Episode 40: Byrne vs Deutsch on Animal Intelligence

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Transcript

[00:00:14]  Blue: Welcome to the theory of anything podcast. How’s it going cameo? It’s great Bruce. How are you good? We don’t have Tracy or Saudi at today, but that’s why we have lots of people is so that somebody shows up So we’re gonna talk this is the final episode on animal intelligence Hopefully if I can get through it all in one session We may revisit may or may not revisit animal sentience at some point That’s way more speculative than animal intelligence We’ve got really good theories around animal intelligence from what I can see Richard Burns theories and the ones he quotes

[00:00:46]  Red: Right

[00:00:47]  Blue: where I don’t think there’s anything equivalent in animal sentience There is some theory there and it’s even somewhat testable. So it’s not completely nothing But you’re definitely speculating a lot more in the animal sentience realm,

[00:00:59]  Red: right?

[00:01:00]  Blue: Okay before we get into this Did you by any chance watch the video of the dolphins that I sent you?

[00:01:05]  Red: No

[00:01:08]  Blue: Let me tell you about it. Okay. It was really interesting after our our discussions I went to my sister’s my sister’s like really into animals and she’s she’s she’s a pet lover So of course she’s biased towards her animals, but she’s really interested in animal intelligence as a pet lover So I was talking with her about I’m studying animal intelligence and she immediately started Offering up examples and one of the ones she offered she said I could give you a link to one about dolphins I’m like, oh, that’s cool. We don’t know that much about dolphin intelligence, but we think they probably have insight So she gives me the link and it was amazing and I don’t want to overstate it because of course It’s only one incident anytime you have with animals one incident. You never know for sure what’s going on But so I I don’t want to overstate it. I would want to see this like replicated So these are two dolphins that have been taught a sign language That’s that’s one of the ways they communicate with dolphins is they got any signs they use Obviously the dolphins can’t sign back But they can they can tell the dolphin do this trick or create your own trick Okay, so they taught them the concept create your own trick So they would say that and the dolphins would come up with some trick that they had never been taught Okay, so they’re clearly understanding the concept of create your own trick

[00:02:21]  Red: Right,

[00:02:21]  Blue: then they told them for the very first time right on the video They said create your own trick, but do it together So the dolphins swim to the bottom of the pool in the video You can hear them talking for a moment And then they come up jump out of the water Simultaneously and then lay on their back and flip their tails up in the air simultaneously a trick that they have never been taught before They made up their own and then executed the trick. Um It’s it was amazing They for them to be able to do that. It was some weird coincidence that for them to be able to do that They had to have the concepts in the language down of doing a trick doing it together They had to have understood it even though they’ve never been trained in it They had to then somehow communicate. I don’t know that dolphins these dolphins have been taught some language They may have more language skills than a normal dolphin does But they had some ability to be able to communicate with each other so that they could synchronize what they were going to do It’s stunning way beyond anything. I would have thought dolphins were capable of doing

[00:03:21]  Red: interesting So

[00:03:22]  Blue: even based on reading Richard burn stuff, I would not have guessed this was possible now My sister gave me some of her own experiences too. So she has a dog named sophie and sophie is the smartest dog She’s ever had she says most my dogs were nowhere near as smart as sophie. That does happen Sometimes you’ve got kind of an einstein dog that just somehow is much smarter than a regular dog

[00:03:43]  Red: right

[00:03:44]  Blue: so Sophie she took her into the bathroom and my sister was playing with the scale and sophie sees that there’s like Lights turning on on the scale, right? She’s kind of interested in it So my sister teaches her that the command tap tap means to hit the scale So that you can turn the light on so she says tap tap she hits it She sees the light come on she gets excited that she made the light come on Okay, so that’s that’s regular trial and error learning so far nothing out of the ordinary here so then Sophie comes has this thing where she comes downstairs and the door is actually a jar But she can’t tell she doesn’t have any concept of a door being a jar So for as far as she’s concerned the door is closed. She can’t get to my sister So she’s whining and whining let me in let me in my sister can see that the door is actually a jar All she has to do is nudge it and it’ll open up.

[00:04:34]  Red: Uh -huh.

[00:04:35]  Blue: So she says to sophie tap tap Okay And at first sophie doesn’t get it and she’s like oh wine wine wine She goes tap tap I think she tried this a couple times with sophie failing at first and then tried it again later And then finally sophie stops for a second and then tap tap on the door the door swings open and she comes in Now this is a new trick that she’s learned She had somehow abstracted the idea of tap tap on the scale to using it on the door And it wasn’t easy. She had to it took her a few tries to be able to realize that’s the right thing to do Right. She had to be

[00:05:09]  Red: helped through the abstraction, but she was still capable of Understanding that that abstraction was was there after after after some prompting.

[00:05:18]  Blue: Yeah Now sophie had another one that was impressive They had a game they played with her where they would call the name of a person in the room And if sophie went to that person she would get a treat and at first she had no clue She would just try randomly going to people and then at one point She suddenly according to my sister jumped up in the air excited then went to the right person And then from that point forward never failed to go to the right person ever again

[00:05:42]  Red: Oh interesting So

[00:05:44]  Blue: now I don’t think that I mean like this is pretty smart for a dog But I don’t think we’re outside the bounds of what Richard bernis saying at all, right? This is trial and error learning. I’m not even sure it’s true insight in the way he uses Now this next one is a lot more impressive. So my sister has a Cockatoo named moonlight and when moonlight would touch her nose with moonlight would use her claw to touch my sister’s nose And she would my sister would go beep anytime she touched her nose So she kind of trained moonlight to know that she’s going to get the reward of having her say beep if she touches her nose Okay So one day my sister as a joke touched the bird’s nose and the bird goes beep Never having been trained to do it And so she was like shocked. She’s like wow She made the connection between a bird’s nose and a human’s nose. Yeah,

[00:06:35]  Red: that’s pretty impressive So

[00:06:36]  Blue: then later she has a fish in a bowl and the fish swims up to the edge of the bowl to feed And the bird comes over taps the taps where the fish’s nose is and goes beep. Oh crazy Okay, then later she does it to the hamster Here’s what’s interesting moonlight is a cockatoo which is I think the same family as parents Which is one of the birds that richard burn thinks might have insight,

[00:06:59]  Red: right?

[00:07:00]  Blue: Well, this certainly seems like this is a level of abstraction that’s shocking Right, it is So I think that might have required insight for them to be able to do that for her to be able to make this connection between You know four different species nose Right be able to reverse my sister saying beep and the bird saying beep.

