Intelligence in Non-human Animals

Recently re-read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I was quite fond of it when I originally read it as an adolescent. I wasn't a fan of the 1982 movie The Secret of NIMH. It was missing the wistful quality of the ending because it dispensed with the plot thread about the rats' forced departure. There's something about being temporarily let in on a vanishing secret bigger than oneself.

Reading it as an adult, it struck me that the novel is not only charming, but also an unusual mixture of science fiction and fantasy. The major drive of the story is the background of rodents being made more intelligent through experimentation by humans. But underneath that is another author choice that fades into the background: even the untreated animals are fantastically much more human-like than reality, e.g., an unaltered "wild type" mouse can understand human speech and be taught, albeit slowly, to read. But of course a novel from an animal perspective is going to have treat animals as more intelligent than they are.¹ It would be difficult to have an enjoyable story otherwise. After all, it's difficult, even impossible for humans to tell what it's like to be a bat (to allude to Thomas Nagel's famous essay at the expense of introducing another mammal to our considerations): how could we humans hope to relate to the experience of an animal so different from us?

One thing as a young person I also enjoyed about the novel was the exciting thought of making animals intelligent through technology. I think I enjoyed the 1983 film Hide and Seek for similar reasons, though with machines instead of animals. My memories are hazy, but it's about a teenager who serendipitously creates an artificial intelligence from a cellular automata not unlike Conway's Game of Life.² I recall a similar wonder, hopefully not impious, in my reaction to both.

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Here's a question that I've been pondering recently. On the assumption that evolution is real, does the existence of humans on planet Earth advance or retard the development of intelligence in other animals?

I put this question to friends last summer and some of them seemed to think our presence advances the animals around us. One person thought our products give them more things to think about. Perhaps. It surprised me that octopodes and crows were prominent in the conversation.³

I tend to think of pets. It's been noted that our pets, mostly dogs, have developed quite an emotional intelligence centered around us humans. It is striking how they seem to respond to human language, sometimes going beyond mere trained stimulus-response.

I wonder how the food we give domesticated animals shapes their development. I'm thinking of how primates developed. Apparently the bodies of some of our ancestors used to synthesize their own vitamin C. But then later they gained access to a dependable source of vitamin C, and lost that ability as the necessity passed. But that loss freed up their physiology for other things. I'm not sure those other things would lead to intelligence, but I hope you can see where I'm going with this. As our physiology is freed of requirements for mere survival, it opens room to develop for less slavish activities. I wonder if the same holds true of pets. Does our supplying them with their needs free their bodies to develop intelligent thought? Or does it simply allow them to become more dependent on us, and retard their intelligence? Part of the question here is about the nature of intelligence: does it have to be independent?⁴

On this topic, I would be remiss not to recommend Erwin Straus's 1949 essay on "Upright Posture," about how our physical embodiment is correlative to our intelligence. The most prominent example is how walking on two limbs frees our hands to pick up things at will. It's not just any physiology that can supplely serve an intelligent soul.

Finally, I have to wonder if non-human animals gained intelligence to the point of competing with us, would we allow them to continue, or would we hunt them down to extinction? I suspect most people would say that of course we would allow them to survive and even encourage them, but in addition to their competing for resources, it's also possible our raw emotional reaction would consign them to the same uncanny valley inhabited by the human-headed dog of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

My own instinct is that our presence here retards the development of intelligence in other animals, similar to the way that the existence of life on Earth apparently prevents the generation of a new lineage of life here (abiogenesis). We occupy an ecological niche (if such a small word can reflect such a big footprint), and there's nothing to be gained by another species trying to fill it (filling unoccupied or poorly occupied niches is one driver of evolution). We don't know how rare life and intelligence are in the universe, or even in our galaxy, but I think that if we want the Earth to flourish as the unique font of life that it seems to be, perhaps we would do well to withdraw to space and let Earth do its thing.

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Notes

1. Watership Down, rather more literalistic than Animal Farm, is an interesting comparison that would take us too far afield.

2. It bears more than a passing similarity to the film WarGames, also from 1983.

3. "Octopus" is from Greek not Latin, so the correct pretentious plural is "octopodes," not "octopi."

4. That question is part of a much larger debate. The bias of 20th century research in artificial intelligence has certainly been toward intelligence being most manifest in what might be called masculine activities, such as chess playing and mathematics. That's a real problem.

Baptizing aliens?

There was an online dispute recently about whether we would be able to baptize intelligent extraterrestrials. Many of the participants in this forum said no, of course not: God took on human flesh to save humans, he became a child of Adam to save the descendants of Adam. My response is: how do we know he didn't become a rational creature to save rational creatures? One can point to Scripture to argue agsinst my point, but I think it requires assuming that statements about whom Jesus died to save are meant not just positively, but also restrictively (he didn't die to save those others).

It's certainly a valid question whether we could baptize extraterrestrials. But I also think there's a certain naiveté about it. One big assumption is that whatever intelligent life we meet out there will have a biology relatively similar to our own, rather like in science ficton TV series, all the extraterrestrial life looks like us, except for maybe a few modifications to the face (looking at you Star Trek). I'm not talking about being carbon based or breathing oxygen, although those are relatively assured, based on what we know. I'm talking about the life cycle and the organization of its society.

Would you baptize a xenomorph from Alien or one of the hunters from Predator? Perhaps the latter, which are at least rational, if you could get them to put their weapons down long enough to talk. All sorts of forms of intelligent life are possible. One needn't go as weird as the creatures in H.P. Lovecraft's twisted meaningless universe (e.g., "The Color from Space," the Great Old Ones) to see that there might be beings for whom Christian faith would just make no sense.

