Meet the footballing bees, optimistic pigs and alien-like octopuses that are shaking up how we think about minds
ow do you spot an optimistic pig? This isn’t the setup for a punchline; the question is genuine, and in the answer lies much that is revealing about our attitudes to other minds – to minds, that is, that are not human. If the notion of an optimistic pig sounds vaguely comical, it is because we scarcely know how to think about other minds except in relation to our own.
We don’t, and probably never can, know what it feels like to be an optimistic pig. Objectively, there’s no reason to suppose that it feels like anything: that there is “something it is like” to be a pig, whether apparently happy or gloomy. Until rather recently, philosophers and scientists have been reluctant to grant a mind to any nonhuman entity. Feelings and emotions, hope and pain and a sense of self were deemed attributes that separated us from the rest of the living world.
It’s not yet clear what the “rules” are that govern a bird’s ability to deploy a tool. There’s a distinction, for example, between “ritualistic” and “mechanistic” thinking: “if I move the stick like this, bugs appear” versus “the stick pokes out the bugs”. Generally you need the latter view to adapt tools to new uses. You need a basic grasp of cause and effect.
Although animal communication can be subtle and complex, it’s generally thought that no animal besides a human uses symbolic communication, where one concept is represented by another, as it is in writing. None, that is, except perhaps the honeybee, which conveys information about a distant food source to its hive members.
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