There is no consensus on what minds are, but there is plenty of agreement on where they can be found: in humans. Yet human consciousness may account for only a small proportion of the consciousness on our planet.
Our guest, Kristin Andrews, is a professor of Animal Minds at the University of York, Ontario, Canada. She is a philosopher working in close contact with biologists and cognitive scientists and has spent time living in the jungle to observe research on orangutans.
Kristin notes that comparative psychology has historically resisted attributing such things as intentions, learning, consciousness, and minds to animals. Yet she argues that this is misguided in the light of the evidence, that often the best way to make sense of the complexity of animal behavior is to invoke minds and intentional concepts.
Recently Kristin has proposed that the default assumption — the null hypothesis — should be that animals have minds. Currently, biologists examine markers of consciousness on a species-by-species basis, for example looking for the presence of pain receptor skills, and preferential tradeoffs in behavior. But everywhere we have looked, even in tiny nematode worms, we find multiple markers present. Kristin reasons that switching the focus from asking “where are the minds?” to “what sort of minds are there?” would prove more fruitful.
The question of consciousness and AI is at the forefront of popular discourse, but to make progress on a scientific theory of mind we should draw on the richer data of the natural world.
Links
- Kristin’s website has links to her books and papers.
- As an introduction to her thinking How To Study Animal Minds is a gem of a book.
Transcript
(timestamps may be messed up!)
00:00.86
multiverses
Hi, Kristin Andries, welcome to Multiverses.
00:03.99
Kristin
Thanks, James. It’s great to be here.
00:06.21
multiverses
um So you’re a philosopher of animal minds and I think this is… you you are perhaps one of the first, if not the first, philosopher of animal minds, at least of the modern era, perhaps. um But there is quite a long history of people thinking about whether animals have minds. And from what I can tell from reading your work, there’s been quite a lot of flip-ropping historically on on on this question. Could you give us a brief overview of the kind of history of this this idea?
00:35.42
Kristin
Yeah, sure. So if you look at, say, ancient Greek philosophy, um you see that there’s a lot of engagement with animals, the animals that the Greeks saw around them, especially insects. There was so much interest in ants and bees and and the social insects that Aristotle and Plato wrote about. but Because they they were taking questions about ah philosophical questions to be answerable, not just by looking at other humans, but by looking at other animals as well. Because our default hypothesis was that these animals also have minds. They’re also doing things. um
01:13.73
Kristin
together in society. They’re also showing their intelligence. They’re also showing their feelings and emotions. Aristotle said that the other animals aren’t rational. Rationality is unique to humans, but they certainly have consciousness. They certainly have feelings and emotions. They certainly have relationships. But it wasn’t just the Greek philosophers. You see this across world philosophy. You see this in the Asian tradition as well, the Buddha famously talking about non-human animals and the avoidance of suffering in in all right living beings. um You see this also in Ibn Sina in Arabic philosophy, um ah addressing and just basically assuming that we’re not the only conscious being.
02:02.22
Kristin
So it was really not a question about whether other animals have minds or consciousness for these philosophers. There was a lot of question about whether other animals are rational, whether they engage in logical thought, what kinds of minds they have, but not that they’re the sorts of things who have minds. And I really think that we can trace it to Darwin or like blame it all on, I’m sorry. I think that we can trace it all to Descartes and blame it on Descartes. um for raising this question that we have now about whether other animals have minds, which animal species have minds, with his famous denial of mind and consciousness.
02:42.53
Kristin
in all other species. So we’re kind of clawing out of this hole that was dug for us um back a couple hundred years ago, and we’ve been making a lot of progress, but things have have have have varied a little bit because there was a lot of work done among psychologists in the late 19th century, early 20th century.
02:46.87
multiverses
Thanks.
03:07.75
Kristin
People like Margaret Floyd Washburn, um who was one of the first women psychologists, and she wrote a book called The Animal Mind. She presumed that animals um all animals were minded, and including um very simple organisms like worms. We see this in the work of people like Pavlov, who famously studied um you know dog learning. He said it would be absurd to deny consciousness to to these animals.
03:39.53
Kristin
And we see it in even in people like Thorndyke and Morgan. These are figures who sometimes are associated with behaviorism, but certainly they assume that animals have minds. So again, what we saw is there was this kind of clawing out of the Cartesian trap
03:52.69
multiverses
All right.
03:58.42
Kristin
and then um And then we get Skinner and Watson pulling us back down into the behaviorist hole and denying consciousness to to animal minds. Today, what, 2024? where We’re maybe 50 years out of behaviorism when it comes to human cognition. um But animal cognition research took a little bit longer to start recovering. And I think that most of the researchers I know who study animal cognition would say that the field itself kind of started in maybe the 1980s. We certainly don’t see textbooks in animal cognition.
04:35.90
Kristin
until the 1990s, and then starting around 2000, we see a number of different textbooks. I think it’s really good to look at textbooks if you want to know what ah what what’s going on in the science, right? You can see what the students are being taught. And interestingly, in these textbooks of animal cognition, there’s no no real discussion of how to study animal consciousness. In fact, what there is is a kind of a ah warning to students to not study animal consciousness. The animal consciousness isn’t scientific. um So there’s still work to be done because there’s science to be done on this question. And animal cognition researchers are great folks to be doing that work. So that’s a very brief history, I suppose, of kind of the ups and downs of of views in the world about whether animals are conscious.
05:29.15
multiverses
Yeah, yeah, I think it’s a really great summary and I guess The one argument we should maybe say that Descartes gave, just so so people are aware of it if they’re not familiar, is that you know language animals don’t have language. We’re the only folks with language, um at least with, well, that’s a controversial statement now. But but ah at least at ah in Descartes’ day, as far as Hino, we’re certainly the only species with language. And and it’s clearly the case we’re the only species with as complex a language as as we have.
06:01.80
multiverses
um And the other D that you mentioned, Darwin, yeah, obviously going in the other direction. um But I wasn’t aware until I read your your works just how forcefully he kind of denied there being any kind of um I think, as you put it, any fundamental difference between the mental faculties of of of animals and humans. um So yeah clearly he was acknowledging there’s some difference in degree of what we do um in terms of our mental faculties and and leaving the door open, obviously, for that being a ah difference in the cultural um inheritance of animals and humans.
06:25.64
Kristin
Thank you.
06:39.20
multiverses
But sort of at the biological level, I suppose, He was very clear in saying that we’re actually pretty continuous. um And um many of these behaviours that we see that we associate with minds in humans, we we find in in animals too. um
07:00.48
Kristin
That’s right. That’s right. It’s really worth going back and reading The Descent of Man because Darwin, in a couple of chapters of that book, which I love, um argues that we see so many rich emotions in non-human animals, ah including moral emotions, including fellow feeling for the other species, um right? Dogs feeling for humans. and also feeling for one’s children and members of one’s own species. It’s a really beautiful writing, but the worry that people had about the descent of man argument that Darwin made about continuity in mentality across species is that the evidence was based on anecdote.
