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
professor of psychology at Emory Frans de Waal, who is a
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
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
finalized. after the arrangements have been
of the semester, I'd like to And since this is the last talk
the planning committee one more ttime for the many hours thatk
they have put into making this
And also to UW-Madison for forum happen.
support. providing funding and logistical
introduce Professor Gary Varner Tonighfrom Texas A&M.sure to
He received his PhD from here,
a good talk. so you know that it will be
"In Nature's Interests His first book entitled
Environmental Ethics" was published in 1998 by Oxford
University Press. It provides an original analysis
of what it means to have morally
examines the relationship between views about animal
rights and views about sound
He's published papers on many topics related to animal ethics
issues, including papers
animal cloning, elephant on hunting, animal agriculture,
ownership. management and also pet
thoughts that he's been developing in a two volume worke
that is currently under contract
scheduled to appear later this from Oxford University Press
The first of these two volumes year.
of personhood, the kinds discusses the concepts
to personhood and the extent of cognitive capacities relevant
capacities. And I take it that that's part
of what we'll be hearing
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
The second volume then uses the theory developed in the
first to shed light on a variety
including animal agricultural, of animal ethics issues,
animals, scientific research pet ownership, and service
of animals in environmental involving anethics.nd the place
So please join me in welcoming
our spea[APPLAUSE]Varner.
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.
a list of people to thank and II didn't ahead of time, so I'me
going to blunder this in one
The planning committee, I really way, shape, or form.
back to Madison after graduating have enjoyed being able to come
in what I described earlier to from here, doing my PhD here
Pleistocene, and it kind of feels like the late Pleistocene
out there to me, because
home, I went to Minneapolis before coming down here, so I've
been in the area for pushing a
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
night. a pleasant reception for me last
Thank you for the great food. I had eaten dinner basically
before I went over there and
But I'm glad I did. So in this talk, basically I'm
going to do four things.
off by talking about the concept First off, I'm going to start
personhood has a legal and/or specifically, in the case of my
subject matter, ethical theory
meaning. term, has a rather different
meaning than it has in sort of A significantly different
Secondly, I'm going to share day-to-day discourse.
least an initial defense of my with you and try to give at
personhood and this related concept that I've labeled
near personhood.
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
terminology. least near persons in my
briefly discussing the problems of marginal cases which is wheny
you endorse a conception of personhood of the kind that I'm
going to argue for tonight, it's
human beings are not persons and going to turn out that some
ethical theorist who wants to that defend such a conceptr any
of personhood.
that I'll come back to later on. Let me first emphasize a caveat
tonight in terms of what sounds Tlike a really clear cutlk
tricotomy among persons, near persons and what I will call the
merely sentient, but as I'll
emphasize again later on, I don't think things are that
clear cut.
simplification, because the Icognitive capacities I'm goingr
to discuss tonight come in
of merely sentient individuals degrees and also that category
may turn out for reasons that tI'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
distinctions to make here and ththat various cognitivent
capacities do have moral
it's necessary to sort of be significance of various kinds,
these three categories as if quick and dirty and talk about
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
just synonymously with a member ofteof our species, but insed
day-to-day speech or common sense thinking, I think there
are a couple of other senses
in legal contexts, in various tpolitical and ethical contexts
and so on.
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
individuals being or not being when people talk about
more like having certain persons, they mean something
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
Notice the second family of definitions of person in terms
of having cognitive capacities
of person, it would be would be a descriptive sense
as having or not having certain cognitive capacities.s
That's a nice way of introducing
which instead of describing an the third family of definitions,
certain capacities, is instead individual as having or lacking
person, I'm saying they deserve a certain kind of treatment or
don't deserve other kinds of
kind of moral or legal respect. treAnd capacities that gettain
mentioned here are things like
not following my own slides. rationality, self awareness, I'm
I'll try to be careful about Sorry about that.
Capacities that often get mentioned in the second family
of definitions are things like
autonomy and moral agency. rationality, self awareness,
focus on tonight are episodic Amemory and conscious planningto
for the future on the one hand
sense of self. and having a biographical
slides and the third family of I got behind myself on my
normative or moral category of definition that says when we
call something a person, we're
that we think the individual calling attention to the fact
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.
