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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting that the test involves showing the animals how to use the rocks to raise the marshmallow. Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating.

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I think that's why they also do the test with floating and sinking balls to see if they discard the lighter balls.

> Not to insult any particular species, but that seems more like a test of the instinct to mimic behavior with some desirable outcome. I assumed the Aesop’s Fable test was testing for an apparent understand of water displacement and floating.

How is that not understanding? They associate the outcome with a cause, and so realize how to trigger that cause themselves to achieve the outcome. What more is there to understanding?

As a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the rock-dropping process work?

> As a simple example, take the water out of the tube. Do the animals continue dumping rocks on top of the marshmallow, since that process used to work, or do they appear to understand that it was the water in the tube that made the rock-dropping process work?

All you're doing is adding more variables which makes the causal relationship more complicated, it doesn't diminish the understanding of the original causal relationship.

These variables were there from the beginning; the question is whether the raccoon's model of the world was taking them all into account, a question which probably requires more experiments to answer.

Understanding is not a binary thing, as demonstrated by Clifford Stoll's 'Why is the sky blue?' question.

> These variables were there from the beginning

But not observable given the experiment's configuration. I don't see how bringing these into the discussion clarifies anything. The question the experiment addresses is whether there is any understanding, 0 or not 0. The degree of understanding is out of scope.

I don’t think it is. If you show a raccoon that putting rocks into a took yields a marshmallow, you cannot include anything about the raccoon’s understanding of water displacement. If you show a raccoon that pressing a button yields a marshmallow, you can’t conclude anything about the raccoon’s understanding of electronics.

"Understanding water displacement" is not the goal of the test.

Your determination to make the point that this experiment does demonstrate some level of understanding seems to have led you into thinking that any discussion of how deep that understanding goes is counterproductive, for some reason. When, however, you asked "what more is there to understanding?", the answer is that in this case, there could be more than that which the experiment actually demonstrates, but it will take further experiments to determine whether that is so.

While you may not be interested in this question, the biologists performing these experiments certainly should be (and I am sure they are.)

There is also the distinct possibility of this experiment being misunderstood by those with a casual interest in biology and/or cognitive science - just because our understanding of the experiment involves buoyancy and displacement, it does not follow that the raccoons' does.

> When, however, you asked "what more is there to understanding?", the answer is that in this case, there could be more than that which the experiment actually demonstrates, but it will take further experiments to determine whether that is so.

You could interpret my question very broadly, but it seems clear from context that I was asking why one would need to set the threshold for qualifying as "understanding" higher than the simple causal reasoning the experiment demonstrated. The most fundamental question is about the minimum unit of understanding and how to test for that, and everything above that bar would simply be more elaborate chains built from these simple units.

This seems to be what the OP I responded to was asking about, and he seemed to want to set that threshold too high IMO.

There are various levels of understanding. One could simply remember that pebbles falling into the tube was followed by getting a treat, then there is the level that gets the significance of the presence of water and the buoyancy of the treats.

For this particular case, are you accusing the raccoons of just merely adapting positive outcome superstitions?

Right now, somewhere in the world, a raccoon is posting a comment on the raccoon-equivalent of the web lamenting the fact that ignorant members of her species have fallen into a cargo cult mentality.

I don’t know exactly what you mean by that. I’m just claiming that, from the initial experiment, you can’t conclude anything about the raccoon’s understanding of buoyancy or water displacement.

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