Robert Streiffer: Welcome to the third talk in the animal
research ethics forum series. This is going to be the last
talk of the semester. For next year, we have already
tentatively lined up Frans de Waal, who is a
professor of psychology at Emory University, where he works
at the Yerkes Primate Center. He studies cultural learning,
communication, cooperation, empathy and altruism among
non-human primates. So one of the people that we've
got lined up for next year. The planning committee hopes to
continue arranging speakers who present a range of diverse views
on topics related to the ethics of animal research.
We also hope to continue arranging a mix of local
speakers as well as outside speakers and we also want to
ensure that there's going to be plenty of opportunity for
discussion at each forum. And information about the talks
next year will be made available after the arrangements have been
finalized. And since this is the last talk
of the semester, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank
the planning committee one more time for the many hours that
they have put into making this forum happen.
And also to UW-Madison for providing funding and logistical
support. Tonight, it's my pleasure to
introduce Professor Gary Varner from Texas A&M.
He received his PhD from here, so you know that it will be
a good talk. His first book entitled
"In Nature's Interests Animal Rights and
Environmental Ethics" was published in 1998 by Oxford
University Press. It provides an original analysis
of what it means to have morally significant interests and
examines the relationship between views about animal
rights and views about sound environmental policy.
He's published papers on many topics related to animal ethics
issues, including papers on hunting, animal agriculture,
animal cloning, elephant management and also pet
ownership. Tonight we're going to hear some
thoughts that he's been developing in a two volume work
that is currently under contract from Oxford University Press
scheduled to appear later this year.
The first of these two volumes discusses the concepts
of personhood, the kinds of cognitive capacities relevant
to personhood and the extent to which animals exhibit those
capacities. And I take it that that's part
of what we'll be hearing about tonight.
One reviewer who has a name with which some of you may be
familiar, Peter Singer, described the first volume as
containing, "the most serious discussion I have yet seen
of whether any non-human animals can be considered persons."
The second volume then uses the theory developed in the
first to shed light on a variety of animal ethics issues,
including animal agricultural, pet ownership, and service
animals, scientific research involving animals and the place
of animals in environmental ethics.
So please join me in welcoming our speaker, Gary Varner.
[APPLAUSE]
Gary Varner: Thanks, Rob. I always like to lower
expectations at the beginning and quoting Singer, given the
topic of this talk didn't quite do that, so I hope you're not
terribly disappointed. It feels like I should have made
a list of people to thank and I didn't ahead of time, so I'm
going to blunder this in one way, shape, or form.
The planning committee, I really have enjoyed being able to come
back to Madison after graduating from here, doing my PhD here
in what I described earlier to Rob over dinner as the late
Pleistocene, and it kind of feels like the late Pleistocene
out there to me, because a couple of days before I left
home, I went to Minneapolis before coming down here, so I've
been in the area for pushing a week.
But a couple days before I came up here, it was 89 degrees for a
high back home. I also want to thank the
Alliance for Animals for hosting a pleasant reception for me last
night. I really enjoyed that.
Thank you for the great food. I had eaten dinner basically
before I went over there and I ended up eating a lot more.
But I'm glad I did. So in this talk, basically I'm
going to do four things. First off, I'm going to start
off by talking about the concept of personhood and how
personhood has a legal and/or specifically, in the case of my
subject matter, ethical theory term, has a rather different
meaning. A significantly different
meaning than it has in sort of day-to-day discourse.
Secondly, I'm going to share with you and try to give at
least an initial defense of my own favored conception of
personhood and this related concept that I've labeled
near personhood. Then I'm going to talk about
animal cognition and what light scientific research is beginning
to shed on the questions of whether or not certain non-human
animals might be persons or at least near persons in my
terminology. Then I'll finish by scandalously
briefly discussing the problems of marginal cases which is when
you endorse a conception of personhood of the kind that I'm
going to argue for tonight, it's going to turn out that some
human beings are not persons and that presents a problem for any
ethical theorist who wants to defend such a concept
of personhood. Let me first emphasize a caveat
that I'll come back to later on. That is, I'm going to talk
tonight in terms of what sounds like a really clear cut
tricotomy among persons, near persons and what I will call the
merely sentient, but as I'll explain later on, or I'll
emphasize again later on, I don't think things are that
clear cut. It turns out that that's an over
simplification, because the cognitive capacities I'm going
to discuss tonight come in degrees and also that category
of merely sentient individuals that I'll talk about tonight,
may turn out for reasons that I'll describe later to be a
complete hypothetical construct and no real individuals fit it
for reasons I'll describe later on.
Nevertheless in order to get on the table in a very short format
here my reasons for thinking that there's a significant
distinctions to make here and that various cognitive
capacities do have moral significance of various kinds,
it's necessary to sort of be quick and dirty and talk about
these three categories as if they were nicely honed and
mutually exclusively, which I in the end don't think they are.
There is much more of a continuum going on there
in terms of the cognitive capacities.
To begin, in day-to-day speech often the word person is used
just synonymously with a member of our species, but in
day-to-day speech or common sense thinking, I think there
are a couple of other senses that get used and they get used
in legal contexts, in various political and ethical contexts
and so on. What I want to do here at the
beginning is lay out four, as I put it, families of definitions.
In addition to this initial one of saying a person just means a
member of our species, sometimes when people talk about
individuals being or not being persons, they mean something
more like having certain cognitive capacities.
And so in science fiction, when star trek treats as persons
various space aliens, they're saying in effect, well, they've
got cognitive capacities that are similar to adult humans,
but they're not saying they're members of our species.
Notice the second family of definitions of person in terms
of having cognitive capacities would be a descriptive sense
of person, it would be describing individuals
as having or not having certain cognitive capacities.
