9UNP0576SD_Gary Varne_WordPress
Wisconsin Public Television University Place Forum on Animal Research
Gary Varner Person and Near-Personhood
April 4, 2011

- 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. 
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