[00:07:18]  Red: Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty impressive insight So

[00:07:21]  Blue: now let’s go back and we’ll talk about animal understanding So we were just talking about certain levels of animal understanding and we’ve been talking about that in past episodes Now in an interview in david deutsch when he was doing an interview with tyler tyler says Dogs understand social life pretty well and david deutsch says they do not dogs have genes which contain knowledge But it is fixed knowledge now. I’m cutting off the rest of what he says I’ll get back to it in just a second if I stop right here It really seems like he’s saying something very very radical It seems like he’s literally claiming that animals understand nothing at all and are nothing more than computer programs with entirely genetically Pre -programmed automatic behavior, right and as we’ve talked about many fans of david deutsch believe That’s what he’s saying and believe that themselves. Okay So maybe that’s not so weird But that is certainly a radical position and drastically at odds with everything we’ve been talking about in richard burn’s theory Yes, here’s the problem though david deutsch then goes on to say and it is not the kind of knowledge that constitutes understanding Understanding is always explanatory. Well, that’s that’s okay. I mean like if that’s what he really means Of course animals don’t have human level explanations, right? If they

[00:08:32]  Red: can’t explain things

[00:08:33]  Blue: to us, right and probably can in their heads really either, right? They don’t have richard as we’ll go through richard burn claims. They don’t really have strong knowledge of physics or Mechanism or anything like that, okay We’ve given a few examples where they clearly do but those are rare. They’re almost counter examples to some degree Now at this point if you if you take david deutsch is simply meaning. Oh, they don’t have human level explanation Then what he’s saying is really trivially true, right? It’s no longer comes across as radical So I was asking myself, you know, which one did he really mean? By the way, I just want to clarify the word understanding can have multiple meanings now David deutsch is saying I’m taking it to mean human level explanations, but that isn’t necessarily the way richard burn is going to use the term Okay, so clearly the fans of david deutsch think he means the more radical view I think they’re right and the reason why I think they’re right and I’m open to the fact I might be wrong But the reason why I think they’re right Is because he cuts off tyler so strongly in the interview He says they do not if all he’s saying is is they don’t understand like a human does it’s not clear tyler was saying Oh, they have human level explanations. I mean doesn’t seem like at all tyler meant that right, right?

[00:09:41]  Red: Well, and that would that would be a Fairly silly thing for anybody to say Right, right, and your sister probably doesn’t believe that right

[00:09:48]  Blue: So I think david deutsch was into I think the fans of david deutsch have him right that at least Speculatively he believes that animals are just computer programs that are automatic and there’s no real Learning they actually have fixed knowledge in their genes We talked about how that can’t possibly be true that they have to be able to pick up Adapted information from learning we might as well just call that knowledge, but this I think does clarify what his view was Here’s the more important thing though is that this is a different understanding of the word understanding than burn Let me give you a quote from burn. I’ve already think I’ve given this quote before explaining why he uses the word insight to describe animal Mentalizing insight remains in everyday usage as a down -to -earth lay term for deep shrewd or discerning kind of Understanding. Okay, let’s not see them necessarily as completely added at odds with each other If you want to read david deutsch in the more trivially true sense then they’re not in contradiction But if you want to read him in the more radical sense then yes, they are in contradiction and they have completely different theories Now let’s let’s kind of answer the question, you know, which one’s right and how do we know? Okay Well, by now it should be obvious from previous episodes. I think richard burns, right? I think richard burns got this right.

[00:10:58]  Blue: He’s done way more research into it But let me explain how he looks at it all the way So he defines insight as the ability to inspect and manipulate a mental representation by some part of the world Went away from any opportunity to see or in any way perceive it directly That probably doesn’t sound that impressive at first like maybe you think all animals can do that But what Richard burn is saying is that most animals can’t Okay, they have a

[00:11:23]  Red: concept and hold a concept in their mind even when they’re not able to to see it Correct. So Richard burn

[00:11:30]  Blue: says my view that there’s a few animals that can do this and most can’t is gets people upset and he talks about cognitive psychologists We’re not talking about people work with animals, but human cognitive psychologists He says cognitive psychologists study humans and they don’t much bother with animals The assumption is that the use of mental representations is unavailable to animals most likely because mental representations are causally related to possession of language which animal species lack The suggestion that the capacity for insight evolved earlier than language And so it may be shared with other living species would be regarded as a pretty dangerous one by most cognitive and comparative psychologists It’s disturbing to comparative psychologists because it suggests that non -human animals may be able to think after all This is from page three of evolving insight. Okay, so he’s first explaining why there are many scientists in the human cognitive psychologists field that would be very bothered by his findings. Okay Then he goes on and he says actually I as I offend both sides

[00:12:30]  Red: And he says it

[00:12:31]  Blue: simply never occurs to most non -psychologist people Including most professional zoologists that animals have anything qualitatively different inside their heads than humans do If people compute with mental representations, then presumably all animals must also do So there’s a risk. I may offend them too by arguing in this book that the most animals lack insight into how things work so I just thought that was really funny But this is this is he’s he’s walking a difficult line here The prevailing theory amongst human psychologists is animals have no insight and the prevailing theory amongst say zoologists Is oh, yeah, of course they do right or pet owners or late people or basically anybody else Burns whole careers to figure out when insight evolved in animals and this proves very difficult because the evidence is mixed Animals that have no insight may under some narrow circumstance show something similar to it And like our squirrel example from the very first episode where I was able to figure out how to cut the line to drop the food I don’t think there’s any real chance squirrels have insight and yet clearly in that one circumstance It acted as if it did so and this is why it’s so hard to study That was why I emphasize burns methodology as being repetitive where you you have to repeat over and over again And then if you consistently find when dogs act like they have insight we can actually explain it through trial and error learning But when chimps do it we can’t like there’s some examples where we can’t only then does he conclude? Okay chimps must have insight very good methodology

[00:13:55]  Red: Okay,

[00:13:56]  Blue: so now what is insight? Here’s the here’s canonical example All right sold in the chimp had learned to use sticks to get food that was out of reach Okay, so one day they decided to give soldon Two short sticks neither long enough to reach the food. So he plays around with each stick He can’t get to the food He kind of gives up and he goes somewhere else Still playing with the sticks or whatever And then this is a quote from burn then insight dawned while fiddling with the sticks for no apparent purpose soldon happened to push two sticks together and they held making a longer stick Soldon suddenly became animated took the sticks across to the out of reach food and used his new combined tool to reach it with immediate success Now what burn emphasizes here is that soldon had to return to the side of the food to use the sticks If this had all happened and it was all right in front of the food We would have assumed it was trial and error learning that just by chance He happened to click them together and then just by chance happened to use it But because he had to put them together and then had to have a mental representation Oh, I can use this right to go get the food then had to go back to get the food That’s why he believes this is an example of insight So was able to think about his problem Even when not engaging in the task because he has a mental representation of its structure in his mind He saw the significance the longer stick was relevant to the unsolved food problem He computed a solution to the problem in his mind.

[00:15:21]  Blue: Okay. Yeah, I can get behind that Now that was actually I think the first experiment If I remember from burn’s book correctly that had ever happened where they started to wonder if chimps had insight Okay, and that had led to a lot of the studies that burn later goes on to do Here’s another one that I’m taking from Nicholas Christakis book blueprint. Okay He says friends D wall took the by the way, this is almost the same as the monkey example I used in the very first episode, but it’s more impressive Okay, friends D wall took this same idea of the cooperating monkeys from the first episode And tried it with elephants this time careful controls were put in place to see if the elephants really understood that cooperation was required Remember, they have to cooperate to get the food

[00:16:01]  Red: Yeah

[00:16:02]  Blue: The experiment was to put two elephants in different lanes and offer them a rope connected to a table If they both pull on the rope the table would move food towards them until they could eat the elephants quickly learned to Cooperate But was it possible that they just learned to pull the rope and they were unaware? They were cooperating So they released the elephants at different times if the elephant started pulling without the second elephant Then they’d know the cooperation was just coincidence But the first elephant would wait for the second elephant before starting to pull Okay But what if the elephant was just learning something like pull rope when near another elephant? So do wall cleverly tried releasing both elephants But one of the two ropes coiled up visible but out of reach in this case Neither elephant made any attempt to pull the rope because they apparently knew it wasn’t possible to get food without cooperation of the other pulling the rope

[00:16:49]  Red: Oh interesting

[00:16:51]  Blue: Now unlike the sultan example, which is just one example. This is a repeatable experiment Yeah, this is really try to come up with an alternate explanation besides insight for this. I don’t know how you would do it I don’t either

[00:17:02]  Red: it seems pretty obvious that they they’re using insights to Understand what they have to do.

