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VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

1. Animal Intelligence, Persona and Sociality

Gagliano, Monica. The Mind of Plants: Thinking the Unthinkable. Communicative & Integrative Biology. 10/2, 2017. We use this entry to gather and report recent contributions about these floral capacities. The University of Western Australia natural biologist is a leading advocate of a growing movement to extend animal cognitive abilities to this leafy realm. The title paper is a follow up to Learning by Association in Plants by MG, et al in Nature Scientific Reports (6/38427, 2016), see second quote. A prime reference is the work of Eva Jablonka and colleagues (search EJ, Simona Ginsburg) about life’s evolutionary preference for an associative knowledge gaining method. See also Plants Learn and Remember by MG in Oecologia (186/1, 2018), Ecological Justice for Nature in Critical Systems Thinking by Anne Stephens et al in Systems Research and Behavioral Science (I36/1, 2018, third quote), and Do Plants Have Something to Say? by Ellie Shechet in the New York Times (August 26, 2019) about Monica’s mission.

Across all species, individuals thrive in complex ecological systems, of which they rarely have complete knowledge. To cope with this uncertainty and make good choices while avoiding errors, organisms are able to exploit key features within their environment. While it is well known that humans and other animals are quick to learn specific cues within locales and circumstances; the idea that plants are also capable of learning by association has not been proven until now. Here I comment on the recent paper (2016) that experimentally demonstrated associative learning in plants, thus qualifying them as proper subjects of cognitive research. (Abstract excerpt)

The emergence of associative learning has been proposed as one of the key biological innovations that powered the Cambrian explosion by driving the evolution of new sensory modalities and altering the life and adaptive possibilities of animals. Our results now show that associative learning is also an essential component of plant behaviour. We propose that the ability to construct, remember and recall new relationships established via associative learning constitutes a universal adaptive mechanism shared by all organisms. The ubiquity of associative learning across taxa, including non-animal groups suggests that the role this learning process plays in nature is thus far underexplored and underappreciated. (MG, et al, 2016, 5)

The authors of this paper provide a brief overview of the rights‐based literature that has been used to produce mechanisms to acknowledge non‐human agency in critical systems thinking (CST). With consideration of recent studies of plant cognition, we propose that by recasting CST's underlying commitments, we may produce new ontologies and new ways of working with the embedded stakeholders of socioecological systems. While the discursive shifts are simple, to recast ‘social awareness’ as ‘socioecological awareness’ and ‘human emancipation’ to ‘emancipation’, these changes open up the boundaries, scope and relevance of practice. (Stephens Abstract)

Griffin, Donald. Animal Minds: From Cognition to Consciousness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. An update of Griffin’s 1992 breakthrough book based on a lifetime of the study of perceptual and reflective states in animals who are in fact able to think, remember, plan, and deceive akin to humans.

In view of the likelihood that all or at least a wide range of animals experience some form of subjective conscious awareness, it is both more parsimonious and more plausible to assume that the difference between human and other brains and minds is the content of conscious experience…..Rather that an absolute all-or-nothing dichotomy between human brains uniquely capable of producing conscious experience, on one hand, and all other brains that can never do so, on the other, this hypothesis is consistent with our general belief in evolutionary continuity. (18)

Hauser, Marc. Wild Minds. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. Nonhuman creatures, in their specific habitat, are capable of similar mentation and emotion. “We share the planet with thinking animals.”

Heyes, Cecilia. Four Routes of Cognitive Evolution. Psychological Review. 110/4, 2003. The study of how human faculties evolved is presently hampered by a “nativist” paradigm and its attribution to cerebral modules. A better approach is to include four domains: phylogenetic construction or inflection, and ontogenetic construction or inflection. Much of the article is about overcoming this misplaced emphasis with a more “constructivist” approach.

A route is described as phylogenetic when the source is natural selection and as ontogenetic when the source is developmental selection. It is called construction when the locus is a cognitive mechanism and inflection when the locus is input to the cognitive mechanism. (714)

Heyes, Cecilia and Ludwig Huber, eds. The Evolution of Cognition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Studies by way of “evolutionary psychology” that imply the driving force toward homo sapiens is social interaction which builds bigger brains.

Hurley, Susan and Matthew Nudds, eds. Rational Animals? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. An extensive, formal work, as scholars lately come around to admitting and qualifying that throughout Metazoan kingdoms, creatures indeed possess an active rationality and relative culture.