That's a nice way of introducing the third family of definitions,
which instead of describing an individual as having or lacking
certain capacities, is instead saying when I call someone a
person, I'm saying they deserve a certain kind of treatment or
don't deserve other kinds of treatment or deserve a certain
kind of moral or legal respect. And capacities that get
mentioned here are things like rationality, self awareness, I'm
not following my own slides. Sorry about that.
I'll try to be careful about that.
Capacities that often get mentioned in the second family
of definitions are things like rationality, self awareness,
autonomy and moral agency. And capacities that I'm going to
focus on tonight are episodic memory and conscious planning
for the future on the one hand and having a biographical
sense of self. I got behind myself on my
slides and the third family of definitions then is this more
normative or moral category of definition that says when we
call something a person, we're calling attention to the fact
that we think the individual deserves a certain kind of
respect or treatment. Now, when it comes to ethical
theory, I think, and people don't normally recognize this
fourth category of definitions. I think this might be original
with me. I hope I've done something
original in my life, maybe this is it, and that's all there is.
The fourth category I think the most useful way to define
personhood in an ethical context is to tie those descriptive and
normative versions of 3 and 2 together in this way, and say
when I claim a person, that something's a person,
I'm saying it deserves a special kind of respect or treatment.
That would be a category 3 definition, because it has
certain cognitive capacities. And the virtue of this fourth
category of definitions is that it calls attention to the kind
of argument that somebody who defends the conception of
personhood in an ethical context really owes you.
Which is to say, I think that these cognitive capacities are
significant and call for a certain kind of respect or
treatment for the following reasons.
Here comes my argument about why those cognitive capacities
matter. And what I'm going to do
tonight, then, is emphasize the conception of personhood in
that fourth category of definitions that I defend
in the forthcoming book that Rob referred to.
And I defend personhood in terms of having a biographical
sense of self for the reasons I'm about to give.
Remember, the category of definitions says here's
obviously the inference in need of justification.
So what I'm going to do is describe the reasons I think
that having a biographical sense of self makes your life, I like
to say more morally charged. It allows you to be harmed
and/or benefited in ways that individuals who lack this
cognitive capacity lack. I'll say more about what I mean
by a biographical sense of self in just a minute, but to start
down the aisle of explaining why I think that cognitive capacity
is significant, I think we can all agree that the ability to
consciously remember the past and consciously anticipate
the future can add value to an individual's life.
And I'm going to describe the ability to consciously remember
a past event or what your experiences were when you
underwent the event, episodic memory, because psychologists
today increasingly use the term episodic memory to refer to the
ability to replay in your head, in your consciousness,
your experiences from previous episodes or events.
And when I talk about planning for the future, I mean
consciously planning for the future.
There are various kinds of planning for the future that I
think can occur without you being conscious of the goal and
how you're aiming to achieve it, like a squirrel storing up
acorns for the winter. A lot of people would be willing
to say I think there is sort of a sense in which
there's planning there, but I don't think the squirrel is
aware of why it's storing up the acorns and thinking I'm going to
have food to eat in the winter. When I talk about consciously
planning for the future, I mean planning for the future that is
specifically conscious. Meaning, thinking explicitly and
consciously about what I want to achieve in the future, how I'm
going to arrange things between now and then to achieve it.
In fact, episodic memory and planning for the future,
in that sense, don't add up to biographical consciousness
yet but I'm working in that direction because I think it's
easy to explain why we might think that those abilities add
value to your life. I mean here both positive and
negative value. I have an example in my book
manuscript that I was-- It was suggested to me that
I probably shouldn't use it because it's racy and off color.
So you can let your imaginations run here.
Let me just instead describe, imagine that you do something
that really feels good at the time and has the effect that
afterwards, like for the afternoon or something or for an
hour afterwards, you have this glow of just well-being and
being relaxed and it just, you know, a nice pleasant glow
about you. Now compare the following.
Imagine enjoying that pleasant relaxed glow in the moments
afterwards, and compare it to enjoying that pleasant relaxed
glow while also replaying in your head consciously
great experiences of whatever you did to get into this state.
Okay, here's a clean example. How about like really intense
prolonged exercise. I've taken up cycling a few
years ago and I get this great feeling afterwards.
I had this great experience that I heroically bridged from the
first chase group to the lead, to the breakaway, you know, then
I both got that nice after glow and I'm remembering how great it
felt at the time. Well it seems to me pretty
straight forward that it sounds like you've got more positive
experience if you can replay the event in your head on top of
enjoying whatever present enjoyment or relaxation or glow
or whatever you're having. So that's what I mean when I say
that the ability to consciously remember the past or episodic
memory can add value to your life.
Obviously it can go the other way.
If I had bad experiences in the past and I'm for some reason
obsessed with replaying it in my head, my life can go worse.
All I'm saying, I'd like to describe these capacities as
giving your life greater moral significance or making your life
more morally charged. I don't say that it makes your
life better or more valuable, because these things
cut two ways. It could go for better or worse.
But when I say that these capacities give your life a sort
of special moral significance, what I mean is it makes it more
complex how we can positively and negatively affect your life.
And I think that gives us good reason morally speaking to think
more carefully about and be willing to put sort of
more safeguards on how we deal with them.
That's what I mean by gives greater moral significance.
And I think we can agree that planning for the future works
the same way. You know, if I'm capable of
forming desires for things that I'm going to accomplish in the
future, then not only do I benefit from whatever the
planning made better for me at the time in the future, like the
squirrel saving up acorns for the winter.
It's going to be better off in the future because
it has more to eat. It'll feel better.
But if it can also experience a sense of satisfaction, you know,
well, I accomplished that with my life, that adds a layer of
value on top of however better off it is made by this, if it is
purely instinctively laying up of acorns for the future.
In normal human lives, at least when we're in good circumstances
have an incredible amount of this layering effect where we
have all kinds of long-term projects and plans and so on
that we get satisfactions from that are sort of layered on top
of whatever our current state in the future is.