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
normative versions of 3 and 2 itogether in this way, and sayd
when I claim a person,
I'm saying it deserves a special that something's a person,
That would be a category 3 kind of respect or treatment.
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
Which is to say, I think that these cognitive capacities are
significant and call for a
treatment for the following certain kreasons.espect or
Here comes my argument about why
matter. tAnd what I'm going to dos
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
sense of self for the reasons terms I'm about to give.phical
Remember, the category of definitions says here's
obviously the inference in need of justification.
So what I'm going to do is
that having a biographical sense describe the reasons I think
to say more morally charged. of self makes your life, I like
and/or benefited in ways that individuals who lack thisd
cognitive capacity lack.
by a biographical sense of self Iin just a minute, but to start
down the aisle of explaining why
is significant, I think we can I think that cognitive capacity
consciously remember the past aland consciously anticipateo
the future can add value
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
And when I talk about planning episodes or events.
consciously planning for the for the future, I mean
There are various kinds of future.
think can occur without you being conscious of the goal and
how you're aiming to achieve it,
acorns for the winter. like a squirrel storing up
to say I think there is A losort of a sense in whichling
there's planning there, but I don't think the squirrel is
aware of why it's storing up the
have food to eat in the winter. aWhen I talk about consciouslyto
planning for the future, I mean planning for the future that is
specifically conscious. Meaning, thinking explicitly and
consciously about what I want to
going to arrange things between anow and then to achieve it.'m
In fact, episodic memory
in that sense, don't add up to and planning for the future,
yet but I'm working in that direction because I think it's
easy to explain why we might
value to your life. I mean here both positive andd
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
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
hour afterwards, you have this afternoon or something or for an
being relaxed and it just, glow of just well-being and
about you. you know, a nice pleasant glow
Imagine enjoying that pleasant Now compare the following.
afterwards, and compare it to enjoying that pleasant relaxed
glow while also replaying in
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
I had this great experience that feeling afterwards.
first chase group to the lead, I heroically bridged from the
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
enjoying whatever present enjoyment or relaxation or glow
or whatever you're having.
that the ability to consciously Sremember the past or episodicay
memory can add value to your
Obviously it can go the other lway.
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
more morally charged. sI don't say that it makes youre
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,
complex how we can positively and negatively affect your life.
And I think that gives us good
more carefully about and be reasowilling to put sort ofthink
more safeguards on how
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
planning made better for me at benefit from whatever the
squirrel saving up acorns the timefor the winter. like the
It's going to be better off in
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
value on top of however better my life, that adds a layer of
purely instinctively laying up off it is made by this, if it is
In normal human lives, at least when we're in good circumstances
have an incredible amount of
have all kinds of long-term tprojects and plans and so on
that we get satisfactions from
of whatever our current state that arin the future is. on top
So that in a nutshell is why I
consciously remember the past and consciously anticipate the
future can add value to your
negatively. liSo it's a two-edged sword.d
So compared to a merely sentient
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
in other words, there is no real may be a hypothetical construct,
that. It seems to me if an organism is
capable of suffering at all, the
about from organisms on earth is basic suffering that we know
But in clinical context, pain researchers define pain as
having this aversive kind of
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
suffer even physical pain probably has some sense of
at least the immediate future.
sentient organism may be a That's why I say that a merely
But talking in terms of a merely hypothetical construct.
literally stuck in the present sentient individual being
convey why I think these is a useful way of trying to
remember the past and anticipate abilities in a robust way to
layered way that I've been the future add value in this
So compared to a merely sentient trying to describe.
an episodic memory has individual, an individual with
add positive or negative value additional experiences that can
that plans for the future tconsciously can form desiresl
that it can get positive value
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
has a biographical sense of self personhood an individual that
biographical consciousness and is that when it comes to
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.
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
have it. can't suffer, because they don't
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
them. I would describe it this way.
