Cognitive Thrift 52 – Cognitive Flexibility
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/01/01
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You gave some examples about dogs in Russia and unexpected cognitive flexibility.
Rick Rosner: That dogs have taught themselves to ride the subway to get to places where it’s easier to beg for stuff, which is kind of crazy sounding at first. But apparently, they do that. People historically and consistently underestimate animals’ abilities.
Animals can’t write bestsellers, but they can figure out how to use door knobs and latches. Animals have behavioral flexibility. Some of them. So let’s talk about whether behavioral flexibility is even possible.
I’ve just said it is, but only for dogs and people, and I assume for higher mammals like elephants. Given the game theoretic setup that we’ve been talking about where under certain conditions, it would pay to have flexibility in behaviour, which means not just flexibility in thought but thought itself. Can animals think?
We’ve pretty much decided that subway riding dogs can think. But 80 years ago, people gave up on asking whether animals could think because it was too complicated a subject, which went with behaviorism, which is the idea that animals are packets of behavior.
Let’s not look at if they can think, but how do they behave. Setting aside the problem of whether animals could think because at the time it was too difficult of a problem.
Here we are going to argue that animals are capable of flexible behavior and that animals can think in proportion to the extent that animals have brains, and you can go all the way down to aphids and even smaller than that. What’s the little freaking thing that has 352 neurons or something?
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