So that in a nutshell is why I think these abilities to
consciously remember the past and consciously anticipate the
future can add value to your life, but both positively and
negatively. So it's a two-edged sword.
So compared to a merely sentient individual, and I'm defining a
merely sentient individual that is one that is literally stuck
in the present. This is the concept that I said
a little bit while ago I suspect may be a hypothetical construct,
in other words, there is no real organism that corresponds to
that. It seems to me if an organism is
capable of suffering at all, the basic suffering that we know
about from organisms on earth is suffering physical pain.
But in clinical context, pain researchers define pain as
having this aversive kind of desire driven element.
To say that you're in pain that other things being equal,
you want or desire it to end. It strikes me that any
individual that is sentient in the sense of being able to
suffer even physical pain probably has some sense of
at least the immediate future. That's why I say that a merely
sentient organism may be a hypothetical construct.
But talking in terms of a merely sentient individual being
literally stuck in the present is a useful way of trying to
convey why I think these abilities in a robust way to
remember the past and anticipate the future add value in this
layered way that I've been trying to describe.
So compared to a merely sentient individual, an individual with
an episodic memory has additional experiences that can
add positive or negative value to its life, and an individual
that plans for the future consciously can form desires
that it can get positive value from satisfying or frustration
from not being able to satisfy. But of course these things cut
both ways.
So let's see. The second reason that I have
for adopting as my definition of personhood an individual that
has a biographical sense of self is that when it comes to
biographical consciousness and I'm going to say more what
I mean by that in a minute. It seems to me that having a
biographical sense of self or biographical consciousness
does a layering trick. In other words, it allows
individuals who have this cognitive capacity to sort of
like pack more positive experiences into their life or,
because it also cuts both ways, suffer in ways that individuals
who lack this cognitive capacity can't suffer, because they don't
have it. So what do I mean by
biographical consciousness? What I mean is thinking of your
life as a story, which is complicated to the extent that
a story has a beginning, middle and end and so it's not a series
of events that you recall, but there is a narrative order to
them. I would describe it this way.
That having a biographical sense of your life means understanding
how earlier events and experiences shape later ones,
so to speak. Metaphorically speaking, but
only barely metaphorically. Earlier chapters set the stage
for things that are possible and likely to happen
in later chapters. Understanding who you are now is
determined by your past actions and your past experiences and
similarly what you are doing now is setting the stage for who and
what you are going to be and what you are going to be able to
do and experience in the future. That is a pretty complicated
cognitive capacity and I'll say something about whether or not
I think any non-human animals could have it in a moment.
But it's a cognitive capacity. I think it's plausible to say
allows you to layer in additional positive and negative
value to your life. So that's what I mean about when
I claim that the lives of persons with this biographical
sense of self, their lives are more morally significant.
By that again, I don't mean that they necessarily go better for
them or that they're even preferable but their lives are
morally charged in ways that individuals who lack those
cognitive capacities aren't. You can harm them and benefit
them in diverse ways that you couldn't harm or benefit an
individual who lacked these cognitive capacities.
Now, if those arguments that I've been very quick and dirty
with laying these out. If you want the longer version,
buy the book and read it. Yeah, but anyway that in a quick
and dirty way gives my basic reasons for thinking that having
biographical consciousness and having episodic memory and
conscious planning for the future add moral significance to
lives. If I'm right about that, then
pretty quickly a sort of, at least, rough hierarchy emerges.
These quote merely sentient individuals who are literally
struck in the present would be at the bottom and above them in
this hierarchy would be what I would like to call near persons,
because they have episodic memory and planning for the
future, although they don't have full-blown biographical
consciousness. But having episodic memory and
planning for the future allows us to both benefit and harm them
in ways that individuals who are merely sentient and lack those
capacities can't be harmed or benefited.
So we should again, our moral relationships with them are
complicated by those cognitive capacities.
Same thing with regard to persons vis a vis near persons.
When you have this added layer of complexity of interest that
biographical sense of self gives you, I think that's a
legitimate reason for thinking we can harm you and benefit you
in complex ways that we can't harm and benefit individuals
who lack that capacity.
Okay. So I've given you my reasons
for endorsing a certain conception of personhood.
I'm saying persons on my view are individuals who have a
biographical sense of self and because of that cognitive
capacity deserve a special kind of moral significance in our
dealings with them. Now in this talk tonight, I'm
not going to talk about the details of what I think that
increased moral significance, how it would pay off in terms of
laws, codes of professional ethics or common sense thinking
about the morality our interaction with them.
I do talk about that in the first book that is coming out
later this year, and then there's the second book
that Rob referred to, that I'm afraid isn't going
to come out this year. It'll be later.
But tonight I'm going to focus for the remainder here on
talking about non-human animals and what research suggests in my
judgment about whether they might be persons or at least
near persons. And so if I ask, are any
non-human animals persons in the sense of having a biographical
sense of self? I think the prospects
are frankly kind of dim because although you can find examples
of primate researchers who report animals, especially in
language studies, like this is Sue Savage-Rumbaugh with her
star pupil Bonobos Kanzi, communicating using a lexogram
board, researchers who do this kind of language acquisition
work with non-humans, well, with the great apes, especially,
I won't say commonly, but do report that the animals
report to them whatever using communication system
they're using past events that it looks like they remember
episodes from the past and they talk about them using the
language board. They do talk about future
events. I mean, the immediate future,
Kanzi, there are videotapes you can watch of him moving around
with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh at their old facility in Georgia
and Kanzi telling Sue where she wants to go in the next few
minutes in the compound. They do report things like them
talking about as far as maybe like a day ahead of time or
something like that. However, I don't think we have
any good evidence of personhood as I prefer to define it
in any non-human animals, because even the most
sophisticated examples that these researchers report, and I
have in mind here Francine Paterson's claim on her website
that a gorilla told her a story in sign language about his
mother who was killed by poachers when he was a baby
in Africa, and he retold the story several times
when asked about his mother. I'll see if I can get this video
to work quickly here. Here is a video that they have
on their website in which Michael tells the story.
