What about for animals? Now, I said that animals cannot produce
human like language. But a lot of people have kind of
challenged that. and, and there's some famous examples.
So, what I'm suggesting here is, this is, this is a chimpanzee named Nim Chimsky.
I, I, you're going to see there is a real interplay between Skinner.
BF Skinner and Noam Chomsky on the other side.
and Noam Chomsky is, is very well known for his arguments of language and the
sort of innateness of language. And so, Nim Chimpsky here was a
chimpanzee that they were trying to, they were trying to assess what is the
potential of a chimpanzee. Now, by the way, all of great apes do not
have the vocal apparatus required to speak as we do.
They simply do not have the voice box. They could never produce words, planet of
the apes aside. They could never produce words the way we
do. but that doesn't mean they couldn't
produce language in some other way. And in fact, American Sign Language,
which is what you see going on here between Nim and Laura and Petito; a very
famous psychologist that worked with Nim and, and once a colleague of mine.
they are communicating with each other using sign language.
And what they actually did with Nim is really fascinating.
They said well, you know, maybe monkeys have, maybe monkeys.
Ooo ,sorry. Ape researchers would not be impressed if
you called a Chimpanzee a monkey. maybe great apes don't communicate in
complex ways because they don't have to in their natural world.
They live in a relatively simple world. But what if you raised a chimpanzee like
a human child. And that's what Nim experienced.
He was raised. It's a kind of crazy story, I'm going to
point you to a link if you want it. There's a movie about this now called,
Project Nim, that kind of lays it all out.
But he was essentially raised like a spoiled human child, kind of allowed to
do whatever he wanted to do. but he was also taught sign language,
especially when Loreann came into the picture and really kind of started adding
a little more structure to the, to the experiment, as it were.
and so, he was very capable of sign language.
In fact, a lot of great apes have shown, th, this is something called a pictogram.
Where a great ape can communicate by touching the pictures of things it's
trying to express. so they've used things like pictograms,
they've used sign language, and they've shown an ape can do something like apple,
I want an apple. and when you give it an apple, it clearly
wanted an apple. Now, so does that suggest language.
And does that suggest consciousness? Well, here's where that behavior-,
behavioral test comes in. A lot of behaviorists, when they saw
these experiments, said, yeah, I don't know.
What this, what these chimps seem to have been learning, or these great apes, is to
associate symbols with objects. And so, yeah, they want apple and they
can say apple. But they can't say, man I remember that
fantastic apple pie we had three days ago, and that was so much fun.
They can't use language in complex ways, with complex sort of grammar and syntax
and structure. and of course importantly, complex
semantics. They can do semantics as the meaning of
things. So, the idea is they can do simple
meanings, kind of like a two year old child.
I want x, I want y. but they can't do anything deep and
complex. And in fact, everything they can do, you
could imagine by the principles of conditioning.
Classical conditioning, operant conditioning, they've just learned that
if they give this signal, then they get that reward.
and so they've associated the two, and there's perhaps nothing deeper going on
than that. They're hungry, they ask for food.
They get food. So, they know by doing this, they learn
by doing this, just like pressing a lever, that, that will ultimately deliver
a reward to them. that's the claim.
Now, a lot of people who work with them say, no, no, it's much more complex than
that, it's not that simple. But how do you demonstrate that?
What do you show, what behavior do you show from an organism like this that
convinces people, they do have some sort of conscious experience and they do have
an ability to express that through language.
And even these mirror tests, remember I told you the mirror test, where they're
wiping the red dot off their eye. Well, one behaviorist explanation of that
or, or behavioral style explanation of that, put forward by someone named Daniel
[UNKNOWN], is that, you know, they're not really recognizing that object as
themselves. What they're very good at is sort of
classical conditioning, operating conditioning.
So, they learn very early on that if I move my body in certain ways, that
organism in the mirror moves it's body in reflective ways.
Kind of like if you're playing a video game, you learn pretty quickly, hey if I
make certain movements, then my character will mirror my movements in certain ways.
and so if I want to control that character, I learn how to make the
movements that control that character, and maybe that's what the chimps have
learned. How to control that character in the
mirror. And so if that character has red spots
here, I've learned that in order for that character to check out its red spots, I
have to touch certain areas and he will now touch those areas.
And if I look at my hands, he will now look at his hands.
And so, what I'm doing is not recognizing that character as me, but I'm just
recognizing my ability to control that character.
So, notice that this explanation, although just suddenly different, has
taken self awareness out of the picture. And if you can do that, if you can
provide an explanation like that. And you, and, and the thing from
behaviorism is it seems like you almost always can, it's very hard to find things
that you cannot provide that explanation, then it's always open to alternative
theories. It's always open to somebody saying they
weren't self aware, they have no consciousness.
you know, in fact, or taking the extreme view that even we don't have a
consciousness that does anything. Okay, that's the real challenge.
So, when, when we're trying to study consciousness and what it does, we're
always kind of trying to show how this behavior is more than you would expect
through simple conditioning. And it can be a real challenge, it really
can. Okay.
So check out a little more on this. There, there's a bunch of fascinating
things. Again, Project Nim was a movie.
you, you can rent it if you want. Fa-, fascinating movie.
kind of shows you how loose science can be sometimes, but also how interesting.
this is just a little interview of, of Koko.
a gorilla who'slearned American sign language.
And Koko's interaction with Robin Williams, somebody that Koko had watched
on videos before, so they get to meet and interact, tickled each other and laugh
together, which is kind of interesting. This is, if, if you're a, if you're a
science geek at all, this is almost must see TV.
Noam Chomsky and Skinner kind of debating each other.
Noam Chomsky being a much more sort of genetically inclined, innate inclined
kind of guy and Skinner of course, being much more about the environment and the
environmental influences. So a little bit of a back and forth
between them, which is fascinating. at least if you're a geek.
here on the reading side, I've given you a nice discussion of this animal language
controversy, so that you can actually see the back and forth a little bit that,
that was going on concerning how to interpret an animal language.
And then this is this actually a Bachelor's thesis.
but I thought it was really kind of well done.
a nice laid out discussion on animal communication that's, that's written in a
nice comfortable way, and lays out many of the, the critical issues.
So check those out if you're interested in more.
and we'll come back for one more lecture in this week about something called
observational learning. I hope you have a fantastic day.
Bye-bye [BLANK_AUDIO]
