Humans are master meaning generators

A hashtag in the sky above a school at dusk in southern Rhode Island.  

Was it put there intentionally? What does it mean?

For as long as we’ve been writing about exquisite Paleolithic cave paintings and carefully crafted Stone Age tools we’ve been debating their meanings.  And the debate carries on because meaning is difficult to interpret and that’s largely because “what does it mean?” is a loaded question.

“Meaning” is a hallmark of humanity and, as the thinking often goes, it is a unique aspect of Homo sapiens. No other species is discussing meaning with us. We’re alone here. So we’re supposed to be at least mildly shocked when we learn that Neanderthals decorated their bodies with eagle talons. And it’s supposed to be even harder to fathom that Neanderthals marked symbolic thinking on cave walls. But such is the implication of lines marked by Neanderthals in the shape of a hashtag at Gibraltar. 

source: "The Gibraltar Museum says scratched patterns found in the Gorham’s Cave, in Gibraltar, are believed to be more than 39,000 years old, dating back to the times of the Neanderthals. Credit: EPA/Stewart Finlayson"

This sort of meaningful behavior, combined with the fact that many of us are harboring parts of the Neanderthal genome, encourages us to stop seeing Neanderthals as separate from us. But another interpretation of the hashtag is one of mere doodling; its maker was not permanently and intentionally scarring the rock with meaning. These opposing perspectives on meaning, whether it’s there or not, clash when it comes to chimpanzee behavior as well.  

We’ve grown comfortable with the ever-lengthening list of chimpanzee tool use and tool-making skills that researchers are reporting back to us. But a newly published chimpanzee behavior has humans scratching their heads. Chimpanzees in West Africa fling stones at trees and hollow tree trunks. The stones pile up in and around the trees, looking like a human-made cairn (intentional landmark) in some cases.  Males are most often the throwers, pant-hooting as they go, which is a well-known score to various interludes of chimpanzee social behavior. 

source: "Mysterious stone piles under trees are the work of chimpanzees.© MPI-EVA PanAf/Chimbo Foundation"

Until now, chimp behaviors that employ nature’s raw materials—stones, logs, branches, twigs, leaves—have been easy to peg as being “for” a reason. They’re for cracking open nutritious nuts, for stabbing tasty bushbabies (small nocturnal primates), or for termite fishing. But throwing stones at trees has nothing to do with food. If these chimps do it for a reason then it’s a little more esoteric. 

Maybe they do it for pleasure, to let off steam, or to display, or maybe they do it because someone else did it. It may be all of those things at once, and maybe so much more. Maybe you’d call that ritual. Maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe you’d say that they do it because that’s what chimps do in those groups: they walk on their knuckles; they eat certain foods; they make certain sounds; they sleep in certain terms in certain trees; and they do certain things with rocks, like fling them in certain places. Maybe we could just say that this behavior is the way of certain chimpanzees, hardly more mystifying than other behaviors that we’ve come to expect of them.

For comparison, I have certain ways. There are piles of books near my desk. They pile up on tables and shelves. I could fling books on the floor but I don’t. I’m not against flinging them on the floor; it’s just not how things are usually done. I share this behavior with many other, but not all, humans in the presence of books, tables, and shelves.  Until I wrote this paragraph, I never gave it much thought, it’s not something that factors even remotely into how I see the world or my place in it, and yet the piling of books on tables and shelves is quite a conspicuous and, therefore, large part of my daily life.

  

So, why isn’t someone setting up a camera trap in my office and writing up “human accumulative book piling” in Nature? Because this type of behavior, whatever it means, is quintessentially human. No one could claim to discover it in a prestigious publication unless they discovered it in a nonhuman. And they did.

