Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Susana Mons ó who presents her new book Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death   (Princeton, 2024).  Susana Monsó  is associate professor of philosophy in the Department of Logic, History, and Philosophy of Science at the National Distance Education University (UNED) in Madrid. She specialises in philosophy of animal minds, animal ethics, and philosophy of comparative psychology. Humans have traditionally thought of themselves as the only animals with a concept of death. Yet, recent years have witnessed a surge of studies that suggest that we may not be the only ones intrigued by this phenomenon. A chimpanzee was seen cleaning the teeth of the corpse of an adolescent of her group with whom she was closely bonded, crows will gather around the bodies of deceased conspecifics to learn about the circumstances of their death, elephants calves have been discovered seemingly buried by their elders, an orca mother was seen carrying her dead baby for s...

Today's post is by Ali Boyle . Ali is a research associate in Kinds of Intelligence at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge and the Center for Science and Thought in Bonn. Her research focusses on non-human minds and the methods used to study them. In this post, she is going to summarise her recent paper,  The impure phenomenology of episodic memory , appeared in Mind & Language. One question under investigation in comparative psychology is whether nonhuman animals have episodic memory – the kind of memory involved in recollecting past experiences. A problem for this research is that on many accounts, the defining feature of episodic memory is that it involves an experience of ‘mentally reliving’ past events. But if that’s right, then asking whether animals have episodic memory amounts to asking whether they have this distinctive experience. Many researchers think this renders the question unanswerable, since we have no experimental way...

Today's post is by Michael Tye on his book Tense Bees and Shell-Shocked Crabs: Are animals conscious ? . I’m a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. I encountered philosophy at Oxford and I’ve taught at Temple University, London University, and the University of St Andrews as well as at Texas. I’ve published widely on consciousness and I am associated with a view that has come to be known as representationalism .   The book described below, published by OUP in November 2016, remains neutral on the question as to the right view on the nature of consciousness. Do birds have feelings? What about fish – can fish feel pain? Do insects have experiences? Can a honeybee feel anxious? If trees aren't conscious but fish are, what's the objective difference that makes a difference? How do we decide which living creatures have experiences and which are zombies? Can there be a conscious robot? This book advances philosophically rigorous, empirically informed ans...

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, ...