
A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test - toufiqbarhamov
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-self-aware-fish-raises-doubts-about-a-cognitive-test-20181212/
======
eksemplar
I’m completely out of my field, but I never understood why it was so hard for
us to imagine that other animals were capable of having rich inner lives or
even being self-aware.

To me it seem obvious that other animals would also possess various degrees of
cognitive ability, I mean, we do.

~~~
castle-bravo
I suspect that it's cultural and derives from our economic relationship to
animals. I remember seeing a film as a child that depicted a native hunter
killing a deer and profusely thanking the spirit of the deer; attributing
intelligence and identity to the deer would predispose a hunter to pay close
attention to the animal's behaviour and give him an edge in hunting it. In
cultures with domestcated animals bred for compliance with human will, it is
less advantageous to view the animal as another mind. Instead, we see them as
tools to be used and discarded. To do otherwise would compromise our ability
to extract maximum economic advantage from use of the animal.

~~~
wincy
I’m not so sure that’s the case though, as for example Talmudic law prohibits
castrating animals. A gelded oxen is much calmer and easier to work with than
a bull. I think it certainly varies from society to society, but ancient
agrarian traditions also respect animals in ways you might not expect.

~~~
dTal
What is interesting is that Talmudic law goes to the trouble. There's no point
prohibiting something that people wouldn't do anyway. There must have been
considerable pressure to castrate animals, and some corresponding spiritual
dismay at the lack of respect for them this entailed. So I wonder if it
doesn't confirm the premise, rather than refute it - the Talmudic authorities
may have been trying to preserve earlier value systems against a changing
society.

------
miltondts
The value of these types of tests has been called into question long before:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHSbvjq1nm4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHSbvjq1nm4)

The above video had a tremendous effect on how I view intelligence and
creativity. Seeing pigeons "talking" and solving problems really puts in
perspective the power of the context/environment.

That is why I think we already have the algorithms for AGI.(i.e. reinforcement
learning is probably all you need) We just don't have the processing and/or
the right context for it to develop. But I also think the result will have all
the downsides of animals/humans. That is, it will be as hard to get the
desired behavior from an AI as it is to get it out of an animal/human because
the predicting the behavior out of the cost function+environment will remain
extremely hard. In fact you can see this mentioned in the video. Getting the
right repertoire even for seemingly "simple" behaviors is hard.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed, that's BF Skinner and associates talking about how creative behavior
arises naturally from learned behavior.

And key here is that things like "the mirror test" are about testing animals
for _what humans naively believe are their unique traits_. And this seems like
it could be easily faulty if these naively human beliefs are false, which
seems quite likely actually.

And also I'd view the focus on consciousness as a naive belief even if
psychologists and philosophers have attempted to systematize it. At the same
time, Skinner in particular as "behaviorist" seems to go from a lab where he's
seeing most behavior _mediated_ by stimulus to a position that seems to imply
behavior coming mechanically from stimulus.

------
godelski
This is an anecdotal story, but has made me feel weird about this test in
general.

I have a cat (who do not pass the mirror test) who loves mirrors. She just
likes looking at herself in them. It is weird. She also frequently walks in on
me in the bathroom and frequently looks at me through the mirror. And I know
she looks at that one because it is the one I look at her with. So it always
has made me feel like this test may be doing something else, because she
clearly recognizes that I'm not in the mirror, but that she can see me with
it. So it seems like she understands what a reflection is, but not her self in
the reflection.

So it seems that animals can understand reflections, but does that really mean
they recognize a self if they recognize themselves in it? IDK, I'm not a
biologist and may be missing a lot from this test.

~~~
porpoisely
The mirror test is very flawed because it assumes other animals think ( or
recognize ) like we do. We are mostly visual creatures so we create visual
tests. But animals like cats are predominantly olfactory creatures. So if you
planted smells of the cat, the cat would immediately recognize the smell as
itself.

Imagine if cat psychologists created a test for humans. They would probably
put your scent on one shirt and 9 other scents of other people on 9 different
shirts and have you "recognize" yourself by picking out the shirt with your
scent. Since we are visual creatures, we would fail such a test and the cat
psychologists would claim that humans obviously have no self-aware. After all,
how could a self-aware creature not recognize it's own scent.

That's how absurd the mirror test is. A mirror test for most animals would be
like a smell test for humans. A cat might not recognize it's own reflection,
but it will recognize its own scent. A human might not recognize our own
scent, but we'll recognize our own reflection.

~~~
jerrre
Interesting point, but not a great analogy. A reflection is a "live" copy, you
can move your arm, and see your reflection move its arm. Your scent experiment
is more like recognizing from photos.