Normally what we do when we learn something new about chimpanzee behavior is we end up crossing one more thing off our list of uniquely human traits. “Man the tool-maker” was nixed decades ago. What should we cross off the list now with this new chimp discovery? Would it be “ritual” and by extension “meaning,” or would it be “piling up stuff”? About that Neanderthal hashtag, do we cross off “art” or “symbolism” and by extension “meaning,” or would we just cross off “doodling,” which holds a quite different meaning? Rather than crossing anything off our list, do we welcome Neanderthals into our kind so we can keep our monopoly on hashtags? Whatever we decide, case by case, trait by trait, we usually interpret our shrinking list of uniquely human traits to be clear demonstration that other animals are becoming more human-like the more we learn about the world.

That’s certainly one way to see it.  But there’s another, more existential, and therefore, arguably, more human way to look at that shrinking list of uniquely human traits: Humans are becoming less human-like the more we learn about the world.

#WhatDoesThatEvenMean #PantHoot #Hashtag #ThisIsMyCaveWall 

Quantum spookiness is nothing compared to biology's mysteries!

The news is properly filled these days with reports of studies documenting various very mysterious aspects of the cosmos, on scales large and small.  News media feed on stories of outer space's inner secrets.  We have dark matter and dark energy that, if models of gravitational effects and other phenomena are correct, comprise the majority of the cosmos's contents. We have relativity, that shows that space and even time itself are curved.  We have ideas that there may be infinitely many universes (there are various versions of this, some called the multiverse).  We have quantum uncertainty by which a particle or wave or whatever can be everywhere at once and have multiple superposed states that are characterized in part only when we observe it.  We have space itself inflating (maybe faster than the speed of light).  And then there's entanglement, by which there seem to be instant correlated actions at unlimited distances.  And there is some idea that everything is just a manifestation of many-dimensional vibrations ('strings').

The general explanations are that these things make no 'sense' in terms of normal human experience, using just our built in sensory systems (eyes, ears, touch-sense, smell, etc.) but that mathematically observable data fit the above sorts of explanations to a huge degree of accuracy.  You cannot understand these phenomena in any real natural way but only by accustoming yourself to accept the mathematical results, the read-outs of instrumentation, and their interpretation.  Even the most thoughtful physicists routinely tell us this.

These kinds of ideas rightfully make the news, and biologists (perhaps not wanting to be left out, especially those in human-related areas) are thus led to concocting other-worldly ideas of their own, making promises of miracle precision and more or less health immortality, based on genes and the like.  There is a difference, however: unlike physicists, biologists reduce things to concepts like individual genes and their enumerable effects, treating them as basically simple, primary and independent causes.

In physics, if we could enumerate the properties of all the molecules in an object, like a baseball, comet, or a specified set of such objects, we (physicists, that is!) could write formal equations to describe their interactions with great precision.  Some of the factors might be probabilistic if we wanted to go beyond gravity and momentum and so on, to describe quantum-scale properties, but everything would follow the same set of rules for contributing to every interaction.  Physics is to a great, and perhaps ultimate extent, about replicable complexity.  A region of space or an object may be made of countless individual bits, but each bit is the same (in terms of things like gravity per unit mass and so on).  Each pair, say, of interactions of similar particles etc. follows the same rules. Every electron is alike as far as is known.  That is why physics can be expressed confidently as a manifestation of laws of nature, laws that seem to hold true everywhere in our detectable cosmos.

Of cats and Schroedinger's cat
Biology is very different.  We're clearly made of molecules and use energy just as inanimate objects do, and the laws of chemistry and physics apply 100% of the time at the molecular and physics levels. But the nature of life is essentially the product of non-replicable complexity, of uniquely interacting interactions.  Life is composed strictly of identifiable elements and forces etc at the molecular level. Yet the essence of life is descent with modification from a common origin, Darwin's key phrase, and this is all about differences.  Differences are essential when it comes to the adaptation of organisms, whether by natural selection, genetic drift, or whatever, because adaptation means change.  Without life's constituent units being different, there would be no evolution beyond purely mechanical changes like the formation of crystals.  Even if life is, in a sense the assembling of molecular structures, it is the difference in their makeups that makes us different from crystals.

