In the past, one person has brought up the cleaner wrasse thing with me as a kind of proof that sentience must be widespread among even the least intelligent animals. That paper seems to do experiments like showing the fish a photograph of itself where it has a mark on it’s belly and then observe the fish “scraping” its belly (touching the sand of the aquarium) -- despite not having a mark on its body. This seems obviously different from the regular mirror test and it’s unclear if these fish even have such good visual abilities of non-moving objects. And they seem to believe in their paper this proves an even higher ability of self-recognition (so while chimps can only recognize themselves when they move the fish can just recognize their own body from a photograph, like a human could). “This is largely because explicit tests of the two potential mechanisms underlying MSR are still lacking: mental image of the self and kinesthetic visual matching. Here, we test the hypothesis that MSR ability in cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, is associated with a mental image of the self, in particular the self-face, like in humans.”
I don’t even have to spell out how the priors look here, but this doesn’t even seem theoretically possible? How’d the fish know what it looks like? I mean the simplest explanation is that they just use a small sample size and the fish just randomly started doing that. It also doesn’t seem to me that the fish really spent some time studying it’s photograph, could just be a case of letting the camera roll for a while until the fish once swims by the photo and then touches the sand a few times:
this doesn’t even seem theoretically possible? How’d the fish know what it looks like?
I can see its reflection in the left wall of the tank, so maybe it can too. In that case, it could learn to recognise its reflection in the obvious way (this image moves exactly as I do) and then mistakenly identify the photograph as a reflection. Also, fish are bendy and have wide-spaced eyes, so it can probably see parts of its own body when it turns.
In the past, one person has brought up the cleaner wrasse thing with me as a kind of proof that sentience must be widespread among even the least intelligent animals. That paper seems to do experiments like showing the fish a photograph of itself where it has a mark on it’s belly and then observe the fish “scraping” its belly (touching the sand of the aquarium) -- despite not having a mark on its body. This seems obviously different from the regular mirror test and it’s unclear if these fish even have such good visual abilities of non-moving objects. And they seem to believe in their paper this proves an even higher ability of self-recognition (so while chimps can only recognize themselves when they move the fish can just recognize their own body from a photograph, like a human could). “This is largely because explicit tests of the two potential mechanisms underlying MSR are still lacking: mental image of the self and kinesthetic visual matching. Here, we test the hypothesis that MSR ability in cleaner fish, Labroides dimidiatus, is associated with a mental image of the self, in particular the self-face, like in humans.”
I don’t even have to spell out how the priors look here, but this doesn’t even seem theoretically possible? How’d the fish know what it looks like? I mean the simplest explanation is that they just use a small sample size and the fish just randomly started doing that. It also doesn’t seem to me that the fish really spent some time studying it’s photograph, could just be a case of letting the camera roll for a while until the fish once swims by the photo and then touches the sand a few times:
I can see its reflection in the left wall of the tank, so maybe it can too. In that case, it could learn to recognise its reflection in the obvious way (this image moves exactly as I do) and then mistakenly identify the photograph as a reflection. Also, fish are bendy and have wide-spaced eyes, so it can probably see parts of its own body when it turns.