The field of animal cognition is undergoing a true revolution, and we are finally discovering just how vast animal intelligence is. Non-human intelligences were the subject of discussion at the International Study Days on the Human-Animal Relationship organised by Siua.
For a long time — and in many cases still today — humans have regarded intelligence as their own peculiar quality, and in the name of this presumed intellectual and moral superiority they have subjugated the other creatures with whom they share the planet. For most of the twentieth century, attributing cognitive and emotional capacities to animals was considered absurd and unscientific, and many scholars firmly opposed such theories, viewing animals as stimulus-response automatons genetically endowed with useful instincts. For some species, the reassessment is extremely recent: "in 1992 only seventy-two articles dealt with fish learning; ten years later there were five hundred (today the figure reaches six hundred and forty). For no other animal have we revised our knowledge so quickly and so radically," wrote Jonathan Safran Foer in the book Eating Animals. These convictions have been boldly dismantled by open-minded thinkers and scientists; thanks to them we now know that, for example, crows and octopuses can recognise human faces, that fish are able to pass learned information from one generation to the next, and that monkeys can learn from the mistakes of their own kind.
Animal minds were indeed the subject of discussion in Bologna, at the International Study Days on the Human-Animal Relationship organised by the Scuola di interazione uomo animale (Siua), founded by zoo-anthropologist Roberto Marchesini. The 2016 edition, held on 29 and 30 October, was devoted primarily to animal cognition, emphasising how wrong it is to compare human intelligence and animal intelligence using ourselves as the benchmark. Guests at the event included Alberto Giovanni Biuso, professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Catania; French philosopher and ethologist Dominique Lestel; Andrea Romeo, a research doctor in Human Sciences at the University of Catania; Thomas Lepeltier, historian and philosopher of science; Giulia Innocenzi, creator and presenter of the television programme Animali come noi; and Francesca Michelini, philosophy lecturer at the German University of Kassel.
"We live in an era of constant destruction of the living world," Roberto Marchesini declared as he opened the conference. "One of the main problems of our time is anthropocentrism. In this society built on individualism, it becomes essential to rediscover our relationship with others, calling into question our egocentrism — both personal and as a species."
What emerges clearly from the conference is that there is no single form of intelligence: every species has a peculiar cognitive structure that we are often unable to understand because we regard these mental processes as based on automatisms rather than on genuine intelligence. "To think of the human being as a consciousness separate from space and from the world is an absolute abstraction," declared Alberto Giovanni Biuso. "Humanity is not the counterpart of animality — it represents one of its specificities. There is no point in asking which animal is the most intelligent, since we base that question on a single model of intelligence."
According to Biuso, "we must stop this obsession with hierarchy. Matter has different states; we cannot claim that a rock is inferior to a squirrel, or a squirrel inferior to a human. We are afraid of the animal that we ourselves are — it is an atavistic fear, rooted in the need to mark territory and establish a hierarchy by differentiating ourselves from other species. We must overcome this concept of centrality; we find ourselves in a labyrinth and there is no centre."
Dominique Lestel, a philosopher and ethologist who has spent years investigating the relationship between humans and animals, took the opportunity to introduce a new school of thought to the audience: Zoo-futurism. "By this term we mean the animalisation of the human being," he explained. "It is a position that is simultaneously philosophical and artistic, and is currently being developed. It is specifically about reactivating our animality by exploring the capacities we have inherited from our phylogenetic history and which we have lost, or never had the opportunity to fully experience, as Homo sapiens."
Anthropomorphism — the impulse to attribute human traits to other animals — has long been regarded as wholly unscientific and has frequently been invoked to challenge any comparison between humans and animals. Yet this assumption too appears less solid than it once did. "Viewing living beings as entities that interpret their environment reassesses anthropomorphism in some way," stated Francesca Michelini. "Modern science has completely alienated humankind from nature and from other species; according to the philosopher Hans Jonas, however, anthropomorphism is unavoidable — we cannot be neutral observers. To deny anthropomorphism is to definitively alienate human beings from their own animality."
"Before asking ourselves whether animals do or do not possess a certain type of intelligence — especially the kind we so prize in ourselves — we must overcome our inner resistance even to considering this possibility," the Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal rightly observed. Today, perhaps, we are ready to open ourselves to other intelligences and to venture into a still largely unexplored territory: that of non-human minds.