Astral Codex Ten

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?

4 min read

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?

Article

Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between June 18, 2021 and May 13, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “the finalists are: 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?”; “I have read one other scientific book … and that is Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal”. It most often appears alongside Addiction By Design, Astralcodexten, attention.

Metadata

  • Category: Books
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: June 18, 2021
  • Last seen: May 13, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Vote In The Book Review Contest!
June 18, 2021 · Original source
1: Order Without Law 2: On The Natural Faculties 3: Progress And Poverty 4: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? 5: Why Buddhism Is True 6: Double Fold 7: The Wizard And The Prophet 8: Through The Eye Of A Needle 9: The Years Of Lyndon Johnson 10: Addiction By Design 11: The Accidental Superpower 12: Humankind 13: The Collapse Of Complex Societies 14: Where’s My Flying Car? 15: Down And Out In Paris And London 16: How Children Fail 17: Plagues And Peoples
Inline links: Order Without Law, On The Natural Faculties, Progress And Poverty, Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?, Why Buddhism Is True, Double Fold, The Wizard And The Prophet, Through The Eye Of A Needle, The Years Of Lyndon Johnson, Addiction By Design, The Accidental Superpower, Humankind, The Collapse Of Complex Societies, Where’s My Flying Car?, Down And Out In Paris And London, How Children Fail, Plagues And Peoples
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain
May 13, 2022 · Original source
I have read one other scientific book which breathes the same positive pedantry, and that is Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. I think there is a pattern. It helps that both fields treat a topic on which everyone has their own opinion, so they get a lot of know-alls from outside the field interfering with the discussion. But more importantly, they are based on methods which used to be tabooed inside their scientific community. De Waal treated his animals as personalities and even bonded with them instead of keeping neutral distance, and he took wildlife observations seriously. All of this was considered totally unscientific, so he was forced to be extra scrupulous in his experiments. For Dehaene and his colleagues, it was the paradigm that “subjective reports can and should be believed” -- as a source of raw data, without making the mistake of conflating the subjective belief with reality. When patients tell you after surgery that they had the impression to leave their body and float at the ceiling, then you should not believe that they actually floated. You should believe that "floating" was their true feeling, and that probably there is a neuroscientific cause for this feeling. Taking it seriously eventually enabled researchers to induce the feeling of leaving your body in any person, by using the right neural stimulation. But until the 90s, it was scientifically taboo to take subjective feelings into account, so experiments with low standards would have been torn apart.
Inline links: Are we Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?