For more than two thousand years, belief in animal *un*intelligence had spread through Western civilization. Aristotle, zoologist as well as philosopher, thought animals capable of feeling only pain or hunger; his hierarchical taxonomy of life, with humans perched on top, was adapted by Christian theologians bent on replacing pagan beliefs in human–animal kinship. They emphasized rationality as a supposedly defining human trait and laid the foundations for Enlightenment thinkers such as Nicholas Malebranche, a seventeenth-century philosopher who neatly distilled the attitude of his peers when he said animals “eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.”
Damn, having it lain out like that is particularly striking. What a cold way to look at animals. It’s kind of a simplistic way to phrase it but man does it feel like so many philosophies of oppression spring from the fundamental belief that difference means “lesser” or “without value”.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong sets aside an entire chapter just on pain, both to look at it as a sense in its own right but also centered around the sort of ethical conundrums that brings up if we do end up getting a better understanding of animal experiences of pain. The main researcher interviewed for that chapter works with lobsters (they’re a common model species for neurology studies), and iirc the reason he’s studying pain in particular was due to a conversation with a seafood chef. They were talking shop about lobsters and cooking and suddenly the chef went quiet and asked, “They don’t actually feel pain, do they?”
As of the publication of that chapter, he still doesn’t really know. (Edit:) And part of this is because of the limitations of the field, that as with any sensory or cognition research you can’t really tell what the experience is simply by looking at the signal, same way you cannot understand a language you don’t speak simply by analyzing the waveforms of an audio file, or counting the frequency of phonemes/syllables/particular letters. But man what a fucking question to frame that chapter around
i noted this excerpt in my blog for today: Meet the Neighbors poses an interesting question of what it means to have self-awareness.
as humans have it? we seem essentially unparalleled. while it’s very hard to quantify this in any meaningful way, it just seems self-evident there’s no obvious contender besides ourselves on our current level of understanding the natural world. if you take the human standard of “self-awareness” we’re likely alone.
but as a general concept that can be inferred? a level of self-awareness seems exceedingly common for animals–many animals seem to have some form it (just not as complex as our own) and are not just driven by biological impulses or whatever:
When one teases apart [self-awareness's] cognitive layers, they’re not so uncommon. Mental time travel is one of them. Another is metacognition, or the ability to reflect upon one’s knowledge: I know. I don’t know. Rats are also metacognitive, as demonstrated in setups that let them choose between getting a small, guaranteed snack now or taking a memory test in which correct answers earn big snacks and wrong answers nothing at all. When the passage of time has blurred their memories, they opt for the guaranteed reward.
Some might argue, though, that rats are uncommonly intelligent, and therefore not representative. Yet consider another component of self-awareness, episodic memory: the what, where, and when qualities that give shape to undifferentiated recollection. Episodic-like memory has been found in zebrafish, a tiny species used as a model organism for investigating the foundations of cognition. Minnows shoaling in the stormwater pond’s shallows almost certainly share this type of memory, with the topographies of their daily lives replacing the experimental setups—familiar and unfamiliar objects, familiar and unfamiliar settings—used to illuminate the memories of their aquarium-bound cousins. Researchers have also demonstrated this type of memory in hummingbirds, mice, and cuttlefish, the latter of whom last shared a common ancestor with vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. That such evolutionarily disparate creatures possess these memories suggests how common they are.
there are also really interesting questions of what forms “self-awareness” can take that might not immediately correspond to human expectations. for example, is this self-awareness? “being able to distinguish yourself from other entities” in this manner seems like it should obviously beget a self-identity and therefore self-awareness, just not the uniquely human notion of what that means:
One suggestive experiment found that dogs are especially interested in their own scent when it’s been mixed with another, unexpected smell; a cousin to this experiment, performed with garter snakes like those sometimes glimpsed vanishing into the high grass, found that they distinguished their own scent from that of their siblings. Their self-image may not be an image at all.
[...] Might this mockingbird experience some of the joy that a human performer would?