And there's no sound, so you just have to watch
the subtitles.
Now, that's it. Okay, that's the video
they have on the website. And I don't think that, for my
money, that's not good evidence of a biographical perspective
on its life being taken by a gorilla.
Here's the text that I put up here, the complete text in case
the video didn't work. And in support of that
skepticism that I have about this being a biographical story.
What's his first name--? There it is, Eugene Linden
who co-authored the book, The Education of Coco
I think it was the title with Francine Paterson.
He lobbied her out of reporting this as a story that the gorilla
was even telling, even though he's sympathetic to her cause
and he's a fluent signer in ASL, which the animal was using.
He said, look, I just don't think--
You're really interpreting a lot into the signs that
the animal was making. And he's a sympathetic, a person
sympathetic to Francine Patterson's research, but even
if we bought literally what Patterson interprets the gorilla
to be trying to communicate, I'm not sure that constitutes
a story in the way that a biography does.
It seems to be relating a series of events.
Whereas I stressed earlier, to have a full-blown biographical
sense of self means you understand how metaphorically
chapters, you know, current chapters set the stage for later
chapters, just as previous ones did for the present.
You understand your life is unfolding according to a logic
of narrative as it were. There's not really any evidence
of that, even in Paterson's interpretation of Michael's
"story," there. So I want to put in quotes,
as it were. So I conclude that given my
concept of personhood, which I defend for the kinds of reasons
that I gave earlier, I think that at present we have no good
evidence of any non-human animals taking a biographical
perspective on their lives. Now, of course, that doesn't
prove they ain't doing it, right?
Because it could be that they have the ability to take such a
perspective, but because of our inability to communicate
with them in relevant ways, we're not able to get the story
from them, as it were. Now, that could change in the
future. Some animals are known to
produce very complex vocalizations.
For instance, one study of dolphins that I've read does
some complicated stuff with information theory to conclude
that the repertoire of vocalizations that dolphins have
is on a par with a repertoire of vocalizations that young
children have, young human children.
Similarly, you might point to elephants, for instance, and
there is a broad range of lots of infrasonic, below the level
human hearing, that elephants are known to use in coordinating
movements and so on, in the wild and it could be that there are
representational systems embodied in those vocalizations
that count as functionally analogous communications
systems sufficiently complex to convey a biographical sense and
represent to the animal themselves a biographical sense
of their lives, but at present we don't have, I don't believe,
any good evidence that that's so.
Evidence is accumulating, however, I think that a range of
animals may have episodic memory, the consciousness of
being able to relive past experiences, and also
consciously plan for the future. And so and the rest of what
I say on the animal cognition side, I'll be sharing some of
the kinds of evidence that I think militates in this
direction and would therefore qualify, perhaps qualify
animals for what I call near personhood.
Remember I said near persons are individuals that have episodic
memory and a conscious ability to plan for the future.
Well, when it comes to episodic memory, remember it's defined as
the ability to consciously recall an experience that you
had in the past. And with humans, the standard
ways of investigating episodic memory involve asking them
questions in language and saying, asking things like well,
do you remember having that experience or do you just know
the answer to my question and you can't actually, you know,
re-experience the event? Well, obviously with humans,
that's a nice way, neat way of getting at whether they're
really consciously remembering the episode or they just have
the information and can answer the question correctly, even
though they can't re-experience it.
Remember, in my arguments it's that re-experiencing of the
episode that adds that second layer of value to your life
on top of what ever is happening in the here and now.
With humans, they can just tell you whether they consciously
recall it or they just know the answer.
But how would you tell when an animal was consciously recalling
a past experience? Research on episodic memory in
animals, well, in fact research on episodic memory in general
has been out there for 20 years, 25 years.
Initiated by some who I will show you a slide of in a second.
Research on episodic memory in animals is brand new.
The only publications on it are in this decade, or this
century, I guess I could say. It sounds more dramatic
than decade. Here's the cartoon I wanted to
share with you. He gave the term episodic memory
its current meaning, of being able to consciously
re-experience the past event. Here you see him.
By the way, he is convinced that no non-linguistic creatures
can have episodic memory, so that's the point of the cartoon.
He's asking the cat, "A mouse, you say, do you remember it
or do you just know?" The idea is if you remember it
in the relevant sense, you can remember the experience, but you
can often know the answer to a question based on a previous
experience without being able to consciously recall the
experience. In fact, in his experiments with
humans, one of the standard things they've done is show
people, give people a list of words to study.
Say we're going to ask you about this later.
Then they later show you two words and say which one
was on the list. People, when they self report
whether they can consciously remember or not will commonly
say things like well I know that one is on the list but I don't
remember seeing it. So you can answer all kinds of
questions, here's a prosaic example.
I might be able to say, yeah, I know I've seen that movie
without remembering anything visually or auditory or
emotionally in terms of my reactions to it.
So it's a real tough nut to crack how you can ask animals
the correct question to get out whether they, as in this
cartoon, you just know it or they actually can consciously
re-experience the event. Well, one of the novel
approaches is to invoke what you might call the element of
surprise. And the idea here is that, look,
if you are routinely asked a certain kind of question, then
when you are having the experience that will later be
the basis for your answering the question, like the next day or
something, you can come up with pneumonic devices and train
yourself to remember how to easily recall the answer,
because you know it's coming over and over again.
In fact, here one episodic memory researcher put it this
way, quote, we see a friend in the morning and ask him
unexpectedly the element of surprise what he had for dinner
last night. After a few seconds of
reflection, presumably to search the episode, he says spaghetti.
