Or on any of the examples that I showed you to try to explain how he has come up with which animals have insight

[01:22:19]  Red: What I’m what I can’t make sense of is how after Looking over all of this research. How did David Deutsch come away with his interpretation of burns research?

[01:22:31]  Blue: That’s an interesting question. Um, I I’m not sure I asked David Deutsch on twitter about how much how much he had researched I wanted to like make sure I had read any of the papers that he had read He had read two of day of burns papers. He had not read his books So I don’t think he was even aware of all of burn’s research I think that he simply read the papers on behavior parsing, which we’ll discuss. I think next week favorite parsing is actually Very interesting for a number of ways both for dutch’s point of view and for burn’s point of view At at different levels strangely enough

[01:23:07]  Green: although hasn’t Hasn’t David Deutsch recently? I can’t remember where he commented maybe i’m wrong that There seemed like he was contradicting his original view.

[01:23:19]  Blue: Oh, yeah. It was in our podcast. Sadia on the remember where we did the People asking questions of David. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah, he he admitted that That he thought probably dogs couldn’t be faking their shows of feelings that That wouldn’t make sense ever from an evolutionary standpoint that probably to Show excitement. They have to be excited So Then he admitted though he was still skeptical of that view. He said, yeah But you can in other ways you can show that they just don’t understand anything and he’s right about that So I do think that he started off with a harder viewpoint on this, but he’s a true paparian fallible list He he has definitely Suggested that maybe he’s wrong and even given examples of how he might be wrong

[01:24:07]  Green: I I actually grew up Having a lot of pets and I was actually surprised to see like chickens Who usually you don’t see much of an expression? I remember one of my roosters Literally got kidnapped by one of my neighbors that was in pakistan And I looked for it and that rooster was pretty close to me like I I used to pet him He would put his head on my shoulder and go to sleep and you know, we were pretty chummy -chummy But I never really thought he was that intelligent But when he got kidnapped I started calling his name. He was by the way, his name was hackle and I had a jackal to hackle and jackal But anyway, so I called him out and I’m like, where’s hackle? This was the first time I saw this type of behavior He actually responded back to me and I traced him where he was and I discovered where he was Because he gave me the signal that he was in distress Even though the people weren’t treating him badly All they did was took him and locked him up if he was just such a dumb animal who was now just in the cage But not really, you know You know, I mean he was taken away from the surroundings And you know, usually chicken will make this noise which says danger, right? And he was making that sound and I literally discovered where he was. He was able to communicate

[01:25:21]  Blue: He had done an abstraction, right? It’s a very limited abstraction, but he had done an abstraction Yeah, I mean when else did

[01:25:27]  Green: he came across a kidnapping or you know, most of the time the dangers are usually there’s a hawk and they usually alert everybody and you know And to be honest with you, sometimes you see these animal videos and you’re like, you know You’re kind of suspicious almost like those UFO footage type videos that oh the animal is creating art and you know And then they never tell you what what went behind the scenes of how they got up to that You know, so that’s one of the reasons I’ve always been really suspicious. I mean the only thing I ever fall back to You know is that uh, I mean, you know, maybe some of the direct experiences I’ve had or in the case, you know, maybe Yeah, I I don’t know. I mean even the people who’ve written books on it Sometimes you’re suspicious that how much you know the tendency for them to anthropomorphize and then presenting what they saw like how much of it has been affected by Uh, how they feel about

[01:26:23]  Blue: animals. Yeah, do you know Before reading burn. I mean, I’ve known people who like There’s lots of dog lovers out there, right? I mean like dogs with dog owners And if you were to ask your average dog owner, they they definitely attribute intelligence to their dog that according to burn likely the dog doesn’t have Yeah, well They have emotions from burn’s point of view So that’s that’s not what I’m really talking about But they would attribute theories of mind to dog Right that this dog understands what the other dog is thinking things like that Which according to burn is not possible Okay Now keep in mind that everything’s a guess everything’s a conjecture Maybe we’ll eventually find that dogs have insight after all or something like that But the fact that he can do so many experiments and all of them can be explained by trial and error learning I I do find that a fairly convincing argument Right, I I suspect that on the one hand dogs are quite intelligent compared to say ai’s On the other hand dogs are nowhere near as intelligent as sometimes we try to anthropomorphize them as As owners, right? Yeah, we It’s gonna end up being something in between. They probably do feel things They they probably do have some really interesting forms of intelligence In which case here. I’m probably mean abstractions that they can abstract things On the other hand, they probably just as a preview for future episodes They probably have no sense of self according to burns experiments. They probably have No theory of mind no concept of deception

[01:27:57]  Blue: Other than if I mount the door That means I can take the chair no no concept of what why that works They probably have no real physical understandings of things of like laws of physics basic things that humans might have Um Kind of the way things work I think we’re going to be surprised that they that they’re way more intelligent than we thought in some ways and way less intelligent than we thought in other ways

[01:28:22]  Green: Yeah

[01:28:24]  Blue: All right.

[01:28:24]  Green: All right Well, nice talking to you there booze.

[01:28:28]  Blue: Yes Thank you, saudi. I thank you tracy

[01:28:32]  Green: Okay, bye. Bye. Bye

[01:28:37]  Blue: The theory of anything podcast could use your help We have a small but loyal audience and we’d like to get the word out about the podcast to others So others can enjoy it as well to the best of our knowledge We’re the only podcast that covers all four strands of david reich’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on apple podcasts This can usually be done right inside your podcast player Or you can google the theory of anything podcast apple or something like that Some players have their own rating system and giving us a five star rating on any rating system would be helpful If you enjoy a particular episode, please consider tweeting about us or linking to us on facebook or other social media to help get the word out If you are interested in financially supporting the podcast, we have two ways to do that The first is via our podcast host site anchor. Just go to anchor.fm slash four dash strands f o u r dash s t r a n d s There’s a support button available that allows you to do reoccurring donations If you want to make a one -time donation go to our blog, which is four strands dot org There is a donation button there that uses paypal. Thank you

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