The short answer: He does, but it’s a bit complicated. Research on zebra finches—a species sometimes used to draw general conclusions about how songbird brains work—suggests that when the audience is a mate or prospective partner, songs are motivated by pleasure seeking; after sex, males stop singing, ostensibly because they’ve been gratified. Scientists test this experimentally by dosing male zebra finches with chemicals that amplify the opiates circulating naturally in their blood, mimicking post-coital bliss. Afterward their female-directed songs are quiet and halfhearted. Already sated, they don’t need more satisfaction. The rewards of territorial singing also seem to reside in their consequences rather than the performance itself.
Yet not all singing is about territory or mating. Juvenile birds sing long before these concerns ever enter their feathered heads, and as adults both males and females often sing in the absence of potential mates or competitors. These tunes are ignored by other birds. They seem to be performed for the singer’s own benefit, for reasons suggested by studies of the role of dopamine in song learning. As birds sing, they make a mental comparison between an idealized version of the song that exists in their heads and the notes coming out of their beaks. A match yields a neurotransmitter flush. Simply hitting the right note is its own reward.
Science brain: Remember not to anthropomorphize too much, the passage itself said “it’s a bit complicated”
Squishy mammal brain: The birds…they like learning the songs…they like singing well!!!
Emotion is profoundly social, and wonderful ambassadors for this principle are none other than our neighbors from the restaurant sidewalk hole and the pocket forest ivy patch, Rattus norvegicus . In the last decade scientists have performed experiments showing how deeply rats feel for one another.1 They respond to the distress of trapped cage mates with such urgency that they’ll forgo chocolate—a delicacy for rats as well as for us—in order to save them, and they are especially generous when sharing food with rats who are anxious.
the classic, age-old conundrum: are we anthropomorphizing animal relationships, or sterilizing them and failing to recognize their similarities to our own?:
[...]The language of romantic relations among animals is decidedly sterile: whereas we have partners, lovers, and spouses, they have mates. Pair bonds and fitness benefits replace passion, romance, and good old-fashioned lust. Their choices are too often described as though animals choose partners by calculating the spread of their genes across time.
It doesn’t help that animal relationships are often hidden to us. Farmed animals are mostly kept behind closed doors and don’t live in natural arrangements. Pets come from shelters or breeders. Wild animals, with a few exceptions, are glimpsed rather than followed intimately across days and seasons. The most detailed accounts come from viral videos or the handful of people whose lives allow them to observe animals up close.
Rita McMahon, the founder of City Wildlife, a hospital for injured wild birds in New York City, once told me about caring for a pigeon with a broken leg. While the bird recuperated on a cushion in her window, the bird’s mate would stand on the other side, keeping her company until finally she was released and the couple could reunite.
Kindness, or prosociality in research argot, is one such predisposition, observable in the tendency of rats to help distressed peers or the way mother raccoons adopt orphans. Another is a sense of fairness, or what scientists call inequity aversion. A dog who performs a trick when asked may quit performing1 upon seeing another dog rewarded for that same behavior; the disparity rankles. Crows and ravens also seem to have a similar aversion2 to inequity, underscoring that this behavior isn’t exclusive to mammals, but is something shaped by social pressures across the animal kingdom.
Animal proto-moralities won’t necessarily resemble our own, but they’re social norms nonetheless. Mix them with relationships, culture, and communication, and the foundation is laid for society —something that’s appreciated when it comes to certain animals, such as African elephants with their matriarchal hierarchies, the alliances of chimpanzees, and orca clans who actually line up to greet one another in formal ceremonies. Yet those examples create what is, to my mind, a too-narrow view, with society limited to a few extra-special species. When garter snakes reunite in winter, black-capped chickadees disperse to breed as pairs and then rejoin their flock in autumn, or bluegill sunfish gather at their spawning colonies in Rock Creek, those too are societies of a sort. Nature is full of them.
i would imagine most people think of voting as a distinctly human concept, but this is not true–not only does it seem quite common among animals,1 they actually exhibit a wide array of procedures. for example:
Red deer groups move only when two-thirds of a herd agrees on a direction; American bison evidently require a majority but tend to follow the lead of older females.