07:48.71
Kristin
home These were really just stories that he collected from people who had traveled the world.
07:48.62
multiverses
Right.
07:54.56
Kristin
um And then he said, hey, look, animals are doing these cool things, so they must have these kind of cognitive and affective capacities. But what the comparative cognition research is doing now is they’re doing science to try to verify or or undermine the sorts of anecdotes that that Darwin collected. But actually what we’re finding is that these anecdotes largely reflect animals capabilities. When we look for things in non-human animals, we very often find them. It might take a very long time, um but sometimes humans are smart enough to figure out what animals are thinking.
08:33.50
multiverses
Yeah. and And coming back to comparative psychology, is yeah as you say, this in some ways this field is um still embracing behaviorism while that has been rejected kind of ah fairly roundly in in in human psychology. um But when it comes to comparative psychology, IEG looking for you know, the differences and similarities between human and other animals. It still seems to be flavored by that perspective. um You give a really good kind of rundown, I think, based on the textbooks um of three kind of big themes or rules, I suppose, which are a taught, drilled into um people who are entering this field, um that kind of embrace that um
09:22.62
multiverses
that, I don’t know, scepticism of animal minds and I suppose trying to move away, trying to be as scientific as possible, but perhaps actually doing a disservice to the science. um Yeah, could you give us a ah rundown of of those rules?
09:40.04
Kristin
Yeah, so Morgan’s canon is probably the best tool known rule that comparative cognition researchers are taught um and and still follow. So Lloyd, Seeloid Morgan, who is one of the advocates of animal consciousness, actually introduced this this rule that says we should prefer basically simpler explanations to more complex explanations for animal behavior. But as you might imagine, um there’s a lot of debate about what counts as simpler and comp complex.
10:14.05
multiverses
Yeah.
10:15.15
Kristin
and And this is a very difficult rule to actually implement. If you look go back and look at the way Morgan put this rule, um it was within a theory he had about cognition that’s been rejected. So he was looking he was saying, well, these are the sorts of cognitive capacities that are more complicated, and these are simpler. And so we should prefer these sorts of explanations. um But these details are completely lost in um and my disregarded because they don’t seem to fit the science.
10:45.73
Kristin
and so The way this Morgan Scanlon is interpreted today is that we should prefer associative explanations over cognitive explanations.
10:56.65
multiverses
you
10:56.91
Kristin
Now, what is what does that mean? That’s a really good question. um what that mean Putting it that way um introduces a presumption that cognitive explanations can’t be associative. But I think that we know that a lot of cognition involves associative processes. We do a lot of our work, our memory, our language learning, our um all sorts of reasoning processes through associative processes, associative reasoning. And so this distinction doesn’t seem to hold up at all. And so so some people will say, well, we should give explanations in terms of the associative processes and not
11:36.38
Kristin
talk about high level capacities like um theory of mind or mental time travel or planning, but we should figure out what the lower level implementation of those things are and when we’re giving the explanations. But then one of the problems is is that we don’t do that when we’re doing human psychology. We do talk about theory of mind, episodic, memory, planning, things like that.
11:56.38
multiverses
Mm.
12:02.05
Kristin
And so it would be doing the sciences of animal cognition differently from the sciences of human cognition. And then we’re not in a position to make those kinds of comparisons and ask questions like the questions that Darwin was was interested in about continuity across species. If we want to look at continuity across species and differences across species, we need to use the same measuring stick. We can’t use different ones.
12:25.50
multiverses
Yeah, yeah you you point out um that kind of one of the consequences of Morgan’s canon, perhaps, is just an opera operationalization of of language, um which doesn’t seem that helpful, where you know something a behavior that might term friendship in humans is called um affiliation or affiliate um ah connections, or something that might talk about episodic-like memory. And it’s not really clear what in what benefit we get from adding these new terms. um It seems like they’re being done to sort of pay lip service to this and kind of ostensibly distance oneself from um anthropomorphic and propomorphizing, perhaps. um But it’s not really clear that they’re necessarily more basic or that they’ve provided a simpler explanation. In some ways, it’s the reverse because they you know they they depend on their
13:23.87
multiverses
um you know, understanding of those things probably depends on what we see in in in in humans. um So yeah, it seems, I mean, Morgan’s kind of at one level strikes me as as a kind of an application of Occam’s razor and therefore kind of hard to argue with, but as a kind of, the the way that it’s been applied or the the heuristic that it’s driving is is is rather, yeah, is rather different and might actually have, in some cases, the reverse effect of ah leading us to the simplest explanation. like We might end up with very convoluted ways of trying to understand an animal’s behavior when we could just say something like, oh, it wants to do this, right? Or it you know yeah it’s caring for its it it’s young, right? So and yeah, we’ve we’ we’ve perhaps lost our way somewhat with with with Morgan’s canon.
14:19.93
Kristin
Yeah, that’s right. And I think that when we are explaining what an animal is doing at the level of of an agent and we’re interested in what they’re doing in their community, in their environment, um talking about them in terms of what they want to do or what they’re thinking and what they’re feeling. makes a lot of sense for those kinds of explanations, but it doesn’t mean that that’s the full explanation. It doesn’t mean that that’s the final story. right For any phenomenon, we can give different levels of explanation. The same goes for humans. ah you You can explain my behavior towards my family.
14:56.14
Kristin
um in folk psychology and say, yes, I love my my partner and my daughter and I enjoy playing with my daughter and my dog and things like this. um But it doesn’t mean that there’s not also, say, a neuroscientific explanation of that behavior as well.
15:10.03
multiverses
Hmm. Hmm.
15:12.67
Kristin
There’s not an explanation in terms of the the biology. There’s not an evolutionary explanation for what I’m doing. Explanations are answers to why questions. And we have lots we can have a lot of different why questions about the same phenomenon. um So it’s really important to remember in animal cognition research that if we’re saying things like, oh, yeah, the animal remembers what happened back there, um remembers where they cashed their their food, we we don’t um necessarily we haven’t necessarily answered the question that’s being asked if we want to know
15:48.06
Kristin
um something about the implementation level of that that capacity. right Where in the brain is this memory being stored? Are there memory traces? How are they stored? um these are These are further questions. And they’re questions that are appropriately asked in different sub-disciplines of the sciences.
16:08.62
multiverses
Right.
00:01.32
multiverses
Yeah and of course none of these explanations need be exclusive of another explanation either so we don’t need like maybe there is a place for Morgan’s cannon within a particular subfield but it shouldn’t be interpreted as saying this is the only way of understanding um animal behavior I suppose. um
00:24.87
kristin
Right. I mean, as you said, what we need in any of our scientific endeavors are um rules about you know having a bunch of different explanations and then deciding between those different explanations. And how we decide between those different explanations is going to depend on the the science we’re doing. So kind of there’s not really a catch-all. We’re not really getting any new information from Morgan’s Canon saying, prefer simpler explanations. where what we i think ah would be What’s more helpful um for animal cognition researchers would be some training maybe in in philosophy of science um and how abductive reasoning works, right?
