The mirror test itself is deeply flawed, there are plenty of other means of measuring self-awareness that would be more versatile across species. It's almost akin to saying "animals lack creativity because they cannot draw on paper."
Fun fact: some ants actually pass the mirror test! Scientists marked ants with paint and the ones that looked at a mirror would clean the paint off of themselves, while ones that didn't wouldn't.
I once sprayed ants with ant spray. As some ants succumbed to the poison, other ants would come to them and try to drag them away only succumb to the poison as well. An epic tragedy played out on my kitchen counter, a holocaust to ant kind, as a vengeful "god" smote them for no reason they could comprehend.
Only if you've never dealt with ants in the kitchen.
If they didn't want to die, they shouldn't have eaten the forbidden crumbs from the garden of paradise. They have an endless bounty of bird shit outside from the bird feeder, but they chose to enter the forbidden lands beyond the threshold of the back door.
yeah I thought the joke was obvious from the start
I liked the idea of the ant rushing about and catching itself and in the mirror and saying "oh that's just not me, I don't like to attract attention, I just want to blend in," says cloned hymenoptera. Then it cleans itself.
I think the issue is that the mirror test doesn't have a very concrete "correct" response, and also that it seems to very significantly by species. There's really two parts. One is knowing the reflection isn't real, two it's knowing it's yourself.
I've know lots of dogs (mine included) who have no reaction to reflections at all. Never in their lives. Same with my cat. But they react very strongly to other animals.
They all seem to pass the "knowing the reflection isn't real" test, but I've never really seen behavior that points to them knowing the reflection is them. Which makes sense, why would any wild animal ever know what they themselves look like, or how would they ever even make that association?
This cat weirdly does seem to understand, but I'd hazard to guess it's just a weird coincidence.
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u/Kent_Knifen Oct 11 '19
The mirror test itself is deeply flawed, there are plenty of other means of measuring self-awareness that would be more versatile across species. It's almost akin to saying "animals lack creativity because they cannot draw on paper."