Japyassu, Hilton and Kevin Laland. Extended Spider Cognition. Animal Cognition. 20/3, 2017. Federal University of Bahia, Brazil, and University of St. Andrews, UK social biologists cleverly perceive a natural propensity for informed intelligence which is seen to expand beyond a creature’s neural system only. In a broad evolutionary arc, life seems to have a persistent drive to gain an increasing beneficial knowledge. Our collaborative human sapiensphere lately seems to have attained an unlimited capacity for reconstructions from this vital microcosm to an infinite, conducive macrocosm. We cite the full Abstract to convey.

There is a tension between the conception of cognition as a central nervous system (CNS) process and a view of cognition as extending towards the body or the contiguous environment. The centralised conception requires large or complex nervous systems to cope with complex environments. Conversely, the extended conception involves the outsourcing of information processing to the body or environment, thus making fewer demands on the processing power of the CNS. The evolution of extended cognition should be particularly favoured among small, generalist predators such as spiders, and here, we review the literature to evaluate the fit of empirical data with these contrasting models of cognition. Spiders do not seem to be cognitively limited, displaying a large diversity of learning processes, from habituation to contextual learning, including a sense of numerosity.

To tease apart the central from the extended cognition, we apply the mutual manipulability criterion, testing the existence of reciprocal causal links between the putative elements of the system. We conclude that the web threads and configurations are integral parts of the cognitive systems. The extension of cognition to the web helps to explain some puzzling features of spider behaviour and seems to promote evolvability within the group, enhancing innovation through cognitive connectivity to variable habitat features. Graded changes in relative brain size could also be explained by outsourcing information processing to environmental features. More generally, niche-constructed structures emerge as prime candidates for extending animal cognition, generating the selective pressures that help to shape the evolving cognitive system. (Abstract)

Kabadayi, Can and Mathias Osvath. Ravens Parallel Great Apes in Flexible Planning for Tool-Use and Bartering. Science. 357/202, 2017. Lund University, Sweden, cognitive scientists offer more evidence about how animals are smart, clever, and indeed human-like in their creative behaviors. If a morsel is put in the middle of a one inch diameter, six inch long, horizontal tube on a post, the ravens manipulate handy twigs to push it out. The experience is then mentally stored for further usage. See also a commentary in the same issue A Raven’s Memories are for the Future by Markus Boeckle and Nicola Clayton.

The ability to flexibly plan for events outside of the current sensory scope is at the core of being human and is crucial to our everyday lives and society. Studies on apes have shaped a belief that this ability evolved within the hominid lineage. Corvids, however, have shown evidence of planning their food hoarding, although this has been suggested to reflect a specific caching adaptation rather than domain-general planning. Here, we show that ravens plan for events unrelated to caching—tool-use and bartering—with delays of up to 17 hours, exert self-control, and consider temporal distance to future events. Their performance parallels that seen in apes and suggests that planning evolved independently in corvids, which opens new avenues for the study of cognitive evolution. (Abstract)

King, James, et al. Evolution of Intelligence, Language and Other Emergent Processes for Consciousness. Stuart Hameroff, et al, eds. Toward a Science of Consciousness II. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. A report about primate researchers who are finding a phylogenetic gradation in animal behavior and awareness.

This chapter proposes the hypothesis that the evolution of consciousness in mammals paralleled the development of independent control of behavior. In other words, as the sophistication of independent control has increased, we assume a corresponding increase in consciousness has occurred. (383)

Koch, Christoph and Florian Mormann. The Neurobiology of Consciousness. Zewail, Ahmed, ed. Physical Biology: From Atoms to Medicine. London: Imperial College Press, 2008. Caltech neuroscientists in part discern an emergent continuum of stirring sentience which extends by degree through the animal kingdoms.

There are three reasons to assume that many species, in particular those with complex behaviors such as mammals, share at least some aspects of consciousness with humans: (i) Similar neuronal architectures (ii) Similar behavior (iii) Evolutionary continuity. (376)

Krutzen, Michael, et al. Cultural Transmission of tool Use in Bottlenose Dolphins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102/8939, 2005. One of the first observations of an existing material culture amongst marine mammals. Female dolphins forage by breaking off a piece of sponge and using it to stir up the sea floor. Similar to tool use by chimpanzees, this is primarily a matriline activity and heritage.

Kuo, Tzu-Hsin and Chuan-Chin Chiao. Learned Valuation during Forage Decision-making in Cuttlefish. Royal Society Open Science. December, 2020. National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan neuroscientists describe the many clever, thought through devices that this cephalopod uses to find and secure food. Their practice of “optimal foraging theory” indicates a heretofore unexpected level of aware intelligence in this species. See also Cuttlefish Took Something Like a Marshmallow Test by Veronique Greenwood in the New York Times for December 30, 2020.

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