The Pongid Theory of Mind

PongidResearchers from the Max Planck Institute and St Andrew’s University have come up with some fresh evidence that chimps have a theory of mind (ToM) – that is to say that they are aware that other individuals possess knowledge and that what they know doesn’t always match what we know.

The researchers placed dummy snakes in the path of wild chimps: the chimps gave warning calls more frequently in the presence of others who, so far as they could tell, had no prior knowledge of the presumed hazard.

This kind of research is fraught with difficulty. Morgan’s Canon tells us that we should only use consciousness as an explanation for some item of behaviour where no simpler explanation is available, and similarly we should be reluctant to grant chimps ToM unless there is no alternative.  Couldn’t the explanation be, for example, that chimps who are alone are more likely to give warning calls, either because that response is just hard-wired, or because they are more fearful when alone? Alternatively, perhaps the observed behaviour could be largely explained if chimps are programmed to give a warning call, but only one, for each member of the troupe they spot or hear approaching?

Although I think Morgan’s Canon is absolutely the right kind of principle to apply, it is difficult to satisfy, and if read too literally perhaps impossible. We know from all the discussions of philosophical zombies that there are plenty of thoughtful people who find it conceivable that all of human behaviour could be produced without consciousness (at any rate, without the kind of consciousness that requires actual phenomenal subjective experience). If that’s really true then there are surely no cases in which behaviour can strictly be explained only by consciousness. It’s equally hard, going on impossible, to rule out every conceivable alternative explanation for the chimps’ behaviour – but the researchers were well aware of the problem and the key point of the research is the observation of circumstances where, for example, chimp A could be presumed to have heard an earlier warning, but chimp B could not. So we can take the claims they make as well grounded. It seems that with some inevitable margin of doubt we can reasonably take it as established that chimps do have ToM.

So what? We might have been willing to assume that that was probably the case anyway. We already know chimps are extremely bright and there are many who believe they can develop language skills which approach human levels. Language is what makes it so much easier to know for sure that human beings have ToM – they can tell us about it – so if chimps are anywhere near that level it’s really no surprise that they also have ToM. (Interesting, by the way that the current research uses the chimps’ proto-linguistic warning calls.) One further conclusion offered by the researchers themselves is that ToM must have emerged in the primate lineage at a point before the divergence of chimp and human ancestors: but that ain’t necessarily so. It could equally be that each lineage has developed a functionally comparable capacity in parallel, one which the latest shared ancestor need never have had.

Do we and our pongid cousins have the same ToM? In some respects obviously not. For one thing, we humans really do have actual academic theories of mind; and we write novels filled with the putative contents of minds that never existed. We have ToM on levels which completely transcend the mental lives of chimps. Are these, though, just fancy overlays on an underlying ability which remains essentially the same?  Alas, there’s no easy way of telling without knowing what’s going on in the chimp’s mind – what it is like to be a chimp – and Nagel long ago told us that that was impossible.

Attempting to know the unknowable is nothing new for us, though, so let’s at least briefly try to achieve the impossible. There are lots of possibilities for what might be passing through the chimp’s mind: by way of illustration it could be any of the following.

  1. A cloudy sense of something indefinable but importantly snake-related which is missing in Chimp B.
  2. A mental picture of Chimp B continuing to advance and stumbling on the snake.
  3. A brief empathetic sense of being Chimp B, and a recollection that seeing the snake or hearing a warning has not occurred.
  4. Routine enumeration of the troupe and its whereabouts leading to a realisation that Chimp B hasn’t been around for a while.
  5. Occurence of proto-verbal content equivalent to uttering the sentence “Look there’s B, who doesn’t know about the snake yet!”

There are plenty of other possibilities: cataloguing them would in itself be a challenging task. Moreover, humans are clearly capable of operating on two or more of these levels at once, and it would be mere speciesism to assume that chimps are not. Still, can we pare it down a bit: given that chimps lack full-blown human linguistic abilities and are relatively limited in their foresight, can we plausibly hypothesise that cases like 5 and other involving relatively complex levels of abstraction are probably absent from the chimp experience? I’m not sure, and even if we can it doesn’t help all that much.

So instead I ask myself what state obtained in my own mind last time I warned someone about a potential hazard. Luckily I do remember a couple of occasions, but interestingly introspection leaves me quite uncertain about the answer. This could be a result of hazy memory, but I think it’s worse than that: I think the main problem is that so far as conscious thought goes I could have been thinking anything.  It feels as if there is no distinct single state of mind which corresponds to noticing that somebody needs to be warned about something; curiously I feel tempted to examine my own behaviour and conclude that if I did go on to warn someone, I must have been thinking that they needed warning.