01:05.37
kristin
Inference to the best explanation.
01:06.59
multiverses
Right.
01:07.37
kristin
When you’ve got a lot of different information about um what animals are doing or what or any phenomenon, and then you have multiple hypotheses on the table, then You pick the hypothesis that fits your evidence the best for now, and then you working with that.
01:22.40
multiverses
Yeah.
01:23.67
kristin
And then if something happens and that’s no longer the best explanation, you throw it ah out or put it back on the table and to pick up something else and work with that. I mean, that’s just how science works. So there’s there’s nothing really special or unique about animal cognition research, I think, um that requires that field of research to have its own special rule about how to do science.
01:46.62
multiverses
Right, yeah. and Perhaps we can talk about the the the the other two rules of the the three we mentioned, which I think are more kind of specific to um comparative psychology. I think I mentioned one of the words earlier, anthropomorphism. um So perhaps that’s a good one, or anti-anthropomorphism, I suppose, is is the rule. um So take us through how that gets adopted within comparative psychology.
02:14.01
kristin
Yeah, so ah comparative psychology really guides the students and researchers to not anthropomorphize their subjects. And what that means is treat them as if they were little um humans, right? Attribute ah human characteristics to them. And you might ask, well, what counts as a human characteristic? We have lots of features, you know, we have mass, we have um yeah have organs like hearts.
02:38.47
multiverses
Right.
02:45.85
kristin
It’s not so it’s not ah advising us not to talk about the mass of animals or their hearts. But what it does is it advises us not to talk about human unique characteristics when it comes to other animals. But the question that arises are, well, what characteristics are human unique? and If we go into the science with already a presumption about which features are human unique, then we’re not going to look for them in other species. And then we’re just going to reinforce this bias that we started out with. So I reject this worry about anthropomorphism understood that way, um because we should be asking broad questions about other animals. We can be asking questions um not just about whether they have theory of mind, but we can be asking questions about whether they have morality, whether they’re rational agents, um whether they make plans for the future. um These are all viable research questions that this this rule um
03:44.24
kristin
of anti-anthropomorphism just kind of shuts down. on it It just tells people, oh, don’t do this kind of research. It’s not scientific. um But it’s exactly what science is, asking questions about things we don’t know about and not making presumptions ahead of time about the way the world is.
04:02.14
multiverses
Yeah, right. I mean, I guess probably this rule was introduced in the spirit of a response to places where anthropomorphism is taken too far. And you know I can buy that sometimes that does happen. and um you know Perhaps with you know some of the anecdotes that that um you know Darwin was fond of collecting, certainly the ones which are more striking and therefore more likely to get picked up as an anecdote and get passed around are the ones where we see a very human-like thing being done by an animal, like a dog walking on its legs, like classic example rights um on its hind legs.
04:44.90
multiverses
um ah Lots of other species can do that, but it’s very striking when it’s a a dog that does that, or a parrot, you know, talking or appearing to, ah you know, at least saying words. So I, you know, I can understand the spirit in which it’s done, but as as you say, it completely closes off particular um avenues of, yeah, of questioning.
05:04.12
kristin
Thank
05:05.31
multiverses
um One thing i I do wonder is just, you know, about this word anthropomorphism, like just the word itself.
05:09.42
kristin
you.
05:12.91
multiverses
ah puts us in such a privileged position, right? I mean, is there any, are there places where we can think of things that might previously have been sort of thought of as very human qualities, um that actually maybe animals are better at, or you know, more, where where these qualities are ah perhaps more strongly instantiated in in animals?
05:43.64
kristin
Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s certainly um true that if we look at other species, there are definitely cases where they’re better than we are at lots of things. Let’s say um ah the perceptual capacity of echolocation. So we can kind of echolocate, right? We can, if you close your eyes and you you know make noise in your space, you can kind of get a sense of your space. We can’t navigate your space the way bats can or dolphins can. Echolocation is much more developed in in these other species.
06:18.59
kristin
So dolphins and bats are better than us at echolocation.
06:20.01
multiverses
Hmm.
06:20.96
kristin
And echo and you know we can we can say this about a lot of different perceptual capacities that other animals have.
06:21.07
multiverses
Mm-hmm.
06:28.00
kristin
Ed Yong wrote a beautiful book um called An Immense World where he detailed all of these different sensory capacities that other animals have. It’s really beautifully illustrated at this point. But then there are other kinds of capacities that used to be thought to be human unique. um So tool use is is a famous one, right? Humans as the rational animal turned into that that er Aristotelian view. got turned into this idea that humans are the only tool users. um And when Jane Goodall found out that chimpanzees make and use tools, Louis Leakey famously said, well, now we have to redefine man, redefine tool, or accept that chimpanzees are are human, something along those lines.
07:22.48
kristin
um So we’re learning, yeah, that chimpanzees aren’t as good at tool use as we are. We can build you know much more elaborated structures than the chimpanzees do. Our tools are more complex than the chimpanzee tools, but they’re also using tools. So there you know there there are there are these these cases where where we see similarities and degree where we’re still better than the animals in one sense, but we also see similarities um when the animals are better than than we are.
07:58.61
multiverses
But I also wonder about things like empathy or or social complexity more broadly where um actually animals may, yeah, they they may have more of those qualities or perhaps dimensions of those qualities that we don’t even appreciate.
07:58.70
kristin
Yeah.
08:17.68
multiverses
um And yeah, so this this idea that we are kind of transporting or transferring projecting, I suppose is the best word, human qualities on top of animals, and so in some cases could be kind of backwards, right? Maybe um those qualities are better understood in animals, or, um you know, more strongly um present than in humans.
08:43.44
kristin
Yeah, this is a good question. therere there I have a couple of of thoughts about this. One is that when we look at, say, eusocial insects, where they have this very different organizational structure, we see individuals sacrificing themselves for the group. right So you might say that this is like a um maybe a morally more developed society than our society or something. like One might make moral judgments about different kinds of social structures. We also see this willingness to sacrifice oneself in cetaceans.
09:11.39
multiverses
Hmm.
09:15.17
kristin
right When dolphins get stranded um and when dolphin gets stranded on a beach and all the other dolphins won’t leave them, um what’s going on there?
09:17.39
multiverses
Hmm.
09:24.13
kristin
Some people speculate that this is because they have a group mind. Others speculate that the empathy that they have toward the the stranded individuals so strong they can’t leave them. you know And so we can make we could make value judgments about these sorts of things as well. but i’m ah the Other example that came to mind when you said this was is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, and that is um multiculturalism in non-human animals.
