5. Reading Animal Minds And Assuming Things

Given his high position within the pseudo-skeptical group CSI(COP) it is incredible how much faith its Council Member, E. O. Wilson, has in the ability of his fellow scientists to read the minds of animals.  Ethologists have been pretending that they can know what animals are thinking for so many decades and selling their results to the human public that it is strange that the subjects of their study have been remarkably silent on what they are saying about them.   Considering that not a single ethologist has ever been an animal, thinking with the mind of an animal, based in an understanding of the world that is the product of living as an animal of the species they claim to understand, it is downright short sighted that there is massive faith among the educated public in what they have to say on the subject of how and what animals are thinking.

The problem with the claims of ethologists can be illustrated by looking at how hard it is for us to know the minds of our fellow human beings, even those with whom we share far, far more than we can with non-humans.

I would not claim to have a thorough understanding of what it would be like to be a fellow human being who lived a significantly different life than the one I have.  I have never been a black man living in Missouri around St. Louis, subject to such extra-legal rules that socieity and the TV trained minds of white people impose on black men on the basis that black men are black men.  The only way I can hope to have ANY understanding of what that experience is like is to listen to what black men living in this society have to say about their experience of living under racism.

Now, despite that large difference in our experience, I have a lot in common with black men in the St. Louis area.  Even more than that we are, for most purposes, almost biologically identical.  We are both American men living under the same federal government with a constitution that asserts we have the same rights, speaking a common language.   We likely have seen some of the same TV or at least have both been exposed to large amounts of similar media imparting the same cultural messages. We likely share some of the same assumptions about how the world is supposed to work, among those is that the police are not supposed to be able to act on an assumption that someone is guilty of a crime when they have no evidence that they are and that the police are required to impose the same system of laws to us, equally, not on the basis of appearance or where they happen to encounter us on the street.  I can know that we share that because I hear black men from the St. Louis area speaking their thoughts and talking about their experience, despite our differences.  In the absence of me ever hearing what they have to say about what it must be like to be a black man living under such things as the unspoken code of conduct imposed on black men to reduce their chances of being summarily executed in the absence of a crime would be, any chance that I could have anything like a full understanding of their inner experience is very small.

For people with whom I have less experience in common, women,  women of color, women of color who speak another language, live in another country, with different cultures, religious environments, radically different assumptions about laws and customs and personal freedom and autonomy, if I don't hear what they have to say about their inner lives, their thoughts, their experience of what it is like to think with their minds, there is no chance I will have any real understanding of what their experience is.   And, perhaps most relevant to my point, I would have no right to assume I understood anything about that without their confirmation.   No one would have any reason to believe I could speak for them with any reliability, they would have an intellectual obligation to be skeptical of whatever I had to say on the lives of those people.

Yet educated people are supposed to believe human beings can have precise and detailed understanding of the unseen,  unexpressed minds of animals with whom we share far, far less than we do even those human beings whose testimony of that inner life is available to us in our own language or, somewhat less ideally, translated into it**.

Yet, when it is a scientist who makes claims about that, it is held to be the duty of an educated person to take that on faith, ignoring the long history of the failures of the effort, the variable results and the real impossibility of their methods producing results of the reliability that should be achieved before calling something "science".  Instead of the requirements of enhanced reliability that should be required to be taken as science, in this area it is the word "science" which sells the unreliable claims.

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Wilson stakes a large part of his claims about the scientific disposal of consciousness, and so free will, on claims about how animals now and in the past think.  In expressing the prospects of sciences ability to do what he wants it to he says:

There are several reasons for optimism.  First, the increase in brain size leading up from the habiline prehumans to Homo sapiens suggests that consciousness evolved in steps, similar to the way other complex biological systems developed - the eukaryotic cell, for example, or the animal eye, or colonial life in insects.

How those "things" are alike is the first question I would ask Wilson to explain. I'd ask that with the firm conviction that he could not do so except by the most far fetched of conceits and metaphors based in an unfounded assumption that, for example, the development of human consciousness had anything to do with colonial life in insects.  If, as he clearly does, he believes that consciousness evolved in the human brain, he would have to believe that ants don't share that consciousness.   It is just sloppy thinking to assert that conclusions about consciousness which he considers the product of the human line of evolution, well after our line diverged from those with which we share eyes, could reliably be made by analogy with the theoretical evolution of the eye (in itself hardly a solved riddle).   But it is sloppy thinking of the kind which pervades Wilson's field and, in fact, this entire quest.

He continues to go out on that already over-long limb.

It should then be possible to track the steps leading to human consciousness through studies of animal species that have come partway to the human level.

If Wilson means through the supposed studies of animal minds, now, which deserve to be treated with the utmost skepticism, then even that claim is already enormously problematic on that ground.  Since he is making an evolutionary argument, he compounds that problem by a rather enormous factor.  He proposes to study the minds of the lines of extinct animals over many millions of years in the past, the assertion that you can say anything reliable about those is absurd.   In a rather incredible passage he mixes so many species of animals together in a soup of assumptions and wild claims that it is breathtaking how far fetched his claims purported to be scientific are.

The mouse has been useful in early brain-mapping research and will continue to be productive.  This species has considerable technical advantages, including convenient laboratory rearing (for a mammal) and a strong supporting foundation of prior genetic and neuroscientific research.  A closer approach to the actual sequence can be made, however, by studying humanities closest phylogenetic relatives among primates, from lemurs and galagos at the more primitive end.  The comparison would reveal which neural circuits and activities were attained by non-human species, when they are attained by them, and in what sequence.  That data would help us determine which neurobiological traits are uniquely human.

