Clever Corvids: a degree of abstract thought (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, March 05, 2016, 13:28 (2978 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Another take on the same study:-https://www.newscientist.com/article/2076025-ravens-fear-of-unseen-snoopers-hints-they-...-Comments:-"Theory of mind
"Nicola Clayton at the University of Cambridge, UK, says the study is beautifully designed, but so far no single study has shown unequivocally that any animal has theory of mind.
“'It's a case of converging evidence to bear on a problem,” she says. “But this study comes as close as any to showing so.”-"Martin Schmelz at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, says the study refutes a major argument against previous studies and shows exciting social cognitive abilities in ravens for the first time.
“'Ravens in this study are shown to attribute visual access to others, which is certainly one aspect of a theory of mind,” he says. “They don't have a human-like full-fledged theory of mind, but the authors are also not claiming this.'”-David's comment: Cognitive, yes. Inference, possible.-I'm delighted to inform you that I have just finished reading a 10,000-page volume entitled Animal Cognition by Professor Ivor Fatt-Grant from the University of the State of the Bleedinobvious. I wish I could repeat for you some of the thousands of examples he cites, resulting from his 25 years of research studying every known organism on the planet, but I'll just try to sum up his conclusions. Every single organism appears to be aware of its environment and generally to know if the environment is safe or threatening. Of course threats may come in many forms, but I will focus here only on those from other organisms. Professor Fatt-Grant observed that whenever an organism perceived any sort of threat from another organism, it took precautions to protect itself. He inferred from the combination of threat and precaution that the threatened organism was able to gauge the intentions of the threatening organism, and he points out that reading another organism's intentions entails reading the other organism's mind. The reading of intentions as a form of mind-reading is clearly an integral feature of what we call “theory of mind”. However, Professor Fatt-Grant was unable to find a single volume on the subject compiled by any of the non-human organisms or communities he studied, and as they did not speak any language he could understand, he concluded tentatively that only humans have a fully fledged theory (a witty pun used in the chapter on birds). From our point of view, though, the all-important conclusion of his study is that all organisms are cognitive and all organisms are able to draw inferences from their cognitive powers that influence their behaviour. He even goes so far as to claim that if organisms did not have these cognitive powers and the ability to act upon inferences drawn from their readings of and communication with the mental processes of other organisms (there are also long sections on the subjects of cooperation and symbiosis), they would not survive. I understand he is planning a sequel entitled: Why Do Humans Think That Only Humans Can Think?