Great apes appear to have “theory of mind”
inverse.com
inverse.com
We often look to the stars and wonder what other intelligent life is out there. I'm sure it's captured every one of our minds at some point. Dark Forest theory of the Fermi Paradox be damned, we want to share in the comfort of knowing that intelligent life exists. That we are not all alone.
But I wonder - had things been not much different, might we be cohabiting with an intelligent species, one perhaps tens of thousands of years ahead of us? Aliens on our own planet?
Would we even realize their sentience - would our minds even be comparable? Would their civilization fade to ruins before we came to sentience, and would we discover remnants of a long-lost civilization? Would they raze the planet to the ground and never provide us the opportunity to develop sentience?
So many questions. Are we in a similar situation right now with other hominids, who we've found to have a "theory of mind"? Are we morally obligated to not cut the nip of societal development in the bud for these species? And if this species suffers in developing and advancing, are we obligated to ease and accelerate their development?
For example, if a far advanced civilization was out there, merely observing us while they knew they had the cure to our dying loved ones and general suffering on this planet, would we not find the only ethical solution to provide said cure? As such, are we in a similar situation with other developing hominids?
When you think about it, it is possible that intelligent life developing on other planets is not a singular species but multiple species. And that's fascinating. I wonder what it must be like, to cohabit with a different species that is effectively your equal with respect to self-awareness/sentience, even if they are not your equal with respect to technology.
That's a question that is more of a decision.
The universe doesn't care either way, and wouldn't care if tomorrow a comet extinguished life on Earth entirely.
I wonder if it's possible that stone tools were developed only once by some early species and then just passed down through generations? What do we really know about those times?
A few of our ancestor species used the exact same model of stone hand tool (it's like a small axe) for a million years! It was even inherited between a few species.
Something like 1.5 million years ago, someone had the brilliant idea of improving it. It was another of our ancestor species. (I think that Denisovans branched before this but IANAA.) After that there are a few (slow) step of progressing.
---
You may be interested to read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clovis_culture Some theory says that they were the first human to reach America. Other theories says that humans had already come to America but they had older stone technology and the Clovis people just brought the new stone technology that was much better. I can't find a clear report, and I'm not sure if there is a clear evidence of both theories. It's easier to track the use of the new arrow heads than track the users.
It sounds intriguing but unfortunately, I think that history teaches us that in reality we'd eventually end up with the problems of racism, but at a whole new level.
I really loved your post especially that paragraph, which could easily spawn a dozen sci-fi stories or conspiracy theories.
I mean, we already do that to an extent. There are "wild" tribes living in remote areas of the planet and surely they must suffer from illnesses which we have cures for, but in the name of leaving them alone we don't provide them with anything.
That doesn't discard the interest of the point, but that brings a call for more specific nuances depending on civilization discrepancies.
1) I'm trying to imagine a sterilized delivery system of treatments that such tribes would be able to understand enough to use.
2) Similar to "how do we communicate to the deep future not to enter nuclear waste storage facilities", how do we communicate to such people when not only is there a language barrier but also a gap of hundreds [thousands?] of technological &c progress as well.
We absolutely do not "leave them alone". Or at least -- in the grandest tradition of human hypocrisy -- we just all agree to say we leave them alone if anyone asks, and just sort of pretend like our laws are foolproof solutions to things like preventing interference with "uncontacted" tribes, or stopping drug addiction, or preventing gun violence, or what have you.
Perhaps we can start by preventing their extinction by stopping the destruction of of their natural habitat.
So yeah, I guess incomprehensibly advanced technological interjection isn't unprecedented.
(Minor nitpick, but I think you meant "sapience" rather than "sentience." Sentience is something that essentially all animals on this planet have, and just means the ability to experience sensations. Sapience appears to be unique to humans (and perhaps a small number of animal species) and refers to the ability to reason.)
(while we are minor nitpicking, they have the cure, our view of their ethics might not be the same as their view of theirs)
Good! I, for one, appreciate selection pressure from our insect overlords, it's the only way Darwinism works. Seriously, science is serious business, and I can't stand namby-pambyism. We are supposed to die, it's narcissistic to believe you and yours are more important than the species.
it's healthy for forest fires to periodically burn out the accumulated brush and revitalize the ecosystem.