In despotically driven animal societies, one or a few individuals tend to have a disproportionate influence on group decision-making and actions. However, global communication allows each group member to assess the relative strength of preferences for different options among their group-mates. Here, we investigate collective decisions by free-ranging African wild dog packs in Botswana. African wild dogs exhibit dominant-directed group living and take part in stereotyped social rallies: high energy greeting ceremonies that occur before collective movements. Not all rallies result in collective movements, for reasons that are not well understood. We show that the probability of rally success (i.e. group departure) is predicted by a minimum number of audible rapid nasal exhalations (sneezes), within the rally. Moreover, the number of sneezes needed for the group to depart (i.e. the quorum) was reduced whenever dominant individuals initiated rallies, suggesting that dominant participation increases the likelihood of a rally’s success, but is not a prerequisite. As such, the ‘will of the group’ may override dominant preferences when the consensus of subordinates is sufficiently great.
1 for reasons i think are quite intuitive: almost anything which has the capacity to “deliberate” in some form should have the capacity to “vote” as we understand that since, at its most basic, a vote is just expressing “i want to do X thing”
“Despotically” is such a strange seeming word to show up; having technical use and common use butt up against each other in my head like this is funny. But yeah, seconding the Cool
i’ll have more to say about animal democracy, but today we’re on to Race After Technology by Ruha Benjamin and we’re definitely cooking in this introduction:
The popular book and Netflix documentary Freakonomics describe the process of parents naming their kids as an exercise in branding, positioning children as more or less valuable in a competitive social marketplace. If we are the product, our names are the billboard – a symptom of a larger neoliberal rationale that subsumes all other sociopolitical priorities to “economic growth, competitive positioning, and capital enhancement.”2 My students invariably chuckle when the “baby-naming expert” comes on the screen to help parents “launch” their newest offspring. But the fact remains that naming is serious business. The stakes are high not only because parents’ decisions will follow their children for a lifetime, but also because names reflect much longer histories of conflict and assimilation and signal fierce political struggles – as when US immigrants from Eastern Europe anglicize their names, or African Americans at the height of the Black Power movement took Arabic or African names to oppose White supremacy.
I will admit, something that irks me about conversations regarding naming trends is how distinctly African American names are set apart as comically “made up” – a pattern continued in Freakonomics. This tendency, as I point out to students, is a symptom of the chronic anti-Blackness that pervades even attempts to “celebrate difference.” Blackness is routinely conflated with cultural deficiency, poverty, and pathology … Oh, those poor Black mothers, look at how they misspell “Uneeq.” Not only does this this reek of classism, but it also harbors a willful disregard for the fact that everyone’s names were at one point made up!
Usually, many of my White students assume that the naming exercise is not about them. “I just have a normal name,” “I was named after my granddad,” “I don’t have an interesting story, prof.” But the presumed blandness of White American culture is a crucial part of our national narrative. Scholars describe the power of this plainness as the invisible “center” against which everything else is compared and as the “norm” against which everyone else is measured. Upon further reflection, what appears to be an absence in terms of being “cultureless” works more like a superpower. Invisibility, with regard to Whiteness, offers immunity. To be unmarked by race allows you to reap the benefits but escape responsibility for your role in an unjust system. Just check out the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite to read the stories of people who are clearly aware that their Whiteness works for them like an armor and a force field when dealing with the police. A “normal” name is just one of many tools that reinforce racial invisibility.