[00:17:09]  Blue: Yes,

[00:17:09]  Red: they’re not they’re not getting lucky.

[00:17:11]  Blue: Yes Okay, now this leads us to the concept of behavior parsing and you asked a question in the last episode Why does david doigt disagree with richard bern on this? So i’m going to actually get into this and what we’re going to see is that doigt’s never really says anything wrong He’s like a right about everything he says, but he’s missing the bigger picture if that makes any sense Okay So behavior parsing doigt uses it richard bern studies into behavior parsing as proof that animals don’t understand things And richard bern does explain behavior parsing in very mechanical terms intentionally now remember richard bern’s whole Purpose is to start with the assumption that anything that can be explained mechanically will be explained mechanically,

[00:17:54]  Red: right?

[00:17:55]  Blue: So richard bern based on his studies There’s these complex maneuvers that you have to do that The chimps have to do to be able to take food with nettles and then remove the nettle so it can be eaten And it doesn’t hurt and it’s not it can’t possibly be Just a mechanical set of trained maneuvers because you have to it’s a whole program You have to do this a certain number of times until this happens Then you have to link in the next part of the program And then you may have to go back to the other ones like a whole flowchart has to exist between the mechanical maneuvers Okay, so richard bern based on his studies He he believes that the individual maneuvers the mechanical maneuvers that are done Individually are learned entirely by just mimicry that the the infant sees the mother And possibly the alpha male the other chimps will never eat around another chimp. So he only has two examples He gets to see it hundreds of times before he has to do it for for his first time So richard bern believes that the right explanation there is that they’re just mechanically learning to See lots of different maneuvers that accomplish something and then they’re statistically pulling out What the correct maneuver is for themselves? Okay, and he even produces evidence of this by showing that they pick up the idiosyncrasies Of the two chimps that they see and not of any of the other chimps Okay, on the other hand, it’s not complete mimicry. They usually have their own kind of way of going about it There’s their own idiosyncrasies also that are involved Okay

[00:19:24]  Blue: Deutch takes the fact that that this is a mechanical process and says see apes don’t understand anything So let’s go ahead and read what deutch actually says apes are capable of recognizing a much larger set of possible meanings Some of them are so complex that aping has often been misinterpreted as evidence of human like understanding Note the word human like understanding there. This is something that deutch really always emphasizes human like understanding Which is why it’s sometimes hard to know if he’s making a radical statement or a trivially true statement

[00:19:50]  Red: Right,

[00:19:51]  Blue: for example when an ape learns a new method of cracking nuts by hitting them with rocks It does not then play the movements required to crack the nut sequence like a parrot does The movements required to crack the nut are never the same twice The ape has to aim the rock at the nut It must have to chase the nut and fetch it back if it rolls away Has to keep hitting it until it cracks rather than a fixed number of times and so on by the way I think it’s interesting that he Attributes dumb mimicry to parents when we’ve actually seen that some parents actually understand the concept of numbers Parents are one of the animals that it very likely does have insight Such activities may seem to depend on explanation on understanding how and why each action within the complex behavior has to fit In with the other actions in order to achieve the overall purpose But recent discoveries have been revealed how apes are able to imitate such behaviors without ever creating any Explanatory knowledge in a remarkable series of observational and theoretical studies The evolutionary psychologist and animal behavior researcher Richard Byrne has shown how they achieve this by a process That he calls behavior parsing which is analogous to the grammatical analysis of parsing of human speech or computer programs

[00:20:58]  Red: Okay,

[00:20:59]  Blue: he goes on to emphasize that this is a very slow process compared to humans Okay, that because it’s a mechanical process They have to generalize from hundreds of examples whereas with the human I could explain to you what i’m doing and maybe show you once or twice And you’d get it because you would then form an explanation of what I meant in your head It would likely be correct or you would ask questions till it was corrected And then you would be able to do it in your own way. You wouldn’t have to mimic me Okay, okay, so so far so good I don’t think there’s necessarily any disagreement between bern and deutch here unless Because he’s specifically talking about human -like understanding, right bern doesn’t believe they have human -like understanding Okay, so now let me give you an example of program imitation One that bern uses from his book involving insight That’s very interesting So we have subpoena the orangutan. So subpoena has a goal.

[00:21:55]  Blue: I believe it’s a she I’m gonna say she to use soap and laundry for fun Okay, so subpoena has seen the the camp staff wash clothes with soap and do laundry And wants to go wash the laundry for herself because she’s seen this and it looked fun Okay Here they wash soap and laundry at the camp dock and there’s a guard protecting them because the staff is afraid of the orangutan So and so and subpoena is afraid of the guard So subpoena comes up with a way to bypass the guard and here is the plan she comes up with using program imitation subpoena steals a canoe full of water by untieing it She stops stops to go check on the guard and seeing that the guard is still there continues She rocks the canoe to get the water out She reorients the canoe and then propels it forward when she arrives to the dock when she arrives The staff jumps into the water to escape and then she goes about using the soap to clean the laundry Rubs the soap on the wet clothes brushes with soap. She scrubs the clothes with brushing She rings the clothes the wet clothes out, etc This is a program level imitation now great notice that there is no human that has done this Okay, there is true novelty in the program that subpoena has put together No human would have to go still a boat to go be able to wash clothes So subpoena was able to start with a goal.

[00:23:18]  Blue: I want to wash the laundry and soap and she’s not just mimicking How to wash laundry and soap she’s actually stringing together actions She’s seen elsewhere But in a novel new way that she’s never seen before so that she can go accomplish a goal This is what behavior parsing and program level imitation really is The behavior parsing part is mechanical the program level imitation requires insight I agree and this is the point that bern is trying to make also I want to point out that whereas deutch emphasize that you need hundreds of examples for for um for a for a great ape To be able to mimic um a behavior a mechanical behavior I kind of doubt subpoena the ape had watched hundreds of people Rock a canoe to get water out. So when we talk about requiring hundreds of examples, they have hundreds of examples That’s really bern’s point and he’s saying that’s sufficient. We know that’s sufficient, right? Because there’s hundreds of examples. We’re not necessarily saying they have to have hundreds of examples That’s an open question.

[00:24:24]  Blue: So I that is another difference where I feel deutch may have slightly misunderstood bern’s purpose there They normally probably do require hundreds of examples if they’re actually trying to learn to eat in the wild But subpoena clearly was picking up something in a far fewer number of examples subpoena the orangutan Could have learned each step by imitation every single one of the steps Untying the boat rocking the boat to get the water out each the points Each of the steps in terms of trying to wash things going across the river All of those could be learned by imitation But the flexible intelligence is at the level of the program not at the individual action level It does not require human level explanations to be able to do what she’s doing It does require some sort of uh mentalizing But it doesn’t require that you understand say why rocking the boat gets water out Okay, you just have to know rock the boat the water will go away. Okay. Do you understand the difference there?

[00:25:18]  Red: Yeah, yeah, I do.

[00:25:19]  Blue: So behavior parsing can there thereby be understood This is um from burn’s paper imitation is behavior parsing Behavior can therefore be understood statistically in terms of its correlations Circumstances of use effects on the environment without understanding of intentions beyond the two mentioned of like the goals And trying to accomplish a goal without the intentions or the everyday physics of cause and effect So he is agreeing that behavior parsing requires does not require any sort of true cause and effect understanding Of why rocking the boat gets the water out or something like that The theory is that apes and humans can learn certain actions By the way burn is the one who says and humans do it doesn’t agree with that So this is i’m giving you burn’s point of view here can learn that certain actions statistically create certain outcomes And then they can flexibly paste these actions together into programs to accomplish something So animals can generalize from a few hundred examples and mimic the individual steps Um, how do they do that? Well, he says it statistically. Well, what we’re talking about is induction, right? And this is where I I feel like there’s still lots of open questions and Deutsche’s maybe too quick to just assume we understand what’s going on here Although I don’t really disagree with his overall point.