09:51.39
multiverses
Hmm.
09:52.38
kristin
So we have you know today, there’s a lot of discussion about cultural appropriation and whether that is acceptable. um There’s a lot of objections when, say, Western cultures adopt elements of indigenous cultures or Asian cultures. um But we see in non-human animals a lot of cultural appropriation, a lot of learning from other animal cultures and adopting those new behaviors as they’re exposed to them. And this is not just across um you know the same species of animals. Say when an orangutan who, um let’s say a chimpanzee that uses a rock to crack nuts moves into a community,
10:41.77
multiverses
Hm.
10:42.35
kristin
where they use woodhammers to crack nuts and they might show them, hey, you can use rocks to crack nuts as well. Like this is the the sort of thing that can happen and in chimpanzee societies. But we can also see the sort of learning across species where um an individual, um for example, I’m trying to think of a really good example yeah I love the examples of nest making because there’s some theory that um that animals have learned about building nests from looking at other animals building nests and that they pick up on pick up on these techniques across species.
11:16.53
multiverses
Hmm.
11:31.89
kristin
And also medicinal use that there’s some ah evidence that animals who see other animals eating a plant in a certain time will explore that plant and learn about its medicinal qualities. like There’s not this worry about where the information flows and that the information has to stay within a certain kind of culture. There seems to be just this kind of gen more generosity in allowing others to acquire the same knowledge that that that is kept in a ah single community. So I like those i like these kinds of ah examples of how humans might be able to learn from other animals when we look at
12:10.50
kristin
how willing animals are to share information across species and across communities and not protect it in the way we sometimes do.
12:20.35
multiverses
Yeah, that’s fascinating. I’m sort of, humans obviously have tried to appropriate some animal thing, like I’m thinking of eventually watching birds flying and and try figuring out, you know, how could I do that, right? i had ah So it’s yeah, it’s it’s really wonderful to, I wasn’t aware of um that going the, between species the other way.
12:34.86
kristin
like
12:45.04
multiverses
I mean, the whole, I think the whole field of um animal culture, it seems so only so recent that that it’s being studied. I’m aware of the kind of guerrilla tool use case and how one side of the river they’re using the the rocks and the other they’re using you know something else to to crack these nuts. And yeah, it’s just something we weren’t aware of probably 100 years ago. And another of those things that’s been knocked down is, oh, this is uniquely human.
13:16.57
kristin
Yeah, absolutely. We are learning so much every day about grade eight behavior. And I think it’s really, it’s kind of critical that we continue doing this work, funding this work, training students, um spending our money to support this research, especially because these are critically endangered communities. And yeah, we can preserve the DNA of great apes and zoos, but we cannot preserve their culture and zoos. Their culture will be gone.
13:45.30
multiverses
Hmm.
13:45.90
kristin
we will not know what kind of techniques, they what kind of knowledge they’ve stored and developed over generations if we just take them and put them in zoos.
13:46.34
multiverses
Yeah.
13:54.96
kristin
So it’s really essential to do this work. And it is super exciting because, yeah, new findings all the time, right? We just saw these new um reports of of orangutan medicinal use, that orangutans use different different kinds of leaves as anti-insecticides.
14:05.20
multiverses
Hmm.
14:13.00
kristin
And we’ve continued to see this kind of evidence of of of great apes and other animals using ah plants as medicines in many different cases.
14:23.65
multiverses
And how um I have to ask about this because I’m um completely fascinated by it. um it’s It’s unusual for philosophers to actually get out into the field, out of the armchairs, as it were. um Dennett famously ah did it with vervet monkeys looking at their ah calls. But you’ve you’ve also been in in the jungle. um Yeah. danger of opening a big tangent here, but I’d love to hear just a little bit about that experience and, you know, whether you think more people should be doing that as philosophers, not just biologists and primatologists.
14:54.63
kristin
Yeah, absolutely. All of my students um have to have some time doing science in order to be a philosopher of animal minds. I think that it’s absolutely essential. And it’s great to get out into the field as well. So my field work has been with orangutans. When I moved to York University, I had an experience working in a dolphin lab um in Hawaii that was run by Lou Herman. Lou was working on things like dolphin communication using a gestural language, analogical reasoning, memory, things like that. Really cool work. um But I’d never been in the field. um And um I met my colleague, um Anne Russin, she gave a talk at York. She was in the psychology department and worked with orangutans in Borneo. And after her talk, I went up and introduced myself, said I’m a new colleague in
15:49.72
kristin
philosophy. I work on animal cognition and worked with dolphins and how how great dolphins were. And she was like, dolphins aren aren’t great at all. You should meet orangutans. You should come to Borneo. And I said, okay. And that summer, um i I went to Borneo for the first time and spent about a month with orangutans in a forest school. A forest school is a weird little piece of forest where rehabilitant orangutan babies are being trained to be wild orangutans. So it was at a rehab. um And there’s a lot of there are a lot of issues in Southeast Asia with the orangutan populations. As I said, there
16:33.84
kristin
or These are endangered animals. and lot of The reason they’re endangered is because there’s palm plantations that are being built and their moms get shot and their babies without moms.
16:45.61
multiverses
Hmm.
16:47.16
kristin
Or there’s pet trade and moms get shot and babies get taken away to be sold into as a pet.
16:47.47
multiverses
Hmm.
16:56.17
kristin
So there are a lot of baby orangutans and I met 12 of them um out of the
17:00.82
multiverses
Hmm.
17:01.92
kristin
kind of hundreds that were being kept in the of facilities locally. And these 12 were lucky because they were getting the opportunity to learn how to be orangutans. So I didn’t just get to go in and work with orangutans. I got to go in and work with orangutans who are learning from humans how to be orangutans, which was really bizarre.
17:21.88
multiverses
Right.
17:23.95
kristin
um And I saw so much in the first few days I was out there.
17:24.10
multiverses
Hmm.
17:27.71
kristin
I saw a lot of things that I had read scientific articles saying, that great apes don’t do. I saw deception. I saw um social referencing, like looking just looking at the human in order to figure out how I should respond to the situation. um I saw play and jokes and um relationships and curiosity. I mean, it was just obvious. You spend some time with these animals and you see so richly the their minds. In the same kind of folk psychological way, we richly see the minds of
18:01.65
kristin
of, like say, human children when we go and hang out and watch them on the playground. And so after I got back from Borneo the first time, I really did like going to playgrounds in Toronto and watching the kids. It was very similar experience, you know just looking at them and trying to figure out what’s going on in their heads.
18:12.23
multiverses
Hmm. Hmm.
18:19.80
kristin
But it was like it was a great opportunity. And then I went back a couple of times and I followed Anne to Kutai National Park, where she set up a wild orangutan site. And we went there, I brought my seven-year-old daughter there too, and we were tracking wild orangutans through the forest. I’m actually kind of running that site right now as my colleague, Alison, has retired.