Evolution and its genetic basis are often described in assertively simple terms, as if we understood them in a profound ultimate sense.  But that is a great exaggeration: the fact that some simple molecules interacted 4 billion years ago, in ways that captured energy and enabled the accretion of molecular complexity to generate today's magnificent biosphere, is every bit as mysterious, in the subjective sense of the term at least, as anything quantum mechanics or relativity can throw at us. Indeed, the essential nature of life itself is equally as non-intuitive. And that's just a start.

The evolution of complex organisms, like cats, built through developmental interactions of awe-inspiring complexity, leading to units made up of associated organ systems that communicate internally in some molecular ways (physiology) and externally in basically different (sensory) ways is as easy to say as "it's genetic!", but again as mysterious as quantum entanglement.  Organisms are the self-assembly of an assemblage of traits with interlocking function, that can be achieved in countless ways (because the genomes and environments of every individual are at least slightly different).  An important difference is that quantum entanglement may simply happen, but we--evolved bags of molecular reactions--can discover that it happens!

The poor cat in the box.  Source: "Schrödinger cat" by File:Kamee01.jpg: Martin Bahmann, Wilimedia Commons

This self-assembly is wondrous, even more so than the dual existence of Schroedinger's famous cat in a box.  That cat is alive and dead at the same time depending on whether a probilistic event has happened inside the box (see this interesting discussion), until you open the box, in which case the cat is alive or dead. This humorous illustration of quantum superposition garnered a lot of attention, though not that much by Schroedinger himself for which it was just a whimsical way to make the point about quantum strangeness.

But nobody seems to give a thought beyond sympathy for the poor cat!  That's too bad, because what's really amazing is the cat itself.  That feline construct makes most of physics pale by comparison.  A cat is not just a thing, but a massively well-organized entity, a phenomenon of interactions, thanks to the incredible dance of embryonic development.  Yet even development and the lives that plants and animals (and, indeed, single-celled organisms) live, impressively elaborate as they are, pale by comparison with various aspects these organisms have of awareness, self-awareness, and consciousness.

This is worth thinking about (so to speak) when inundated by the fully justified media blitz that weird physics evokes, but then you should ask whether anything in the incomprehensibly grand physics and cosmology worlds are even close to the elusiveness and amazing reality of these properties of life and how these properties could possibly come about, how they evolved and how they develop in each individual--as particular traits, not just the result of some generic evolutionary process.

And there's even more:  If flies or cats are not 'conscious' in the way that we are, then it is perhaps as amazing that their behavior, which so seems to have aspects of those traits, could be achieved without conscious awareness.  But if that be so, then the mystery of the nature of consciousness having evolved, and the nature of its nature, are only augmented many-fold, and even farther from our intuition than quantum entanglement.

Caveat emptor
Of course, we may have evolved to perceive the world just the way the world really is (extending our native senses with sensitive instruments to do so).  Maybe what seems strange or weird is just our own misunderstanding or willingness to jump on strangeness bandwagons.  Here from Aeon Magazine is a recent and thoughtful expression of reservations about such concepts as dark matter and energy.

If quantum entanglement and superposition, or relativity's time dilation and length contraction, are inscrutable, and stump our intuition, then surely consciousness trumps those stumps.  Will anyone reading this blog live to see even a comparable level of understanding in biology to what we have in physics?

Smart as can bee; leafcutter bees, another example

A week or so ago we blogged about a paper on bee navigation and other aspects of animal behavior, and whether such behavior can be said to be evidence of 'intelligence'.  We mused about the word, and whether ideas about whether animals other than ourselves are 'intelligent' or 'sentient' or--the real big Prize, 'conscious'.  That post generated quite a lot of interest.

It's perhaps a definitional issue, beautifully suited to endless debate and a guarantee of no solution.  But one thing is for sure, we think:  what the little old bee-brain guys are doing is quite complex.

