[Ari]

A ‘Self-Aware’ Fish Raises Doubts About a Cognitive Test | Quanta Magazine

Quanta Magazine

A little blue-and-black fish swims up to a mirror. It maneuvers its body vertically to reflect its belly, along with a brown mark that researchers have placed on its throat. The fish then pivots and dives to strike its throat against the sandy bottom of its tank with a glancing blow. Then it returns to the mirror. Depending on which scientists you ask, this moment represents either a revolution or a red herring.

Alex Jordan, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany, thinks this fish — a cleaner wrasse — has just passed a classic test of self-recognition. Scientists have long thought that being able to recognize oneself in a mirror reveals some sort of self-awareness, and perhaps an awareness of others’ perspectives, too. For almost 50 years, they have been using mirrors to test animals for that capacity. After letting an animal get familiar with a mirror, they put a mark someplace on the animal’s body that it can see only in its reflection. If the animal looks in the mirror and then touches or examines the mark on its body, it passes the test.

Logs in the eye apply to scientists as well

In Gallup’s view, though, only three species have definitively passed: chimpanzees, orangutans and humans. He finds the evidence for every other species uncompelling, and thinks researchers are reading things into animals’ behavior that aren’t there.

...Any animal that can recognize itself in a mirror, Gallup thinks, can potentially recognize that others have their own minds and even empathize with them. A sense of self means a sense of selves.

Someday soon I think humans are going to need to accept that we aren't all that special after all and many things we think of that 'make us human' are really things that makes us alive, but exist in other animals.

The mirror test has always felt quite questionable as often it's scientists taking animals into strange settings, expecting them to act in a certain way (pawwing at a mark on their body seen in the mirror at the very moment as if the mark causes them concern) and then asking the scientists to judge whether or not they believe the animal acted in a way that means they have self awareness. There's just too many guesses at actions going on here to assume much of anything. With the rise of internet animal videos, I've seen more than a couple animals accidentally pass the mirror test while being dumb or cute in some other unrelated way, which has made me wonder if doing things like strapping monkey's heads down so they can't look away or other strange lab environments is one of the reasons animals are failing.

I would go so far as to argue that many types of self awareness are the default mode of things and the real advancement is understanding that others are self aware as well. Once we stop thinking of animals are automatons put here by god and instead similar neural networks that got here through evolution, it would seem silly for a self contained advanced neural network designed for preservation and procreation *not* to be self aware of its existence as an individual entity.