18:42.66
multiverses
Wow.
18:44.56
kristin
This has been 20 years now of this time with orangutans. And setting it up so that Dr. Wendy Herb can take it over, which is gonna be very exciting. But, you know,
18:56.18
multiverses
You’re dangerously close to being a ah scientist.
18:58.55
kristin
Getting out of the field is great.
18:58.70
multiverses
but
18:59.79
kristin
i recommend I highly recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to go and watch animals. And the field can be your backyard or your local park. ah Going out and just watch the animals do something ah for a while, whether it’s ants or squirrels or foxes, it it’s absolutely fascinating.
19:20.53
multiverses
Brilliant. Yeah. And I think, you know, particularly interesting as well, that you can also see the interaction of scientists with animals. Because I see that come across in your work that, you know, it’s not just the animal mind, but what is it? It’s what people say about the animal mind. um And i I imagine, yeah, in the field, like, you know, one is just forced to leave any, any assumptions about animals not having minds at at the door, as it were.
19:37.78
kristin
yeah
19:48.36
multiverses
And, you know, to make any headway, right particularly in, gosh, yeah, such a difficult situation as an animal rehab.
19:56.54
kristin
Yeah.
19:57.40
multiverses
um Yeah, fascinating.
19:57.83
kristin
Uh-huh.
19:59.88
multiverses
um A couple of last things on anthropomorphism. I just want to um when i get out or get two concepts into people’s heads. One is kind of critical anthropomorphism, which I touched upon briefly with Gordon Burghardt. previously. And another is anthroporectomy, I think, a term which you introduced. ah Perhaps you could give your kind of ah take on on both of these concepts.
20:28.85
kristin
Yeah, so critical anthropomorphism is this um idea that that really relates to the idea that I call um anti-anthropocentrism in my book, How to Study Animal Minds. The ideas are the same. So this is something that um that I think is important for animal cognition researchers to do, and that is recognize where there are differences between humans um and ah the animals that they’re studying. So don’t be anthropocentric. Don’t think that everyone is going to be like you. ah Recognize how ah different sensory systems are going to affect their behavior. Recognize how different you know desires and interests are going to affect others’ behavior. Recognize how different embodiments will affect behavior. and So it’s this idea that goes back to Von Uck’s goal when he talked about the tick. That the tick, like every other animal,
21:26.35
kristin
has their own world, their unvelte, their sensory world that matters to them. We cannot process every bit of information that’s in our environment. There’s way too much. Some of it we cannot see without instruments. you know I can’t see the molecules on my desk um because I don’t have the right sensory equipment to do that. I can’t see ultraviolet light because I don’t have the right sensory equipment to do that. I can’t sense the heat of other animals in my environment, etc, etc. But so others can.
21:58.20
kristin
And so for the tick, the their world is a world of heat and a few other things, but it’s it doesn’t have the same sort of um qualities as the environment does for a human. And it’s the same goes for a dog, right? Take your dog for a walk. Your dog is going to notice so many things that you don’t notice. The unveil of the dog is a lot of smells that we don’t register. um And so I spent a lot of time wondering what my dog’s smelling and thinking, wow, wouldn’t it be cool to be able to like see what happened an hour ago, the way my dog can see what happened an hour ago by smelling the urine of the dog that was there an hour ago?
22:36.17
multiverses
Hmm.
22:41.54
kristin
So this is, I think, the idea of um critical anthropomorphism or anti-anthropocentrism that we have to recognize what it’s like a little bit to be these other species when we’re studying them. um and And it’s actually a fun exercise to do as well, right? When you’re when you’re engaging with the animals, you’re trying to understand like, ah, what is it like to have a tail? What does this do to your experience of the environment to have this other appendage?
23:13.03
kristin
So ah so it requires some imagination.
23:13.29
multiverses
Hm.
23:18.56
kristin
And then answer andro um anthropectomy is this um was introduced um as a kind of flip side of anthropomorphism. So anthropomorphism, the idea again, is this attributing human characteristics to non-human animals, usually with the implement ah ah with the idea that it’s done without reason. And anthropectomy means cutting out a human quality from an animal, usually with the understanding that it’s done without reason. So the the criticism and the criticism of anthropectomy is this criticism that we’re denying a property to a nonhuman animal just because it’s a property that humans have. um And again, we need to do the research before we know whether or not the property is had or not.
24:11.91
kristin
But it was just naming a bias that and that Brian Huss and I took to do the flip side of the bias um that we ah that we see in the the worries about anthropomorphism. This is also something that Franz de Wallis are in quite a bit about. He calls it anthropodenial. And we just we just coined a new term for the same idea. um A lot of people have talked about this this worry that we need to have. um yeah We need to be able to recognize both kinds of errors if we’re going to be yeah discussing this on an even playing field.
24:45.87
kristin
Because really what we want to do in our science is to try to make accurate claims about the world.
24:46.30
multiverses
right
24:52.68
kristin
That’s what we want to do.
24:54.96
multiverses
Right, yeah, and I think just it’s surprising how putting a name to something can be so effective in flipping a switch and making people realize, oh yeah, that is a problem. um Yeah, and I think the, yeah, I really like your discussion of anti-anthropomorphism or critical anthropomorphism as, ah sorry, anti-anthropocentrism, um criticalical and anthropomorphism. I’m in danger of doing a bit of a Joe Biden here. solving constant These days I’m i mean i’m i’m constantly thinking, oh gosh, you know I just substitute one word for another. I’m on my mental faculties failing me, but I think we’ve got to approach these things in the spirit of generosity. Anyway, that’s a complete um by the bye-bye.
25:40.94
multiverses
ah but
25:41.17
kristin
have
25:43.58
kristin
yeah I called Descartes Darwin, so you know, I think you’re fine.
25:43.61
multiverses
ah so Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, you’re not going to be president of the US. We’re OK. um
25:55.71
multiverses
Yeah, so I mean, I think that was a really good um take on it. and And that is, I think, the third piece of the, ah you or the the third of the three rules, which is, of those three rules, the one but that you would agree is that we shouldn’t, you know, we do need to be anti-anthropocentric and um try to imagine ourselves in the unwealth of um
26:04.94
kristin
What?
26:17.65
multiverses
other another of other species. um And I guess, I mean, being critical of the first two rules, embracing the third, is it, let me put this in another way, is how much traction is this is this getting? All kind of comparative psychologists receiving your ideas and and actually saying, yes, this, you know, pesky philosopher of science actually maybe onto something. Is is it informing the the science, um these kind of criticisms that you’re bringing to the field?
26:56.88
kristin
Well, some of my colleagues say it is, but I think that i I’m not in a position to really know to what extent this is um has been widespread um and in any kind of acceptance. I do think that there’s a new generation of comparative cognition researchers who are more willing to investigate things like consciousness and more willing to do things like recognize you can have a relationship with your research subject. recognize that there are levels of explanation and that folks psychological explanations are not anti-scientific, but they’re a way of organizing behaviors into patterns that can then be used um when you’re investigating mechanisms or physical implementations at a neurobiological level.