In the interim, we read this beautiful and fascinating post by Hollis Marriot on her blog, "In The Company of Plants and Rocks."  Hollis is, we think it's right to say, truly a naturalist (though a professional botanist) who lives and works in Wyoming and blogs about botany, geology, nature, her travels, and more.  She's a beautiful writer, photographer and observer of the world.  The question this particular post raises is similar to ours about bee navigation or the problem-solving talents of crows.  In this case, she describes how solitary leaf-cutter bees cut a disk from nearby leaves, curl it up, tuck it under their legs like an architect carrying building blue-prints, and hie back home.  Home to a leaf-cutter bee is likely to be a crevice in an old piece of wood.  They build a dozen or so cells inside their crevice, lay an egg in each one and seal it with one of the leafy disks they've harvested a short distance away.

Leafcutter bee: Wikipedia

Now just think about any of these acts this behavior requires: finding an appropriate leaf (is it by some taste-test as well as size and so on?), then knowing how to cut a circular disk (without using a compass to inscribe it first!), then how to roll it up and tuck it between (well, among) their legs, and so on.  This is complex behavior and cannot entirely be pre-programmed.  That's because no a priori program can know where the tasty, cushiony leaves will be, nor how to fold them up, and so on.  It must look, smell, hear or whatever around its environment, resolve various images such as the trees and leaves, often when both it and they are moving, assess them, know how to work directed aeronautics of its wings and halteres to get there, and its many appendages to land its complex mouth and jaws to carve.  And then how to do the apparently simple thing of tucking it in amongst six (count 'em!) legs, then adjust its aeronautics so it can still fly properly back home.

To me, this is mental behavior, and whether or not you want to say it involves 'thinking' is basically a semantic question.  I personally would call it intelligent, far less robotic than, say, how amoebas mechanically and purely biochemically flow pseudopods towards food or respond to light.  It involves neurons, sensory systems, limbs and so on that use many of the same genes we use for the same systems.  Just because it's not doing full-blown trigonometry, what it is doing is still complex.

This is what leads me to think those who are being too restrictive about what counts as intelligence, as we discussed last week, are minimizing a very important, and fascinating question:  How can DNA and its coded products possibly achieve such feats?  This is not a mystical question, nor any invocation of mind-matter dualism immaterialism.  It's simply a willingness to acknowledge that our understanding of brain function, and the translation of linear codes to 4-dimensional actions, is at present elaborate in data-detail and paltry in substance.

From this point of view, none of us should be making pronouncements about what is 'genetic' and what 'must be' programmed and what 'environmental'.   This is another illustration of clear knowledge that should make us much more humble about what we claim to be knowledge--about bees, much less human behavior.

A Leash of Hemp: Does our slow, overbearing consciousness mislead us about human nature?

source

Running is a precious 30 or so minutes for me. It's a drug. If the pace and the light and the rock'n'roll in the earpods are just right, it's god. But today while I ran on the old railroad-turned-trail in our neighborhood, everything was more or less ungodly, more or less routine. As always, I passed by many walkers, cyclists, runners, dogs, cats, squirrels going the other direction. Most humans say hi or wave. I give the peace sign. I live in Peace Dale. I like words and peace and cute.

And as I'm apt to do, I meditate on the people I see, sizing them up, giving them roles, stories, assessing their general vibe, riffing on them until new thoughts hijack those neurons, which is frequent on a run. And I want to tell you about a specific people-passing incident from this morning because it illustrates, just in that fleeting, mundane, snapshot of a throwaway moment something much more profound, not just about human nature but about how we perceive it which folds back on the nature of human nature itself. (whoa)

He's about 50 yards away when I first notice him:  White, in his twenties, gray hooded sweatshirt and jeans, hood up over his hair, walking a dark-brown pitbull-looking breed. 

And I think to myself, I bet his dog's leash is made of hemp.

To me, all those traits I'm observing together scream 'leash of hemp.'

And sure enough, as the space between us narrows, I can see it's a leash of hemp. 

Naturally I'm thinking something like, See? See, politically correct world? Stereotypes can be true. Some biological and cultural traits cluster together predictably. Calm down everybody. It's just human nature! We vary predictably in many ways.