That kind of approach is another option, I suppose: we can take a behaviourist tack and say that if chimps behave in a way that displays ToM, then they have it, and that’s all there is to be said about it. If we can’t formulate clearly what kind of behaviour that would be, that just means ToM itself turns out to be mentalistic nonsense.  The snag with that is that ToM is pretty certainly mentalistic nonsense to behaviourists anyway; so if we think the question is worth answering we have to look elsewhere.

We could get neuronal on this: we might, for example, be able to scan human and chimp brains and detect some distinctive patterns of activity which occur just when the relevant primate appears to be getting ready to issue a warning. If these patterns of activity occurred in the corresponding sections of the chimp and human brain (perhaps involving some of those special mirror neurons) we should be inclined to conclude that our ToMs were basically the same: if they occurred in different places we should be very tempted to conclude that evolution had recruited different sections of the two species’ brains to carry out the same function. This latter case is quite plausible – in human brains, for example, the areas used for speech don’t match the bits of the chimp brain used for vocalisations (which apparently correspond to areas used by humans only for involuntary gasps and cries and, strangely enough, for swearing).

Results like that might settle the evolutionary question; but not the deeper philosophical one. Even if we did use a different set of neurons, it wouldn’t prove we weren’t running the same ToM. Different human beings certainly use somewhat different arrays of neurons – no two brains are wired identically. If we came across the yeti and found he was fully up to human levels of consciousness, able to hold an impeccably normal human-style conversation with us and discuss ToM just as we do, and then we made the astonishing discovery that he had no prefrontal cortex and was using what in humans would have been his cerebellum to do his conscious thinking with, we would not on that account alone say he had a different kind of consciousness (at least, I don’t think we would).

So it looks to me as if we have a radical pattern of variation at both ends. All sorts of neuronal wiring (or maybe silicon or beer cans and string – why not?) will do at the bottom level; all sorts of cogitative content will do at the top levels. Somewhere in the middle is there a level of description where deciding that someone needs to be warned is just that and nothing else, and where we can meaningfully compare and contrast human and chimp?  I suspect there is, but I also suspect that it resides in something analogous to a high-level mental metacode of a kind we should need a proper theory of mind even to begin imagining.

13 thoughts on “The Pongid Theory of Mind

  1. The topic is interesting, but it seems to me that warning about a threat is quite an instinctive behaviour (clearly favoured by evolution) observed in many species.

    What would be very interesting is to observe the opposite. If it could be proven that a chimp has “on purpose” not warn another chimp (competitor in the group) about a threat, in order to get rid of it, that would be a trait of high consciousness.

    What would make chimps closer to humans, is to skip a warning to the group leader about the snake, as an strategy to take its position.

  2. Indeed, an interesting topic.
    Haven’t bees been documented to warn other bees by secreting some chemical? I don’t think we can ever resolve this question as many people cannot even agree on what we are trying to prove – what is consciousness. It is Mission Impossible – the zombie protocol.

  3. I do not think consciousness is ‘Mission Impossible’, and have never been a zombie fan.
    In my opinion consciousness, which comes in varying abilities, primarily evolved to manage the somatic nervous system, to do the necessary work required by the autonomic nervous system, born out of necessity due to the creatures environment which is why we do not fully require consciousness when we are asleep. Tress etc and some creatures do not need to evolve consciousness due to their environment.

  4. Richard, thanks for proving my point: we do not agree on what we are trying to prove.

    To me, the kind of consciousness you are referring to is best described as “access consciousness”, while the type I am focusing on is “phenomenal consciousness”, following Ned Block. Using this terminology, I will grant that the i-Robot Roomba vacuum cleaner has some access consciousness, but not phenomenal consciousness.

    To me, a-consciousness is graded, from 0 where components are not talking to each other at all to 1 where all the components and information are fully integrated to form a coherent entity, while p-consciousness is binary – either 0 or 1. Either an object has it or does not have it. A zombie is one that has no phenomenal consciousness, but could well be rated very high in its a-consciousness level.

  5. I agree with Vicente, this warning call is commonly observed in birds and even lower animals. Parents frequently call their brood back home if they stray too far or get anywhere close to danger such as predators.