I doubt you would speak as you did if were, in fact, next to a loved one on their death bed.
But then again, this is all a matter of opinion. We're all entitled to our right answers :)
Escaping death and disease with technology is a slippery slope. If that technology disappears or is unavailable, it puts a species in potential peril. Selection pressure keeps the fitness of the gene pool resilient, although at a cost to many individuals. This is relevant to all species, human and otherwise.
We have started to apply serious medical care to dogs and cats though. I can see perhaps over the longer term as material abundance increases we would actively setup "nature hospitals".
Nonsense. Hominin toolmaking and tool use go back more than 2 million years, long before the last common ancestor of humans and the Neanderthal/Denisovan branch. About all we can say about Denisovan tool use is that their technology, circa 100,000 or 150,000 years ago, was roughly the same as contemporary Neanderthal and human technology.
Look at how we don't expose isolated tribes in Brazil to civilization.
If we found a struggling intelligent alien species on a planet somewhere, would we interfere? Looking at how we handle the issue even within our own species, possibly not.
It should be important to note that whilst this result isn't particularly surprising, there is one giant glaring issue that can undercut this paper.
They define theory of mind based on past definitions and research, and base their methodology on methods that have arisen that seem to fit-for-purpose to those definitions.
Which would usually be fine.
However, during the Replication Crisis, basically everything to do with theory of mind was dashed to pieces. (Worth pointing out that more than 1/3 of psychological research was found to be un-replicatable.)
One of the main components of "theory of mind", "embodied cognition" was particularly badly hit by the crisis.
So whilst this paper may be unsurprising, it rests on the laurels of stuff that has turned out to be nothing more than a polished turd, making the result questionable until such time as psychology has managed to recover the massive amount of ground lost.
You mention a main component that was badly hit, what would that be?
Thanks in advance!
Embodied cognition basically has not a single paper able to be replicated [0], so it's out the window.
This isn't to say that ToM is a flawed theory - in general, it's conclusion is probably true. Rather, psychology has some terrible, terrible, mainstream practices - things like outlier elimination and p-value rounding basically make it impossible to replicate a study unless the original author is involved.
But _assuming_, without evidence to the contrary, that the theory is still sound is denying the problem exists. Thankfully there is some research [6] attempting to show where the world is at with regards to this particular theory.
The study the article is about uses the fairly typical false-belief task. We've been using versions of it since '83, so it should be solid. Except it might not work at all when a person has autism [1], and as autistic people generally are aware of others and that others can differ in thought, the task may be flawed or our understanding flawed. Or maybe autism really does mean you lack something that fundamental [+]. There are other inconsistencies with it. [7]
The false-photograph task was developed in part because of the apparent limitations of the false-belief task. Unfortunately, Woodward's results haven't yet been replicated, just relied upon.
Before the crisis hit home, the research was leaning towards people with autism being ToM deficient, but replications don't show statically sound results that say it conclusively or not, thanks to p-value rounding, whilst some more recent research suggests we simply aren't measuring it correctly, and those results may be caused by the coping mechanisms employed. [2][5] Which, if true, suggests that the false-belief task may not actually be stimulating the right parts of any individual's mind, but rather just engaging them in something visually intensive.
A lot of our measurements of ToM, such as when using fMRIs, have been called into question, as they might just be falsely noticing the spatial orientation that happens during visual stimulus. [3] But again, there isn't enough replication to say definitively one way or t'other.
There's also some lesser issues. Some of the strongest ToM research suggests that the origin lies in mirror neurons [4], but the animals studied in the article of this thread don't have them, and animals possibly having ToM is extremely inflammatory within the broader psychological community. If you want someone to try and replicate your study, suggest that a particular animal has ToM. There's about a 50/50 success rate, which is not really encouraging.
Hopefully that's a little bit to chew on. As I've said, ToM probably does work. But we don't currently have the statistics to say it does.