And nobody can argue against the fact that some traits do cluster and that you can predict some things about people based on things like their sex, their clothes, their age, their gait, their dog breed, ... 

Okay, cool. But whoa whoa whoa.

Did I really use all those observations to successfully predict the leash was made of hemp? Did I really just validate that stereotype about 'hemp dog leash people?' Did I really just support that theory (stereotypes are real, baby) by forming a hypothesis that ended up being correct?

Of course it could have been a coincidence, my correct guess. There are only so many kinds of dog leashes: Leather, acrylic, and hemp are the main ones I think. So, given a leash exists, the odds are pretty good that I'll guess what kind it is, regardless of what the guy or the dog look like who are tethered together by it. 

But that's not what I meant by my doubt. I'm wondering about something other than coincidence, something quite sinister.

I'm wondering whether I actually predicted the leash was made of hemp or if my brain tricked me into thinking I did.

I mean, don't you think it's suspicious that I caught myself predicting what the leash would be made of? Doesn't that seem weird?

I could, just as easily, have tried to guess his shoe or jeans brand, whether he was wearing a watch or not, if he was going to smile at me or not, harass me or not. Many things that I could see or experience upon closer proximity were available for prediction and, instead of any those things, I chose to predict the material of the dog leash.

Why? What was my consciousness up to?

Let's cut to the punchline: I don't think I predicted anything at all. Right after the whole thing went down, I caught my consciousness red-handed.[1] 

From as far away as I was, I could still have quite easily perceived that the leash draped and swung like hemp, and unlike leather or acrylic. I could also have very easily perceived the pale color, unlike the dark colors that acrylic and leather usually are.

So I could have known it was hemp without yet knowing it, consciously, since there's a delay between perception and consciousness.

And instead of coming to know 'hemp' from my immediate perception of it, I think my consciousness narrated my experience in such a way that I was predicting something I already knew! My consciousness made me believe that I had a clever hunch, a hunch that was consistent with a stereotype of this 'hemp dog leash person.'

Put another way, my consciousness was taking creative credit for the observations that the perceptive parts of my brain were already processing. Sounds a bit like some people you work with, doesn't it?

All this is happening in split seconds. It's not hard to imagine how my consciousness--since it's already very busy trying to constantly make sense of the world--could garble this input and the timing of it by inserting a narrative. It's not hard to imagine, given the delay between perception and consciousness, how my mind could mangle the more likely true story which was simply...

input-input-input (ad nauseam)

by editing it into a story of ...

input-prediction-input-I'mAGenius

OK. Besides how fascinating this cognitive delay is, with all its relevancy for studies of ESP, pre-cognition, magic tricks, and falling for them. Besides all the implications for the existence (or not) of free will ... since, if your consciousness is delayed, are you really deciding your life or are you just experiencing life and narrating it as if you're deciding it?

Aside from all those fascinating supernatural and existential implications, this is the kicker: This illusion stemming from our slow and overbearing consciousness probably affects how we relate to other human beings who we encounter every day.

See, the leash of hemp boosted my confidence in two things that are already boosting one another to begin with:

1. I think I'm good at predicting human nature.

2. I think human nature, especially in stereotyped and categorical terms, is predictable.

These two things may be true in many regards. But my experience, my little experiment, my leash of hemp, lead me to believe that 1 and 2 are stronger than they are and that they're realer than they probably are, in reality.

And a leash of hemp moment is just so exhilarating, at least for a scientist like me, when it's about traits untied to value, like leash material. It's a similar feeling you get once you're so familiar with the chimpanzees you're observing that you can predict, given a set of circumstances or time of day or whatever, what they'll do next, where they'll walk, climb, who they'll play with or groom. It's a real high.

But how about when those links, those predictions, are about value-laden traits like beauty, intelligence, sexual orientation, religious belief, violence? I'm more likely to believe stereotypes and my own abilities to predict human nature when it comes to these much more sensitive or much more volatile issues simply because I guessed that a dog's leash was hemp while running this morning.

