It popped up on my news feed the other day: Crows Are Self-Aware and ‘Know What They Know,’ Just Like Humans, from Popular Mechanics. “Research shows that crows and other corvids ‘know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds’. … This is considered a cornerstone of self-awareness and shared by just a handful of animal species besides humans.”

The quote there came pulled from an article in STAT, a source that’s considerably less well-known than Popular Mechanics but has a considerably stronger professional reputation. You’ll be interested to read the rest of that sentence:

Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.”

Crows aren’t just smart, they know they’re smart. If true, this would be a serious attack on human exceptionalism. “Just like Humans,” reads the headline. We aren’t all that special. More intelligent, maybe, but it’s only a difference of degree, not of kind.

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https://twitter.com/Streamdotorg/status/1715443784765366754

Funny thing, though: It isn’t true. Not even close. I don’t know where that idea came from, but “someone made it up” might be a good candidate. It definitely wasn’t in the research these articles said it came from. So we’re not just talking about an attack on human exceptionalism. This was an attack on science.

Setting Your Grid

You’d think science journalists, at least, would write news straight, the way it happens. You’d think they’d hate hype and exaggeration as much as science itself hates it. Scientists are trained to be careful: Be precise, be cautious, and never, ever over-interpret your results. Professional journal articles routinely include “Limitations” sections, spelling out in detail what the reader should not take away as a finding. Scientists are human so things don’t always happen that way, but it’s still the standard.

You might expect journalists to take that example seriously. Sorry, but no such luck. Science reporting is rife with hype and exaggeration. (I exaggerated something myself the same way a moment ago, an experiment I’ll explain shortly.)

I’m sure science journalism is more trustworthy on the whole than other news, but not enough that you can really count on it. Errors, distortions, and sensationalizing aren’t the least bit uncommon. The only rare thing is anyone calling it out.

Bad for Truth

This crow story is a case in point. Crows “can ponder the content of their own minds”? No, not even close. To ponder is to think in terms of what philosophers call propositions, that is, ideas that can be expressed in sentence form. This research had absolutely nothing to do with any such thing. The same goes for “Crows know what they know.”

As for “Crows aren’t just smart, they know they’re smart,” that one’s different. I threw that in as an experiment of sorts. I’ll admit it: It’s every bit as false as the rest of it. But I was wondering how easily a writer could get away with such a thing. I’d like to know, after you’d already read about crows “pondering” and “knowing what they know,” did that line seem out of place?

If you caught it as a problem, good job. If not, don’t be hard on yourself: I seriously doubt you’re the only one. All I did there, after all, was to take what they’d said and push it a little further. If what PM and STAT wrote had been true, then what I added might have been, too.

And I think a lot of us are still inclined to trust what we read from the world of science. We’re wary of science being co-opted for politics, as we should be. But this is about birds and brains. That’s not political, is it? And it’s posted on a science site, so it must be true, right?

So you read it, accept it, tell your friends about it, and now you’re misleading your friends without even realizing it. This does the pursuit of truth no good.

Bad for Science

It’s bad for science, too. I emailed Dr. Andreas Nieder, the lead researcher in this study, asking him if would please tell me his team’s operational definitions for “consciousness” and “self-awareness.” (Both Popular Mechanics and STAT wrote of crows’ “consciousness” as well as knowing and self-awareness.) I told him the angle I was planning to take with this article. He answered,

Thanks for asking because there is a constant misunderstanding about what we show – and do not show – in our latest Science paper.

The paper is not about “self-consciousness” or “self-awareness”. We do not touch upon these types of higher-order consciousnesses.

What we show is a neuronal correlate of “sensory consciousness.” By that we mean that the crows have subjective experiences about stimuli, that it ‘feels’ for the crows in some way to have such sensory experiences, that they are aware of sensory stimuli, that they are sentient about stimuli.

We do not talk about whether they would reflect on their subjective experiences, which would then be a form of higher-order consciousness, or “self-consciousness.” We simply don’t know and don’t discuss this issue.

I would be grateful if you could discriminate between these types of consciousnesses.

It’s ironic: These articles say this research proves crows “know what they know.” But they were claiming to know what they didn’t know — indeed, what they couldn’t know. Because it wasn’t true.

Why It Failed the Smell Test

Now, I won’t be able to fulfill Dr. Nieder’s closing request here. It would require quite a technical discussion, and I know just enough about it to know that I don’t know enough to do it. I refuse to pretend I know what I do not know.

What I do know is this: Neuroscience cannot do what PM and STAT claimed for it. It cannot show that any organism “knows that it knows.” I do not think neuroscience could prove this ever, under any conditions. Not everyone agrees on that, I know. That’s okay: Controversy is fine in science. What’s not fine is saying it’s been done and implying the matter has been settled.

Interestingly, it’s almost exactly the same question that’s been popping up a lot lately with regard to computers: Could AI ever become self-aware, in the sense that it’s not just spitting out results but actually knows things? I don’t think that’s possible either, but suppose I were wrong, and a computer somehow could know things. We’d still have a problem: How would we know that it knows? How would we tell the difference between an AI that acts like it knows, and an AI that actually does know?

If you think it would be easy, take a one-minute stroll through J. D. Searle’s famous Chinese Room — a simple, entertaining little parable that’s spawned thousands and thousands of pages of debate. Then think again.

That’s why these articles on crows smelled so wrong to me, in case you’re wondering.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Political to Be Wrong

My real point here, though, is that half of what PM and STAT wrote on this “research” wasn’t true. The juicier half, naturally. The part that sells. And this sort of thing isn’t rare.

Science at its best is the pursuit of truth. Science journalism should be, too.

 

Tom Gilson (@TomGilsonAuthor) is a senior editor with The Stream and the author or editor of six books, including the highly acclaimed Too Good To Be False: How Jesus’ Incomparable Character Reveals His Reality. He’s back today after time off for vacation and some behind-the-scenes days spent planning an upcoming Stream project to equip pastors and churches for the challenges of our day.