Crows are self-aware just like us, says new study (2020)

Here's what the experiment did:

The crows were trained to watch for a flash — which didn’t always appear — and then peck at a red or blue target to register whether or not a flash of light was seen. Ozzie and Glenn were also taught to understand a changing “rule key” that specified whether red or blue signified the presence of a flash with the other color signifying that no flash occurred.

In each round of a test, after a flash did or didn’t appear, the crows were presented a rule key describing the current meaning of the red and blue targets, after which they pecked their response.

This sequence prevented the crows from simply rehearsing their response on auto-pilot, so to speak. In each test, they had to take the entire process from the top, seeing a flash or no flash, and then figuring out which target to peck.

Not sure I'd say this means 'self aware' but it does seem smart, as in evidence of problem solving rather than just conditioning

I don’t doubt that corvids are quite intelligent, but I do find the conclusion jump in this type of science from “we did these experiments and saw these results” to “crows are self aware” to be quite dubious. Specifically the connection between X and Y in “we are demonstrating X by doing Y” is very often quite weak and prevalent across scientific disciplines.

Of course, us being self-aware is pure conjecture.

A short video I enjoy along these lines:

Causal understanding of water displacement by a crow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04

It seems to me that most of these animal experiments boil down to asking "do they have experiences like we have?" Of course they don't -- they're crows and we're humans. Duh. It's a philosophical problem, not a scientific one.

Nagel [1] says, "* But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism."

Definitely read the whole article.

So when we're asking if corvids are self-aware, we can't help really* asking if their experience of self-awareness is the same as ours. And we cannot know that, as Nagel so elaborately demonstrates.

Consciousness (and intelligence) are not binary on/off choices. They're points in a multi-dimensional space.

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

Never understood the self-awareness consciousness stuff. How is it rational to think at all that any species with a brain is anything more than a collection of responses to that stimuli, humans especially included?