Now imagine we ask him the same question every morning.
Now at dinnertime while eating chicken, he may say to himself
when I'm asked what I had for dinner, I'll say chicken and
the next day when asked the question, he says to himself,
I don't have to think back about what I had for dinner,
because I know to say chicken. This would be an example of
semantic or associative memory rather than episodic memory.
And it would be the basis for performance of any task with
repeated trial. So the idea is, one approach you
could take to getting at whether or not animals have episodic
memories is trying to put them in a situation where as humans
we don't think we could give the right answer to the question
without going back and as they said, searching the episode,
re-experiencing it and getting the relevant information
out of it. This is no doubt an
oversimplification, but one way I tend to think about episodic
memory and why it might be evolutionarily advantageous
to organisms, is if you watch a CD, and if you only watch it
once, there are all kinds of stuff that you miss,
that if you could go back and watch it again you could
extract more useful information. I was going to say this later,
but I'll say it now, it shouldn't surprise us if
episodic memory is surprising widely distributed in the animal
kingdom, because being able to replay the episode and extract
additional information that you didn't store via associative
memory the first time, could be a really advantageous thing to
do, especially if you are dealing with a complex
environment that is changing in various kinds of ways.
So one thing that researchers, Bennett Schwartz and colleagues
use the element of surprise approach on one gorilla and
often in these studies with great apes, the end turns out to
be really small. This is one gorilla named King
at Monkey Jungle in Miami who had been there for 20 years and
had been I don't know for how many years, I don't think they
reported this in the paper, but for a number of years had been
trained to answer questions that were posed to him in English and
answer them by having a spread of photographs laid out in front
of him. Then he selects a photograph to
answer the question. So what they did, Schwartz and
colleagues, was they arranged for King to observe some totally
novel events, like either being presented with totally novel
food that he had never seen before, or having people
dressed up in various ways. You would never see zoo visitors
doing this. They arranged for these novel
events and gave King a range of photographs, only one of which
related to the event. I think it's like five to 15
minutes later after the events, he at a level of, or a rate
of 55 percent of the time chose the picture that was
associated with the novel event. Now they say,
if I can find it here, "That was less than stellar, but
significantly above chance," which would have been.
They report 33 percent if he was just randomly choosing when the
pictures are presented. Then they also note
that misinformation, presenting a human subject with
misinformation about a past episode that they claim
to remember can mess up their episodic recall.
And so to mimic that with King, what they did was arrange for
more of these novel events and then sometimes present King
with a blank photo, which wouldn't present any
misinformation, but it didn't present any information,
and other times present a photo that would look like the scene,
and therefore a scene like the same event, but presented
misinformation that wasn't present in the actual event.
When they presented the blank pictures, his performance was
basically the same, 53% of the time, 55% before,
with the blank pictures it was 53.
When they introduced the misinformation in the
photograph, his performance dropped to 40%.
So they conclude that this suggests that King was using
episodic memory to remember these surprising events and
answer questions about them. Well, another approach that's
not feasible yet, so I'm going to be really quick with this
one, is turns out in humans, PET scan data indicate clearly
that if you lay a human in one of these PET scan devices, where
you have to lie still and it's a big weird thing, so it's not
plausible at this point to use these on animals.
In humans, it's well confirmed that there's lateralization
of function. If you tell somebody to get a
good visual memory of what we're showing you inside the tube
there on a little screen or what we're playing for you auditorily
so you can answer you questions about it later, what you are
asking them to do is in code episodic memory.
Remember what this experience was like so you can extract
information later. When that's done, as you see
in the first row of the chart there at the bottom,
there is heavy activity in the left prefrontal cortex
during encoding and there is roughly equally heavy activity
on the right prefrontal cortex upon retrieval.
One thing that occurred to me, I read in the New York Times
the other day, by the way, that somebody has invented a tiny
PET scanner that a rat can wear. That's not quite fair, I think
you can make a rat wear it. You can do PET scans, it looks
like soon, on a rat while it's interacting in an environment.
You can't do that with any other animal yet.
For all mammals it seems to me that a relevant kind of test
that we can try some day hopefully, if the technology
gets advanced enough, is to give them episodic memory problems
that would involve both encoding and retrieval, although it would
take creativity to come up with how you present them with a
problem where you are encouraging them to encode an
episodic memory. As I'm trying to illustrate
here in this section on animal cognition, researchers need
to be innovative and creative to create ways of testing
for these kinds of cognitive capacities in animals.
Eventually it may be possible to look for lateralization of
function in encoding and recall on episodic memory problems and
that would add an analogy that's confirmed between humans
performing episodic memory problems and various non-humans
if it came out positive, of course.
One of the most widely discussed and also I think really
innovative approaches to studying episodic memory has
involved western scrub jays from North America.
This research has been done by Nicole Clayton and colleagues.
She's a professor of comparative cognition in England.
And scrub jays in the wild cache food for future retrieval,
and it turns out that they cache a range of different foods,
some of which spoil earlier than other foods
that they also cache. So Clayton and colleagues
surmise that, well, maybe scrub jays could have evolved to have
what we might call time stamped memories, so they remember not
only what they put where, but also how long ago, because
that's going to be relevant to whether or not I should go
retrieve that which would have spoiled by now, versus this
other kind of food that would not have spoiled.
What they did was created a situation where they allowed
captive scrub jays to cache food in, and this isn't very
appetizing I know, but common ice cube trays filled with
clean cat litter. The jays are happy to cache food
in there. They would allow the jays to
cache only on one side of the ice tray a certain kind of food
and then give them another session where they could only
cache on the opposite side of the tray a different food.
