The Fog Blog

In comments to my recent post on dolphins, I asked the question what exactly "intelligence" is.

Some theories of intelligence allow for different kinds of intelligence. According to Howard Gardner, for instance, intelligence is about having certain kinds of abilities. When we say someone is intelligent, we mean that s/he has some (or all) of these abilities. Gardner gives a taxonomy of intelligence comprising seven types: namely, (1) linguistic, (2) musical, (3) mathematical-logical, (4) spatial, (5) bodily-kinaesthetic, (6) interpersonal, and (7) intrapersonal. Each type is separate and persons may have some or all of them in various combinations.

In order, these "intelligences" involve (1) language and how we use it; (2) musical appreciation, and the performing or composing of music; (3) calculation and logical reasoning; (4) art and design, and the ability to orient oneself spatially or find one's way around; (5) physical skills such as those required in sport or dancing; (6) interacting with others socially and sensitively; (7) understanding oneself and one's abilities.

According to Gardner, most tests for intelligence -- IQ tests, and so forth -- measure only (1) the linguistic and (3) the mathematical-logical sorts.

It seems to me that there is something correct about this way of thinking about intelligence.

Being such as we are, of course, we philosophers naturally tend to emphasize (1) and (3). But on Gardner's account, an "intelligent" philosopher (or physicist, or linguist, etc.) could be miserably "stupid" in certain other ways, for example either intra- or interpersonally. Likewise, persons with high kinaesthetic "intelligence" -- who are, for example, exceptionally good at field games such as soccer, and who always seem to know where to be on the field, or who display an uncanny ability to read the flow of the game -- may perform poorly on IQ tests.

This raises a further issue.

If there are really such different kinds of intelligence within the category "human", then I should think it hardly surprising that there may be different sorts -- perhaps radically different sorts -- of intelligence across species. In his book on dolphins, Thomas White utilizes EQ (encephalization quotient) in order to try to give a comparative analysis of human and dolphin intelligence. EQ is based on the relation of a species' average body weight to brain weight. Roughly, we subtract the part of the brain required to operate the body, and what remains is supposed to indicate more or less purely cognitive ability. The supposition, then, is that EQ correlates with a species' capacity for cognitive or behavioural complexity, and thus it is a convenient way to make comparisons across species in terms of their intelligence.

According to the formula used by this measurement apparatus, humans come in at 7.0, dolphins at 4.1 to 4.9, chimpanzees at 2.3, and gorillas at 1.6.

[I'm not sure how these figures are calculated, or how exactly the EQ apparatus works; White cites the following paper, which may give details: Lori Marino, "Convergence of Complex Cognitive Abilities in Cetaceans and Primates", Brain, Behavior and Evolution 59 (2002): p. 26.]

In any case, according to White dolphins display especially high levels of (6), interpersonal intelligence. Indeed, he cites various research which supports the thesis that dolphins' brains have the capacity to process more limbic or emotional information than can human brains.

Controversially, White also argues that dolphins possess more of type (3) intelligence -- the ability to reason logically -- than we had previously thought. The many anecdotes and studies to which he refers suggest that dolphins have the ability to handle abstract notions well enough to be able to grasp the causal structure of their environment, and -- as a consequence of this -- they can solve puzzles in complex situations and can understand such problems well enough to be able to develop innovative behaviours and strategies as solutions.

And of course dolphins are also able to understand and use artificial languages (created and taught to them by us) in both meaningful and novel ways.

Questions:

Are there different sorts of intelligence?
Are there different sorts of intelligence across species?

Are dolphins (or other non-human animals) intelligent?
Are dolphins perhaps more intelligent (in at least some sense or senses) than us?

I've been thinking about dolphins again, and consequently about the status of non-human animals in relation to ourselves generally (and related issues). I recently commented on Mark Rowlands' blog post "Why I am not a Humanist, Part 1", and I sort of sidetracked things there by bringing up dolphins -- although I think I had due cause for doing so.

Mark's bottom line was that the idea that "humans are the most important thing there is -- at least in the known universe ... makes humanism far too much like a religion" for his liking. One response, by Bernie R., was that Mark's "implied belief that humans are not the most important things there are in the known universe is far too much like religion for my liking ... Do you not realise what you have got? Look around the known universe, and see what you would swap for being a human. There's nothing, is there?"

To this, I could not but respond as follows:

I don't consider it at all odd to say that I could swap being a human for, say, being a dolphin; especially if I could be assured (in advance) that there would be no humans in my world; or at least no fishermen (or is it fisherpersons?).

(Oh, and there would have to be plenty of fish and other dolphins too.)

