Earlier this year, a bonobo named Kanzi (now deceased) was shown to interact with imaginary grapes and juice, suggesting a capacity for imagination. A review from last year suggested that insects possess subjective experience, citing bumblebees who roll balls without reward and honeybees that opt out of difficult tasks. Other studies suggest some birds and flies have lasting fear memories or that some corvids show causal reasoning.
But what does all of this tell us about whether animals possess consciousness? Comparative cognition researcher Edward Wasserman would say not much. Wasserman, who is a professor at University of Iowa, has been studying pigeon cognition for more than 40 years, particularly the birds’ ability to understand complex concepts.
Pigeons are quite intelligent, his findings show, but he says he is highly skeptical of the idea that intelligent behavior can be equated with internal subjective experience. He’s also increasingly interested in what intelligent animal minds can tell us about the nature of intelligent machines. Read more: “Insects and Other Animals May Have Consciousness” Wasserman was recently included on a list of 100 researchers working on provocative and difficult to answer research questions published by The New York Times.
The question attributed to Wasserman was, “Will we ever understand consciousness in a way that could apply to nonliving entities?” I spoke with Wasserman recently about the law of effect and the edge of chaos, how animal research informed machine learning, what separates animal consciousness from human consciousness, and what that can tell us about whether Claude has a mind. You’ve spent many decades studying pigeon behavior. Why do pigeons play such an important role in animal cognition research?
Pigeons came into the process with B.F. In the middle 1940s, Skinner got involved in a project that was ultimately supported for a while by the military, to have pigeons guide missiles via screens. He found out in a hurry that you had to engage in active learning methods to get the pigeon to do this.
He and his students developed this technique to train pigeons by using reward. That’s how “shaping” came about. The work with pigeons was foundational to many things that Skinner later went on to study.
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