By pairing up foods that were both known to be differentially
attractive to the birds and also ensuring--
The researchers used chemical techniques to ensure that the
foods went bad in predictable time periods, they got
the following situation going. The birds prefer mealworms
to peanuts, and they prefer crickets to peanuts, and also
prefer mealworms to crickets. And so the birds were given
one of two scenarios. Either they first, it doesn't
matter which order, but they cached peanuts on one side and
mealworms on the other, or they cached peanuts on one side
and crickets on the other. At different time periods later,
they were given the opportunity to retrieve food and the idea
was if they could remember not only what they cached and where,
but also how long ago, because they'd had a bunch of experience
with the foods going bad in predictable lengths of
time, when they entered the data gathering phase of the study,
which amounted to doing the same thing, cache two different
foods, wait a specified length of time and then you can
retrieve, now they took out the cat litter in the food and put
in fresh cat litter in a fresh tray so they couldn't be going
by olfactory queues, like I smell a rotten cricket here and
I'm not going to retrieve that. When they did that,
they discovered that after four hours, the birds attempted to
retrieve the mealworms side of the tray first and spent most of
their time looking for food there.
After 28 and 100 hours, they looked for peanuts instead.
When crickets were paired with the peanuts, the birds went for
the crickets at four hours and 28 hours after caching,
but switched to peanuts after 100 hours.
I think that's a really novel-- I mean, I admire scientists who
come up with insightful ways of asking the animal the right
question, as it were, and getting some suggestive results.
In this case, about what you might call other contenders
besides kind of the, I like to call them the usual suspects.
People in our culture today are pretty comfortable thinking that
fancy cognitive capacities are going to be exhibited by the
usual suspects of great apes, elephants, and setations, but
this research illustrates how if you ask the animals the right
question, you might discover that something, an ability like
episodic memory is surprisingly widespread in the animal
kingdom. In my book, I call these the
contenders. It's the usual suspects and then
the contenders, the underdogs.
Okay, let me turn to conscious planning.
That's the other half of being a near person in my conception
is you can consciously re-experience past episodes
and you can consciously imagine and benefit from, or suffer from
your imagining of future events. Well, the first piece of
research I want to discuss here concerns taking tools
to use the next day. And this experiment involves
one of the usual suspects, but the end is low again.
It was one bonobos and one orangutan, who were
given the following problem that I'm going to describe,
at the Primate Research Center at the -- Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology. They first, and this picture
is kind of complicated here. In one respect I think it's
misleading but I'm going to go ahead and take the time to
explain why I think it's misleading.
What they did was first off train up an animal with an
apparatus which is in the one quadrant there.
It's that sing that looks like a window on the wall.
Down here in the lower right quadrant, you can see how the
animal is able to retrieve grapes by using a straight pole
to put through a little hole that's barely bigger than the
pole and knock the grapes off so that they can reach through the
holes at the bottom and get the grapes.
The idea here was they first trained the animals to use tools
to manipulate the apparatus and get the food out.
Now they had a range of tools available and only one or two of
the tools would actually work. None of the others would work.
So you get the animal used to, okay, this kind of tool works to
retrieve that kind of food. Then they did the following.
They presented the animal, and here's where the picture
I think is inaccurate. My memory is that they presented
the animal with the tools, but with the apparatus not in the
room. Picture number 1 shows the
apparatus in the wall. If the apparatus was in the
wall, it wasn't baited so the animal couldn't use the tools to
retrieve the food. Let's go with my description,
which is how I remember it was supposed to work.
The apparatus is not present. Here are the tools.
I've been trained on using the tools.
I know this one works with the apparatus, but the apparatus is
not present. Next in frame 2 there, I'm
taken, if I'm the bonobos or the orangutan,
out of my room to my usual sleeping room and I sleep for
the night. In the morning in frame 3 they
let me back in the room and now the apparatus is present.
But there are no tools present. And the object was to see
on repetitions of this cycle of giving them tools, no apparatus
present, take them out to bed and then they come back in the
morning and the apparatus is present, would they start taking
the right tool to bed with them for use the next morning.
You or I, the reasoning behind the experiment is if you or I
were presented with this the first time it wouldn't occur
to me to take any tools. Hell that never happened before,
but sure as hell the first time I walked in the next morning and
saw my Starbucks and a bagel in there and I couldn't get it out
because I didn't have the tool, I'd say I'm taking the tool
tomorrow night in case this happens again.
I want to read my description of the results.
Neither of the animals took any tool the first night.
Just like us, right? But on a large majority of
subsequent nights they did and on a large majority of mornings
they brought a suitable tool back with them.
Because humans report in such cases that they would solve this
problem by consciously planning for the future then, they claim
that this is evidence the animals were consciously
planning for the future when they started taking the tools
after the first night. Well, another area of research
that has actually been exploding for more than 20 years now
is research on the use of a theory of mind or TOM,
as I'll abbreviate it here. I need to say something here
about why I think using a theory of mind is suggestive of
conscious planning for the future.
First off, probably most of you have heard about it, but I'll
briefly describe what theory of mind use involves.
It basically involves attributing beliefs and desires
to other individuals as a way of understanding and predicting and
manipulating their behavior. So if you understand that
so and so wants something and has certain beliefs about where
those things are located, you can present them with
information that will cause them to behave in one way or another.
Now, human children are known to exhibit the development of
theory of mind in a developmentally stereotyped
way. For instance, around 18 months
they first become able to understand what others are
looking at, in other words follow the gaze of others.
Later on they develop an understanding of pretend play,
which they don't have earlier. It sort of snowballs and they
can understand others have differing beliefs from their own
and sometimes false beliefs. There are those and more
elements to the human full-blown theory of mind, but the research
I'm going to describe here concerns one of the most
elemental aspects, gaze following.
Being able to understand what others can and cannot see.
And, oh, I'm sorry, I need to say something about why I think
this involves planning for the future.
