A species without shared intentionality

[RyanW]

There have been a variety of tests where chimps show an "individual" intelligence (e.g. figure out how to open the box to get the candy) similar to a two year old human child. On the other hand, they perform far worse in "social" intelligence tests (e.g. open the box after watching someone demonstrate how to open it). Humans are, ironically, the only primates that do much learning by monkey see, monkey do.

I've also seen tests that show even very young children can recognize that separation of their perceptions from others Sam knows where it is, but he understands Mickey doesn't know), but chimps generally can't.

[Flyndaran]

There is that famous "experiment" where a man raised a chimp with his infant son. He stopped, because the chimp wasn't mimicking the human. But his son was mimicking the chimp.
Humans copy-cat more than cats, and monkey see; monkey do more than monkeys. We also tend to pig out more than pigs who rarely overeat or are as undiscriminating as many of us are.

[D10]

Originally Posted by whswhs

That's our theory, but we're a social species that evolved intelligence. That might bias our views.

Thats true, but its also a bit more than that.

Originally Posted by whswhs

For example, I've read about experiments in psychology that test people's ability to figure out puzzles in logic. Most people are unexpectedly bad at doing this, ordinarily. But if you frame the puzzle, not as an abstract set of questions, but as a way of detecting whether someone is deceiving you, the same people do significantly better. That is, we seem to have highly developed social intelligence, but our general purpose intelligence isn't as good in most people (autistic spectrum people might be an exception).

Thats correct

Originally Posted by whswhs

So could we have a different pattern, one where toolmaking or navigation was the core ability, and social reasoning was at best a difficult addon?

The thing is, as far as the data shows, you could consider toolmaking to be a difficult addon to navigation in a 3d space, when this navigational capacity starts to be imbued with timespan considerations due to the developments in memory.

Originally Posted by whswhs

We know a nervous system can work like that, because some people have that pattern. Could it evolve without sociality?

Thats a great question, our current thinking indicates that there are indeed some who are exceptional individuals in our species, who make do with a highly biased mental frame towards complex mathematical pattern understanding in detriment of social skills.

I wont get into all the factors involved, but regarding the relation between social interaction and inteligence, the core what we currently understand is the following. Social interaction plays a huge part in developing neurological function, and language seems to make this progression exponentional enabling ever increasing levels of complexity in social exchange.

A neurological system that has to constantly judge and evaluate its equally complex peers all the time is receiving a lot more input and having to adapt to a lot more than the same system developing in near isolation.

We have good reason to believe that the circuits that involve navigation/judgement calls and motor control received memory as a sort of addon that allowed this navigation/movement but now with potential for learning, remembering and proposing. At the same time this system added emotions on top of these existing circuits and their expressions to easily tap into memories and recall the adaptative response related to that situation.

Since we are good visually and are social creatures, we also evolved to identify these emotions in each other and the muscular expressions associated with emotion gave the basis for a language system to be developed.

Language made use of finer motor control skills related to tool using, abstract thinking and better work-memory. There is a lot of information being connected when we talk to each other, you can see patterns of thought based on body language, eye movement, that is because these motor circuits are somewhat hijacked by language, which uses several conections between sensory-motor circuits and social consideration circuits to process the information and articulate responses in real time.

Its likely that we became social because it was a natural step for creatures with that capacity to do so in our situation. There is also the inevitable conundrum that any decent existing species is gonna have a drive to survive which is gonna make it so that they have a biological similarity in the way their brains ascribe value to reality, consider motor action cost benefit, learns, remembers, etc. In our case, so many things are done by the same circuits with the same underlying principles.

Therefore if the life being considered is anything like ours in the sense that it evolved with a basic sensory-motor-value system then developing shared intentionality would be a question of capacity and habit.

I heard that two male dolphins usually team up to find and mate with a female. One of them holds the female while the other copulates. Isnt that shared intentionality? In the end its all a question of being able to fire those conections, anything with enough IQ is gonna realize that its worth working toghether for a single goal. Its part of any halfway decent value judgement system that asserts how much an action is gonna be worth for the being. At some point you start getting too smart not to cooperate, specially if there are hazards and other evil beings out in the woods threathening your survival.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Could we have a species that was either fully autistic, or Asperger-like, putting together social alliances through rational calculation?

You could have a human culture do that already with enough forethought to explain it.

In terms of having a species, well its not like we have any biomarkers for that yet to really understand whats going on, but for some reason, maybe due to their single-mindedness when hunting prey, I think cats would make a great autistic species.

But I wouldnt recommend making it a mandatory trait.

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure we know.

We can always be sure we dont know enough.