[0] https://qz.com/1525854/psychologys-replication-crisis-is-deb...
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027785...
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn1611
[3] https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1073858407304654
[4] https://doi.org/10.1016%2FS1364-6613%2898%2901262-5
[5] https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.neuroimage.2011.02.067
[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235234091...
[7] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09567976124478...
[+] I'm not the right person to judge this. I have autism. Which, if the ToM theories are correct, means I lack the perspective to tell whether or not I have a ToM deficit.
I currently research mental representation such as emotions in applied computing which is near-at-hand with ToM and although many of the theories seem intuitive, the replication crisis is something that really bothered me (since I come from a STEM background).
I will read through your post and definitely check the sources, thank you very much!
As for your last point, ToM+Autism might be one of the more interesting aspects of ToM research and as far as I can tell, we are far from conclusive theories.
I'm by no means an expert, I became interested when my ex-wife was being taught p-value rounding in her first year course, right before the Crisis became well-known, which with a background in statistics absolutely horrified me.
I haven't put in a huge effort to stay up-to-date, so hopefully the situation has improved some, but the community has seemed... Divided on whether or not replicating studies is even important.
Your assertion that [2] and [5] are evidence of problems with the conclusion of [1] does not follow. [2] and [5] are findings of atypical neural activity in specific systems/areas of the brain in response to imitating and experiencing emotional stimuli. [1] is a finding that people with ASD score poorly on a test of theory of mind. It does not at all follow that they are evidence that the result of [1] is incorrect. They could just as easily by a reason why people with ASD are lacking in theory of mind rather than be evidence that the result is incorrect.
It's the same thing with [4]. I also don't see evidence to your claim that great apes do not have them. I only see a lack of any kind of studies on MNS in almost all animals. This is the only excerpt I found on them is in [9], and it says nothing of the sort, and it implies that there haven't been any attempts at observation of MNS in other animals including hominids/apes.
There is nothing on whether or not hominids do not have MNS, and on dolphins there is only (at this time) conjecture. On the other hand animals having mirror neurons but not having theory of mind does not mean that mirror neurons are not necessary for forming theory of mind. It just means that it's more complicated than that. [8] asserts that it is a part of it. In fact MNS is now believed to be a separate system from the ToM system (even if they are related and interact) [10].
Although [3] cast some doubt, it is by no means a conclusive dismissal. It essentially says one area of the brain previously studied probably has several different functions instead of just a social-cognitive one. It shows only that the specifically relevant previous work is less conclusive. It is also from 2007, and has nearly 1000 citing papers. One such paper that is fairly highly cited is [10], which compensates for issues presented by [3] by looking at a different area of the brain. Here is another study which examines a different aspect of the brain [12]. It also cites a few studies which it cites as specifically showing reduced activity in regions in the brain which are part of the ToM/mentalizing system.
It is not obvious to me from the evidence you've provided what the problems with ToM are, especially with regards to people with ASD.
[8] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976340...
[9] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5810456/
[10] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524046
[11] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...
[12] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abst...
and
> This conclusion is contrary to suggestions that the mirror system might aid the mentalizing system to inferring intentions of others.
[10] Doesn't seem to support the idea that the mirror system is at all involved in ToM. It may cite other papers, but the conclusions are not in support of that concept.
---
> They could just as easily by a reason why people with ASD are lacking in theory of mind rather than be evidence that the result is incorrect.
I didn't rule this out. However, from the evidence we have, there isn't enough to rule it in, either. The neurological patterns being seen could simply be the mirror system, which doesn't seem to have to be involved with ToM being active. We don't understand enough.
If the test is incorrect, then there isn't a reason to believe people with ASD are ToM deficit.
Further, the result that people with ASD have a mirror system deficit hasn't always been reproduced. [0]
[0] http://www.antoniahamilton.com/HamiltonMarsh_UoM_preprint.pd...
---
[12] Brings out the statistician in me a bit. They use Bonferroni correction, which while it works, it isn't the most suitable way of dealing with the problem on hand. If instead they'd used Sidak correction, the resulting confidence may have been different. They would have ended up close to the same result, but if they've made this very simple mistake, (choosing a correction method that has known applicable flaws, in fact probably the weakest familywise method), what else have they done?