~~~
porpoisely
What difference does it makes whether it is "live" or not? Ultimately, the
question is about recognition and self-awareness. Whether you can do that
through a reflection or a photo or a video or scent, it doesn't matter.

Also, I think don't you understood my point. My point is that different
species recognize themselves differently. Cats recognize themselves and others
through smell. So a mirror test is not applicable. It would be like giving a
blind man the mirror test and expecting an actionable result.

------
clubm8
Reminds me of this article from 2009 where a dead salmon "reacted" to ""a
series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations."

[https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/](https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/)

~~~
thanatropism
The irreplaceable Alone, the pirate doctor, thus reacted to the dead salmon
fMRIs:

[https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/the_problem_with_sci...](https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/10/the_problem_with_science_is_sc.html)

~~~
wpietri
Do we know what happened to him? I really miss his work.

~~~
thanatropism
People speculate that the "Hotel Concierge" Tumblr is him, but HC denies.

------
tsherr
We're still in the "earth is the centre of the universe" stage when it comes
to other life forms.

~~~
gnulinux
2018 Ig Nobel Prize in Anthropology winner: Spontaneous Cross-Species
Imitation in Interaction Between Chimpanzees and Zoo Visitors [1] "[...] for
collecting evidence, in a zoo, that chimpanzees imitate humans about as often,
and about as well, as humans imitate chimpanzees." I think this is evidence
towards your point that we understand very little of cognition of other
species.

[1]:
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-017-0624-9](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-017-0624-9)

~~~
PacifyFish
I'm sure this work was groundbreaking , but let's not kid ourselves that
imitation is some high and misunderstood form of intelligence.

Nor should we kid ourselves that this is new information. The adage "monkey
see, monkey do" has been around for, what, centuries? Is it really that
surprising that apes imitate things they see? Does it really reveal a paltry
understanding of monkey cognition?

~~~
jamiek88
Hence the _ig_ noble prize!

~~~
PacifyFish
Ah thanks, missed the "ig."

~~~
gnulinux
Yeah there is no Nobel in Anthropology.

------
namlem
The cleaner wrasse has long been known to be extremely intelligent. The fact
that scientists are questioning the mirror test because of this fish is more
telling of their credibility than the test's.

The cleaner wrasse even engages in complex economic behavior:
[http://freakonomics.com/podcast/animal-
economics/](http://freakonomics.com/podcast/animal-economics/)

------
colordrops
An anecdote here - my wife and I both met a tropical fish in a tank at a
restaurant and it was clear to both of us that the fish exhibited significant
intelligence. It observed us patiently and even made playful eye contact. It
seems that there are different levels of intelligence within fish species and
they can't just all be categorized the same. It's only very recently where
humans realized the great intelligence found on octopuses. The same may be
true of some fish.

------
rv-de
The mirror test always seemed flawed to be because of its reliance on visual
perception. For many animals eyes and the primary source of environmental
information. For some it's the nose. Now how about a special device that
synthesizes your body odor and fans it back to you - would you recognize
yourself?

------
b_tterc_p
Unless I’m reading this incorrectly, their sample size is 4 fish, 3 of which
sort of passed.

~~~
Buldak
I don't know if the usual caveats about sample size should be salient when
we're investigating something like self-awareness. If I found a fish who could
talk, I wouldn't demur, " ... but it's a small sample."

~~~
b_tterc_p
Point taken, but we’re a far cry from evidence as strong as talking. The
article itself mentions refuted studies which were later proven to not be
reproduceable. It’s more likely to find three weird fish than three fish that
have self awareness unlike the rest of their species. Also unclear how many
chances these fish were given, and I am guessing it was very generous.

------
ada1981
If the fish is able to bring up concerns about the test being used, it has to
have some degree of intelligence.

------
jvagner
I've been doing a 30 day vegetarian challenge this month. It hasn't even been
hard. Pizza is already not working for me. You can guess where I'm going in
January.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going back.

~~~
gnulinux
Going vegan isn't easy at all, I even doubt it's possible if you care about
your protein intake. Plant sources are very carb rich and more and more
evidence suggests high carb, low fat diets aren't good for humans. There is
simply no way to get enough protein from plant sources unless you wanna eat
highly processed tofu every day. A full vegan, high protein diet would require
eating low carb tofu at least 2 meals a day. Otherwise you need to accept
taking exorbitant amounts of carb to get enough protein (basically, from
beans). Seeing that how popular weightlifting in young Americans (especially
males) today, suggesting "vegan diet is easy" is intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not arguing anything about ethics or availability or cost of vegan diet.
There is simply no evidence suggesting full vegan diet is healthy. The most
alarming thing about vegan diet is that you'll have absolutely no source of
Omega 3 except expensive açai berry and walnut (all other plant sources have
trace amount of Omega 3). So in a vegan diet you get excess amount of carbs
(especially sugars) and Omega 6 which causes inflammatory diseases.
[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113095430.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171113095430.htm)

If I were vegan I would eat Trader Joes low carb tofu, avacado, açai berries
and walnut every day, all day and supplement it with high fiber veggies like
broccoli, and brussel sprouts. This is simply not feasible and practical from
a cost and social aspect. Eat too much fruits to get cheap, and widely
available calories and you'll get bizarre amounts of fructose. Good luck with
that.