Of course, I have no way of knowing what it's like to be a dolphin (although see In Defense of Dolphins by Thomas White for some illumination in this regard). But in whatever way it makes sense to even ask the question what in the known universe I would swap for being a human, I think it makes sense to reply, "A dolphin!"

In other words, I think it makes at least some sense.

In my case, at least, it seems I don't have to look very far, after all.

Bernie replied, in turn, that she ought to have anticipated such a response, and she asserted that the reason she was interested in this issue at all was that she hears people saying "how awful humans are, how awful our existence is, how we would be better off as animals and so on." (My first thought here, of course, was, "Aren't we animals?" But I held my tongue.) Bernie finished up by informing me that "I think it shows you really don't understand what you've got. What a pity." After subsequently apologizing for sounding "so harsh" (no offence taken, Bernie, don't worry!!), she added:

I do think it's lovely to imagine being like a dolphin, but you would be giving up so much if dolphin life is like I think it is. Constant swimming, emotions and urges and mechanisms to express them at a grunty/squeaky level, but very little imagination. I think you underestimate the size of the gap between us and them.

At this point, I expressed my concern that we were -- or at least I was -- virtually hijacking Mark's blog.

Still, I added that

First, I hope I haven't misrepresented myself. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that humans are awful, that our existence is awful, or that we would be better off as animals. Aside from the obvious fact that many humans can be awful creatures, I think humans are quite wonderful -- both in general and in the cases of specific individuals. I fear we have much progress to make, and I'd really like to see us make it; but still, we are wonderful. I certainly hope I appreciate what I -- and we -- have got (and I think I do).

Second (and I hope this doesn't conflict with my first point; I don't think it does), if dolphin life is supposed to be inferior to ours in virtue of its merely involving "Constant swimming, emotions and urges and mechanisms to express them at a grunty/squeaky level, but very little imagination", then I wonder if you have not overestimated the gap between us and them: if we omit "swimming" and insert something more appropriate to our means of locomotion, I think we have a fair description of much of what passes for human life.

Third, I actually happen to think that there is a big gap between us and the dolphins, though they are -- even on our scales of measuring such things -- close to being our peers in intelligence. But I don't think intelligence is a property that manifests itself in the same way no matter what the species or environment. In other words, I wonder if there might be as much to be gained as lost by our *swapping* being a human for a dolphin. I think dolphins, since they are my example, represent a quite alien intelligence, with alien values, and so forth. I think they live incredibly complex and highly fulfilling lives. I wonder how much of value they would have to give up in *swapping* being a dolphin for a human?

Bernie subsequently replied that "Dolphins are not 'close to being our peers' in intelligence", and added that

Language-assisted thinking puts us in a different league to dolphins. It allows us to understand and use time and space and energy and matter in infinite ways that transcend anything any other animal could do. We can change the world, for ourselves and all the other creatures, we can insulate ourselves from natural forces, we are conquering disease, soon we may create life. ... Some wild dolphins have learned to protect their noses with sponges they pick up off the seabed, and that is about the limit of their natural creative ingenuity, their ability to assess a situation and change it purposefully.

She ended by assuring me that compared to a dolphin, I was "like a god".

In my final response, I wondered whether language is really as important to intelligence as we philosophers tend to think it is:

If intelligence is about the brain's ability to process information in ways that solve problems, thereby enhancing the survival of individual members of a species as well as the species itself. Then dolphins may be more intelligent than us.

At this point, I quoted from Thomas White's (quite wonderful) book on dolphins (p. 154):

Dolphins have not produced what humans have. But their intelligence appears to have let them discover how to live within the limits of their environment and how to deal with each other. The way dolphins live maximizes the odds that not only the individual dolphins but entire species will have long and successful lives in the water. Since the same cannot yet be said of humans, asking which species is "more intelligent" may not be such a silly question after all.

I ended by paraphrasing some of White's conclusions. According to him, dolphins use their impressive cognitive and affective abilities to deal with problems, they have highly organized societies, acoustic and non-acoustic ways of communicating with one another, and devote most of their time to developing and maintaining strong relationships with one another. Indeed, given the centrality of emotion in their lives, it seems likely that they regularly process more emotional information than we humans do. Moreover, I noted that on comparative measures of EQ (encephalization quotient, which correlates with the degree of behavioural complexity and cognitive capacity of a species' brain), humans come in at 7.0 and dolphins come in at 4.95, with our closest related primate lagging somewhat behind at 2.3. Thus, I pointed out that what I had meant to say by maintaining that Dolphins are "close to being our peers in intelligence" was that dolphins are our closest peers in the known universe in intelligence (and not really that far from us, all things considered); and that's before we factor in how different "intelligence" may actually be across species.

