About a month ago, one of my regular respondents asked me to blog about self-awareness in animals. I’m doing so now because it will be useful for an essay I’m planning to write about ethical and legal definitions of humanity.
Let’s start by defining a slightly more abstract category, what science-fiction fans call a ‘sophont’. A being or animal is fully sophont if it:
(That last one may seem odd to those of you not familiar with primate ethology, but bear with me…)
Normal human beings pass all these tests. Few animals are known to even come close to passing all of them — but the “are known” is necessary, because in some cases animals might pass all of the tests other than tool use without being able to communicate that to humans.
Some people feel quite strongly about animal rights. Their position does not, however, generally spring from an assertion that animals are sophonts; rather, it seems to come down to an unwillingness, or inability, to distinguish between sophont status and sentience — that is, being able to feel. In practice, while theoretically even insects can feel, even PETA members tend to ascribe sentience only to animals that can exchange recognizable emotional signals with us — which is to say, basically, mammals.
The mamalian repertoire of behaviors for communicating states like fear, affection, anger, boredom, and playfulness is remarkably conservative. So much so that humans can have meaningful emotional communication with cats, dogs, and raccoons, a datum that would be astonishing if we weren’t so used to it! Some mammals are so good at this that we routinely keep them around for pleasure.
Even dogs and cats exhibit little evidence of sophont behavior, though. They can learn tricks by reinforcement, but they don’t use tools, they show only very weak problem-solving intelligence and even less evidence that they have a theory of mind or self-awareness. One test animal behaviorists use for self-awareness is whether the animal will try to remove a smudge from its face when it sees itself in the
mirrors; cats and dogs generally fail this. Sentience is less than sophont status.
There are, however, interesting borderline cases among the animals. Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang-utans, dolphins, whales, seals, otters, elephants, a few species of birds, and even octopi and squid have all displayed not merely sentience but suspiciously sophont-like behaviors. Here are some data:
Significantly, the birds who seem to be using speech, and the apes who handle abstractions best, are animals that have lived with humans for a long time. Even cats and dogs, though not very bright compared to elephants or dolphins or chimps, accasionally show flashes of self-awareness (for example, by recognizing themselves in a mirror).
Given all this animal data, what’s left as a unqiquely human capability? Though interpretation of the experimental results is controversial, one thing even the cleverest nonhuman primates seem to have problems with are counterfactual hypotheticals.
Imagine a table with two red balls, three green balls, and an upright paper screen large enough to hide a sixth ball behind it. To human beings, the following two questions are both easy and nearly indistinguishable:
But these two questions are subtly different. The first is a what-if that is consistent with all visible facts: the second is a what-if that contradicts a visible fact (thus ‘counterfactual’).
The brightest non-human primates handle questions like the first one pretty well, but questions like the second one rather poorly. They don’t seem to have have the capacity to construct a full-blown hypothetical universe in their heads and reason about it despite what observable reality is telling them.
(This test has only been done with primates. You need to have a language in common with your subject(s) to do it; primates can use sign language or symbol tiles, but communication with other possible quasi-sophonts is far more limited so far.)
If this test is to be believed, what distinguishes humans from other higher primates is not reasoning ability but imagination!