27:45.68
kristin
So I think there is change, but we’re still waiting. I’m still waiting, I should say, for the next generation of textbooks to come out.
27:53.42
multiverses
Aha, yeah.
27:54.83
kristin
Yeah.
27:56.34
multiverses
Yeah, that will be really interesting to see. and i But I do have to say, I think this is such a fascinating example of a place where philosophy can speak directly to science. you know This is not metaphysics. It’s philosophy of mind, but in a way that really connects with the research. um and it’s you know your Your papers are probably mentioned, probably more scientific research than philosophical articles. if i I haven’t done a count, but i mean just though at least those are all the pieces that I remember are sort of drawing from scientific literature and saying, look, here are some experiments which seem very hard to deny that there is um you know something
28:47.27
multiverses
more than just behaviorism going on. there’s you know The best explanation of this is is that there is something um behind this, a mind behind this. So yeah, I do find it a really um great example of of where philosophers can productively um enter the scientific discussion.
29:05.94
kristin
Yeah, I mean, I would say I’m doing philosophy of mind as philosophy of science. And in order to do any philosophy of science, I think it’s really important to um to actually know the science well.
29:09.96
multiverses
Hmm.
29:18.28
kristin
um And so I had already said that i’m I tell my students they have to go into the field or go into the lab. They have to be exposed to the science. But I also make them read the science. We have regular discussion groups with scientists. um They get training in science as well as in philosophy. So it is quite robustly interdisciplinary research, which makes which makes it a lot of fun, I think. And we’ve had a lot of great conversations over the years with the scientists and in our our Greater Toronto Area Animal
29:51.27
kristin
cognition discussion group. It’s been very fun learning how to talk across disciplines because we have our own languages. It’s hard sometimes to translate um what we mean by terms and consciousness is one of those terms is really hard to to let people know what you’re talking about. um But we’ve had a lot of very good will because we’re all friends. And I think we’ve done a lot of really good work there and trained in ah a nice generation of of students and philosophy of animal minds.
30:24.31
multiverses
Yeah, let’s talk about one of the, so I think these criticisms that you’ve made are um i hope gaining traction and we’ll we’ll wait for the next crop of tax books to see. um I want to talk about one of the other very bold suggestions that you’ve made recently, ah which is that the null hypothesis in ah should be consciousness for other animals. um And you know that’s That’s new because when people people are in the business of looking for markers of consciousness in other animals at the moment, and there’s kind of a it seems to be there’s a kind of industry or so almost various subfields which are cons concerning themselves with looking for um markers of consciousness in in in other animals. um But you you argue that
31:17.36
multiverses
It’s almost inevitable that we find these. and what have they actually I mean, perhaps you can take us through um the case of C. elegans, which I think suggests just why we’re so likely to find you know consciousness might be so widely distributed in life. um Or maybe not, but at least the things that we’re doing to look for consciousness um probably get positive advances all over the animal kingdom.
31:37.27
kristin
Yeah,
31:47.76
kristin
yeah that’s that’s right. i mean it So right now, we don’t have a secure theory of consciousness, of course. um There’s a ah recent paper that came out that identified over 200 theories of consciousness that are on the table right now.
32:02.40
multiverses
Wow.
32:04.33
kristin
um And the one thing everyone agrees on is that none of these are secure. Some have better evidence than others, but none are secure.
32:13.86
multiverses
Hmm.
32:15.03
kristin
So what do we do when we are interested in questions about who is conscious, which other species are conscious. the The kind of best practice that we have right now is to use this kind of marker methodology. And the marker methodology goes back to right these ancient philosophical questions about other minds. How do we know that anyone has a mind? And this goes for humans too, right? I don’t see your mind directly. I see your behavior. I see your body. I see you know the environment you’re moving around in.
32:46.42
kristin
but I don’t see your conscious experience. I can experience my own conscious experience. I have direct awareness of it. That’s how I know I have a mind, conscious mind. um And the kind of general answer, John Stuart Mill gives us argument from analogy. Well, you’re doing the same things that I’m doing when I have a mind.
33:04.56
multiverses
Hmm.
33:04.72
kristin
So I’m just inferring that you have a mind as well. And so that really gets to this idea that it’s observable markers or indicators of consciousness that we are using in order to justify our commitment to minds in other humans and in other animals as well. And this is ah the marker methodology that is the the best practice for trying to answer this question about non-human animals. It’s used in animal welfare science, where they’re really interested in and trying to figure out how to make
33:35.14
kristin
living conditions more humane for captive animals, animals use in research or in agriculture. And it’s also used when people are interested in just a general distribution question like, which animals are conscious? How do we and how do we figure that out? And so I think that we can identify different like sets of markers to begin with. We have these kind of starting markers that um make us think that something might be conscious because they’re moving in ways that seem agential, that there’s this kind of biological movement. So this is humans, but also pretty much any animal we see, um moves in in ways that look goal-directed, whether it’s a bee that goes, you know, flies from flower to flower and in a way that makes sense, or an ant that’s carrying a little crumb on their back, going back into a hole with all the other ants,
34:31.38
kristin
or your dog that’s pawing at the back door when they want to go outside for a walk. and All of these are explainable and look agential. It’s also when we see ah you know the behaviors of animals that we know really well, like, say, your pet dog, that you have relationships with them. You feel like the dog’s responding to your emotions. You can respond to the dog’s emotions. Maybe you’re making eye contact. Maybe you play, things like that. these All of these are observable behaviors of the same sort that we have with other human minds that just justify, that can be used to justify our commitment that they’re conscious. but But there are fewer of these kind of initial markers with with some animals, right? Animals that we can’t see close up, that behave in ways that are very different from us. And when we don’t have relationships with them, like the ants and the bees um and sea sponge spores and
35:26.36
kristin
scary looking things that live at the bottom of the ocean. um These initial markers have less weight um and so we we look for other sorts of markers as well. We can look for neurobiological markers. These help um in cases you also with humans when they’re not engaging in the kind of typical behaviors. Say consider a human um with a disorder of consciousness who’s like a non-responsive in a coma. And we want to know whether they have conscious experience or not. Science researchers are able to identify some neurobiological markers that ah provide evidence of conscious experience in some of these patients. We could use this with infants who don’t yet talk or engage in a lot of really good goal-oriented behaviors because they don’t have control of their body yet.
36:17.33
kristin
um Presumably, we could use this with fetuses as well. um But we can use it with non-human animals who don’t engage in the same sorts of primary behaviors that we were often recognizing in and other mammals. ah and so In the case of C. elegans, this is a microscopic worm. It has a 304 to 20 neurons depending on the stage of development they’re in. um And they, ah you might ask, are they conscious?
