Theory of Mind and Insight in Chimpanzees, Elephants, and Other Animals?

Abstract

This chapter attempts to provide an accessible review of a fundamental scientific and philosophical question: Are animals conscious? Instead of trying to address the issue of consciousness as a whole, this partial review will for the most part touch upon just two facets of consciousness theory of mind and insight. This review takes it for granted that we need to place a question mark on the understandable but as yet unfounded assumption that our evolutionary next of kin the great apes are also our closest cognitive relatives. At the moment, we cannot rule out the view that a classification of the animal kingdom based on intelligence would probably cut right across the classifications based on structure (Hobhouse, 1915). As a matter of fact, at the moment we cannot even refute the counterintuitive claim that there are no differences in intelligence between one nonhuman vertebrate and another (Macphail, 1982; Thomas, 1986). On first sight, the case for consciousness in animals seems overwhelming. Given the evolutionary notion of continuity, and given moreover the remarkable physiological and genetic similarity between apes and humans, it seems scarcely credible to argue that apes are devoid of any trace of consciousness. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to suppose that consciousness confers an enormous evolutionary advantage, for it allows animals to try out possible actions in their head without actually performing them through costly trial and error (Griffin, 2001). Common intuition seems to point in the same direction, as the following passage suggests. When I looked into Washoes eyes she caught my gaze and regarded me thoughtfully, just like my own son did. There was a person inside that ape costume. And in those moments of steady eye contact I knew that Washoe was a child (Fouts, 1997). Regretfully, the question of animal consciousness cannot be resolved by either intuition or theory. Although intuition often serves as valuable breeding ground for research ideas, it is notoriously fallible. And as far as theory is concerned, it could be just as well supposed that consciousness exerts its own evolutionary price (e.g., hesitation when swift action is called for), or that it is not readily achieved, even when favored by natural selection.