Wait. Barash’s hypothesis overlooks the fact that suffering is more than an alarm system. An alarm could be going off in an empty building. If some invertebrates show much more self-awareness than expected, it hardly follows that all do. We risk impeding humane reforms if we cast the net too widely.
Animal minds
At Mind Matters News: Are birds really smarter than reptiles?
Scientists clash over how to measure animal intelligence:… Taking all that into consideration, to beat the birds, the reptiles must outdo an impressive list of recently noted accomplishments. Will the reptiles win? Match? Stay tuned?
How can spiders be so smart?
Even animal life forms don’t seem to obey materialist brain rules.
The oldest cephalopods — much older than thought — had 10 working arms, not 8
Wouldn’t that mean that the cephalopods had an even more complex nervous system in the past? For that matter, why do we hear about so much stasis and so little about evolution? The evolution must be happening very fast, punctuated by long periods of stasis.
What bats learn from echolocation: “much more complex than previously thought”
This raises an issue: Social intelligence seems to imply an underlying intelligence in the universe. It’s not at all clear that it is merely a matter of natural selection acting on random mutations (Darwinism). For one thing, if there were no intelligence, there would be no need for social intelligence. Social intelligence is a response to existing intelligence. And no one knows how it arose.
At Mind Matters News: Ants use algorithms similar to those of the internet
Discovering that ants follow the same principles as computer systems raises the question of the ultimate source of intelligence in nature; it’s not the ant.
At Mind Matters News: The remarkable things we’re learning about bird intelligence
Crows and chimpanzees are thought to have last had a common ancestor 300 million years ago. Bees are thought to have had a common ancestor with them 600 million years ago. But crows, chimpanzees, and bees are all much more closely related to life forms that have not attracted attention for their intelligence. Are we just missing their intelligence? Or perhaps the question of unusual intelligence in some birds and other life forms but not others is one of the fruitful mysteries of science that invites further study.
At Mind Matters News: The mystery of how newborns know things gets deeper
An innate program guides newborns to seek human faces and body movements but it wanes in favor of personal learning. But that may take longer for autists.
At Mind Matters News: Source of most animal intelligence still a mystery
Question: Magnetic poles can shift. We can suddenly have north become south and south become north. The continents can drift. So can these animal behaviors accommodate changes in earth’s magnetic field or its geography in order to allow animals to continue to migrate? No one really knows the answers to this stuff as yet.
At Mind Matters News: Can insects be conscious? Let’s look at bees first
Consciousness does not seem to reside in the neocortex. So complex behavior in bees has raised the question for biologists and philosophers alike.
At Mind Matters News: How do insects use their very small brains to think clearly?
Another strategy, one that enables social insects to engage in complex behaviors, is an established but little understood concept: The colony can have a memory that individual insects don’t have. Stanford biology prof Deborah M. Gordon, author of Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010), recounts an experiment she did, to create an obstacle for ants and see if they remembered it.
At Mind Matters News: Can animal behavior simply be transferred into the genome?
Eric Cassell: I think it’s such a daunting task to try to explain how something is sophisticated as an algorithm, particularly a mathematical type of algorithm, could have evolved in the first place. It has to be in the genome somehow. And then that information that’s in the genome has to be encoded in a neural network when the brain develops, and then it all has to be run, as the animal is performing the behavior.
At Mind Matters News: Science paper: Could octopuses be aliens from outer space?
There is no simple way of accounting for how smart the eight-armed invertebrate is. So, even if we dismiss an extraterrestrial origin, we still face a mystery.
At Mind Matters News: Neuroscience mystery: How do tiny brains enable complex behavior?
Eric Cassell notes that insects with brains of only a million neurons exhibit principles found only in the most advanced man-made navigation systems. How?
At Mind Matters News: Dogs understand many more words than we think
Of course, the dog is responding to words as signals, not as components of sentences.