That having a biographical sense
how earlier events and of your life means understanding
so to speak. experiences shape later ones,
only barely metaphorically. Earlier chapters set the stage
for things that are possible
in later chapters. and likely to happen
determined by your past actions Uand your past experiences andis
similarly what you are doing now
what you are going to be and is setting the stage for who and
do and experience in the future. what you are going to be able to
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.
allows you to layer in I think it's plausible to say
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
By that again, I don't mean that more morally significant.
them or that they're even preferable but their lives are
morally charged in ways that
cognitive capacities aren't. individuals who lack those
them in diverse ways that you Ycouldn't harm or benefit ant
individual who lacked these cognitive capacities.
Now, if those arguments that
with laying these out. I've been very quick and dirty
buy the book and read it. Yeah, but anyway that in a quick
and dirty way gives my basic
biographical consciousness and reasons for thinking that having
conscious planning for the having episodic memory and
lives. future add moral significance to
pretty quickly a sort of, at If I'm right about that, then
These quote merely sentient lindividuals who are literally.
struck in the present would be
this hierarchy would be what I at the bottom and above them in
because they have episodic would like to call near persons,
future, although they don't have memory and planning for the
consciousness. full-blown biographical
planning for the future allows But having episodic memory and
in ways that individuals who are us to both benefit and harm them
capacities can't be harmed or merely senbenefited.lack those
So we should again, our moral relationships with them are
complicated by those cognitive
Same thing with regard to persons vis a vis near persons.
When you have this added layer
biographical sense of self of complexity of interest that
legitimate reason for thinking gives you, I think that's a
in complex ways that we can't weharm and benefit individualsu
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
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
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.
But tonight I'm going to focus It'll be later.
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 self? sense of having a biographical
are frankly kind of dim because although you can find examples
of primate researchers who
language studies, like this is report animals, especially in
star pupil Bonobos Kanzi, communicating using a lexogram
board, researchers who do this
work with non-humans, well, with kind of language acquisition
I won't say commonly, but do the great apes, especially,
report to them whatever using recommunication systems
they're using past events that
episodes from the past and they italk about them using ther
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.
talking about as far as maybe Thlike a day ahead of time orem
something like that.
any good evidence of personhood Howas I prefer to define itave
in any non-human animals, because even the most
sophisticated examples that these researchers report, and I
have in mind here Francine
that a gorilla told her a story Patin sign language about histe
mother who was killed by poachers when he was a baby
in Africa, and he retold
when asked about his mother. the story several times
to work quickly here. IHere is a video that they haveo
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
Here's the text that I put up here, the complete text in case
the video didn't work.
skepticism that I have about And in support of that
What's his first name--? this being a biographical story.
who co-authored the book, ThThe Education of Cocoden
I think it was the title
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,
He said, look, which the animal was using.
You're really interpreting a lot I just don't think--
the animal was making. into the signs that
sympathetic to Francine APatterson's research, but evenn
if we bought literally what Patterson interprets the gorilla
to be trying to communicate,
a story in the way I'm not sure that constitutes
It seems to be relating a series that a biography does.
Whereas I stressed earlier, to of events.
sense of self means you understand how metaphoricallyl
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.
of that, even in Paterson's Thinterpretation of Michael'sce
"story," there. So I want to put in quotes,
as it were. So I conclude that given my
concept of personhood, which I
that I gave earlier, I think defend for the kinds of reasons
evidence of any non-human tanimals taking a biographicald
perspective on their lives. Now, of course, that doesn't
prove they ain't doing it,
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.
future. NoSome animals are known tohe
produce very complex
For instance, one study of vocalizations.
some complicated stuff with information theory to conclude
that the repertoire of
is on a par with a repertoire of vocalizations that dolphins have
children have, young human vocalizations that young
Similarly, you might point to elephants, for instance, and
there is a broad range of lots
human hearing, that elephants are known to use in coordinating
movements and so on, in the wild
representational systems and it could be that there are
that count as functionally embodied in those vocalizations
systems sufficiently complex to convey a biographical sense and
represent to the animal themselves a biographical sense
of their lives, but at present
any good evidence that that's we don't have,so.don't believe,
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.
I say on the animal cognition side, I'll be sharing some of
the kinds of evidence that
direction and would therefore Iqualify, perhaps qualify
animals for what I call near personhood.
