An Ecology of MInd (17 page)

He raised massive powerful arms ending in razor-sharp claws and screamed his rage. It came out as an ear-splitting mix between a roar and a howl that
pierced the hearts of the people of the camp with fear.

Then he began to kill.

DR. PEARSON TOOK A DRINK OF WATER from a bottle at the podium and continued. "I want to leave our discussion of culture and barriers it forms to reality
and spend some time looking at intelligence and language."

"First let's look at some things related to intelligence. When discussing intelligence you will frequently hear the term IQ. This refers to Intelligence
Quotient, which is a number assigned to designate intelligence. If you give a large group of humans an intelligence test, the results from the test can be
plotted with respect to frequency. This frequency can be represented by a curve. The shape of the curve is a normal distribution curve. Most of you will be
familiar with it, even if only as a "bell curve" used to adjust grades in school."

"Many things follow a normal distribution curve. The characteristics are that the majority of a group centre around some point and the number of a group
drop rapidly the farther you are from that point. For intelligence, the peak of the distribution curve or what is referred to as normal intelligence is
defined as being 100. Tests to measure intelligence are given and the scores applied to where you fall on the curve."

"This is used to categorize people according to intelligence levels. These results are used for a variety of purposes. For example, they are used by
educators to classify children as to what sorts of education programs; they should be in. They are also used by the military to determine suitability of
applicants to various trade or job classifications. They are seen as a way of measuring intelligence and while the tests are testing something, it is not
accurate to take the results of IQ tests as always being truly indicative of intelligence."

"Sometimes the rough results you get from an IQ test; while in many ways inaccurate may be all, you have to go on. They can be useful, as long as some of
the limitations are understood."

"For example, the tests may have a cultural bias. I have had many IQ tests administered to me over the years, and I remember one that had the question,
"Which of the following scrambled words is not the name of one of Shakespeare's plays?" This question is supposed to be a measure of innate intelligence
but assumes you know the names of Shakespeare's plays. I doubt a young street beggar in Ethiopia knows the names of Shakespeare's plays, but he could be
extremely intelligent."

"They frequently have an education bias as well. For example, often there are questions that give a sequence of numbers, and you are supposed to give the
next number in the sequence. It is not unusual for the sequence to be related to a series of prime numbers in some way, but what if you have never been
taught what prime numbers are?"

"There is also the question of how do you accurately test the intelligence of a person that is more intelligent than you are?"

"These are issues and problems with how we assign some designation of intelligence to fellow humans. It is far worse for how we do it for non-humans. As I
mentioned earlier, we have a built-in bias for humans in our consideration and understanding of the world. One of the areas usually tested in IQ tests is
language ability. In the thinking of most people, animals don't have language, so they are obviously much less intelligent than we are."

"There was a study done many years ago where researchers raised a chimpanzee as part of their family in an attempt to teach it to talk. It did not go well.
A chimpanzee's vocal cords and throat structure are not the same as humans. The chimp was repeatedly very frustrated by trying to communicate things in a
human language that it could not physically speak, no matter what it did."

"The next study recognized this physical limitation and repeated the experiment with a new chimpanzee, but this time the researchers spoke American Sign
Language to each other, and with the chimpanzee. Chimps can physically handle sign language fine. The chimp learned sign language quite easily and
communicated very well. Estimates put his communication at a level of a five or six-year-old human. This could be an accurate assessment of his
intelligence, or it could be inaccurate due to species-centric factors in estimating it. Since then, a number of apes have been taught sign language."

"The argument has been made that this does not really count because the apes didn't have language of their own and had to be taught a human language. This
is not necessarily true either. There may be many languages in animals that we just don't recognize as such."

"For example, bees have a non-verbal language. When a worker bee discovers a new flower patch with pollen, it returns to the hive and does a dance for the
other worker bees. The movements of this dance convey to the other worker bees the direction and distance to the pollen. The other worker bees are then
able to fly directly to the newly discovered flowers on their own without having been physically led there."

"While you could argue that merely communicating direction and distance does not constitute a complete language; it is all we have deciphered so far. They
could also be discussing very deep issues of bee philosophy all the time and how would we know?" Dr. Pearson smiled.

"Another creature with a probable language is whales. Whales make sounds that can travel for incredible distances underwater and seem to be communicating
information of some sort."

"How intelligent is a whale? How do you test it? We have no common language. They have no hands to work complicated tools. We often take tool use as an
indicator of intelligence but that could just be because we use tools."