~~~
aschearer
Not sure why you're speaking with so much authority. I regularly bike 50-100
miles per day. I rock climb 2-3 times weekly. I follow StrongLifts. I'm vegan
and don't obsess over my diet. I simply make an effort to eat a lot of
healthy, whole foods. I feel great. I have tons of energy. It's been five
years without issue.

Further, from my reading on the topic the evidence supports the healthfulness
of a WFPB diet. Eating this way isn't hard nor expensive. It can be socially
inconvenient. It can take time to learn the ropes if you're transitioning to
cooking and eating healthier. But it's worth it!

~~~
monocasa
For those of us that don't bike 50-100 miles in a day, balancing nutrient
intake with caloric intake is very difficult on a vegan diet.

~~~
Rifnfirnd
Should be easier for you since you're burning fewer calories and consuming
fewer nutrients.

~~~
monocasa
Nutrient requirements don't increase nearly as much as caloric requirements
under high activity. Additionally, vegan diets with enough nutrients tend to
be calorie heavy.

So flipping that around, my point is that it's difficult to have a healthy
vegan diet that gives you enough nutrients, without an extremely high activity
level.

~~~
uhtred
What on earth are you talking about?

------
qwerty456127
The ink-dot and mirror "self-awareness" always sounded ridiculous to me. Isn't
it obvious that a self-aware creature does not necessarily has to care about
their appearance and can ignore the dot and that a creature driven by
instincts and reflexes only can be programmed to maintain their skin color
pattern (as the species has developed the pattern for a reason)? I would
rather believe it might be self-aware if the same creature would remove the
dot some times, would do it later every now and then and would ignore it
occasionally.

In fact I even doubt every human is consciously self-aware, a huge number of
people probably live their lives the way we see dreams. So many people have no
doubts their bare feelings and judgments are the reality e.g. believing the
fact they're upset means a counterpart has done something really wrong and/or
hates them while in fact they might just have not slept well or followed a bad
diet...

~~~
fwip
Contrary to popular belief, other people have rich inner lives, not just you.
I know it's gratifying to think you're in an exclusive club of smart people,
but you're really fooling yourself.

You're like a half-step away from the "NPC" meme.

~~~
PavlovsCat
Define "rich".

> _It is unbelievable how blank and devoid of meaning, seen from the outside,
> and how muffled and unconscious, felt from the inside, the lives of most
> people flow along. It 's a dull desiring and suffering, a dream-like
> tumbling through the four season towards death, accompanied by a series of
> trivial thoughts._

\-- Arthur Schopenhauer

> _[..] the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any
> influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think
> that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity.
> It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it 's also true
> that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes
> empty and stupid._

\-- Erich Fromm, who also said

> _The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these
> vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the
> errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same
> form of mental pathology does not make these people sane._

~~~
perl4ever
How would Schopenhauer, or anyone, know what life is like for other people
"felt from the inside"?

I see a fine line between empathy and delusion.

~~~
PavlovsCat
For starters, "rich" is always relative, compared to what we consider rich.
It's not like we can help that, just like you are, just from a short quote,
are making a call about someone being delududed rather than empathic.

For me, a rich inner life, for a human, today, depends a lot on whether a
person belongs to themselves, or is a collection of external opinions they
just repeat. People who play tetris with exclusively pre-configured pieces
instead of thinking. We all do that do a degree of course, but there's a big
fat line between using shorthands and being able to reflect on them, and
_just_ using them and changing the subject whenever asked to reflect on any of
it, and it's drawn with crayon.

Just on HN, how often do people say "I don't necesarily think this, but it's
possible to hold the view that...", or "I think you're right, but sadly the
average person...", "I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced that I feel like I
agree with.." and all sorts of ways to _avoid_ having and owning a personal
position?

And then there's spookyness, e.g.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18102401)

Look at those replies and how partycoder got greyed out a little for having
some humanity and attention span left. Maybe these people generally have rich
inner lives, but that wasn't one of their rich moments. And this goes for all
who passed it by, too, not their best day.