[00:26:33]  Blue: How do apes watch Let’s even say a few hundred examples and then understand what it is they need to do Okay, or in the case of subpoena with the boat, maybe just a dozen examples The idea is is that they’re inductively like machine learning They’re not the the cody induction, but they’re coming up with what is the You know, what are the what are the steps I need to do? How do I go about this and they’re coming up with this this maneuver that they then know how to do? Okay, burn is certainly acting like it’s just obvious that it’s possible to do that But we don’t really know how to program that like what we could do it if we knew exactly Okay, I’m going to program to rock the boat to get the water out But again animals can set their own decisions on what they’re going to learn, right? So there’s something more going on there And we don’t have an example of an algorithm that could explain it if that makes any sense It does it does okay now for people listening You’re not going to be able to see this but cameo will be able to see it This is a flow chart and I’ll like put it up on my blog So there’s a link in the show notes And this is the flow chart of what a typical program real life in the wild program imitation would be like And it’s a giant flow chart. It’s like a program, right?

[00:27:43]  Blue: They first you pull something to range then you grip the stems loosely near the base slide up Is that enough if no then do it again if yes then grip the the base of the leaf I won’t read the whole thing But there is a whole bunch of decision points and repeats and Flow from here to there wait until you reach a certain point and then flow there Okay, this is program level imitation and it is what is required for chimps in the wild to be able to eat They would die if they couldn’t pick up program level imitation from their mother and the alpha alpha chim Because the food that’s available to them that there’s like lots of different food available to them But most of most of the food monkeys can go take they’ve got to be able to and can get there faster because they’re smaller So chimps have to be able to get at food sources that monkeys can’t don’t have enough insight to be able to get Does that make sense?

[00:28:31]  Red: Yeah

[00:28:31]  Blue: And burn believes this is what led to the evolution of insight One of the things that led to the evolution of insight was the fact that to be able to survive They needed to develop that that kind of program level imitation Okay, so don’t just point animals do not have human level understanding or full Explanatory power like I said we learned from far fewer examples We could have learned a lot of this in far fewer examples than subpoena the orangutan could however according to Burn insight is a sort of very simple explanation, but it’s based solely on correlations So here’s again coding burn from his book is all involving insight Behavior parsing gives the ability to see below the surface of behavior and detect the logical organization that produced it behavior parsing picks out the correlation structure of a changing environment quite well Cause as correlation is the is the valuable everyday way of representing reality a reliable correlation of this kind might be Described as a pretty good cause and only physicists or philosophers dealing with the fundamentals of matter may need to go much beyond it So burn’s conclusion is that animals have insider mentalizing And babe behavior parsing is not to be understood as a purely mechanical behavior Just the steps in it are to be understood as purely mechanical behavior And he sees what what the apes what what the like subpoena the ape is doing or the orangutan is doing is She’s learned this maneuver produces this result. I do an input.

[00:29:54]  Blue: I do an out and it gets an output His assumption is they’re not getting anything else that it is literally just cause as correlation This is what hysteria is anyhow, so they don’t have true causes beyond I have a goal I need to accomplish I have maneuvers I can do that have an input and an output And I can I’ve got the ability to string them together through mentalizing to form a program that will accomplish my goal

[00:30:18]  Red: Okay, yeah,

[00:30:20]  Blue: okay now going back to deutch in the beginning of infinity An ape parses a continuous stream of behavior that is that it witnesses into individual elements Each of which is already known genetically how to imitate. Okay. I’m going to do fact check now on the things that uh, do it says we’re going to find he for the most part gets it right But sometimes maybe doesn’t quite get the full context So what he just said here is strictly true But berm points out so chimps in the wild They believe that the gestures that chimps use are all genetically known. Okay So they have this set of gestures. They only in the wild. They only use those gestures And so it it’s always the same ones And even if they’re not raised by each other, they can still they still learn the same ones or they still have the same ones So they believe it’s basically a genetic program that they can have the set of gestures I can choose the gesture, but they don’t have to ever actually learn the individual gestures So what do I just saying here is strictly true? However, burn points out that apes in ASL studies, so not in the wild Can and do learn how to use gestures that they don’t already genetically know.

[00:31:24]  Blue: They just don’t do this in the wild So apes are not limited to genetic gestures and can learn new ones They just don’t except when humans make them basically This is actually an important point because if they only had genetic gestures that really would be That would really challenge the idea of them having insight But if they do have insight then they should be able to learn new ones Even if they don’t and in fact they do and this is something that he points out Is like chimps do a whole bunch of things in the wild that show insight where most other great apes don’t But the moment you take them into Um captivity the great apes can all do the same things a chimp can do They just don’t happen to do it in the wild and it is it is fascinating Okay, he talks about how chimps and great apes seem to have excess intelligence for their environment They don’t need they’re able to do things that they don’t need to do So continuing with uh, David Deutsch It turns out that in every known case of complex behavior in non -humans The necessary information can be obtained merely by watching the behavior many times and looking out for simple statistical patterns It is a very inefficient method requiring a lot of watching behavior that a human could mimic almost immediately by understanding their purpose Okay, so fact check So think of burn’s example of sold in the chimp having insight Donning and putting the the sticks together or subpoena going out and washing clothes. Okay These are examples where it did not require a few hundred examples.

[00:32:48]  Blue: So this is why I say Deutsch is assuming it requires a few hundred examples where what burns really saying is they usually have a few hundred examples So that that’s probably sufficient, but he’s not necessarily saying it requires it. Um, also these are not mechanical examples, right? The individual gestures are but um, the actual goal is novel So Deutsch is correct for the individual Individual set of actions that they have to be learned by watching learning patterns But the apes show real insight to figure out how to string those actions together into a set of actions Often not needing to repeat some of them to accomplish both an overall goal and the sub -goals that work towards that goal Okay, they have to be able to see as burn put it see beneath the surface of the individual moves And come to an understanding. Oh, I have to do this one to get that output I have to do this one to get that output and then figure out how to string those together Okay apes are unable to imitate sound. This is continuing with Deutsch They cannot even parrot sounds repeat them blindly despite having a complex inborn repertoire of calls That they can make uh, recognize and act upon in genetically pre -determined ways. Okay So this specific example is true But it seems to me like this is a misleading statement. No, David Deutsch did run his summary of burn’s studies across burn Okay, and burn okayed them.

[00:34:09]  Blue: So for whatever reason burn felt like this one was okay But let me just explain why I feel like it’s it’s a little misleading to the average reader So burn at length points out that apes have no ability to learn audible calls But he also at length points out that they can learn new communication gestures through asl and that they use them with intent So it’s true that the inborn repertoire of calls of an of apes Is genetically pre -determined and even that they’re gestures in the wild are genetically pre -determined But Deutsch is using it to show they don’t understand what in fact they can go beyond that and we know that from studies Right, which suggests that they do understand something that they’re not just completely mechanical Then Deutsch continues the ape avoids infinite Ambiguity and copying by already knowing inexplicitly the meaning of every action that it is capable of copying And it is only capable of associating one meeting with each action that it can copy okay, so I have to this one have to break down a little bit So I am not aware of anywhere burn claims that the meaning of each action is genetically already known In fact, he claims that the animals have to learn which gestures imply which meanings So like young apes they have these genetically pre -determined gestures, but they don’t know which one means which So a young ape will try every gesture and then and then over time start to figure out which ones mean what And then eventually they stop trying every gesture and they try just the ones that they Convey their actual intent to the other ape.