> the mean z score for ToM overconnected clusters was correlated with ADI-R Social and ADI-R Communication scores (r = 0.45, P < .05 and r = 0.51, P < .01, respectively), although neither survived Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.
If it didn't survive simple correction over multiple comparisons, then it probably isn't significant. However, rather than looking at that, this value that can't survive correction lead to their conclusion that their first hypothesis and second hypothesis were correct.
I don't have the time or energy required to use the supplied data to re-evaluate the given data, but currently there does appear to be the suggestion that this paper is a victim of P-value hunting.
Which is kind of the point. These practices are incredibly wide-spread, and incredibly harmful to the whole field.
Well, like I said it's a quickly growing field...[8] is a review from 2001 early on in the discovery of mirror neurons (although I know at some point or another their existence was disputed...not sure if that's still happening) and contains a lot of conjecture, [10] is a meta-analysis from 2009. I would say [10] is correct, so MNS may even be a red herring in the conversation on ToM.
However, if you're responding to confusion over this statement:
> One such paper that is fairly highly cited is [10], which compensates for issues presented by [3] by looking at a different area of the brain.
I believe the paper I attempted to cite here was in fact [11], which is also one of your citations, [5]. In it's discussion it asserts that the area of the brain relevant to the paper is "functionally and spatially dissociable from nearby dorsal clusters which respond to attentional reorienting", citing [3].
>I didn't rule this out. However, from the evidence we have, there isn't enough to rule it in, either.
I absolutely agree...but you asserted [2] and [5] 'suggested we simply aren't measuring it correctly', which they don't. I just wanted to clarify this wasn't the case. [7] suggests that, but absolutely not [2] or [5].
>Further, the result that people with ASD have a mirror system deficit hasn't always been reproduced. [0]
What you're saying is true, but this review doesn't support the assertion that people with ASD do not have a ToM deficit. It brings up two theoretical explanations for why people with ASD 'have difficulty understanding goals and intentions of others', and shows that evidence towards one of the theories, the 'broken mirror theory' is shaky at best and evidence is leaning against the broken mirror theory at worst.
There are three questions here which are being muddied together:
1. Does the MNS have a role in development of ToM?
2. Do people with ASD have a deficient MSN?
3. Do people with autism have a ToM deficit?
The answer to 1 appears to be, we do not know, however as the mentalizing/ToM system can act independently to the MNS, this may not be material to question 3.
The answer to 2 appears to be, it's as of yet inconclusive, and the review you posted seems to assert evidence is mounting to the contrary.
As for question 3...all current measures seems to point towards 'yes' [13], however, all current measures are also disputed as to whether or not they are accurately measuring ToM [14]. The method discussed in [7], is actually not the only method used to study ToM in people with ASD. It is an explicit (verbal) method (such as those referenced in [0] of the parent comment), and 'implicit' (visual) methods followed which used eye tracking (it is not yet clear whether these tests measure different things or the verbal tests are simply ineffective). These methods found impaired mentalizing in people with ASD [15]. More recently, more methods have arisen [14]. Here is one of the linked studies with an interesting discussion [16].
So, frankly it wouldn't be correct in my eyes to say it's certain in any way that people with ASD have a ToM deficit...but at the very least progress and improvements in methodology don't seem to have yet cast significant doubt on conclusions reached by previous research in this topic.
Unfortunately I'm unable to give input on your comments on p-value hacking for [12] since I don't have expertise. But at least the papers subject is on the mechanism rather than the degree to which people with ASD have a ToM deficit, so it doesn't affect the overall discussion too much.
[13] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23686020?dopt=Abstract
[14] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10803-018-3823-3
[15] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.0169...
I think this where we're getting stuck.
For me, if a methodology is in doubt, then so are any conclusions that rely upon it. If the methodologies are in doubt, then the conclusions shouldn't be used as a foundation for anything.
Whereas for you, it seems that you'll continue along with the previous belief until such time as new methodologies quantitatively say one way or the other.