Say there were an intelligent species that organized itself as a hive consciousness; what would salvation even mean to them? Or what if the life cycle of the intelligent species required that one mate to kill the other and lay eggs in its corpse? Actually the latter would be a relatively easy sell for the Gospel, despite being rather weird. There are possibilities far beyond our imaginings, possibilities that would go beyond just making us uncomfortable, but actually appear to us as violations of the integrity of persons.

None of this is to say that we wouldn't be able to baptize extraterrestrials, just that we may find fewer candidates out there than we in our earth-centric view anticipate.

In Fiction

Some time ago, I wrote a review of The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber, which was a sort of liberal Protestant imagining of aliens who wanted to hear about Jesus for their own odd purposes, but without any need for salvation from sin.

A much better book on baptizing extraterrestrials was Eifelheim by Michael Flynn. Insect-like (but also somewhat humanoid) aliens crash-land on Earth in the Middle Ages. A pastor and well educated priest befriends a group of them and evangelizes them. The second half of the book is a detailed imagining of the aliens' realization that they need salvation from sin (not just physical death), and their acceptance of faith in Jesus. I found it moving.

Mamma Borg

I recently caught up with some episodes of Star Trek I hadn't seen before. Among these episodes were those of Voyager in which "Seven of Nine" first appears and then joins the the crew, and then when her (Borg) cortical implant starts to malfunction, endangering her life. Let me tell you why I found these episodes disappointing.

Anyone who has seen the show can tell you that Seven is a healthy specimen of womanhood. And it's more than clear why the people who run the show chose an actress with a good figure: ratings. But the question remains: in the context of the show's fiction, why would the Borg allow an assimilated organism to devote its metabolism to the development of such inefficient structures as large breasts and wide hips? They take up space, and wide hips are inefficient for running. And that's not to mention the way anatomical irregularities make the resultant drone hard to fit within the uniformity of the collective.

I can think of no reason. It's not as if Borg females need to gestate babies, give birth, or suckle infants. And even if they were to do so, a Caesarian section and smaller breasts would do the job well enough for the intervention-happy Borg.

In actuality, the Borg would be much more likely control the hormones of their drones to channel their metabolism to "necessary" structures, like bones and muscles, or at least amputate the breasts and remove the uterus. The resultant drone would be even more efficient and terrifying than what we see on screen now, and certainly much less viewer friendly.

And then there were the couple episodes in which Seven's cortical implant begins to malfunction. They had Tuvok, Torres, and Janeway all allowing themselves to be assimilated to acquire a new implant and then being rescued by Voyager and returned their natural state, apparently without any permanent damage of significance.¹ It was all too easy. And after that there was an episode with "Borg children"—rescued on Voyager. Ugh.

The reason I found this all so disappointing is that all these developments soften the Borg and present them as less terrifying than they should be. The original genius of imagining this "race" (for lack of a better word) is that they are the major dark attractor toward which human development is in our very non-fictional world being drawn: completely anti-human and opposed to the ideals represented by the Federation and the Star Trek franchise itself. To soften or "nerf" them is to compromise the humanistic (dare I say "prophetic") witness of the show.

But of course, making such a statement about hormone blockers would hit far too close to home these days for many in the audience, at least now if not back in the day when the episodes were first aired. The simple truth is that the dominant culture of the developed world has, at present, set a course to turn mankind into the Borg.²

Huxley's Brave New World is far too cheery in imagining humanity will find contentment in its humanity, in the norms of its nature, to any recognizable extent. But as in that tale, the dystopia is far more likely to come about through the sum of individual choices than through imposition of a dictatorship through some 1984-style extrinsic power.³ Thanks to James Cameron and others, the popular notion of the post-human world portrays it as being initiated by newly intelligent machines; in reality machines will only trouble to take notice of and work against humans at the behest of other humans for the latter's peculiar gain. Thus has it always been that man's greatest enemy is man. Similarly it will not be the machines who turn the humans into machines, but the humans who dehumanize themselves. And I daresay it will be individual humans who will choose to dehumanize themselves, at least initially, before gaining enough strength to force that transformation onto others.

The people pushing for this future are "transhumanists," though this word has become associated in the popular press solely with the folks who want to "upload" our minds into computers, whatever that means. The dominant culture of Western modernity has no resources to oppose their core notion that man is really God and should have his power: because that notion is in fact at the heart of modernity. The only thing that can challenge their ideas is a spiritual power. In the West, the spiritual power is Christianity, which gave rise to it and imparted what strength it has, but in which the West has sadly lost all faith.

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As I was finishing this post up, this review by Michael Gerson of Yuval Noah Harari's book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow came to my attention: "Humans reach for godhood — and leave their humanity behind." The review illustrates the crisis of belief in the West and how it leaves us powerless to oppose the coming storm.

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Notes

1. One of the perils of watching TV episodes in syndication is their presentation is discontinuous and likely incomplete. If I'm wrong about this or any show detail, please let me know in the comments.

2. The original navigators were Bacon and Descartes.

3. In this discussion we're not considering "principalities and powers"

Weight and Cosmic Love

This ring does not weigh anything,
the needle does not move from zero
and I cannot make it show
even a milligram.
Your husband must be alive—
in which case neither of your rings, taken separately,
will weigh anything—only both together will register.

Karol Wojtyla, The Jeweler's Shop, act II

What if it were a cosmic law, and not only a law of love, but a physical law that the each member of a couple separately lacks the significance of the pair together?

We cannot know directly whether unpaired charged lack weight. The problem is that electromagnetic forces are so large that only the smallest particles are tolerated to remain unpaired for any significant time, and these are too small to have appreciable weight. Put another way, the systematic uncertainties of electromagnetic forces so far dominate gravity as to make the latter completely negligible.

But are there indirect ways to know whether unpaired charges lack weight? What would the universe look like were this true? Would it differ from our own? If so, how?