Just to take the first possible problem with Wilson's vast and unwarranted practice of making assumptions and drawing analogies to the minds of mice and "human consciousness" there is no reason to believe that the connections are sufficently strong to make those conclusions.  Since Wilson demands that consciousness and minds are physical phenomena, it is reasonable to look at what is known about the similarities and dissimilarities in the physiology of mice and human beings when you investigate the founding assumption of that belief.

There is recent research calling into question the long held assumption that you could use mice as a stand in for human beings in studying observable physical phenomena.

Murine models have been extensively used in recent decades to identify and test drug candidates for subsequent human trials (1–3). However, few of these human trials have shown success (4–7). The success rate is even worse for those trials in the field of inflammation, a condition present in many human diseases. To date, there have been nearly 150 clinical trials testing candidate agents intended to block the inflammatory response in critically ill patients, and every one of these trials failed (8–11). Despite commentaries that question the merit of an overreliance of animal systems to model human immunology (3, 12, 13), in the absence of systematic evidence, investigators and public regulators assume that results from animal research reflect human disease. To date, there have been no studies to systematically evaluate, on a molecular basis, how well the murine clinical models mimic human inflammatory diseases in patients.

... In this article, we report on a systematic comparison of the genomic response between human inflammatory diseases and murine models. First, we compared the correlations of gene expression changes with trauma, burns, and endotoxemia between human subjects and corresponding mouse models. Second, we characterized and compared the temporal gene response patterns seen in these human conditions and models. Third, we also identified the major signaling pathways significantly regulated in the inflammatory response to human injuries and compared them with the human in vivo endotoxemia model and three murine models. Fourth, we sought and evaluated representative patient and murine studies of several additional acute inflammatory diseases. These results show that the genomic responses to different acute inflammatory stresses are highly similar in humans, but these responses are not reproduced in the current mouse models. New approaches need be explored to improve the ways that human diseases are studied.

If those assumptions about the relevance of mice to human physiology were never founded in evidence and when they are tested they are shown to be less than reliable, matched with a failure of the model in practical terms in human testing of drugs shown to be effective in mice, then the even more speculative belief that you could learn anything about human consciousness through making opportunistic assertions about the entirely unobservable minds of mice is presumably less worthy of belief.  Yet, through the habits and traditions of such science, the proven unreliability of using mice to answer such questions is ignored and is, apparently, unspeakable.

You can say the same thing about using other species as lab specimens, even those who are more closely related through only millions instead of tens or hundreds of millions of years of evolutionary change and alteration.  One of the most constant features of the Socio-bioloical and evolutionary psychological racket is to pretend that the members of other species alive today represent some more primitive model of what our shared ancestor was like when they, as well as us, are the product of an independent evolutionary history as long as ours is.  There is no reason to believe that any non-physical aspects of their lives are any more like that of our shared ancestor or what they or we have in common with that ancestor and each other.  You can't even reliably assume that in great detail for our human ancestors in the period before written language.

I will go so far as to say that the entire effort is so full of such problems that it is a massive intellectual con job not that far removed from a cable TV pet psychic.   It is a con which might be sold to a gullible public as having the reliability of science but which has the proven potential to have the most dire of social and political effects.  When science drifts that far into denying the basis of democracy, they have opened themselves up for questioning on other than merely scientific grounds.  Yet they will protest that they are merely doing science when it is clear they are not.

* It has been a huge mistake to allow people to call themselves scientists and their novel innovations in academic publication "science" without holding either to basic standards of rigor.   To allow "sciences" to arise in which any "review" is done by others with the same vested interest in their "science," has been a venue to give false legitimacy to some of the worst ideas that get to be called science.

The science published about things that can't be observed has turned out such unreliable results, been so open to shoddy and lax practices and dishonest manipulation, that the practice should not be allowed to be called "science".   Any "science" that starts with demanding the right to do massive corner cutting because of the difficulty of studying their proposed subject matter should not be allowed to go to the next step in earning the name.

I have become convinced that a lot of the skepticism of the public for real science of enormous importance is due to the discrediting of the brand name, "science" in the publicity given to unreliable and, frankly, wacky junk that gets to be called "science" by people who get to be called "scientists".   Lots of that "inexact science" is grown in the field that Wilson has worked in.

**  The, at times vicious, disagreement among anthropologists "interpreting" people who live in the same tiny ethnic, or large, groups of people, would indicate that their methods of collecting information and analyzing that information is hardly a science.   In a lot of cases their methods of both are governed by what school of anthropology and the social sciences they were trained in or adopted.  The results are frequently the obvious product, not of rigorous and dispassionate analysis of fact, but a desire to produce results that support the basic stands of their school of anthropology.  And it is certain that, if presented with the results of the anthropology, the people studied would likely disagree with large parts of it.

That is especially true in groups where anthropologists depend on a core of selected "informants", people within the group who have all of the biases and prejudices and personal disagreement, family and class connections, with other members of their community and group.  That kind of bias due to the professional relationship that anthropologists form with their "subjects" is wide spread and, to a large extent, inevitable in anthropology.

Yet those practices and their results are to be believed on the basis of anthropology being called a science, bringing it under the same umbrella with such sciences as chemistry and physics whose published work is based on the rigorous physical analysis of rather simple objects.  Anthropology can neither follow those standards of rigor nor produce any results that come anywhere near to matching the reliability of their holdings.

Though since it is called "science" antropology is supposed to enjoy the same regard as those hard sciences.   And anthropology has some access to what people express about their thoughts, something which ethologists will never have.  To call either more than "lore" is an intellectual fraud.   I think what ethologists have to say about the minds of animals is far less effective as a lens looking at the minds of animals and more effective as a mirror, reflecting the ethologists'  thinking.