Back when I was in school for mathematics and taking a few grad classes (my math knowledge drained out unfortunately quickly) I was told by a colleague that the Riemann Zeta hypothesis was generally regarded as 'true', and that it's not uncommon for mathematicians to do research proving theorems on the condition that the Riemann Zeta hypothesis is true. Point being, don't think there's anything wrong building on something which we may not yet know to be true...as long as caveats are stated up front.
You have this reversed: only ~1/3 could be replicated [1]. That's much worse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
She also knew not to go into the living room while father was there (because she was technically forbidden to do that), but went to that room when father was away.
I'm pretty sure she had some kind of theory of mind.
Every time it came up in one of my classes (I'm thinking of three: epistemology, learning and cognition, and philosophy of language) there was always somebody around ready to act authoritative on the matter and squash the idea that animals are more capable than we think they are.
On two separate occasions, elsewhere on campus, I found conversations among students in those classes but not majoring in either philosophy or psychology (like myself) where there was unanimous agreement that those disciplines have a stick up their ass about the subject.
Maybe I should accept that they're more familiar with the research in this area than I am, and therefore probably just correct, but I'm inclined to suspect a more particular bias. Like maybe certain influential folk in the recent past tried to make an academic stand for the specialness of humans (if there's a place for such a stand, it's in philosophy or psychology) and their work only travels in certain circles, which makes the cliques stand out to us muggles.
I've found academic discourse to be quirky like that.
When we slaughter other animals by the millions (often in very painful ways) though it can be avoided, are we in a position to ask such questions?
We're basically a cruel species lacking empathy.
The very idea of one species caring for another, which many humans do, seems completely unique in the animal kingdom.
I would say the rest of the natural world is very ruthless. Humans have empathy for other species, nothing else in nature seems to.
I don't think empathy is uniquely human. That would be very unusual for a trait to have emerged fully formed for only one species in all animal kingdom--I think most things are on a gradient.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcs-H5p-MYw
It's an extreme situation that created this, but I think if you take species in which empathy has been observed, and put them in a secure environment, where they are all well fed, I don't think it's crazy to imagine that they too will have the luxury of inter species empathy, without any human involve in that regard. In general, "That's actually why people keeps mammals in the home and not turtles or snake or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy." (Moral Behaviors in animals | Franz de Waal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJxRqTs5nk)
A quick youtube search would provide you countless counterexamples to this.
http://oceanwildthings.com/2018/06/what-humpback-whales-can-...
They also have mirror neurons that have been an important component in theory of mind.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127111607.h...
> And the species that do display empathy at an individual level will also display cruelty.
Sounds like that applies equally to humans. There are cultures where cruelty towards dogs and cats is more common that empathy, and even in places where empathy is more common, individuals can still be cruel.
A "Save the Whales" campaign may seem like empathy towards another species, but it only exists because humans hunted whales so vigorously, and are also in the midsts of ruining their environments, so neither of those sound like examples of true empathy towards another species.
An invasive species (or if an imbalance occurs such as predators become scarce and prey population explodes) will just outcompete other species for resources with no empathy. Humans can certainly do that, but we also sometimes worry about preserving species and habitats.
In any case, I'd argue that this isn't real "empathy." We feel intellectually that we've done something wrong, and we even feel sadness about it (although possibly in a similar way that we'd feel towards abiotic ruin, like destroying all the arches in arches national park), but I don't think we truly empathize with the, say, beetles who are going extinct, as we cannot comprehend their minds in any way.
Since this whole discussion is about theory of mind, we should use empathy correctly: "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another."
I don't think that's the case. It's just ignorance that can lead to cruel behavior, which is just amplified the bigger our society is. That's more actionable than simply judging our species as cruel (call me naive, but I honestly think most of us want to be good).
If you reverse this line of thought, we are psychopaths in our relation to animals. Our relation to animals is selfish, callous, and remorseless use (interpersonal-affective factor) and chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle in or relation to pets (social deviance factor).
Humans have also tendency to act like predators towards our outgroup. Maybe this ability selfish, callous, and remorseless behavior is important part of being a human.