Remember I said near persons are
memory and a conscious ability individuals that have episodic
Well, when it comes to episodic memory, remember it's defined as
the ability to consciously
had in the past. recall an experience that you
ways of investigating episodic And with humans, the standard
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?
that's a nice way, neat way of Well, obviously with humans,
really consciously remembering getting at whether they're
the information and can answer the episode or they just have
though they can't re-experience the questionit.rrectly, even
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
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
a past experience? animal was consciously recalling
animals, well, in fact research on episodic memory in generaln
has been out there for 20 years,
Initiated by some who I will 25 years.
Research on episodic memory in show you a slide of in a second.
The only publications on it are in this decade, or this
century, I guess I could say. It sounds more dramatic
than decade.
share with you. He gave the term episodic memory
its current meaning,
re-experience the past event. of beHere you see him.iously
By the way, he is convinced that no non-linguistic creatures
can have episodic memory, so
He's asking the cat, "A mouse, that's the point of the cartoon.
or do you just know?" The idea is if you remember it
in the relevant sense, you can
can often know the answer to a remember the experience, but you
experience without being able to question based on a previous
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
Then they later show you this later.
was on the list. two words and say which one
whether they can consciously People, when they self report
say things like well I know that remember or not will commonly
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
emotionally in terms of my visually or auditory or
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
re-experience the event. they actually can consciously
approaches is to invoke what you Well, one of the novel
surprise. And the idea here is that, look,
if you are routinely asked a
when you are having the experience that will later ben
the basis for your answering the
something, you can come up with qpneumonic devices and trainor
yourself to remember how to easily recall the answer,
because you know it's coming
In fact, here one episodic over and over again.
way, quote, we see a friend in memory researcher put it this
unexpectedly the element of surprise what he had for dinner
last night. After a few seconds of
reflection, presumably to search
Now imagine we ask him the same the question every morning.tti.
Now at dinnertime while eating
when I'm asked what I had for cdinner, I'll say chicken andf
the next day when asked the question, he says to himself,
I don't have to think back
because I know to say chicken. about what I had for dinner,
semantic or associative memory This would be an example of
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
memories is trying to put them or not animals have episodic
we don't think we could give the in a situation where as humans
without going back and as they right answer to the question
re-experiencing it and getting said, searching the episode,
out of it. the relevant information
oversimplification, but one way I tend to think about episodic
memory and why it might be
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.
but I'll say it now, I was going to say this later,
episodic memory is surprising widely distributed in the animal
kingdom, because being able to
additional information that you rdidn't store via associativet
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,
use the element of surprise Beapproach on one gorilla andes
often in these studies with great apes, the end turns out to
be really small.
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
answer them by having a spread were posed to him in English and
of him. Then he selects a photograph tot
answer the question.
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.
if I can find it here, Now they say,
significantly above chance," "That was less than stellar, but
They report 33 percent if he was which would have been.
pictures are presented. just rThen they also noteen the
that misinformation,
misinformation about a past presepisode that they claimwith
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
with a blank photo, twhich 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
misinformation that wasn't the same event, but presented
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
photograph, his performance the mdropped to 40%.n the
So they conclude that this
episodic memory to remember these surprising events andg
answer questions about them.
not feasible yet, so I'm going Well, another approach that's
one, is turns out in humans, to be really quick with this
that if you lay a human in one PET scan data indicate clearly
you have to lie still and it's a of these PET scan devices, where
plausible at this point to use big weird thing, so it's not
In humans, it's well confirmed these on animals.
of function. that there's lateralization
good visual memory of what we're If you tell somebody to get a
there on a little screen or what showing you inside the tube
so you can answer you questions weabout it later, what you arely
asking them to do is in code
Remember what this experience was like so you can extract
information later.
in the first row of the chart Whenthere at the bottom, see
there is heavy activity in the left prefrontal cortex
during encoding and there is
on the right prefrontal cortex roughly equally heavy activity
One thing that occurred to me, upon retrieval.
the other day, by the way, that somebody has invented a tiny
PET scanner that a rat can wear.
you can make a rat wear it. You can do PET scans, it looks
like soon, on a rat while it's
You can't do that with any other interacting in an environment.