  6. Karl, there are some people that do not think we evolved at all but came from mythical Adam and Eve. I do not see why you do not think that basic animal or access consciousness did not evolve into what we know as human/phenomenal consciousness. It is surely an exaptation in evolution of higher consciousness, a baby does not initially have a theory of mind. Perhaps you are what I call a brain in a box person that does not appreciate how the body and brain evolved together as one complete entity, which could evolve further as Michio Kaku suggests through what he describes as type O to type 3 beings.

  7. Richard,
    Unfortunately, up to this point, it is still very difficult to clearly define what is a-consciousness and what is p-consciousness, just like consciousness itself is difficult to define. But for people who are in the camp that makes the distinction, claiming that a-consciousness can be evolved into p-consciousness is making a category mistake. They are not the same thing. To use Ned Block’s example, it is like confusing temperature with heat content because intuitively higher temperature implies more heat content. But the intuition is wrong because this implication is not logically right. You can have the same heat content, but if you spread the heat content around and dilute it, the temperature comes down even the total heat content remains the same. The unit for heat content is Joule or Calorie, like energy, while temperature is degree C, which is a dimensionless pure number. They are fundamentally different. In a similar way, a-consciousness is fundamentally different from p-consciousness and they are often confused for the same thing.

  8. I think the point of these experiments is not the warning per se, but the fact that the chimps appear to selectively give the warning only to other chimps who (so far as they can tell) are unaware of the threat. So they appear to be making inferences about what others know.

  9. Kar, I feel I have gone off topic enough and do not want to annoy our superb host. However, I must say that I do not agree with Ned Block who I think like many others categorise consciousness wrongly, possibly by ignoring the initial driver, unconsciousness, which of course all conscious creatures including Pogids have. Unfortunately categorization necessary for scientific proof can obscure and limit analogue thought, which regularly occurs on this site as well as others, for example:- first and third person point of view, your red my red, not everything is black or white.

  10. Peter, yes, you are right, their selective choice for the warning target is clearly more sophisticated than a general warning, but does it add an important qualitative improvement to the “general alarm” behaviour? Could be. Are there other traits in the chimps social behaviour more adequate for high consciousness search, to be used as a high consciousness “probe”?

    Considering your introspective analysis: could the selective warning be the result of the observation of what the chimps programming identifies as an anomalous behaviour? i.e: The other chimps behave normally when a threat is around ¿!!? what the hell are they doing? “he thinks”. That is the reason of their selective behaviour, is not that they infere knowledge using ToM, it is just that the others behaviour is not following the script, the genetical, or learned, instructions for threat management. I don’t know.

    Once I sat face to face with a 240 Kg gorilla, with just a glass in between us, I looked into his eyes, and I thought he was human.

  11. Vicente,
    I am going off-topic a little bit here. Two funny things:

    1) This is the first time I came across:
    what the hell are they doing? “he thinks”, instead of “what the hell are they doing?” he thinks. And the usage makes perfect sense to a human (would have meant something very different if done the other way), but it will probably confuse the hell out of a grammatically programmed Turing Machine. 🙂 Difference between a conscious reader and an unconsciousness reader?
    2) When I read “Once I sat face to face with a 240 Kg gorilla, with just a glass in between us, I looked into his eyes, and I thought he was human.” I smiled. The gorilla starts to speak in my imagination.

  12. Re comment 10 Yes Vicente, I know what you mean. My experience with a gorilla at Chessington Zoo who, very carefully was trying to reach a piece of orange peel outside his cage with a stick. He glanced at me and others and had obviously been trying for awhile and seemed quite content, even when his most recent attempt of trying to move it up and into his cage failed. I bent down, picked it up and offered it to him. The look he directed at me was one of initial disgust, a sigh of deflation, disappointment and final sadness which was overwhelming. He put down the stick slowly, turned away and sat very still in a corner. He did not need vocal language to communicate his feelings. I put the piece of orange peel back but did not know how to apologise to a gorilla, who was now fairly motionless and looking away. I helplessly said sorry. With hindsight I should have realised, as he had several pieces of orange peel inside of his cage. I could only hope he would come back and continue his game with his stick when I had gone. A sad experience because I ruined his game.
    I have also been ‘told off’ by a pigeon but that is another event, for both of which I have seperate witnesses. These are two events that have stayed with me. I know David Attenborough has plenty of others, possibly too many to remember. I would like to know his most memorable.

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