A leash of hemp's no big deal when it's just about a leash of hemp,[2] but a taking a 'leash of hemp' about someone who's wearing a head scarf or a short skirt, about someone who speaks with a Southern accent or an educated accent, who goes to temple or to church, who has darkly or lightly pigmented skin? Maybe that's when we should humble our consciousness. Maybe that's when we should remind it that perception was there first. Maybe help it question whether it's really so smart. After all, maybe it already saw, heard, smelt what it so cleverly claims to have sensed, believed, predicted. Maybe it doesn't deserve the credit it's taking, thereby encouraging itself to apply its methods to other situations that require more nuance, more sensitivity, more observation, more time, actually getting to know a person, that whole human connection thing, you know?

It might feel like it, but we're not, objectively, human nature experts. We can be too easily tricked by our delayed and overbearing consciousness. We're too quick to be seduced by these split-second cognitive events that validate our intellect, our experience, and our beliefs all at once.[3]

Knowing this, being conscious of the lag between perception and consciousness, catching one's mind in the act, why is it still so hard to change our minds going into the future?

Maybe if leashes of hemp were more ubiquitous they'd serve as a nice gimmicky reminder about these illusions--dampening our habit of skyrocketing all the way up to "human nature" from a dog's leash. But would that really do any good? After all, skin colors, eye shapes, skirt lengths, accents... these things are ubiquitous and yet they clearly aren't gimmick enough to humble our consciousness, to help us remain skeptical of what each of us knows so well about human nature just from our itty bitty n of 1.

**

Related reading...

1. How stereotypes are reinforced and how they are broken, in the NYTimes: click here. 
2. Dan Dennett's stuff.
3. [a broad Scholar.Google.com search]
4. http://cogprints.org/838/1/BJP2web.html
5. http://behaviouralscience.net/2007/11/07/free-will-and-consciousness/
6. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-free-will-an-illusion
7. http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/lab/
8. http://www.eaglemanlab.net/papers/StetsonetalNeuron2006.pdf
9. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/09/15/time-on-the-brain-how-you-are-always-living-in-the-past-and-other-quirks-of-perception/

[1] I thank running for opening my brain to such a thing--a good hypothesis considering how my most satisfying thoughts usually come during the 30 minutes of the day that I am pushing my body down the running trail.

[2] Unless you've got something against hemp, hippies, dogs, pitbulls, white people, men, hoodies.

[3] Implicit here is an assumption that all humans suffer from this delayed consciousness, that it's part of "human nature." oy, is it?

Cute and fuzzy....cockroaches?

We humans like to think of ourselves as specially endowed with social niceties and conscious awareness of our group, our friends and neighbors, and our relatives.  We might make exceptions for other species, like cute little puppies, and argue that they really must have some sense of self and socialness, some form of consciousness that we would accept.  Here, we'll ignore warfare, holocausts, torture, rapine and pillaging, and burning at the stake, which aren't really social niceties, or we can excuse them away by saying that those are ways that we keep our own tribe pure.

But what even tree-huggers really, really don't want to acknowledge is that definitively not cute or cuddly critters could possibly be like that.  Sadly, a current story is now reporting that Nature's absolutely most uncuddly creatures, cockroaches (Ugh! we hate even to type the word!), could be social animals with social awareness and even social consciences!  Heavens to Murgatroyde!  Not that!

The theories of consciousness usually rely on some aspect of brain size, in particular, of course, to exceptionalize humans.  Our greater cortical endowment compared to our primate relatives is Exhibit A in this claim.  As partial confirmation, dolphins, who in their own way are also cute and cuddly, have relatively large brains and relatively social behavior.  But ants?  Cocroaches?  Plants?  Yes, even peas in a pod have some similar attributes! 

It is a hard pill to swallow, perhaps, but it is not impossible even for non-neurally wired critters, like peas, to have some sort of a sense of self.  Understanding that in neural terms is out of the question, so if it exists it would be in some utterly different form.  We have zero idea what that might 'feel' like to be a leaf or pea plant, since 'feeling' is a neural term.