For all mammals it seems to me animal yet.
that we can try some day that a relevant kind of test
gets advanced enough, is to give hopefully, if the technology
that would involve both encoding them episodic memory problems
take creativity to come up with anhow you present them with auld
problem where you are encouraging them to encode an
episodic memory.
here in this section on animal As I'm trying to illustrate
to be innovative and creative cto create ways of testingd
for these kinds of cognitive
Eventually it may be possible to capacities in animals.
function in encoding and recall on episodic memory problems and
that would add an analogy that's
performing episodic memory confirmed between humans
if it came out positive, problems and various non-humans
One of the most widely discussed of course.
innovative approaches to and also I think really
involved western scrub jays studfrom North America.y has
This research has been done by
She's a professor of comparative Nicole Clayton and colleagues.
And scrub jays in the wild cognition in England.
and it turns out that they cache cache food for future retrieval,
some of which spoil earlier a rangthan other foodsoods,
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
retrieve that which would have whether or not I should go
other kind of food that would spoilnot have spoiled. this
What they did was created a situation where they allowed
captive scrub jays to cache food
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
cache on the opposite side of sethe tray a different food.y
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.
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
mealworms on the other, or they cacached peanuts on one sidend
and crickets on the other.
they were given the opportunity Ato retrieve food and the idear,
was if they could remember not
but also how long ago, because only what they cached and where,
with the foods going bad they'd had a bunch of experience
time, when they entered the data in predictable lengths of
which amounted to doing the same gathering phase of the study,
foods, wait a specified length thing, cache two different
retrieve, now they took out the cat litter in the food and put
in fresh cat litter in a fresh
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
their time looking for food the tray firsthere.spent most of
After 28 and 100 hours, they
When crickets were paired with looked for peanuts instead.
the crickets at four hours the peanuts, the birds went for
but switched to peanuts and 28after 100 hours.hing,
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
besides kind of the, I like to might call other contenders
People in our culture today are pretty comfortable thinking that
fancy cognitive capacities are
usual suspects of great apes, elephants, and setations, but
this research illustrates how if
question, you might discover you ask the animals the right
episodic memory is surprisingly thatwidespread in the animalike
kingdom.
contenders. It's the usual suspects and then
the contenders, the underdogs.
Okay, let me turn to
That's the other half of being conscious planning.
is you can consciously a near person in my conception
and you can consciously imagine and benefit from, or suffer from
your imagining of future events.
research I want to discuss here Wconcerns taking toolsof
to use the next day.
one of the usual suspects, And this experiment involves
It was one bonobos but the end is low again.
given the following problem that I'm going to describe,
at the Primate Research Center
Evolutionary Anthropology. at the -- Institute for
is kind of complicated here. They first, and this picture
misleading but I'm going to go In one respect I think it's
explain why I think it's ahead and take the time to
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
Down here in the lower right a window on the wall.
animal is able to retrieve quadrant, you can see how the
to put through a little hole grapes by using a straight pole
pole and knock the grapes off so that's barely bigger than the
holes at the bottom and get the that they cagrapes. through the
The idea here was they first
to manipulate the apparatus and trainedget the food out.se tools
Now they had a range of tools available and only one or two of
the tools would actually work.
So you get the animal used to, None of the others would work.
retrieve that kind of food. okThen they did the following.to
They presented the animal, and
I think is inaccurate. here's where the picture
the animal with the tools, but My memory is that they presented
room. wiPicture number 1 shows thee
apparatus in the wall.
wall, it wasn't baited so the animal couldn't use the tools to
retrieve the food.
which is how I remember it was Let's go with my description,
The apparatus is not present. Here are the tools.
I've been trained on using the
I know this one works with the tools.
not present. apparatus, but the apparatus is
taken, if I'm the bonobos Nextor the orangutan,, I'm
out of my room to my usual
the night. sleeping room and I sleep for
let me back in the room and now Inthe apparatus is present.hey
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
the right tool to bed with them prefor use the next morning.king
You or I, the reasoning behind
were presented with this the the experiment is if you or I
to me to take any tools. first time it wouldn't occur
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
Neither of the animals took any tool the first night.
