Left2Right Comments

I think David got the name of the author of the article wrong. David keeps criticizing "Charles Siewart" who is a philosopher (I think). But Siewart is not the author of the article -- the author's name is Siebert isn't it?
 

Yes, though DV is not the first to screw up his name. The Times Magazine online cover page has it as "Charles Stewart"!

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/magazine/index.html
 

I see that Siewart is going to be on NPR's "On Point" this morning (1/23) discussing this research.
 

I meant Siebert, of course.
 

Well, glad to see the Left2Right bloggers are back in business. So far, though, that seems to be the business of lecturing to us common folk. But will the original mission of the blog - dialogue - come back, too, in the form of actual back-and-forth? That would be awesome! Still, this is a much-awaited improvement.

This particular post, for example, raises some interesting questions, even if only tangential to an article with less than meets the eye. For example, if there are things that make us people unique, do those things matter in any way, and why? Certainly we think it's wrong that another person suffer. But does it matter that this other sufferer is a "person" -- who can reflect on and dialogue about that suffering -- as opposed to a creature that merely suffers? Seems pretty obvious that no, it doesn't matter, since it's suffering that's bad, not self-conscious or thoughtful suffering (I think only someone in the grips of a theory about what kinds of "interests" grounds "rights" could think otherwise, but maybe not). People are certainly different from animals, but not -- as the post suggests -- in that we have behavioral traits. Are the ways that we're different special, entitling people to special treatment, or just plain different?
 

Do conservatives have personalities?
Do octopuses? How can we tell?
It's a variation on the solipicsm problem - are other people real, and are they fundamentally like me, or somehow different in a way that makes understanding very difficult?
Some very preliminary research suggests that if you want to look for intelligence in sea-based life, look at the cetaceans and the octopuses.
Right now, I'm not sure we have the tools for assessing the personality makeups of our 8-tentacled friends.
We don't yet have a margaret mead to go live among the giant squid and report on their social structure. And a problem that came up with mead was her observations may have been colored by her own culture.
Now, psychology is an area of ignorance for me; I'm not well informed, especially when it comes to transspecies psych.
I know a fair amount has been done with rats and dogs and primates (because they are convenient victims.) What's a personality and how do we test for it? I'm mostly interested in "for dummies" non technical literature, and stuff that isn't biased against nonhumans or nonliberals. Good post and I'm glad you're back, but you only raised the question, not settled it.
-arbitrary aardvark
 

David, you say that the findings described in the article would only be interesting if they were evidence of personhood or character, and are boring because they only are evidence of personality, which is merely a collection behavioral traits. I'm not sure this is fair.

Nonhuman animals may lack the internal dialogue which you assert is necessary for personhood and character, but a lot of humans lack this dialogue too--infants, the senile, etc. I'm not even sure normal adults have such an inner dialogue most of the time--I suspect it is stronger amongst those who are very verbal, like academics in the humanities.

It is also not at all clear that inner dialogue is that important in human decision making. The famous result about the delay between the decision to act and the awareness of decisions to act, deGroot's (?) studies of people making decisions in chess, all indicate to me that the inner dialogue is not that big a deal.

So I don't think that Siebert has confused personality with personhood or character. More likely he just thinks that the important trait is personality.

This generally happens with cognitive traits. We are looking for the cognitive trait that "makes us special." The ones that are common and important to humans turn out to be present in animals. The ones that actually make up the bulk of our mental life are widely spread throughout the natural world.