Basically it's because when we use theory of mind, we describe
it introspectively as we're imagining future scenarios and
what I can do to manipulate Rob so that he'll do or not do
something. So at least introspectively we
talk about using theory of mind to plan for the future in
various scenarios. And by the way, it turns out
that when people are actively using theory of mind, PET scans
show activity in the prefrontal cortex which is involved with
future planning. So that seems like some kind of
conscious future planning, which seems like some sort of
confirmation. So in a nutshell that's why I
think theory of mind use can be construed as being about
conscious planning for the future.
Now, research in this area has been exploding like I said for
over 20 years and there are on the other hand all kinds of
anecdotal field reports about monkeys and apes doing all kind
of manipulative things in the wild.
Like if there is dominant, like Rob is my dominant alpha
whatever and I want to groom this lovely, here I go getting
off color again, but anyway, there are examples of animals
doing things that sure look like they were trying to move,
you know, really slowly so Rob wouldn't notice that I was
getting close to that female behind that pile of rocks or
something, and then we go at it and groom.
So it looks like you're being sneaky.
There is a phenomenon called sneaky copulation, which you can
fill in the blank on. There are these impressive,
but of course anecdotal field reports.
Some of the work in the laboratory didn't come out
looking very good for chimpanzees in particular,
and probably many of you know about this.
Daniel Povinelli who is the Director of Cognition Evolution
Center at the University of Louisiana, his early research
suggested that chimpanzees probably don't know what other
chimpanzees can see. Sorry, I'm getting
a bit of a cold here. What he did was present
chimpanzees with situations where if they begged from the
person who could see them, they would get the reward.
If they begged from the person who could not see them,
they would not get the reward. Here, although they're
elephants, the elephant on the left is
responding correctly because the person is facing them, whereas
the elephant on the right is responding incorrectly because
the person is facing away from them.
Povinelli's research showed that although young children,
as young as three passed this with flying colors,
his chimpanzees that he tested only got about 58%
in the condition. They give them various ones
including buckets over heads and screens in front of their eyes
to have different ways of interrupting the vision of the
individual humans. Brian Hare, though, has more
recently suggested that well if you want to check for gaze
following in primates, probably a competitive situation would be
a better test than a cooperative situation.
Kind of a dim view, I suppose of us primates, right.
What they did was have dominants and subordinates in a cage
layout like I'm showing you here, where in this picture,
when the doors are opened and they come out of their cages
and can now see where the food is in the environment, those
walls in the middle are there opaque, so that in this picture,
the dominant can see the food towards the top of the screen
and the food that's in the doorway, the subordinate can't
see the food that's on the dominant side of the cage.
Here's another situation where both pieces of food are in the
door and then here is the subordinate door positioned
where the subordinate can see the food on his or her side of
the opaque wall, but the dominant cannot.
Now, during the experiment, they found that 83% of all food
obtained by the subordinate animals came from pieces on
their side of this dominant-- or, I'm sorry, subordinate door
condition. The experimenters also noted
that, "on a number of occasions in the subordinate door
condition," which we're seeing here, "subordinate individuals
behaved in strategic ways with regard to a piece of food
that only they could see." On seven occasions, five
different individuals approached the door in the middle there and
stood there until the dominant moved away and then grabbed the
food that only they could see. And on four occasions, two
different individuals moved to the side of the doorway out of
sight of the dominant to take the food that the dominant
couldn't see. And let's see.
I was also going to mention that in the dominant door condition,
the dominant retrieved the piece of food in the door first 75% of
the time. Which is the strategy we would
probably use if we were the dominant, go get the food that
the subordinate can get to before I get to the one that he
or she can't see. To make a long story short,
or shorter, I suppose, a researcher did some great stuff.
He tested the gaze following on both chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees though who were older than Povinelli's,
and were a mix of wild and captive reared and he got better
results with his chimpanzees suggesting that they could
follow the gaze of others. He also took this picture
involving the elephants that he was testing.
The elephants begged correctly 81% of the time when one person
was lying on the ground as in the right frame here and the
other was lying facing the other direction.
Those were much better performances than Povinelli's
initial laboratory results. One last category of planning
for the future. Clayton, et al, scrub jays,
innovative research by Clayton et al
has suggested that scrub jays can use theory of mind.
They did this by raising scrub jays so they could control
their experiences. And in the wild, scrub jays
pilfer from each other. See somebody cache some food
over there and pilfer it from them.
They controlled these animals in captivity, so they were there
two groups. One group that never had the
opportunity to pilfer from anybody else and a group that
did. And then they tested those two
groups and here are the results. When they were initially able to
cache foods, either in private or observed by another bird, and
the bar on the right shows that when observed caching foods, the
birds who had experience of pilfering from others re-cached
their food a whole lot and almost exclusively in new places
that they hadn't used before in the trays.
Whereas in the left frame you see birds who didn't have
experience pilfering from others didn't in a statistically
significant way anyway re-cache their food significantly more
when they were observed versus when they were caching
in private. And so Clayton et al,
say "Our results suggest that jays relate information
about their previous experience as a pilferer to the possibility
of future stealing by another bird and modify their caching
strategy accordingly." So something like planning
for the future. And here's another really
innovative test that they did. It's kind of on par with
the bonobos and orangutans taking the tool for use
at breakfast in the morning. They put scrub jays in a
three-compartment situation where in the morning they were
habituated over six days I think it was to either being
put in compartment A or compartment C,
and one but not the other, they were fed in.
Then in the evenings, they were allowed to access food in what's
labeled the food bowl there in compartment B during those six
nights, but it was ground up pine nuts, I think it was.
And so they couldn't cache that effectively
for the morning, so to speak. But then after they had been
habituated to where they were going to get fed or not in the
morning, they gave the birds in the evening whole pine nuts and
watched where they cached and no surprise, right, they cached
differentially in the compartment where they would not
get food if that's where they ended up in the morning.