36:50.84
kristin
Do they have these initial markers?
36:52.10
multiverses
Hm.
36:53.14
kristin
Well, they they have some of the initial markers. They have goal-directed behavior that we can observe through microscopes. We can see them move towards nutrient substances and moving away from um ah from substances that are aversive to them. But we can also use these kind of neurobiological markers in order to to help bolster evidence that they’re that they’re experiencing things as well. We can see that they’ve got a nerve ring.
37:23.90
kristin
We can see that they integrate information from different sensory modalities.
37:28.48
multiverses
Mm.
37:28.84
kristin
We can also look at behaviors that are a bit more complex and set up an experiment um to test what they’ll do in a certain condition. So for example, One of the experimental um paradigms that are used in order to provide evidence of of pain experience in animals is called a motivational trade-off test. This sort of a test involves exposing an animal to kind of two bad options. All right, so in the case of a hermit crab, the bad option to the two bad options are being shocked
38:10.31
kristin
um and leaving your nice shell. So they don’t want to do either of those things. um And so they’ll they have to weigh off, which is worse. um Bob Elwood and his colleagues have done a lot of work on this with with the hermit crabs. And what they found is that in that case, the hermit crabs will tolerate a shock ah higher shock when they’re in a higher quality shell um before they leave it.
38:36.62
multiverses
Right.
38:39.22
kristin
But if they’re in a lower quality shell, they’ll leave it sooner um with a lower a lower um range of a shock. um So they seem to value these these nicer shells more
38:49.48
multiverses
you
38:53.71
kristin
they’ll suffer more bad consequences before they suffer the consequence of leaving leaving the good shell. In the case of C. elegans, something similar was done with them. Then they um presented the C. elegans with a nutritive substance that they wanted, but then they put an aversive chemical um in front of this, the the food item. And so they waited to see what the C. elegans would do um
39:24.77
kristin
And hunger is one thing you want to avoid and going through this yucky chemical is another thing you want to avoid. And what they saw is that it took the C. elegans time to get for their hunger level to go up before they would go through this the subversive substance.
39:41.69
multiverses
Mmhmm.
39:44.38
kristin
And so this looks like it might be something similar to what was happening in in that the hermit crab case. So these are just very beginning pieces of evidence for C. elegans. As far as I know, none of the C. elegans researchers themselves have been studying consciousness or or markers of pain in particular in C. elegans. I think that it’s a really good opportunity to study pain experience in um in a very, very different system to see what sort of other behavioral ah markers of of pain experience we could um we can find in the C. elegans and then look and see what part of their their nerve ring is involved in these sorts of pain behaviors in order to try to get at
40:30.33
kristin
the physical correlates, the neurobiological correlates of pain experience in the C. elegans, which might then help us understand pain experience in us and in other mammals with our much more convoluted brains with our so many neurons um and so many you know brain structures. Whenever we study a simpler model in science, we make progress. And in consciousness science, we’ve not been studying simpler models.
41:04.30
kristin
I mean, the simpler model has been a macaque monkey.
41:04.52
multiverses
Hm.
41:07.44
kristin
That’s still not very simple. um And so I think if we switched, maybe not switched, but added to the research going on in consciousness science and started studying simpler models like C. elegans, which are readily available in labs at almost every university um that’s got a biochemistry lab, We might be able to make significant progress. um and And yeah, you know it seems like we’re like, oh, 20 years later, and we still don’t know what the neural correlates of consciousness are. We’re still stuck with these 200 plus theories.
41:47.56
kristin
But maybe it’s because we’ve not been doing the right kind of science. So I’m i’m super excited to propose this idea that but just we stop asking this question, oh, who’s conscious?
41:53.52
multiverses
All
41:57.70
kristin
Which animals are conscious?
41:59.25
multiverses
right.
41:59.62
kristin
And then instead say, OK, let’s just assume the animals are conscious and then examine different dimensions of consciousness, self-awareness, pain experience, um pleasure experience, and examine those very specific dimensions of consciousness in a variety of species in order to try to figure out how these are implemented, what the mechanisms are in those species. That I think is going to give us real progress.
42:28.56
multiverses
Right, so we move away from this distribution question to this question of of dimension um and also open at the same time, ah open ourselves up to looking at really perhaps edge cases of consciousness, um which I think is always something fruitful for science. Like if you can find where, you know, maybe it’s not C. elegans, but maybe there’s some slightly smaller ah brain where we just don’t find any of the markers of consciousness, and then we can start to draw a line between what is required at the physical level um before, yeah.
43:07.96
kristin
Absolutely.
43:09.85
multiverses
So yeah, I think this is yeah really promising. And I have to ask, are there other, I know you’re looking at animal, societal norms, and I am curious, are there, is there something analogous to be done here? You know, at the moment the question is perhaps, you know, do animals have societal norms? Should should it just be assumed that all animals have societal norms? That maybe even all animals have culture? Perhaps that’s too far of a null hypothesis, but um are there any new null hypotheses you’d like to throw out?
43:44.85
kristin
Yeah, that’s ums a super interesting question. um on like On the question of animal culture, I think that we’ve we’ve kind of, um we might be in a similar situation now because we’ve asked this question about um chimpanzee cultures in 1989, 2000, this nature paper came out. finding cultural differences and in different chimpanzee communities. And then 25 years later, what we found is culture in every species where it’s been looked for, ah including fruit flies, right including bumblebees.
44:16.16
multiverses
All right.
44:20.14
kristin
So and you might say, well, what do you mean by culture then? It’s been found everywhere. What do you mean? You don’t mean like museums and ah and works of art. ah So what what the scientists are referring to by culture are group level traditions that are acquired through social learning. this is ah in contrast with having innate behaviors, right? So one of the postulates of human uniqueness that I often hear is that, oh, humans alone are able to learn things. Humans alone are able to solve problems in real time when ah when they’re confronted with them in their environment, and then they can learn them from other members of their community. That is not human unique. That is found in fruit flies. That is found in bumblebees. um Social learning is widespread.
45:05.66
kristin
So I think that asking like about shifting the null hypothesis for animal culture to all animals um is we’re probably in a very similar situation to the situation we are with with the markers for consciousness, where I would predict we’d continue to find them as we look for them.
45:20.85
multiverses
Yeah.
45:24.88
kristin
This question of social norms is slightly different, I think, because we haven’t yet really done, even started an an empirical investigation of social norms and non-human animals. What we have is is kind of the place, we’re at the place where where Darwin was in the descent of man. We have a lot of anecdotes. We have a lot of stories about animals who seem to be enforcing patterns of behavior that exist in their communities. um enforcing these patterns either by letting young individuals watch them and learn them or assisting them by some form of teaching, um some some evidence of punishment in a few rare cases, ah but we don’t yet have a lot of empirical evidence. And I think that this is this is a point where we’re at a point in the investigation where it would be most fruitful
46:14.48
kristin
to just go out with this account of what a social norm is, that is a pattern of behavior that’s maintained by community members, either through a positive or negative reinforcement, um and and find out where they might be and what they might be in in different communities.