Now we can certainly come with statistics of tendencies, but to my mind they seem to be condemned with cultural biases. Not only the human brain plasticity is molded by the culture where it is immersed, so any data will tell us more about the result of such a culture than about "human inherent tendencies", but even the way we will decide to analyze them and consider/interpret the outcomes will depend on our culture (and our current mood or other more "local" psychological factors).
With that in mind, it's hard to categorically conclude that humans are fundamentally "psychopaths in [their] relation to animals". Dominant cultures, offspring of predatory cultures, surely help to foster such a behavior. That doesn't require it to be an intractable instinctive trait.
Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.
Raw, brutal hunger simply does not exist in advanced societies anymore. You have the privilege to be allowed to question your and others' eating habits. For most of our history that wasn't really a possibility.
Of course we all are part of some systemic oppression one way or another in the products we consume, but with the availability of information on how brutal and sadistic factory farming is, nobody has an excuse in the first world.
Hyperbole aside, I think we can all agree that farming and killing animals isn't as bad as mass executions of people.
It might be best to split human and non-human slaughter into entirely separate categories. You don't need to make comparisons between one and the other; you can just accept that both are unacceptable.
Its not even apples-to-oranges to compare humans to chickens. Its apples-to-something-that-isn't-even-a-fruit. Apples-to-French-poetry...
Regardless of how you feel about chickens vs humans, I don't see why it's binary. Life is life. Suffering is suffering. There's plenty of inside footage of how chickens and turkeys are treated, no conscious being should be subjected to that.
What about the 121 million pigs slaughtered a year? The 29 million cows?
I bet 100% of people visiting farms in the third world would be absolutely reviled by the "modern" human condition with how crop farming is currently done. And 99% of vegans/vegetarians disregard the human violence and food shortage behind that quinoa in their plates.
The more I read this comment, the less I understand it. Following your train of thought, there'd be LESS people enduring that misery and LESS strain on the world's environments if we ate less meat -- we would need less land to grow mankind's food, and would require less imports from third world countries in doing so.
less cruel to whom? I made it very clear that for me, your plant based, "more sustainable" way of consuming cause misery to lots of human-beings, and for me this is more vile and cruel than raise animals to eat nutritious and healthy food.
That is exactly what I mean. We, the not ultra intelligent specie might not have even a clue about how they could benefit from raising and harvesting us :) Maybe that is what some people call faith/religion. Some believe it, some disregard it as low level primitive behavior.
I'm all for acting ethically. And mostly because we are the creature to compose the concept of ethics.
Nature is an idea; a human idea... or a bucket of ideas. One that different people or cultures put different things into. One needs to be highly suspicious of anybody who appeals to nature for some value in itself, or as a source of natural laws. People tend to see in 'nature' what they already believe.
And I think a similar principle holds for how we apply ethics in relation to the not-human, natural world. Careful.
Pretty sure empathetic behaviors existed before anyone identified and conceptualized them.
Roses, names and all that.
I can't believe someone downvoted this. Show me one counter example, I dare you.
Scientists can’t agree on how the intelligence of our primate relatives, but [...]
It's like saying - there's a trained neural net with inputs: opacity of screen = 1 with expected output of searching target box. When tested, similar neural nets with similar training expected output of target box. Hence neural net has "theory of mind"
It'd be way more conclusive if the apes knew what was going on, and then decided to act to change the outcome.
It's not. There's a world of difference between a neural net and a chimpanzee. Chimpanzees are some our closest evolutionary relatives. They are living animals with whom we share a great deal of our DNA (98.8% seems to be an often quoted figure). Therefore, conclusions that are likely given the observation "neural net shows similar behavior to humans" are vastly different those given the observation "Chimpanzee shows similar behavior to humans".
That's like saying there is a 99.9% chance to survive the end of the year vs a 99% chance. Vastly different!
We share 99.9 % of our DNA with any other human being. Chimps are 12X more different than we are to ourselves - and how different we are!
Your use of neural nets is also something of a red herring: you would have just as good a counter-example with two passive devices giving the same output on the same inputs.