Philosopher Jeff Sebo discusses animal intelligence (Part 2)

Jeff Sebo and I am a philosopher by training and I direct the center for Environmental and Animal Protection and the center for Mind Ethics and Policy at New York University. My most recent book is called the Moral Circle and it examines the consciousness and sentience and agency and moral status of non humans, like animals and AI systems. Okay, Jeff, it's really interesting that you look at non human intelligence because we've been talking about human intelligence. I especially want to get into animals. How is animal intelligence different from human intelligence? This is a great way to phrase the question, because a mistake that people often make is using human intelligence as the bar for any kind of intelligence, when in reality there can be different kinds of intelligence in the world and we need to study each on its own terms. And so intelligence in general is the ability to process information and solve problems and adapt to the environment. And they might not look exactly like ours, but they can help animals solve problems and navigate their environments and adapt to their situations really effectively. What is it about one animal's intelligence that makes us want to protect it versus another animal which can end up on our dinner table? I think of dogs versus cows and pigs, or dolphins versus fish. There are many factors that shape how much empathy we have for non human animals of various kinds. One question is, are they cute and do they look like us? Do they remind us of ourselves? And then another question is, what role do we assign them in our lives? We have more empathy by default for animals who play companion roles in our lives, as opposed to animals who play commodity roles in our lives. And this is why we can often have much more empathy for some animals over others. Even if they display the same markers of sentience, the same markers of intelligence, even if their capacities are very similar to each other, we can still find it within ourselves to care much more about some than about others. What's a discovery about an animal's mind that might surprise people, that might make us think of that animal differently than we maybe do? So one example from insects is that there are really interesting studies showing that bees are capable of.