In sum, I noted that I have complex abilities that a dolphin doesn't; but equally vice versa (and for a dramatic instance of the latter, see the video clip at the end of this post).

For anyone who hasn't read White's book, I strongly recommend doing so. White makes an extremely strong case for our considering dolphins to be persons, and utilizes the suggestive idea that dolphin intelligence is alien intelligence (an idea he borrows from Diana Reiss). In particular, this device makes it possible for White to avoid the obvious temptation to anthropomorphize dolphins. By examining dolphins' evolutionary adaptations to living in the water, the structure of their brain -- especially in relation to ours, noting both important similarities and differences -- White concludes that

• The dolphin brain is the second most complicated and powerful brain on the planet (to our own).

• The dolphin has a "paralimbic" lobe which the human brain lacks; this may result in more integrated information processing, allowing more limbic or emotional information to be processed by the dolphin brain than by the human brain.

• While the human brain emphasizes detail, the dolphin's may emphasize speed.
• The dolphin brain may compensate with its size for what it lacks structurally; White notes that the dolphin brain has been evolving for 15 million years, and hence has had "more opportunity to develop the nuances of its potential than the human brain has."

White also shows that Dolphins are capable of advanced cognitive tasks, including self-recognition, language comprehension, and social behaviour. His conclusion is that dolphin and human brains have managed to get to roughly (in the larger scheme of things) the same order of cognitive capacity, but via very different evolutionary routes. This, he takes it, reinforces the idea that dolphins are a sort of "alien" intelligence for us.

He also argues dolphins are not only able to recognize themselves in mirror tests, and so forth, but are also able to understand pointing behaviour; hence, he concludes (you'll have to read the original for details) that dolphins understand the intention behind pointing, and so are able to recognize the existence of other minds. The upshot is that dolphins are

• aware of themselves and others
• experience at least basic emotions
• engage in a degree of abstract, conceptual thought, and
• choose their actions

Dolphins are cognitively flexible, self-motivated to learn, able to problem-solve, and can understand language.

In this last regard, White's conclusion is that Dolphins can understand and work with the basic elements of an artificial language, including:

• a wide vocabulary, which includes symbols to represent actions, objects, and the presence and absence of objects
• a vocabulary which incorporates the concept of generalization
• grammatical rules and categories by means of which to assemble symbols into meaningful sentences
• complex sentences including modifiers and both direct and indirect objects
• questions and commands

Because dolphins have no language of their own, White notes that their so successfully learning and using our specially constructed "dolphin languages" has an important implication: dolphins are able to highly successfully operate in a completely foreign cognitive environment. In order to illustrate what it would be mean for us to operate in a similarly foreign cognitive environment, White presents us with the following analogy (p. 111):

[I]magine that you're an explorer looking for a lost civilization. You come upon a huge door at the base of a mountain. Behind you is a swift, white-water stream. What you haven't realized is that the stream is actually an artifact -- made by the civilization for which you're searching. And the instructions for opening the door are contained in the recurring patterns and shapes that the water takes as it flows past you. The eddies, swirls and splashes are actually symbols that appear in the shape and order that they do because of the unique design of the stream. You must learn to break the code contained in the motion of the water if you're going to open the door. However, in order to do so, you must think very differently about what you're seeing when you look at the stream. You must demonstrate enormous cognitive flexibility.

There is much of great wonder and importance in White's book, and I really think that everyone should read it. (It's available here.) However, one aspect of dolphin life and behaviour upon which White only briefly touches is their exquisite playfulness and creativity; for a striking example of such behaviour -- and of what I dearly want to call "dolphin art" -- I offer this (switch on the sound!):

What, exactly, is an "existential risk"?

In a paper titled "Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards", published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Vol. 9, March 2002, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom writes the following:

Because of accelerating technological progress, humankind may be rapidly approaching a critical phase in its career. In addition to well-known threats such as nuclear holocaust, the prospects of radically transforming technologies like nanotech systems and machine intelligence present us with unprecedented opportunities and risks. Our future, and whether we will have a future at all, may well be determined by how we deal with these challenges. In the case of radically transforming technologies, a better understanding of the transition dynamics from a human to a 'posthuman' society is needed. Of particular importance is to know where the pitfalls are: the ways in which things could go terminally wrong. While we have had long exposure to various personal, local, and endurable global hazards, this paper analyzes a recently emerging category: that of existential risks. These are threats that could cause our extinction or destroy the potential of Earth-originating intelligent life. Some of these threats are relatively well known while others, including some of the gravest, have gone almost unrecognized. Existential risks have a cluster of features that make ordinary risk management ineffective. A final section of this paper discusses several ethical and policy implications. A clearer understanding of the threat picture will enable us to formulate better strategies.