[00:35:34]  Blue: Okay So to me that seems different than what it seems like Deutsch is saying here And then I did not also I also didn’t find anywhere where he claims that they only associate one meaning with each action Right But that one seems reasonable to me like even though I never found burn saying that specifically That seems to fit the idea of correlation as causation. You’ve got one input. You’ve got one output So my guess is that douche has this one, right? Okay So burn’s theory is that animals learn something like this perform behavior a will cause b So a simple correlative cause and effect. I must repeat c until sufficiently d repetition of behavior until a goal is reached Or I’m a string b and d in order to accomplish e program level imitation This is what berm believes animals are capable of doing nothing really beyond that So now from interview with tyler tyler. Do chimpanzees understand in your view? David Deutsch, no one knows but they show virtually no sign of understanding anything So then he covers richard burn studies with wild gorillas and this is again quoting David Deutsch Burn did some ingenious experiments or rather observations to try to determine whether they understand Apes understand why they are doing each particular action Apparently these gorillas are prone to certain injury which disables their thumb when you’ve disabled your thumb One of those motions learned via memes becomes irrelevant and the others become less effective But the gorillas that have learned how to do the thing will make the motion the inefficient motion again and again every single time Okay, does this show a lack of understanding? Absolutely. Okay.

[00:37:08]  Blue: It is I understand exactly why Deutsch is raising this as an example of gorillas just don’t seem to understand much Okay, however, this is actually consistent with burn’s theory and that’s the point I’m trying to make Okay, is that burn does not believe that they understand the meaning of Why the individual gestures work But rather they understand how to string them together intelligently So so burn um, we call that he said behavior can their their body understood statistically in terms of its correlations circumstances of use effects on the environment without understanding the intentions beyond the goal of the everyday physics of cause and effect So dutch isn’t saying anything here that is at odds with burn’s theory It’s it’s what you might call a non differentiator. Okay. He’s he’s creating a narrative of see they don’t understand this Therefore, I’m kind of inductively concluding that they just don’t understand things and he’s missing the fact That that burn agrees with him. They don’t understand the meaning of the individual gesture But they do in some sense understand I do this gesture. I get this output. I can string these together. I can set goals Their insight operates at a different level. Okay, we’ve talked about burn’s methodology. It’s incredibly rigorous Literally anything that can be explained as not needing insight is just assumed to not need insight Okay I think this is what really attracted dutch to richard burn’s theory because richard burns spends considerable time debunking That animals understand things. I’ve read the quotes.

[00:38:37]  Blue: I’ve seen that he does this Okay, but his main point is that insight is required to string them together into a program level imitation That insight is required to do a lot of the things that they do It’s it’s only a smaller group. It’s not most animals. This is burn’s main point All right. Sure. He’s emphasizing the lack of understanding in most cases, but he does that because that’s his methodology He’s trying to find the examples that don’t fit that explanation and he’s finding them. He’s finding examples where some animals Must understand things to some degree beyond simple trial and error learning I think this is how the two of them see it different don’t she’s behavior parsing is evidence that animals have no understanding While burn sees it as evidence that apes do have mental models that they use So tyler asked david what animals why animals and human intelligence isn’t a continuum So david deutch had just barely said that animals understand anything but humans understand, you know, have universal understandings And deutch says I don’t think it could be a discrete break because evolution would happen gradually My best guess I think what happened is that the capacity of the brain to store memes to store programs In the brain rather than the genes increased for some reason very fast because of some reason these memes were very valuable So the capacity for memes increased rapidly.

[00:39:57]  Blue: Okay, just as a side note so far This is what burn says burns trying to say to be able to learn how to eat and to be able to feed themselves They had to develop these more complex memes that were at the program level Right just individual gesture level continuing with with deutch once memes go beyond a certain complexity that cannot be copied All we can do is look at the behavior and guess what the purpose was Complex memes have to be transmitted like that rather than by aping and then they came up There came a moment when our species capable of explanatory knowledge But they never used it for further tens or hundreds of thousands of years. Okay So the thing I really want to kind of emphasize here is first of all david deutch is correct according to burns theory This is what happened is that they started needing these more complex memes that couldn’t be mimicked entirely So but here’s the difference burn is saying so they learned to mimic at the program level and then to understand how to string Things together and that required insight. This is what burn is saying So burn is creating an in between burrs david deutch thinks you’ve got dumb animals and humans with explanations Burn is specifically claiming. There’s an in between point There’s a there’s another jump in between that had to happen first and that was required before human intelligence could evolve Now, what are problems with this theory at this point?

[00:41:17]  Blue: Let’s kind of just be honest about this So burn never really explains how behavior parsing actually works He just sort of assumes that if you see a few hundred examples that ought to be enough for animals to statistically figure out Which parts of the behavior matter and to be able to mimic it from there Because induction works, I guess I I don’t think we’ve got a good explanation there. I think that that’s a more Computation, you know, that’s a more computer scientist type question. It’s just not what burns interested in He doesn’t address how subpoena learned to rock a boat to get water out in very few examples Okay, he’s there must be something more going on there So we don’t really have a truly good explanation Even with burns explanation. There’s there’s more that we could dig into and try to understand this better And as I mentioned Concurrent machine learning techniques would require hundreds require thousands or even hundreds of thousands of observations to generalize So even when we are talking about animals being stupid that they need hundreds of examples to learn something That’s still super impressive Right, it’s like beyond impressive compared to the algorithms that we know how to make So there’s also the mystery about how do animals even if it does require a few hundred examples How do animals do that because we don’t know how we don’t know of any algorithm that allows that that to happen

[00:42:28]  Blue: So deutch In beginning of infinity now says this my guess is is that every ai is a person a general purpose explainer It is conceivable that there are other levels of universality between ai and universal explainer ai meaning, you know robots That don’t know anything And perhaps separate levels of those Social attributes like consciousness But those attributes all seem to have arrived in one jump to universality in humans And although we have little explanation of any of them I know of no plausible argument that they are at There are different levels or can be achieved independently of each other So I tentatively assume they cannot In any case we should expect ai Agi is what he really means here to be achieved in a jumped universality starting with something starting from something much less powerful Okay This is the quote That has led people to believe animals aren’t sentient those that are fans of david doigt because he basically here says For inhumans we saw this jump all at once of consciousness and what’s associated with consciousness and universal explainer in a single jump What i’m going to suggest is that david doigt she says he does not know of he doesn’t know of a plausible argument Well, I think berns is a plausible argument. I think david doigt is just not aware of what berns full argument is So I think this is an open question at this point, right?

[00:43:50]  Blue: We really have to question everything at this point and look into this more deeply so bern says I propose that insight evolved twice And that both kinds of insight are available to adult modern humans Non -human great apes with their intentions limited to expected results can do very well at non -verbal experimental tests of insight Okay, so bern is saying there are two kinds of insight animal insight and human insight humans have both You have to have the animal one before you can gain the human one Okay, it had to come first It was to use an analogy from computational theory. You have the finite state machine You’ve got the push down automata and then you’ve got the Turing machine Each of those is a different level of universality with the Turing machine being the one that finally encompasses every possible algorithm He is claiming that normal animals are finite state machines bern is claiming normal animals are finite state machines Um animals with insight like great apes are pushed down automata and humans are Turing machines That is what bern is claiming. Okay, that’s an analogy obviously that i’m making up So bern makes it clear that he sees behavior parsing as a form of insight and a necessary precursor to human level explanations He also points out that his theory makes testable predictions. Now. This is what I find interesting He says all non -verbal tests of theory of mind will eventually be passed by non -human great apes And all non -verbal tests of cause and effect logic will eventually be passed by non -human great apes So he his theory has testable consequences That we can actually eventually see if he’s right or not basically. Does that make sense?

