Ape Interpretation

Do apes really have “a theory of mind”? This research, reported in the Guardian, suggests that they do. We don’t mean, of course, that chimps are actually drafting papers or holding seminars, merely that they understand that others can have beliefs which may differ from their own and which may be true or false. In the experiment the chimps see a man in a gorilla suit switch hiding places; but when his pursuer appears, they look at the original hiding place. This is, hypothetically, because they know that the pursuer didn’t see the switch, so presumably he still believes his target is in the original hiding place, and that’s where we should expect him to go.

I must admit I thought similar tell-tale behaviour had already been observed in wild chimps, but a quick search doesn’t turn anything up, and it’s claimed that the research establishes new conclusions. Unfortunately I think there are several other quite plausible ways to interpret the chimps’ behaviour that don’t require a theory of mind.

  1. The chimps momentarily forgot about the switch, or needed to ‘check’ (older readers, like me, may find this easy to identify with).
  2. The chimps were mentally reviewing ‘the story so far’, and so looked at the old hiding place.
  3. Minute clues in the experimenters’ behaviour told the chimps what to expect. The famous story of Clever Hans shows that animals can pick up very subtle signals humans are not even aware of giving.

This illustrates the perennial difficulty of investigating the mental states of creatures that cannot report them in language. Another common test of animal awareness involves putting a spot on the subject’s forehead and then showing them a mirror; if they touch the spot it is supposed to demonstrate that they recognise the reflection as themselves and therefore that they have a sense of their own selfhood. But it doesn’t really prove that they know the reflection is their own, only that the sight of someone with a spot causes them to check their own forehead. A control where they are shown another real subject with a spot might point to other interpretations, but I’ve never heard of it being done. It is also rather difficult to say exactly what belief is being attributed to the subjects. They surely don’t simply believe that the reflection is them: they’re still themselves. Are we saying they understand the concepts of images and reflections? It’s hard to say.

The suggestion of adding a control to this experiment raises the wider question of whether this sort of experiment can be generally tightened up by more ingenious set-ups? Who knows what ingenuity might accomplish, but it does seem to me that there is an insoluble methodological issue. How can we ever prove that particular patterns of behaviour relate to beliefs about the state of mind of others and not to similar beliefs in the subject’s own minds?

It could be that the problem really lies further back: that the questions themselves make no sense. Is it perhaps already fatally anthropomorphic to ask whether other animals have “a theory of mind” or “a conception of their own personhood”; perhaps these are already incorrigibly linguistic ideas that just don’t apply to creatures with no language. If so, we may need to unpick our thinking a bit and identify more purely behavioural ways of thinking, ones that are more informative and appropriate?

Consciousness speed-dating

datingWhy can’t we solve the problem of consciousness? That is the question asked by a recent Guardian piece.  The account given there is not bad at all; excellent by journalistic standards, although I think it probably overstates the significance of Francis Crick’s intervention.  His book was well worth reading, but in spite of the title his hypothesis had ceased to be astonishing quite a while before. Surely also a little odd to have Colin McGinn named only as Ted Honderich’s adversary when his own Mysterian views are so much more widely cited. Still the piece makes a good point; lots of Davids and not a few Samsons have gone up against this particular Goliath, yet the giant is still on his feet.

Well, if several decades of great minds can’t do the job, why not throw a few dozen more at it? The Edge, in its annual question this year, asks its strike force of intellectuals to tackle the question: What do you think about machines that think? This evoked no fewer than 186 responses. Some of the respondents are old hands at the consciousness game, notably Dan Dennett; we must also tip our hat to our friend Arnold Trehub, who briefly denounces the idea that artefactual machines can think. It’s certainly true, in my own opinion, that we are nowhere near thinkng machines, and in fact it’s not clear that we are getting materially closer: what we have got is splendid machines that clearly don’t think at all but are increasingly good at doing tasks we previously believed needed thought. You could argue that eliminating the need for thought was Babbage’s project right from the beginning, and we know that Turing discarded the question ‘Can machines think?’ as not worthy of an answer.

186 answers is of course, at least 185 more than we really wanted, and those are not good odds of getting even a congenial analysis. In fact, the rapid succession of views, some well-informed, others perhaps shooting from the hip to a degree, is rather exhausting: the effect is like a dreadfully prolonged session of speed dating: like my theory? No? Well don’t worry, there are 180 more on the way immediately. It is sort of fun to surf the wave of punditry, but I’d be surprised to hear that many people were still with the programme when it got to view number 186 (which, despairingly or perhaps refreshingly, is a picture).

Honestly. though, why can’t we solve the problem of consciousness? Could it be that there is something fundamentally wrong? Colin McGinn, of course, argues that we can never understand consciousness because of cognitive closure; there’s no real mystery about it, but our mental toolset just doesn’t allow us to get to the answer.  McGinn makes a good case, but I think that human cognition is not formal enough to be affected by a closure of this kind; and if it were, I think we should most likely remain blissfully unaware of it: if we were unable to understand consciousness, we shouldn’t see any problem with it either.

Perhaps, though, the whole idea of consciousness as conceived in contemporary Western thought is just wrong? It does seem to be the case that non-European schools of philosophy construe the world in ways that mean a problem of consciousness never really arises. For that matter, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not really see the problem the way we do: although ancient philosophers discussed the soul and personal identity, they didn’t really worry about consciousness. Commonly people blame Western dualism for drawing too sharp a division between the world of the mind and the world of material objects: and the finger is usually pointed at Descartes in particular. Perhaps if we stopped thinking about a physical world and a non-physical mind the alleged problem would simply evaporate. If we thought of a world constituted by pure experience, not differentiated into two worlds, everything would seem perfectly natural?

Perhaps, but it’s not a trick I can pull off myself. I’m sure it’s true our thinking on this has changed over the years, and that the advent of computers, for example, meant that consciousness, and phenomenal consciousness in particular, became more salient than before. Consciousness provided the extra thing computers hadn’t got, answering our intuitive needs and itself being somewhat reshaped to fill the role.  William James, as we know, thought the idea was already on the way out in 1904: “A mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing ‘soul’ upon the air of philosophy”; but over a hundred years later it still stands as one of the great enigmas.

Still, maybe if we send in another 200 intellectuals…?