And by the way, since they said, well, look, there could be just
an association between looking at that compartment and feeling
hungry because I've never gotten to eat in there when I'm
in there in the morning and therefore I'm going to put food
over there, then what they did was a variation on the
experiment where they were always fed in the morning
whichever compartment, A or C they were in but they were fed
different foods in A and C, kibbles on the one hand,
dog kibbles I think it was and peanuts.
Then they were given and I forget how this, yeah, they
were given in the food bowl in the evening either kibbles
or peanuts and observed where they cached them.
It turns out that mammals in general including humans prefer
a variety of foods to one food of equal quantity.
And sure enough, the jays differentially, they tended to
cache peanuts in the place where they were going to get kibbles
if that's where they ended up in the morning.
They tended to cache kibbles in the compartment where they would
get peanuts in the morning. So that's a really quick
overview of why I think there's emerging evidence that various
non-human animals might qualify as near persons having episodic
memory and conscious planning for the future and that would
make them near persons in my favored terminology.
Turns out that it looks to me, and in greater detail in the
book version of this, I talk about some other research and
talk about this research in greater detail, but it seems to
me like the usual suspects are going to turn out to be fairly
good contenders for near personhood because
it's probably going to turn out that there's going to be good
evidence when we look for it more carefully and thoroughly
in the future given the results we have already, that they'll be
able to consciously remember the past and consciously plan
for the future. But the scrub jays illustrate
how we might be surprised when we investigate things further
and we might discover that there are some surprising contenders,
maybe not limited to the scrub jays of Clayton, et al,
by the way. Now I'll try to conclude very
quickly here by briefly discussing the so-called problem
of marginal cases. Clearly some human beings lack
a biographical sense of self and some even lack episodic memory
an the ability to plan for the future.
In fact, people who study episodic memory estimate that
children don't develop episodic memory until about three or four
years of age. People who study biographical
memory, which is the backward looking half of biographical
consciousness, say that full-blown biographical
understanding of your life may not even emerge until something
like in the teens. So a fairly broad range of
individuals are going to be, you know, not persons,
not qualify for personhood in my view, and maybe
not even near personhood. Adults can lose these cognitive
capacities that I've been talking about, episodic memory
and planning and all the way, in various degrees and all the way
up to, including comas, of course.
So does that mean that I think these so-called marginal cases,
well, doesn't matter how we treat them, they're just like on
all fours, pun intended with the merely sentient animals.
The short answer is no, I don't think that.
I just want to give you a snapshot version of the kinds of
reasons I give in the book for saying that that's not the
conclusion to draw here. For one thing, I note that we
already treat human non-persons differently.
That is, we treat individuals, human individuals who have
lost various of these cognitive capacities that I'm talking
about, we do things like treat them more paternalistically
than we treat normal adult humans.
We don't allow them to make their own medical decisions,
for instance. Maybe not even live alone.
Argue their own cases in court, make their own legal decisions,
etc. And in such ways, we already
distinguish in common sense and the law between what would
qualify as full-blown persons on the definition I give and
various so-called marginal cases.
Well, but on the other hand there are some things we do
in our culture today to various non-person animals
that we just would not do to human non-persons.
We don't raise them and slaughter them for food,
for instance. And the question to be asked
here, of course, is Varner, can this asymmetry between the
human non-persons and the animal non-persons and the ways we
treat the two categories be defended?
I think that it can. It's justified insofar as the
following are true and there is nothing original here by the
way. This is a pretty straight line
way that various philosophers who defend conceptions
of personhood have responded to this problem.
Infants and young children may not be persons, but they're
surely in the normal course of events persons in training.
We have very good reasons and we do this in the normal case of
child rearing a lot when we almost treat them as if they
have capacities they don't have yet to sort of like ratchet up
their acquisition of various capacities and so on.
When it comes to things like comas, there's notoriously
imprecision or uncertainty about which commas are reversible
or not, or which comas are really as deep as they're
treating them as being. Since each of us has a
possibility of ending up in a coma ourselves I think we have
good reason to allow patients to have advanced directives that
allow us not to pull the plug, just because they're becoming
an inconvenience to us. Each of us has an interest in
having that sort of ratcheted up protection when and if we get
into that situation and maybe we're not really comatose and
the doctors are sitting there, yeah, they're comatose and let's
unplug them. Similarly, cases of dementia and
mental illness certainly lie on a continuum and various
interested parties, obviously when inheritance is, and/or
expenses of continued medical care have reasons for
exaggerating the severity of these kinds of problems,
so all of us are also at risk of slipping into dementia
and mental illness and we therefore have good reasons
for erring on the side of caution with the kinds
of protections we provide in medical ethics, for instance.
Also how we treat human non-persons typically affects
many other humans and because such humans are usually members
of families that care deeply about them and fervently want to
see them treated differently than we might treat animal
non-persons. Since again, all of us are at
risk of falling into such situations ourselves, we're
justifiably fearful of policies that would cheapen the lives
of human non-persons. So that's my really quick and
dirty treatment of the marginal cases issue.
Let me remind you in closing here, there's my contact
information, I will try to respond to you if you email me
and it's not like I get a huge amount, so I will try to write
back. There is my web page if you want
to investigate that. Let me close by reminding you
of that caveat, that I've been talking simplistically in terms
of these three categories of persons, near persons, and the
merely sentient. But the cognitive capacities in
question I think almost unquestionably come on a
spectrum and in degrees, and so it's a bit of an over
simplification that I've been speaking in terms of that really
simple tricotomy tonight. But it was necessary I think to
get my reasons on the table for thinking that cognitive
capacities of normal humans and various categories of animals
matter morally in certain ways. With that, I end the prepared
remarks and welcome some discussion.
Thanks. [APPLAUSE]