[00:45:26]  Red: Yeah, totally makes sense

[00:45:27]  Blue: As of yet, they haven’t passed all these tests yet So he’s claiming that they eventually will once we figure out how to It’s sometimes far with animals to figure out how to test them because they have their own interests And they may choose to ignore you and things like that.

[00:45:39]  Red: Well, in some months what they do I think can be easily misinterpreted

[00:45:43]  Blue: Yeah, so now here’s another one human language is itself a strong example of behavior parsing Or at least maybe we do not for the most part teach children how to speak via explanation We don’t say this word means this and we don’t explain it to them They really just learn by hearing others speak and generalizing In fact, in exactly the same way we’re talking about behavior parsing They hear it lots of different times and statistically they pick up what it means inductively, I guess I don’t know we don’t know how right So behavior parsing one could argue is required to learn language and is therefore precursor to Universal explanatory abilities and I actually the Bern nevers specifically says what I just said I think this is what he’s getting at on the other hand to defend the Deutsch feel One might argue that we learn language by explaining words to ourselves Now is this possible before we language is acquired? I don’t know Maybe if explanations aren’t if you can do explanations without language Maybe you could still fit deutch’s view to what we actually see and it doesn’t have to be

[00:46:43]  Blue: Bern’s view I would consider this to competitive theories that need to stay competitive for the moment We don’t want to get one over the other of the moment Okay, now keep in mind though that we do apparently use language to explain things in our own head if children used Lingual explanations to learn language that would be an infinite regress So we would be claiming that explanations are different than lingual explanations in some sense that If you’re into agi and you agree with deutch on this That would be a hint now About agi on the other hand if deutch is wrong that would be a mislead on agi This is why it’s important that we actually take all the theories seriously and try to work things out So it’s possible that behavior parsing may be necessary But insufficient to learn language because otherwise apes could learn language, right? So we know it must be insufficient Now let’s let’s talk about I haven’t gotten into this one But let’s talk about uh self -awareness, which is um something that Bern talks about and it seems to be a big interest of deutch’s also although they’re completely different on this one, okay So deutch has criticized the mirror test A number of times I even responded to him on twitter when he was talking about Someone ought to just make a cell phone that recognizes itself in the mirror and we can prove that It doesn’t that the fact that you can pass the mirror test does not prove that you have self -awareness Okay, okay.

[00:48:02]  Blue: He says yeah, it would be it would be trivial for software to pass So he doubts that that the fact that some animals can pass the mirror test shows us really anything now I brought up on twitter on the place where he said this I said, you know, the only problem I agree with what you’re saying But the only problem with what you’re saying is is that If someone programs a piece of software specifically to to recognize itself in the mirror Then there’s a human Programming it to recognize itself in the mirror and then we have an explanation of why it can do it We’re kind of starting with the assumption that there’s no evolutionary purpose to recognize yourself in a mirror And if that’s the case that animals that can recognize recognize themselves in a mirror They’re doing it by some other means completely different than the way a smartphone would do it Okay,

[00:48:47]  Red: yes, right There is not a An agent that is teaching them how to do the thing or training them to do the thing

[00:48:55]  Blue: Yes, and if they don’t and they don’t have mirrors in the wild, right? I mean mirrors don’t exist in the wild So there would be no evolutionary purpose for them to recognize themselves in the mirror Now somebody came back and gave a decent criticism. They said, um What if like they needed to learn to recognize themselves in the mirror because They would otherwise get spooked at their reflection in the water and I said, oh, that’s actually a good point But that’s that’s testable. We can’t just assume you’ve now Taking care of things We should now find the implication of what you just said if it’s we take it seriously as a theory Is that we should find that all animals that have to drink from pools of water will pass the mirror test Otherwise your explanation doesn’t make sense. Nobody responded to me after that and that conversation was kind of done

[00:49:40]  Red: And there are not very many animals that can recognize themselves in water or yes spoiler. That is correct

[00:49:47]  Unknown: Okay,

[00:49:48]  Blue: so what I’m going to do is I’m going to refer to the deutch mirror test as the smartphone mirror test Okay, that would be you program a smartphone to recognize itself in the mirror It’s trivial. It’s not that hard And he’s right that we could do that and that would require absolutely no insight at all To be able to do that therefore it is at least possible to pass the mirror test using the smartphone mirror test approach Okay, okay Now question how many animals are known to be able to pass the smartphone mirror test?

[00:50:21]  Unknown: Okay,

[00:50:21]  Blue: where they just recognize themselves in a mirror on their first try which is part of the smartphone mirror test So here’s berns Here’s berns answer When confronted with a mirror for the first time most animals treat the image as an unfamiliar cons Animal of the same species conspect the seven They make inappropriate social responses and often try to find where the other animal is by looking behind the glass The best to catch show these reactions young children show them and adult humans who have never in their lives experience with mirrors also show them Meaning

[00:50:58]  Red: even humans even

[00:51:00]  Blue: humans no animal passes the smartphone mirror test None with experience however reactions change all humans come to realize that the image is of themselves a result of reflection At this point they begin to use the mirror in distinctive new ways examining parts of their face They cannot reach cats on the other hand do not their social response may habituate But they simply ignore the mirror and show no signs of understanding the reflected images

[00:51:25]  Red: But

[00:51:26]  Blue: why is this so hard anyway, especially for an animal with paws or hands that they Can see in action there is continual opportunity to see that the paw in the mirror appears the same as their own There was therefore great excitement when it was found that a few species behave like humans apparently eventually understanding the image as themselves In other words We’re not trying to explain we’re not target starting with the idea that oh just because they can see something in the Mirror that shows they have self -awareness We’re actually showing the opposite that the vast majority of animals can’t pass the mirror test and therefore have no sense of self That’s actually what we’re trying to explain with the mirror test. Now if that’s true. Now, that’s a conjecture We don’t know exactly why most animals can’t pass the mirror test Okay, but the the conjecture they have no sense of self That would explain it right if if animals literally just lack the concept That i’m a self i’m a cat just like the other cats in my species Then they would never be able to pass the mirror test. It would be impossible for them to okay Yeah, that the lack of insight would make it impossible

[00:52:39]  Red: All right, so can I ask a question?

[00:52:42]  Blue: Yes Do you do you think that that the sense of self Would have do you need a sense of self to be able to have Intelligence Okay, that’s a no, that’s a good question Now it just so happens That the animals that pass the mirror test Are for the most part the same group of animals that burned by experiment has demonstrated have insight However, there are some exceptions. Like I’ve heard that some ants can pass the mirror test I I don’t believe for an instant that ants have a sense of self. I agree That may actually be a different sort of case in the case of ants. I haven’t looked into those as experiments I’ve just had people tell me that so I don’t think the mirror test is meant as any sort of foolproof method Let’s determine if this animal has a sense of self I think it was really intended exactly the opposite It was trying to demonstrate that most animals do not have a sense of self and then by by implication That would mean that an animal that does have a sense of self Would have to be in the category of the ones that pass the mirror test

[00:53:45]  Red: Yeah, and

[00:53:46]  Blue: that’s and then the media misrepresents. I will give doge complete credit on that point The media doesn’t even come close to representing it correctly, right? So in many ways doge’s criticisms of it would be completely correct for the media version of the mirror test But not for the burn version of the mirror test if that makes any sense Okay, yeah, because they’re they’re they’re very different Now one of the things that he that burn talks about In this theory doesn’t quite fit. He says that one of the theories is that you have to develop a sense of self If you’re a larger animal Like an ape like monkeys. They just you know swing through the trees and they don’t have to worry about how to engineer their maneuvers because they’re too light When a chimpanzee swings through the trees, it has to think a lot about its own body and what its body is doing And so one of the theories burn suggests is that that may have been what caused some animals to gain a sense of self Okay, that it was really just a solution to a evolutionary problem. They have to be able to swing through trees now How good is this explanation? You know, like I think it’s a crummy explanation.