46:18.46
multiverses
Mmm.
46:34.46
kristin
Now, if you asked me to speculate how widespread they are, I think I’d be willing to to predict that we’re going to find them in lots of different animal societies as well. And I think that social norms probably are going to go along with any kind of group living animal that is that is conscious. And if we’re predicting that all animals are conscious or presuming that all animals are conscious, Maybe we should presume that all animals have social norms too. I don’t know if that’s fruitful right now for the science. In the same way, people often ask me, should we presume that plants are conscious too? And my response is, I don’t know if that’s going to be fruitful for the science right now. That might be too far of an edge case for us to investigate. We don’t maybe have the methods.
47:20.08
kristin
to to do really good research in that area right now. um So yeah, it might not be fruitful for the science to assume that all animals have social norms, but certainly we should look for social norms in any species that you’re studying.
47:35.02
multiverses
Right.
47:36.86
kristin
I think that that would be really, really robust and vibrant science.
47:43.30
multiverses
Again, I’m reminded of my conversation with Gordon Burghart and how in coming up with a definition for play, he kind of made it somewhat acceptable to look for those activities in in in animals, where before people had been very perhaps rather nervous about looking for um calling something play in animals because it had been deemed too anthropomorphic. um And again, you know, perhaps we have these overhangs
48:06.21
kristin
Yes.
48:11.27
multiverses
and this feeling that society is something uniquely human, but just unpacking the definition of social norm maybe just opens, makes people a bit more open-minded to look for those kinds of behaviors. And then once we discover them in enough places, we can say, well, actually, yeah, clearly there is there there are societies here. um
48:38.48
kristin
Yeah, well, absolutely. Being clear on what we mean by the question when we ask, do animals have culture, is has to be the first step. And that’s what really allowed for a lot of progress in the science of animal culture, um defining culture in terms of group level traditions that are socially learned. um One of the kind of ah trends, I think, in a lot of comparative psychology is exactly as you identified in Gordon Burkhart’s account of of play, is when we stop focusing on assumptions about what the cognitive mechanisms are and instead focus on the observable patterns of behavior and get really clear on those those patterns of interest and define them, we make progress.
49:26.81
multiverses
Hm.
49:27.19
kristin
um The next step once we’ve identified patterns of behavior is to is to figure out how the animals are doing it. What are the mechanisms? What do you need to have? What kind of neurobiological machinery um do you need to have? What sort of cognitive processes do you need to have in order to do these things? That’s a further question. um The first step really is identifying these patterns of interest and defining them really clearly. And so that’s what was done with play, what was done with culture, what was done with teaching, and now what we’ve done with social norms. And since this paper came out um that um um we had, I can’t tell you 10 authors on a paper.
50:14.75
kristin
in on how to study animal norms in non-human great apes, non-human primates actually. We found a lot of interest among scientists in taking up this question. There’s been a lot of enthusiasm in the conferences we’ve gone to, the conversations we’ve had with scientists. And our next step is to just get the funding and do the research. ah And once we do that with with great apes, I think is the first step. We’ll probably move on and and and explore it in ah other species. This is exactly how all things worked in culture. It started with great apes, kind of easiest test case because we’ve studied them quite extensively on this kind of so societal level. um But I think we might find them.
51:04.52
kristin
and
51:04.92
multiverses
Mm.
51:05.73
kristin
a wide variety of animal species. And it’s it’s so exciting to be at this kind of edge of knowledge too. I think that we’re we’re going to be learning more and more and should expect more of these kind of exciting ah discoveries as time goes on. And I think that once we make these exciting discoveries, it really does, but for me at least, it causes me to see humans differently, right? It causes me to see us as just another, you know, culture and of another species that also engages with other cultures and other species and that we are more socially interconnected um as well.
51:28.56
multiverses
Right.
51:46.00
kristin
And so right now I’ve got fruit flies in my kitchen, you know, it’s, it’s July. So I don’t know about you, but I’ve got, you know, a lot of fruits in my kitchen and they sometimes they sit on the counter and sometimes they get overripe and the fruit flies love them. And what I used to do is I’d make a little fruit fly traps with some vinegar and soapy water and, and saran wrap with little holes in them. and trap and drown the fruit flies. um But ever since I found out that fruit flies have culture and that they learn, female fruit flies learn who to mate with by watching other female fruit flies have sex.
52:24.22
multiverses
Okay.
52:25.20
kristin
i mean that’s so That’s so weird and cool and awesome. And since I learned that, and like I look at the fruit flies on my berries in a different way.
52:29.98
multiverses
Yeah.
52:35.54
kristin
And instead of making the traps, I just like take the bowl of berries outside and then brush them away and then bring the berries back and put them in the fridge or cover them with saran wrap. I don’t feel comfortable drowning the fruit flies if I don’t have to. So we I’m living with them, right? We’re living with these other species. I am not. you know, the only important person in the world in my house. It’s the fruit flies that live there, the the ants that live there, and the spiders that live there are important too. If the rats who live outside get in my house, I’m definitely getting them outside of my house one way or another.
53:11.54
kristin
If I have to kill them, so be it, but I prefer not to if I don’t have to.
53:15.44
multiverses
Yeah.
53:16.50
kristin
It just gives me a little bit more appreciation for all of the animals that that we live with. um doing this kind of research. And it’s it’s a nice way of of seeing the world. It’s a very friendly way. You don’t feel lonely when when you know your house is also filled with fruit flies who are learning who to have sex with by watching other fruit flies mate. That’s just awesome.
53:43.88
multiverses
I think I have so many more questions that I would love to ask, but I also feel like that was just a lovely point that you made, and and I can’t think of a better way to to end it, right? ah You know, if we can find such an appreciation for the humblest of of creatures um in a way that enriches our own lives, right? we it’s It’s not pure charity, like, to ah keep these through private lives. They they are ah you know just wonderfully fascinating things, um and they have value in their own right. So, yeah.
54:17.94
multiverses
um Unless you have, I don’t know if you if you want to add any other things, perhaps some information on, I know you’ve got a book coming out, so in case people are listening to this in the future, well, that’s almost certainly the case, but and yeah, if you want to get some notes on that.
54:29.10
kristin
Mm hmm.
54:33.04
multiverses
um But this has been such a wonderful conversation, Kristen, thank you.
54:36.69
kristin
Yeah, thanks, James. It was it was great talking to you. It was a lot of fun. And yeah, folks can check out my website, which I guess you’ll link to if they’re interested in reading any of my work.
54:46.68
multiverses
Yes, I will be. Thank you.
54:48.67
kristin
Yeah, thanks so much.