Just like us, right?
subsequent nights they did and But on a large majority of
they brought a suitable tool on a large majority of mornings
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
after the first night. they started taking the tools
that has actually been exploding Well, another area of research
is research on the use of a fotheory of mind or TOM,ow
as I'll abbreviate it here. I need to say something here
about why I think using a theory
conscious planning for the of mind is suggestive of
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
manipulating their behavior. understanding and predicting and
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
Now, human children are known to to behave in one way or another.
theory of mind in a developmentally stereotyped
way.
they first become able to Founderstand what others arehs
looking at, in other words
Later on they develop an follow the gaze of others.
which they don't have earlier. understanding of pretend play,
can understand others have It sort of snowballs and they
and sometimes false beliefs. differing beliefs from their own
elements to the human full-blown There are those and more
I'm going to describe here theory of mind, but the research
elemental aspects, concerns one of the most
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
Basically it's because when we future.
it introspectively as we're uimagining future scenarios and
what I can do to manipulate Rob so that he'll do or not do
something.
talk about using theory of mind Soto plan for the future in we
various scenarios.
that when people are actively using theory of mind, PET scans
show activity in the prefrontal cortex which is involved with
future planning.
conscious future planning, So that seems like some kind 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
Now, research in this area has future.
over 20 years and there are on been exploding like I said for
anecdotal field reports about monkeys and apes doing all kind
of manipulative things in the wild.
Like if there is dominant,
whatever and I want to groom like Rob is my dominant alpha
off color again, but anyway, this lovely, here I go getting
doing things that sure look like there are examples of animals
you know, really slowly so Rob they were trying to move,
getting close to that female wouldn't notice that I was
something, and then we go at it behind thand groom. rocks or
So it looks like you're being sneaky.
There is a phenomenon called
fill in the blank on. snThere are these impressive,can
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
chimpanzees can see. probably don't know what other
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,
If they begged from the person they would get the reward.
they would not get the reward. who could not see them,
elephants, Here, although they're
responding correctly because the the elephant on the left is
the elephant on the right is person is facing them, whereas
the person is facing away from responding incorrectly because
Povinelli's research showed that them.
as young as three passed this with flying colors,
his chimpanzees that he tested
in the condition. They give them various ones
including buckets over heads and
to have different ways of interrupting the vision of the
individual humans.
recently suggested that well if Byou want to check for gazee
following in primates, probably a competitive situation would be
a better test than a cooperative
Kind of a dim view, I suppose of situation.
What they did was have dominants us primates, right.
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
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
see the food that's on the doorway, the subordinate can't
Here's another situation where dominant side of the cage.
door and then here is the bsubordinate door positionedhe
where the subordinate can see the food on his or her side of
the opaque wall, but the
Now, during the experiment, they dominant cannot.
obtained by the subordinate animals came from pieces on
their side of this dominant-- or, I'm sorry, subordinate door
condition.
that, "on a number of occasions Thin the subordinate doorted
condition," which we're seeing
behaved in strategic ways with regard to a piece of food
that only they could see."
different individuals approached On seven occasions, five
stood there until the dominant the door in the middle there and
food that only they could see. moved away and then grabbed the
different individuals moved to And on four occasions, two
sight of the dominant to take ththe food that the dominantof
couldn't see. And let's see.
I was also going to mention that
the dominant retrieved the piece in the dominant door condition,
the time. oWhich is the strategy we wouldf
probably use if we were the dominant, go get the food that
the subordinate can get to
or she can't see. beTo make a long story short,he
or shorter, I suppose, a
He tested the gaze following researcher did some great stuff.
Chimpanzees though who were older than Povinelli's,
and were a mix of wild and
results with his chimpanzees captive reared and he got better
follow the gaze of others. suggesting that they could
involving the elephants He that he was testing.re
The elephants begged correctly
was lying on the ground as in 81the right frame here and then
other was lying facing the other
Those were much better direction.
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
their experiences. scrub jays so they could control
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
did. anybody else and a group that
groups and here are the results. And then they tested those two
cache foods, either in private When they were initially able to
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
that they hadn't used before in almost exclthe trays. new places
Whereas in the left frame you see birds who didn't have
experience pilfering from others
significant way anyway re-cache their food significantly more
when they were observed versus
in private. And so Clayton et al,g
say "Our results suggest
about their previous experience as a pilferer to the possibility
of future stealing by another bird and modify their caching
strategy accordingly."
for the future. And here's another reallyg
innovative test that they did.
the bonobos and orangutans It's kind of on par with
at breakfast in the morning. taking the tool for use
three-compartment situation where in the morning they were
habituated over six days
put in compartment A I think it was to either being
and one but not the other, or compartment C,
Then in the evenings, they were allowed to access food in what's
labeled the food bowl there in
nights, but it was ground up compartment B during those six
And so they couldn't cache pine nuts, I think it was.