But back to our pets, the roaches.  The BBC reports:

By unveiling the secret lives of these insects, they are finding out that cockroaches are actually highly social creatures; they recognise members of their own families, with different generations of the same families living together.

Cockroaches do not like to be left alone, and suffer ill health when they are.

And they form closely bonded, egalitarian societies, based on social structures and rules. Communities of cockroaches are even capable of making collective decisions for the greater good.

Without going that far down on the food chain, maybe, just possibly, other primates have what we would recognize as consciousness if we could experience it.  But we face a serious problem, that goes beyond the elusiveness of the notion of internal self-awareness that we call 'consciousness'.  If this is a "quantum" kind of phenomenon that depends on large numbers, then how is it that cockroaches, with brains smaller than their droppings, have sophisticated social and discretionary behavior?  And what about the tiniest ants with brains smaller than pinpoints, yet who have complex problem-solving ability?

The obvious but hubristic answer is that the roaches are just molecular robots, responding to food molecules and pheromones.  They don't actually think!  But we must let that idea scurry away into a dark crevice.  That's because by the very same anti-Cartesian argument--that brains are just molecular constructs, and that 'mind' is nothing apart from what those molecules do--our brains are just molecular robots, too: neurons communicating by neurotransmitter molecules and the like.

And if we're hypothesizing molecular 'auras' of activity, like electromagnetic fields, to show that mind is just the higher-level organization of many molecules, then as in physics this should exist at ever smaller scales (tiny magnets have tiny magnetic fields, but they still have fields).

This means that we have to search for consciousness in some different way, that is not in the least specific to humans (otherwise, for example, humans must have something beyond the real-world 'stuff' of other animals, the Cartesian mind/body dualism rising its ugly head again!).

Whatever consciousness is, it has evolved, as far as we can tell.  That means it must exist in other species in some form or other, and if precedents mean anything, we'll find different forms of it, and we'll find it all over the biosphere. Anything that complex requires many components and is assembled very slowly over eons, with manifestations in diverse species.  And the sensitive social peas may suggest that it has wholly different forms, not all based on neurons, as we mentioned earlier.

What kind of musings cockroaches do, in the long dark nights while they're quietly active in your house, only they know; but without writing, they  have no way to tell us!

Does the hook hurt? What about the experiment?

Do fish feel pain?  Unequivocally yes, according to Victoria Braithwaite, a fish biologist here at Penn State.  She described how she knows this on The Forum, a radio program on the BBC World Service on 12/18.  It's very odd that this wasn't understood until her work -- a paper that garnered much attention by Braithwaite and co-authors was published in 2003 (but has been selectively forgotten or ignored by many) -- but very nice that she's cleared that up.  Amazingly, people have long labored under the belief that fish are insensate creatures.

The reasoning behind such views is difficult to understand.  Fish certainly avoid danger, but they don't have facial expressions we can read, and they are cold, slimy, primitive creatures (well, relative to us humans, we like to think!).  They reproduce like, well, like fish so with such numbers what's the advantage of pain receptions?  They have primitive brains (relative to ours).  

Or is it more than just the arrogance that goes with the angler's realization that we're in charge?  Not so long ago, lobbying was done among life scientists to write to Congress to oppose legislation that might regulate the kinds of experiments that could be done on fish.  Our noble peers in biology wanted to be left alone, not constrained, after all!  It was even said that pain in lab animals was good for them--yes, it was said!--because it made them resilient to the conditions under which they lived.  We're not enamored of bureaucrats who feel they can meddle in our daily research life, but this wholly self-interested campaign-of-convenience by scientists was gross.

Anyway, the idea of piscal pain experience would be more convincing if they had what we would at least recognize as neural pain receptors.  In fact, pain wiring was long ago worked out in birds and mammals, perhaps, according to Briathwaite, because it's easier to feel empathy with these creatures.  But, even the question of whether fish have the neural wiring that transmits the  stimulus to the brain wasn't known until Briathwaite et al.'s work.