"We have little common ground to motivate whales to take what tests we may have, other than food. Any larger understanding of the thoughts of whales and
their motivation is pure guesswork on our part. The process of do a trick we teach you, and we give you a fish, is very difficult to expand into a full
understanding of the inner workings of another creature's mind."

"We know whales are intelligent, look at performing killer whales at marine parks. How intelligent, we can't really tell for sure. We assume they are less
intelligent than humans because they don't do the things we do, but again, they are not physically built to behave as we do."

"A species-specific bias towards humans is part of the problem of recognizing some form of language use in another species. We always look for something
similar to human speech or writing, but nothing says language has to be in those forms. Efforts at understanding even human languages without having
someone provide a translation or working together to explain the meanings has proven to be impossible so far."

"Humans learn human languages by being taught by other humans. This involves a process of observing some sort of link between the combination of sounds or
written symbols and trying to repeat them in some combination. Whether the sounds or symbols are used correctly is assessed and corrected by the other
person that knows the language."

"It has a large component of trial and error with continuing correction. It is usually a process of another human showing them something and giving the
word, or symbols to describe it. The process moves on to learning a number of words and trying to put them together to communicate more complicated things
while other people correct you as you go. Again, the meaning is explained by a source outside the person learning the language."

"The meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the form of writing used by ancient Egyptians was lost for many years. There was nobody living that could teach how
to read them. There were numerous attempts to try to decipher them, but without a way to be taught the meaning, they were all unsuccessful."

"Finally, an archeological find was made of a stone that had the same message recorded in a number of languages, including Egyptian hieroglyphics. With
identical messages being represented the words of the known languages could be used to translate the hieroglyphics. This was called the Rosetta Stone."

"Another interesting thing about language is that thought itself is usually carried out using language. Languages are not identical in structure or
meanings conveyed. Concepts cannot always be conveyed equally by all languages. Have you ever had someone from another country tell you a joke and then
tell you that it is much funnier in their language? Some concepts just don't translate the same because the particular language may not have an exactly
equivalent word or phrase to describe it. A language may be able to describe with a single word what a different language needs a phrase to describe."

"Even some concepts that are near the core, of how we think can vary from language to language. In English when you are describing your body you use terms
like "my arm, my leg, my brain. Even the term I used when I said, "your body" is similar. All of these imply that "you" is separate and distinct from the
body "you" inhabit. In some Native American languages, this is not the case. There is no linguistic separation between "you" and "your body," they are a
single inseparable entity."

"Since much of thought is carried out in language, we find it very difficult to get a good mental grasp on that concept. Our language is set up differently
so we are missing the particular tools of thought that language provides, to think the thought."

"Language is shaped by the concepts and thoughts taught in a given culture. Many of us have heard that the Inuit have many words for snow because it is
such an important factor in their lives. This sort of thing is true in other cultures as well. The Balti people of Northern Pakistan live in an extremely
mountainous and rocky area. They have many words for rock. Words which can indicate everything from size, shape, use, strength and tendency to break or
shatter, and so on.“

“It is also important to keep in mind, there is nothing saying that the concepts or thoughts in a language are accurate. Limitations or errors in the
cultural way of thinking shape language, which is the tool that we use to think most of our thoughts. This means that any errors in the underlying thoughts
or concepts that shape the language are very difficult to notice or get around. They have already contaminated your tools for thought itself."

"Noting errors in fundamental concepts is very difficult and often requires approaching and thinking about it in round about or circuitous ways, because
language does not allow you to question it directly. This can be a very complicated process. The more observant of you will have seen that to a limited
extent, it is an approach I am taking with this seminar."

"With respect to noting errors in fundamental concepts, I am only tackling some easier surface issues. If you would like to explore more of this in far
greater detail you can read the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" by Robert Pirsig. He maintains that some of the foundations of our Western
thought created by the ancient Greek philosophers contain errors."

"This type of questioning of fundamental concepts in thought to check for correctness is something he deals with in the book. It has a title which is
somewhat misleading. It is not really about Zen or motorcycle maintenance. Like I said, you usually have to approach a questioning of the fundamental
concepts that our culture uses as a framework for thought in extremely round about ways."

"So, language affects how we think and how we think affects how we behave. You can get differences in behavior between people who speak different
languages. There is a lot of overlap between languages as to what concepts they describe, but they are not identical."

"This is the case with human languages. Try to imagine how different thought might be using a non-human language, like that of whales."

THE SURVEY SHIP HAD COMPLETED its cataloguing of the other planets in the system and was carefully approaching the inhabited third planet. The crew and
ship were gathering data as they approached. They mapped out the concentrations of electromagnetic spectrum emanating from the planet as a way to try to
decide where to land.