Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryAnimal mind

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遊ぶチンパンジーの子供

Why Humans Can’t “Share the Spotlight” With Tool-Using Animals

As the Ivy League war on human exceptionalism motors on, researchers’ thinking sometimes shorts out — and they don’t even notice
Their discussion of animal behavior depends wholly on the uniquely human ability to abstract. That ability also radically changes how humans use tools. Read More ›
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closeup ants

Ants: An Utterly Different Model of a Large Communal Society

In terms of sheer complexity of society, ants are similar to humans but they “think” very differently from us, as a British science writer finds
At one point, Southeast Asian ants invaded the sealed Biosphere II project in Arizona (intended for space exploration studies), using it as a honeydew farm. Read More ›
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goats on the roof

Researchers: Goats Can Read Basic Human Emotions

The research team hopes to improve care of livestock by establishing what they do and don’t feel about the way they are treated
It’s no surprise if a wide range of animals understand human contentedness vs. anger. Those are precisely the elements of the mind that we and goats share. Read More ›
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three dolphins close up portrait underwater while looking at you

Why Animals Don’t Really Have Anything Much to Say

Terrace attempted to teach infant chimpanzee Nim Chimpsky to form a sentence but conceded defeat. His apparent early successes were traced to human prompting. Read More ›
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free-range chickens on an organic farm in styria,austria

Chicken Whisperers? Humans Learn to Interpret Chicken-ese Quickly

Animal languages deal in emotions and sometimes in basic information but not in ideas. Humans can understand them to the extent that we can follow the emotions. Read More ›
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little fluffy kitten on a gray background

Can Science Tell Us Whether Our Cats Love Us?

Researchers have found out some intriguing things about the way cats react to humans
In the human sense, cats neither love nor hate neither because for us these emotions are mixed up with the indelible effects of human reason. Read More ›
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Macro photo of Toxocara canis, dog roundworm

Can the Simplest Animal Minds Explain Human Minds?

Kristin Andrews thinks consciousness researchers should discard the assumptions of “overwhelmingly white, male and WEIRD” philosophy profs and study more crabs
Panpsychism is a faith, like materialism; its assumptions and assertions are not “value-free.” We are likely to be unpacking them for some time. Read More ›
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illustration, mouse in the kitchen, generative ai.

Mice Pass the Mirror Test — Not a Self-Knowledge Test

Whether an animal recognizes its own image surely has less to do with self-awareness than with the role that sight — as a sense — plays in its life
The researchers, refreshingly, made clear that they were NOT making unsubstantiable claims about mouse self-awareness; they were studying neural wiring. Read More ›
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Bumblebee on a flower

What Do Bees’ Joy and Pain Really Tell Us About Insect Minds?

If sentience, like intelligence, can be independent of phylogeny (place in Darwin’s tree of life), the conventional picture of evolution might need rethinking
Efforts to relate insect consciousness to the human type are doomed because the key features of human consciousness are abstract thinking and moral choice. Read More ›
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An octopus holding a plastic bottle , generative ai

Will the Octopus Ever Find Its Way Into a Tidy Evolutionary Tree?

New finds in genetics and neuroscience both shed light and deepen the puzzle of the almost "alien" species
Octopus information-gathering is fundamentally different from that of intelligent mammals. Are comparisons in intelligence even meaningful then? Read More ›
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fishy reflection

The Mirror Test: The Key to a Sense of Self?

When fish and ants pass the test for “a higher sense of self” — but dogs and even kids in some cultures don’t — we should ask some questions
When fish and ants pass the test for “a higher sense of self” — but dogs and even kids in some cultures don’t — we should ask some questions Read More ›
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Closeup portrait of cute baby chimpanzee dressed in blue wool jacket. Generative AI.

Psychology: When a Child and a Chimp Were Raised Together…

When their son was ten months old, a psychologist couple decided to raise him alongside a baby female chimpanzee, for research purposes
It ended sadly. No one has ever been able to give chimpanzees human minds — the real goal all along, surely — because the human mind is not a material thing. Read More ›
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Spider birded in terrarium live end sleep

What Does It Mean to Say That Spiders “Dream”?

It means much less than we might be led to think
The war on the basic fact that humans are different from other life forms is leading researchers down some very unusual paths. Read More ›
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An octopus holding a plastic bottle , generative ai

Octopus Intelligence Is Unlike Anything We Know

Could such a different neurology really evolve purely by natural selection acting on random mutations?
If a complex neurology like that of the mammal was a fluke, what are the chances of a completely different complex neurology happening by chance again? Read More ›