Animals have to get their enjoyment where they can. It's always fun to watch them play. You can start to think that animals are always optimizing the time they spend being active and are carefully preserving their energy in order to survive, but then you see some birds going sledding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0OjCneVUg) and it's clear that they're just in it for the fun.
This summer I spent an hour watching a pair of magpies harass a fox. The fox was trying to sunbathe, but the magpies kept dive-bombing it, pecking its tail, and landing in front of it then flying away just as the fox went for them, all while making a chattering sound that seemed a lot like laughter.
I've heard theories that they do this as revenge for stolen eggs, or to chase foxes away from their nests, but this was in an open patch of ground far from where they nest and it really looked to me that they were just teasing it for fun.
Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].
Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.
Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
In my hometown, sometimes birds (I think they may have been crows) swoop across real close to cars along a straight stretch of highway. I've had to slow down sometimes thinking I might hit one.
I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".
One of favourite examples of this sort of thrill seeking animal behaviour is this gibbon pulling the ears of a young tiger
https://youtu.be/SHXo-BpE8T8
That's a cool video but I'm not 100% convinced that crow is "having fun". It looks equally plausible that the crow is trying to break open the object, possibly in search of food.
Of course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.
Humour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is.
It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
I once dated someone who couldn't consider hypotheticals or how they could be used as a reasoning tool. Disagreements were the most frustrating thing ever because I couldn't play devils advocate or steelman. She thought I was agreeing with her intermittently to make her mad. She had no concept of walking in someone else's shoes or arguing a position you don't actually hold. It blew my mind.
(Human) Humor is a far broader spectrum than you describe here too. It can range from "ROFTL because someone accidentally stepped in poop" to deeply layered liguistic jokes like you describe.
> One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility
All humor? (Honest question)
I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.
It's difficult to reason about intelligence in this context.
Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.
Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.
Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.
Anectodally elephants do things like hiding and revaling objects for no apparent reason other than comical effect. One could build elaborate evolutionary fitness reasons for this, but I mean...
I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
> Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits
I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.
Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.
Play has a purpose, it hones reflexes, teaches youth about concealment, traps, ambushes, what their bodies can do, whether running away works in a scenario or fighting is better.
It also shows who is best to lead a fight. Play much like curiosity, makes you able to navigate your environment. It very much has extreme usefulness.
That’s not the point. Evolutionary pressure doesn’t care if something is or isn’t useful per see. It’s all situational anyway.
To simplify a lot, either you have offsprings and your genes spread or you don’t and they don’t. Evolution is not a purposeful process towards fitness. It’s a reification of the results of the way genes are passed, how they and the environment affect individual characteristics and how an individual fitness to their current environment impacts their chance to mate.
That's not accurate at all. Evolution does care if something is useful, if it aids in reproduction. Learning how to fight, protect, run, hunt, tricks, all of these (such as ambushes, hiding, etc) helps both prey and predator survive in the wild.
Play hones reflexes. Its entire purpose is to train young animals on tactics, and on how to use their body, and on their local environment.
Put another way, if you aren't trained to use your body, you're more likely to die. The same goes with not learning tactics. Or what the local environment is like.
If you don't know what a tree is, if you don't know what a hole in the ground is, what a hill is, how well grass hides you or not, you are at a major disadvantage, if you're hunting, OR if you're hunted!
There can be other mechanisms to learn things, but play is one of them, and having children teach each other, lets the adult protect, and gather food to feed. It also ensures that youth is trained up on the current environment, not one that the parent recalls from youth.
Sure, maybe, but if you tried you could come up with a similar explanation for literally any behavior or emotion. It might be true, but it isn’t falsifiable.
there is this study that shows bumblebees exhibit behaviour that looks a lot like what we would call playing, seems to serve no purpose except being enjoyable.
My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)
We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves. We cannot detect it directly. If there were consciousness in the world that was significantly different to our own then we likely would be ignorant of it.
We do know that human consciousness has something to do with the networks of neurons in our brains. We know this because we can poke specific parts of it and manipulate specific aspects of our consciousness: we can observe a fairly direct correspondence between conscious experience and biological substrate.
To play devil's advocate: have a look at the way plants in a forest communicate with each other - even across different species! That's a complex network, in which individual plants could be analogized to neurons.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
> We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
> It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
> The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
Consider the slime molds, which have no brain, specifically Physarum polycephalum and Dictyostelium discoideum (you'll forgive me for conflating them a bit in this brief comment):
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
Why do they have to have brains? Is it impossible that another structure could serve a similar purpose? Like, how long did it take us to figure out what brains are for?
They don't need to have "brains" in the sense that humans do, ie. discrete neurons and axons, but they do need to have "neural networks" - networks of nonlinear operators with a training mechanism. I'm aware of zero evidence that trees perform computation on a larger-than-single-cell basis.
You cannot direct growth at the scale of a single cell. There are many computations (based on hormonal gradients and other mechanisms) that occur at the scale of larger structures, such as leaves or branches. Of course, those mechanicisms are not going to create consciousness.
So my brother was in a zoo somewhere in Europe (I forget which one) and he was watching the penguins. The enclosure had various levels and one penquin was throwing stones at a fellow penguin down below. It would throw a stone and then hide behind the ledge and the penguin it was taunting would look up to try to find out what was going on.
Humans are fundamentally not that different from other animals really. Any emotion you have, they have. It's a Victorian era misconception that humans are somehow a unique species with all these wonderful properties and animals are dumb.
Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.
I think that largely depends on how you look at it. As with any topic, Greek philosophers had widely different opinions across schools of thought and generations. Many highlighted rational thinking as the line between humans and animals, while still thinking animals intelligent and emotional. I do agree with your point on Darwin, but why that point works is exactly because his work contrasted with the rest of his peers. His work was also far from being widely accepted at first, and was met with heavy skepticism on many, if not most fronts. It was only later that this became a widely accepted part of science.
OK, I think I see what you meant: Not that the "misnomer" arose in the Victorian era, but that the Victorian era was the last era in which you would expect to encounter this "misnomer".
As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.
Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".
This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."
Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.
Thanks for denomering my misnomer misconception. Joking aside, I appreciate you correcting me, I'm not a native speaker, so these small issues pop up here and there, and it helps when you point them out.
it's a common error even of native speakers, and I hadn't the faintest clue it mightn't be your first language. I am barely conversant in one, so consider me shamed.