A former Apple employee who noted that he was “not Black or Hispanic” described his experience on a team that was developing speech recognition for Siri, the virtual assistant program. As they worked on different English dialects – Australian, Singaporean, and Indian English – he asked his boss: “What about African American English?” To this his boss responded: “Well, Apple products are for the premium market.” And this happened in 2015, “one year after [the rapper] Dr. Dre sold Beats by Dr. Dre to Apple for a billion dollars.” The irony, the former employee seemed to imply, was that the company could somehow devalue and value Blackness at the same time. It is one thing to capitalize on the coolness of a Black artist to sell (overpriced) products and quite another to engage the cultural specificity of Black people enough to enhance the underlying design of a widely used technology. This is why the notion that tech bias is “unintentional” or “unconscious” obscures the reality – that there is no way to create something without some intention and intended user in mind[...]
this is one of those underrated issues with the omnipresence of algorithms–even when they’re good they often represent an outsourcing to unaccountable private sector entities (and in a lot of cases that are relevant to what’s talked about here, they have glaring problems that have no obvious avenue to be redressed). not sure what the best way to solve this is:
Racist robots, as I invoke them here, represent a much broader process: social bias embedded in technical artifacts, the allure of objectivity without public accountability. Race as a form of technology – the sorting, establishment and enforcement of racial hierarchies with real consequences – is embodied in robots, which are often presented as simultaneously akin to humans but different and at times superior in terms of efficiency and regulation of bias. Yet the way robots can be racist often remains a mystery or is purposefully hidden from public view.
Consider that machine-learning systems, in particular, allow officials to outsource decisions that are (or should be) the purview of democratic oversight. Even when public agencies are employing such systems, private companies are the ones developing them, thereby acting like political entities but with none of the checks and balances. They are, in the words of one observer, “governing without a mandate,” which means that people whose lives are being shaped in ever more consequential ways by automated decisions have very little say in how they are governed.
Housing isn’t in crisis, tenants are. Our lives are wrecked and wrung by price gouging, eviction, and displacement. We suffer trauma, loss, precarity, panic, poor health, and premature death. For poor and working-class people, particularly people of color, this crisis is permanent. The capitalist housing system has never provided universal access to safe and stable homes, and the policies enshrined by our federal, state, and municipal governments—both its compromised regulations and its deliberate deregulations—maintain crisis as the norm.
The frame of “housing crisis” trains our attention away from the fundamental power imbalance between landlords and tenants. It suggests that to solve the crisis, we should focus on the people who design housing, who build housing, who profit from housing, not the people who live in it. It encourages us to think about abstract, interchangeable “housing units” and not about power, or about people and the constraints that shape their lives.
[…]The entire real estate industry relies on privatizing a common resource (land), hoarding a human need (housing), blocking public intervention or competition, and maintaining a captive market of tenants to exploit and dominate. The immiseration of tenants is a feature of a housing system built on this unequal power dynamic, not a bug we can tinker away. Tenants are exploited and oppressed not just by corporate landlords, or by unscrupulous landlords, but by the fact of having a landlord at all.
— Abolish Rent, Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis
Rent is a fine for having a human need . If we can’t afford to buy a home, from the day we are separated from our parents or caretakers, we have no choice but to pay rent. We don’t get to decide if we pay or not, and we don’t get to decide how much we pay. […] Rent is the price of being poorer than others, of our parents being poorer than the parents of others. It’s no wonder that the descendants of enslaved and Indigenous people, immigrants, and people of color are more likely to pay rent and to be unhoused. (Over half of Black households pay rent to secure housing; only a third of white households do.) As the feudal name “landlord” continues to suggest, rent is a monthly tribute to those with generational wealth, a hoard of resources built on stolen lives and stolen land.
The housing crisis is not a problem to be solved; it is a class struggle to be fought and won. The conclusion that Engels drew still applies now: “In order to make an end to *this* housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.” Rent is a fundamental engine of inequality and injustice, a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, which drives millions into debt and despair and onto the streets. From the perspective of tenants, the answer to the housing crisis is as simple as it is revolutionary: a world without landlords and a world without rent. Our self-interest as tenants isn’t just fixing the leak in our shower; it’s dismantling the capitalist unhousing system.