A person who is alive, and has a rich inner life, does not look the other way
in this fashion when others get murdered. They don't have picnics on mass
graves. They do not say things that are technically true but give off a really
cruel smell, and then act offended when called out on that. And hardly anyone
ever _debates_ me on that; if I say it crudely in the wrong context, I get
downvoted, if I say it cleverly in response to someone who said something
dumb, I get upvoted, but either way I can't get no interaction.

So then I'll take _that_ as the answer: not only do many people not have rich
inner lives, they know that, at least subconciously, and they carefully curate
their communication to hide it, with multiple people acting as if orchestrated
by their own defects, their own lack, and their commeon hostility towards
those who have what they lack.

> _You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great
> opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great
> principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it
> because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live
> longer... You 're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that
> you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're
> afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you
> refuse to take the stand._

> _Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you 're just as dead at
> 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but
> the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit._

\-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Any discussion about anything serious and dangerous is filled with comments
saying "I can't do anything", disagreed with by people who have not given up
responsibility and agency, who at best get ignored, at worst punished. And I
don't mean my own comments, they're crap, but I see other people say the same
thing in 3 beautiful sentences, and they too get fuck all for their efforts --
and the people they corrected just ignore them and keep repeating their
bullshit in other threads.

The proof is in the pudding. This shit wouldn't happen in a community where
most people have rich inner lives, and such a community wouldn't happen in a
world where most people have rich inner lives. I see people _so_ dead, they
outlawed the concept of deadness being discussed in earnest. We can talk about
how "the average user doesn't care about privacy" (if that happens to lead to
totalitarian horror, so be it, they don't know and don't care, so we're off
the hook)... but pointing out how sick it is to talk about the nice landscape
or even Star Wars in context of genocide being swept under the rug -- that's
_not cool_. _Being_ so sick is okay, _calling_ it sick is not.

> _Hobbes [..] even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline
> the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such
> a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry
> of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being
> called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to
> surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make
> him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against
> tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing
> government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent
> victim to an incomprehensible raison d 'etat._

\-- Hannah Arendt

Being broken in that way, which is completely accepted in polite society, is
mutually exclusive with having an inner life I would consider rich. And I
don't need to prove that others have a rich inner live, they need to express
it. If they don't, as far as I'm concerned, there is no difference between
them having a rich inner life or not. That doesn't mean I dehuamnize them,
that just means when they say something, I can't take it at face value, unless
I kicked their tires and they showed signs of rich aliveness.

I don't auot-import and auto-update any random crap from untrusted sources
just because someone might call me "deluded" for noticing the inability or
unwillingness of someone to reason themselves out of a wet paperbag. If that's
all, people who I don't consider to have rich inner lives being offended at
that (and then being hypocrites by being so sure I'm deluded, that I can't
possibly be seeing anything they don't, but otherwise offering no argument) --
that's like saying if I use an ad-blocker, you'll show me super mean ads. It's
utterly moot, and kinda like pretending to burn a bridge after I burned it. I
don't care about the revisionism going on behind that burned bridge, that's
why I burned it. It's like a psycho SO you can't break up with because they
_have_ to twist it around so they broke up with you. Fine, whatever, as long
as it's over ^^

Anywhere on the net, and "even on HN", there's so many comments that don't
really parse. There's so much people talking past each other, hiding their
argument in "..", and when you ask them "how so?" or "can you elaborate",
there's just nothing. Most recent example for me:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18673428)

I can't say "that's a brainfart" or "that's nonsense". No, I need to say "can
you walk me through the logic here", heh. And I'll never know if the other
person simply hasn't seen my question.. but I know 19 times out of 20, I get
no answer. It's like certain things are just facade, and when you try to
access them, the program freezes. So basically, even when a program crashes
half of the time, produces broken output the rest of the time, I can't make
any deductions about the quality of the code? No. I can, I did, I will again.

P.S.: I'll take me, and possibly Schopenhauer, being arrogant. But you would
do yourself a disfavour to hold my attitude against Erich Fromm, that dude was
from a wholly different and greater caliber. He knows a lot about how unhappy
and alienated people are because he actually listened to them, and it doesn't
take much of his writing, or interviews, to see that he was a very kind and
optimistic and loving person. He also said many things that would kinda
deflate and supersede my self-righteous rants, so I never quote those parts.
Read him and you shall find :D

~~~
perl4ever
"you are, just from a short quote, are making a call about someone being
delududed rather than empathic."

That is not the case. I was _not_ making a call from a short quote. By saying
there is a "fine line" I wasn't literally endorsing a dichotomy, but rather
expressing the futility of trying to make one. Irrespective of any quote,
empathy is _always_ a delusion, in the sense that there is no such thing as
direct mind-to-mind contact, but at the same time one can be right or wrong
about what someone else is feeling. In that sense, one may "have empathy" or
not, but not final authority over someone else's humanity.