[00:54:55]  Red: I gotta tell you

[00:54:56]  Blue: I mean like we’re just making conjectures, right? But like why do parrots then have a sense of self? You know, I mean I I don’t know right one

[00:55:04]  Red: and if you know when you’re talking about apes that seem to have communication at the That’s built into their system Why they wouldn’t the thing the thing any animal needs to think the very least about is how it moves through The world, right? Like we don’t think about running. We don’t think about It’s it’s a very questionable concept. All

[00:55:30]  Blue: right fair enough. I wasn’t sure I bought it And even burn doesn’t buy the explanation. He criticizes it also But he throws it out there as one possibility and then he criticizes it So I’m telling you it burns really a good scientist He he really tries to criticize each of the theories and try to figure out what survives One other thing I I should mention is the way they test for The mirror test is they’ll do something like they’ll put a dot on their hand on the animal’s hand and then on their forehead But while they’re why they don’t notice that it’s happening when they see the dot on their hand They’ll like remove it But they won’t remove the one on their forehead because they can’t see it Then if they go and look in the mirror and see it then the ones that pass the mirror test will remove the dot Because they know it’s them in the mirror. They know it’s their reflection. Okay in the case of like Dolphins which do pass the mirror test they can’t do that test quite so easily But they have seen dolphins like go up to mirrors and open up their mouth to try to look inside their own Mouth they do the exact same sorts of things that humans do when they come across a mirror for the first time right,

[00:56:32]  Red: right

[00:56:33]  Blue: Um So anyhow, just wanted to explain that. Okay, so now I’m I’m just about done. Let me let me just wrap up here So we’ve seen that apes have an amazing level. Great. The greater apes have an amazing level of intelligence

[00:56:46]  Red: Okay,

[00:56:47]  Blue: but they also have an amazing level of ignorance. They just don’t get how powerful some other ideas are This is this is burn’s point. So quoting from burn Um apes may build novel hierarchical organized organized actions But seem to have no concept of the power of hierarchical organization more generally Example apes can learn asl and captivity, but they never in the wild use anything, but genetically predetermined gestures Um, they use gestures to intentionally influence others But never comprehend how asl might allow them to communicate their intentions to others they never Propose or introduce new labels because the idea of reference itself is missing. They can use reference They can learn a language a basic language that we talked about asl or The the symbols or the things we’ve talked about in the past episodes But the idea of reference itself is missing. They can’t figure out Oh, I can do other things through symbolic reference They learned to see others and understand complex ideas like if they can’t see it If the other animal can’t see it, they have no knowledge of it But they never show any knowledge of the idea that they themselves might have been deceived Well, we actually did see a couple examples of that, but I think he means in the lab But only very borderline very borderline. Yes, like the example he gives is a female ape Hides the male ape that She wants to have a mate with behind a rock because the alpha can’t see that can see her but not The other male ape and then she’s able to get away with mating and the alpha doesn’t break it up The alpha never so that’s deception.

[00:58:25]  Blue: She’s showing a degree of insight and deception He can’t see the other ape. Therefore. He doesn’t have the knowledge on mating with it That’s that’s intelligent But the the alpha 8 there’s never been a case of an alpha 8 finding evidence later that he’s been cheated on And getting upset at that point that that is just beyond what they can do with deception Okay, they can pass a mirror test proving some concepts Some concept of themselves as an entity, but they never become embarrassed or prideful at their appearance They are capable of pedagogy and we talked about how they Really rarely but some chimps have modeled behavior slowly for their infants in past episodes But they use it so rarely they can’t possibly understand how valuable pedagogy is. Okay in short Great apes seem to be able to only model explanations at a single level one input one statistical output They lack any sort of deeper insight beyond that Okay, like humans have and then let me just This is just burn from thinking ape. I’m going to end on this. This is his own words describing his own understanding monkeys and lesser apes develop tactics in the social arena, which are Impressively intelligent, but there is usually no evidence to suggest that the tactics are acquired by qualitatively different mechanisms than those of other animals a trial and error learning instead monkeys and lesser apes are quicker at learning Especially socially, but it’s not different. They’re just they’re very faster at trial and error than in other animals Yes

[01:00:02]  Blue: But there is also a sharp disconnect discontinuity between one type of primate and the other a rubicon of cognitive capacity This intellectual watershed lies between monkey and great apes the great apes Especially chimpanzees give abundant evidence of a greater depth of intelligence Than possessed by any monkey the ability that we call insight in humans One possible way of looking at the inside of great apes is to say that apes seem to have the ability to think plan and compute Although admittedly only in a limited way. This is a good very good summary of burn’s theory So I

[01:00:38]  Red: like this as a wrap up one one thing. Well, actually two concepts I had kind of written down to just to touch on really briefly here When we were talking about the ape that wanted to go do the the laundry. I mean the the chimpanzee I’m I’m very curious about the the idea of fun in in animals in general Because you know fun is kind of this super abstract thing anyway Like how does you know this this chimpanzee watching the people do the laundry and says oh that looks fun But I’ve also seen you know videos of Just this last week. I saw this video of a dog that somehow figured out He could stand on this This piece of metal and slide down this little pink hill on snow And he’s doing it over and over again He’s pushing the the piece of metal up to the top of the hill with his nose Climbing on it and sliding down over and over. You know, he said he’s playing so In burns findings and burns discussion does he talk about the concept of fun as it relates to intelligence? No So the word fun

[01:01:52]  Blue: was my word Uh -huh I don’t think he doubts that animals do things for fun And I was actually just watching a video on a TED talk on youtube Where they were talking about crows and how crows will actually take a little Piece of wood and then fly up in the air and surf in the air on the piece of wood Even though they could do this with their wings they choose to do it on the piece of wood Because they they enjoy it just like a human would surfing.

[01:02:18]  Red: Okay crazy, but okay

[01:02:19]  Blue: Um Animals have behaved and we’re getting a little bit into sandians, which I’ve been trying to avoid But animals have behaviors that I don’t think there is any way currently to explain by any known theory other than the assumption that they have Very similar feelings to ours and that’s the way we explain it We explain it that way because it’s the only explanation we currently have it could be wrong, right? It could be that animals feel nothing. Okay, but when you see A dog sliding down and you say or a orangutan wanting to wash clothes Which is clearly has no any sort of survival value for it. Sure

[01:02:54]  Red: none at all

[01:02:56]  Blue: It’s completely natural and correct to say oh the animal is having fun It’s it’s not that you know for sure. That’s the case. It’s just the only explanation you happen to have available Well,

[01:03:07]  Red: and typically the things they might be doing you can you can think oh, I can see where that’s fun Like little kids love laundry because it’s it’s fun to have your hands in water and squish in the things, you know We recognize it as fun because those are the same things we might do to have fun.