And yes, fish do have them!  (Sorry, anglers and zebrafish torturers!).  Transmitting pain information is done in two stages, by two different types of nerve fibers, the A-delta and C fibers.  A-delta fibers transmit information about damaging or noxious stimuli instantaneously and the second transmits it more slowly.  Fish have both of these nerve types, though in a different ratio from birds and mammals (fish have more of the C type, relative to other vertebrates).

But, says Braithwaite, "finding the fibers themselves doesn't necessarily tell us that the second stage of pain is going on", that when the signal passes up the spinal cord to the brain, the fish becomes aware that it has been damaged.  To test this, Braithwaite et al. provided fish with a painful stimulus, either vinegar or bee venom, injecting small amounts into the snout of rainbow trout.  They injected saline solution into the snouts of a control group of fish, and found the two groups had very different responses.  The respiration rate of those injected with the pain stimulus quickly accelerated and stayed high, and these fish went off their feed, while the control group responded to being handled and injected with increased respiratory rate and not eating, but their respiration quickly went back down and their feeding behavior returned to normal.  Which Braithwaite et al. interpreted as clear evidence that they feel pain.

But does it matter?  Is it enough to modify their behavior?  That is, do the fish respond to pain?  Fish have a low tolerance for novelty, so the researchers put Lego objects into the tanks, treated them with pain injections, and observed their behavior.  Would they avoid the Legos, as normal? In fact, when treated with pain stimulus, they did approach the novel object, which the researchers interpreted as showing that the fish were distracted from their normal behavior by pain.  But, they were able to reverse this with pain relief.  They gave the fish some morphine and observed that they again avoided the Legos, as normal.  (Are you nauseous yet, given that they knew by now that fish feel pain?)

Braithwaite says that responding to something that is damaging is important evolutionarily, and only vertebrates can have the experience of learning from pain, and learning to avoid it.  But, do fish suffer when they feel pain?  Is that an odd question?  Isn't perceiving pain by definition suffering? Is it more than self-centered for us to couch this in terms that relate to our, human, kind of experience?  Braithwaite explained that they've found an area in the fish brain that's devoted to processing emotional information, as in other vertebrate brains.  It's more rudimentary in fish, but if it's damaged or lesioned, the fish's ability to respond to emotional information is impaired, she said.

And further, do fish have consciousness?  Ascribing consciousness to a non-human animal is a tricky area, Braithwaite said.  She takes her model of consciousness from Gerald Edelmann, who says that consciousness is modular.  She didn't expect to find all the modules we have in fish, but says there is evidence for two of them; 'primary consciousness' and 'phenomenal consciousness'.

Primary consciousness is the ability to create a mental representation of something, and Braithwaite says that fish can do that.   That is, they can do spatial mapping.  Phenomenal consciousness is how we experience and understand the world.  Braithwaite's view is that the fact that fish can learn from experience is evidence that they have phenomenal consciousness, too.  And, the evidence of fish consciousness is, to Braithwaite, both evidence that fish can suffer, and that they are deserving of welfare rights, as are birds and mammals -- equivalent to humans.  Sport fishermen, especially those who enjoy catch and release fishing, need to consider that fish feel pain, as do fish farmers.

This is all well and good, and it's good to see the old conceit that fish don't feel pain put to rest, but we think there are also lessons here about academic hubris that should, but probably won't be learned. The anthropocentric conceit isn't new, but we're supposed to be scientists, to deal with the real world, not the one we wish were out there!  We have bestialized the world except for ourselves.  In the west, at least, this might be a consequence of long-standing (convenient) biblical views that God, in His wisdom and compassion, gave us dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth (does that include bacteria and hookworms?).

Whatever the source, we want to be able to have our will with these beasts and will not welcome the latest piscine bulletin.  It's bad enough that after having our experimental will with chimps we have to let them live out their natural life (but not monkeys), and we are not supposed to subject lab mice to torture (as we and our IRBs define it, which turns out to be pretty lenient).  But fish?!