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
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,
an association between looking well, look, there could be just
hungry because I've never gotten at that compartment and feeling
in there in the morning and therefore I'm going to put food
over there, then what they did
experiment where they were was a variation on the
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
Then they were given and and peanuts.
were given in the food bowl in I forget how this, yeah, they
or peanuts and observed twhere they cached them.es
It turns out that mammals in
a variety of foods to one food general including humans prefer
And sure enough, the jays differentially, they tended to
cache peanuts in the place where
if that's where they ended up in they were going to get kibbles
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
Turns out that it looks to me, favored terminology.
book version of this, I talk and in greater detail in the
talk about this research in greater detail, but it seems to
me like the usual suspects are
good contenders for goinear personhood becauseirly
it's probably going to turn out that there's going to be good
evidence when we look for it
in the future given the results we have already, that they'll be
able to consciously remember
for the future. But the scrub jays illustrate
how we might be surprised when
and we might discover that there we investigate things further
maybe not limited to the scrub are some surprising contenders,
by the way. Now I'll try to conclude very
quickly here by briefly discussing the so-called problem
of marginal cases.
a biographical sense of self and Clearly some human beings lack
an the ability to plan for the some even lack episodic memory
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
like in the teens. not even emerge until something
individuals are going to be, So a fairly broad range of
not qualify for personhood you know, not persons,
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
up to, including comas, various degof course.ll the way
So does that mean that I think
well, doesn't matter how we treat them, they're just like on
all fours, pun intended with the
The short answer is no, meI don't think that.ls.
I just want to give you a snapshot version of the kinds of
reasons I give in the book for
conclusion to draw here. saying that that's not the
already treat human non-persons For one tdifferently. that we
That is, we treat individuals,
lost various of these cognitive capacities that I'm talking
about, we do things like treat
than we treat normal adult them more paternalistically
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.
distinguish in common sense and Athe law between what wouldy
qualify as full-blown persons on the definition I give and
various so-called marginal
Well, but on the other hand there are some things we do
in our culture today
that we just would not do to vto human non-persons.mals
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
treat the two categories be non-persodefended?e ways we
I think that it can.
following are true and there is Inothing original here by the
way.
way that various philosophers Thiswho defend conceptionsline
of personhood have responded
Infants and young children to this problem.
surely in the normal course mof events persons in training.
We have very good reasons and we
child rearing a lot when we dalmost treat them as if they
have capacities they don't have yet to sort of like ratchet up
their acquisition of various
When it comes to things like capacities and so on.
imprecision or uncertainty about comas, there's notoriously
or not, or which comas are which commas are reversible
treating them as being. reSince each of us has ae
possibility of ending up in a coma ourselves I think we have
good reason to allow patients to
allow us not to pull the plug, have advanced directives that
an inconvenience to us. Each of us has an interest in
having that sort of ratcheted up
into that situation and maybe we're not really comatose and
the doctors are sitting there,
unplug them. yeah, they're comatose and let's
mental illness certainly Similarly, cases of dementia and
interested parties, obviously lwhen inheritance is, and/orus
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
for erring on the side we therefore have good reasons
of protections we provide in of caution with the kinds
Also how we treat human non-persons typically affects
many other humans and because such humans are usually members
of families that care deeply
see them treated differently about them and fervently want to
non-persons. than we might treat animal
risk of falling into such Ssituations ourselves, we'ret
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
information, I will try to here, there's my contact
and it's not like I get a huge respond to you if you email me
back. There is my web page if you want
to investigate that.
of that caveat, that I've been Let me close by reminding you
of these three categories of talking simplistically in terms
merely sentient. persons, near persons, and the
question I think almost But unquestionably come on a in
spectrum and in degrees, and
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
Thanks. [APPLAUSE]