[01:03:23]  Blue: That’s right. Okay, they’re And if I ever do an animal sentience one, it won’t be the next episode We’ll we’ll wait for a while if I ever decide to do it that is the point I’m gonna make right is that there’s kind of this need to explain animal behavior in terms of Them having valences Feelings things like that and they have to be at least somewhat similar to our own I know that fans of David Deutsch are bothered by that and they think they have an alternative explanation that it’s all robotic There is no alternative explanation that explains all this through robotic algorithms period end of story So they don’t have a competing explanation. That’s actually in a nutshell my entire view on animal sentient It’s not that I think I know animals are sentient or not. It’s that we have one explanation I don’t know how good it is, but it’s there’s no competitor at the moment I can’t explain why a monkey acts like it’s jealous Because it doesn’t get paid as much as another monkey without referencing the word jealous There’s no non -feeling explanation available or I can say well, it’s You know, it’s trying to signal and I mean like I could but it wouldn’t be a good explanation It would be so clearly just something I made up to try to explain it away, right? If we had let’s say we had a theory of philosophical zombies, right? Like some humans actually were feel so philosophical zombies and we knew it because they told us, right? It’s unlike the philosophical zombies where you can’t tell the difference. They go.

[01:04:47]  Blue: Oh, no, I can’t feel any pain You know, I can I can just tell that my hands, you know have damage So I pull it away, you know or let’s say humans were there was a group of humans like that. Okay Then maybe that would make sense. We would study that we would Develop a theory around how that worked out was different than when you had feelings It would become testable between the two groups. Okay, but there are no such humans, right? We don’t know if those philosophical zombies are even physically possible at this point, right? So there’s no reason you can’t use that as an explanation for animals because it’s a non explanation Whereas doing things because it’s trying to have fun is an explanation that is a good explanation that we already know That it’s already part of our own evolution. We understand it directly It fits with evolutionary theory. It ties into all sorts of things. We can pinpoint where in the brain The feelings come from and it’s in the brainstem for the most part other than maybe suffering They all come from the brainstem So we know it’s early in the evolution of animals that they started to feel things Okay, we we understand we have a theory that’s

[01:05:53]  Unknown: developed

[01:05:53]  Blue: about Why they have these feelings. It’s actually curiosity. Okay, the curiosity is the export -sploit trade -off Okay To be able to talk about animals intelligibly and not come across like you’re just completely out hocking You have to reference animal feelings today because it is the sole explanation that actually explains things That’s it. There’s nothing special going on. I’m not trying to advocate for therefore. I know Animals feel things. It’s just it’s just the only way I know how to go about explaining things because it’s the only explanation available Yeah, and I think that’s fine I think we should that because that is a good hard to vary explanation to assume they have feelings similar to ourselves You know, and that’s an explanation that works for us. It’s a good explanation for humans Of course, it’s a good explanation for animals, right? And it’s a good explanation for humans evolutionarily It’s a good explanation for humans how it ties into our evolution How we understand our brain structure how we understand where the feelings come from everything we know Everything we’ve studied it makes perfect sense to assume other humans feel things just like you do Okay, that’s the only explanation. There is no alternative explanation And the same is true for animals. You just apply it over for animals. You can see they’re having fun So you call it them having fun. Sure. I don’t know what else to say on that subject to be honest I don’t think bern would strongly in any way disagree with me on this. He’s not studying that He would accept though.

[01:07:16]  Blue: He does talk about The valences of animals the fact that they get the reward system How do you explain reinforcement learning if they don’t have valences that are rewards and punishments for them? It being you know, I mean like trial and error learning assumes the existence of valences of some sort.

[01:07:32]  Red: I agree Well, let’s put a pin in that one then and then when we finally get back around to doing sentience We can we can talk about about fun and feelings as part of that. All right

[01:07:43]  Blue: sounds

[01:07:43]  Red: good All

[01:07:44]  Blue: right, that wraps up our four part episode on richard bern’s theories about animals and in this episode we Went into depth about how bern and dutch understand the theories differently the way this all started I I read what was in beginning of infinity and I I even have a blog post where I talked about How behavior parsing explains away many things that seem like explanations in humans But then I pointed to the existence of like the elephant example Where there was no behavior parsing because there was there was no imitation happening hundreds of times And animals still seem to have some sort of Explanation or insight going on and I said, I don’t know if behavior parsing can explain that or not I’m going to now go study richard bern’s behavior parsing so that I can understand it better And it was only then that I realized ah richard bern has a very different understanding of his own theory Right, right and that was what led to making these Podcasts and trying to get the other point of view out.

[01:08:43]  Red: I think it’s a great point of view It’ll be interesting to see if you can get people to Engage with it and respond to it because as you’ve mentioned in some of the earlier episodes specific to this the deutchians are passionately against this and and have if anything it seems like kind of picked it up as a key part of the philosophy

[01:09:05]  Blue: Yes, at least some of them.

[01:09:07]  Red: I

[01:09:07]  Blue: mean like there’s there’s kind of two groups I’m in one group and a bunch are in the other but yeah, there’s definitely a group that It feels very passionately about this and you know what I don’t even want to talk them out of it Right. I mean if they feel very passionately about that that’s fine. I don’t know that they’re wrong I’m not claiming they are wrong Right. I’m just trying to say look. I’m just curious. I’m just trying to figure out. What do we really know? How do we think we know it? I want to understand that I’m not interested in digging into one position or the other I’ve done that it looks to me like richard bern has thought this through And I think he’s right that there is a there is a intermediate jump to universality Now that could be wrong But let’s get back to agi studies That would be something worth knowing if it were true and it would be worth knowing if it wasn’t true So yeah,

[01:09:55]  Red: absolutely,

[01:09:55]  Blue: right if if in fact there had to be a sub jump to universality of animal level insight Before you could get to human level insight if those two are related in some way But you can separate them That’s really something important to know the and the fact that he has a theory about what it is That it’s correlation as causation Okay, that would be a really interesting starting point for trying to figure out what animal intelligence is as I step towards figuring out what agi is

[01:10:24]  Red: Yeah, absolutely. If he’s right, if he’s right, but it certainly is worthy of Of more thought and discussion Since nobody really knows how to how to create an agi yet, right right,

[01:10:37]  Blue: and I was talking to a phd friend who’s Interested in david doigt and I was talking about my interests in agi And I said, you know my my podcast if you really pay attention like 60 of the episodes are secretly about agi I hide it But like the reason why i’m doing animal intelligence is because i’m trying to figure out if there’s something there I should learn first, right and I’ve come away with the feeling Maybe i’m wrong I’ve come up with the feeling that maybe I should look into animal intelligence first because it may be a stepping stone to agi I think there’s a good theory that exists richard burns theory that suggests that that is the case So that might be worth now Presumably it’s easier to figure out animal intelligence than human intelligence So that would be a good stepping stone that and if i’m wrong Well, then animal intelligence is still in and of itself an interesting subject that we need to come to understand

[01:11:34]  Red: I’ve known this about me for years I’ve known that that’s that’s what all of this is all this is about. Yeah

[01:11:44]  Blue: So you really look at each episode i’m exploring different concepts related to agi, but I dig into each concept um the only real exceptions are like when we do marvel or star wars or You know hindu dance or something like that. No,

[01:11:59]  Red: even even those I think they’re yeah

[01:12:03]  Blue: They’re they’re connected by nerdy -ness that’s All

[01:12:06]  Red: right. Well, this was a great episode. All right. Thank you campio. Thank you. All right

[01:12:16]  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 dutch’s philosophy as well as other interesting subjects If you’re enjoying this podcast, please give us a five star rating on apple podcast 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 dot 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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