Bostrom's entire paper is available here. It's disquieting reading. Bostrom begins his paper as follows:

It's dangerous to be alive and risks are everywhere. Luckily, not all risks are equally serious. For present purposes we can use three dimensions to describe the magnitude of a risk: scope, intensity, and probability. By 'scope' I mean the size of the group of people that are at risk. By 'intensity' I mean how badly each individual in the group would be affected. And by 'probability' I mean the best current subjective estimate of the probability of the adverse outcome.

We can distinguish six qualitatively distinct types of risks based on their scope and intensity... The third dimension, probability, can be superimposed on the two dimensions plotted in the figure. Other things equal, a risk is more serious if it has a substantial probability and if our actions can make that probability significantly greater or smaller.

'Personal', 'local', or 'global' refer to the size of the population that is directly affected; a global risk is one that affects the whole of humankind (and our successors). 'Endurable' vs. 'terminal' indicates how intensely the target population would be affected. An endurable risk may cause great destruction, but one can either recover from the damage or find ways of coping with the fallout. In contrast, a terminal risk is one where the targets are either annihilated or irreversibly crippled in ways that radically reduce their potential to live the sort of life they aspire to. In the case of personal risks, for instance, a terminal outcome could for example be death, permanent severe brain injury, or a lifetime prison sentence. An example of a local terminal risk would be genocide leading to the annihilation of a people (this happened to several Indian nations). Permanent enslavement is another example.

In this paper we shall discuss risks of the sixth category... This is the category of global, terminal risks. I shall call these existential risks.

Existential risks are distinct from global endurable risks. Examples of the latter kind include: threats to the biodiversity of Earth’s ecosphere, moderate global warming, global economic recessions (even major ones), and possibly stifling cultural or religious eras such as the 'dark ages', even if they encompass the whole global community, provided they are transitory... To say that a particular global risk is endurable is evidently not to say that it is acceptable or not very serious. A world war fought with conventional weapons or a Nazi-style Reich lasting for a decade would be extremely horrible events even though they would fall under the rubric of endurable global risks since humanity could eventually recover. (On the other hand, they could be a local terminal risk for many individuals and for persecuted ethnic groups.)

I shall use the following definition of existential risks:

Existential risk – One where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.

An existential risk is one where humankind as a whole is imperiled. Existential disasters have major adverse consequences for the course of human civilization for all time to come.

Immediately following this, Bostrom asserts that,

Risks in this sixth category are a recent phenomenon. This is part of the reason why it is useful to distinguish them from other risks... The first manmade existential risk was the inaugural detonation of an atomic bomb.

I can't recommend strongly enough that everyone read this paper—simply in order to know just where we stand, and how precarious is our situation.

More Free Willish Goodness from Science -

The Libet studies, which have caused such a stir, apparently demonstrated that conscious choice lags behind by neural activity by around one third of a second. One of my favorite responses to these studies  - Dennett's - argues that the notion we can perform simultaneity judgments as to neural events and volitions depends upon the idea of the Cartesian Theatre, a place in the brain where everything comes together. But while that response looks plausible for a lag of one third of a second, it doesn't look quite so plausible when the gap is an enormous 7 seconds. That's the claim of a new study just published in Nature Neuroscience.

In the study, subjects engaged in a free choice task, choosing between pressing a button with their left or their right hands. The researchers found that they could predict with 60% accuracy which hand they would choose, a full 7 (and up to 10) seconds before the subject reported that the decision was made, by analysing activity in the PFC. The popular presentations of this study have not failed to draw the conclusion that this study threatens free will. 

One comment: I don't see why we shouldn't interpret the PFC activity as representing a disposition and not a choice (though PFC is involved in high level planning).

[Garden of Forking Paths]

I'm currently doing some work on Galen Strawson's Basic Argument, so I was intrigued to see this. (Now, back to work.)

Helpful advice here, at Philosophy, et cetera, on how to start your own philosophy blog. The only category of entry I'd like to add to those Richard outlines is the "magpie" category: i.e., interesting links (philosophical or otherwise) that you've picked up — from elsewhere in the blogosphere, or wherever.

Interesting new trolley thought experiments here.

Is stupidity a matter of character? If so, in what sense are persons morally responsible (or not) for being stupid?

Joshua Knobe is on BloggingHeads TV again! See here; this time he's talking about morality and religion. (The first section, on whether morality is hardwired into us, was the subject of Joshua's talk here at UBC earlier this term.)

Interesting thoughts here on the subjective experience of punishment.