Posts Tagged ‘cognition’
“If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.”
As Lars Chittka explains, insects have surprisingly rich inner lives—a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications…
In the early 1990s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Free University of Berlin modeling the evolution of bee color perception, I asked a botany professor for some advice about flower pigments. I wanted to know the degrees of freedom that flowers have in producing colors to signal to bees. He replied, rather furiously, that he was not going to engage in a discussion with me, because I worked in a neurobiological laboratory where invasive procedures on live honeybees were performed. The professor was convinced that insects had the capacity to feel pain. I remember walking out of the botanist’s office shaking my head, thinking the man had lost his mind.
Back then, my views were in line with the mainstream. Pain is a conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that consciousness is unique to humans. But these days, after decades of researching the perception and intelligence of bees, I am wondering if the Berlin botany professor might have been right.
Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.
These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild…
Insects are key enablers of much life on earth. They appear to exhibit intelligence, and maybe more: “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?” in @sciam.
Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord.
– Thomas Eisner
Pair with this helpfully skeptical (but respectful) review of Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee.
* Jonas Salk
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As we ponder our place, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that physician Sir Ronald Ross made a key breakthrough when he discovered malaria parasites while dissecting a mosquito. This day is now known as World Mosquito Day, in celebration of his critical discovery.

“Sheer dumb sentience”*…
As the power of AI grows, we find ourselves searching for a way to tell it might– or has– become sentient. Kristen Andrews and Jonathan Birch suggest that we should look to the minds of animals…
… Last year, [Google engineer Blake] Lemoine leaked the transcript [of an exchange he’d had with LaMDA, a Google AI system] because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection.
Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not – sentient?
The question is vast and daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. But it may be comforting to learn that a group of scientists has been wrestling with a very similar question for a long time. They are ‘comparative psychologists’: scientists of animal minds.
We have lots of evidence that many other animals are sentient beings. It’s not that we have a single, decisive test that conclusively settles the issue, but rather that animals display many different markers of sentience. Markers are behavioural and physiological properties we can observe in scientific settings, and often in our everyday life as well. Their presence in animals can justify our seeing them as having sentient minds. Just as we often diagnose a disease by looking for lots of symptoms, all of which raise the probability of having that disease, so we can look for sentience by investigating many different markers…
On learning from our experience of animals to assess AI sentience: “What has feelings?” from @KristinAndrewz and @birchlse in @aeonmag.
Apposite: “The Future of Human Agency” (a Pew round-up of expert opinion on the future impact of AI)
Provocative in a resonant way: “The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
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As we talk to the animals, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to J. P. Guilford; he was born on this date in 1897. A psychologist, he’s best remembered as a developer and practitioner of psychometrics, the quantitative measurement of subjective psychological phenomena (such sensation, personality, attention).
Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory rejected the view that intelligence could be characterized in a single numerical parameter. He proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description: operations, content, and products.
Guilford also developed the concepts of “convergent” and “divergent” thinking, as part of work he did emphasizing the importance of creativity in industry, science, arts, and education, and in urging more research into it nature.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Guilford as the 27th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings”*…
Can artificial intelligence have those feelings? Scientist and poet Keith Holyoak explores:
… Artificial intelligence (AI) is in the process of changing the world and its societies in ways no one can fully predict. On the hazier side of the present horizon, there may come a tipping point at which AI surpasses the general intelligence of humans. (In various specific domains, notably mathematical calculation, the intersection point was passed decades ago.) Many people anticipate this technological moment, dubbed the Singularity, as a kind of Second Coming — though whether of a savior or of Yeats’s rough beast is less clear. Perhaps by constructing an artificial human, computer scientists will finally realize Mary Shelley’s vision.
Of all the actual and potential consequences of AI, surely the least significant is that AI programs are beginning to write poetry. But that effort happens to be the AI application most relevant to our theme. And in a certain sense, poetry may serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine — an early indicator of the extent to which AI promises (threatens?) to challenge humans as artistic creators. If AI can be a poet, what other previously human-only roles will it slip into?…
A provocative consideration: “Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?” @mitpress.
Apposite: a fascinating Twitter thread on “why GPT3 algorithm proficiency at producing fluent, correct-seeming prose is an exciting opportunity for improving how we teach writing, how students learn to write, and how this can also benefit profs who assign writing, but don’t necessarily teach it.”
* W. H. Auden
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As we ruminate on rhymes, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Michael Gazzaniga; he was born on this date in 1939. A leading researcher in cognitive neuroscience (the study of the neural basis of mind), his work has focused on how the brain enables humans to perform those advanced mental functions that are generally associated with what we call “the mind.” Gazzaniga has made significant contributions to the emerging understanding of how the brain facilitates such higher cognitive functions as remembering, speaking, interpreting, and making judgments.
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