Animal · Other minds · 2015
They Gather to Learn
American crows come to a dead crow. The paper’s title is danger, not a funeral. The gathering is still a fact.
- Seattle, and sites around it
- Twenty-first-century field experiment
- 47.66°N 122.30°W
Motion · Ambient plate · Generated interpretation
Count the living birds before you decide what the gathering is for.
Listen · Eve
0:00 / —:—
Kaeli N. Swift and John M. Marzluff, “Wild American crows gather around their dead to learn about danger,” Animal Behaviour 109 (2015). In experiments around Seattle, crows alarm, gather, and later avoid places and people associated with a dead conspecific. The popular word is funeral. The paper’s word is learning.
Swift and Marzluff 2015, Animal Behaviour 109: 187–197. DOI 10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.08.021. Subsequent work records occasional tactile contact with the dead. That is still not a liturgy.
A protocol is not a soul. The house already keeps that fence for the octopus. It holds here. Gathering is observed. Danger-learning is the experimenters’ reading, tested against alternatives. Mourning is a human name that may or may not fit. The crows do not fill in the caption.
Avoidance of people seen with dead crows can last. Faces are remembered. The hippocampus lights in related imaging work by Marzluff’s group. None of that is a report of what it is like to be a crow at a carcass.
Nagel’s bat is the neighboring refusal. Swift’s crows are the neighboring data. They do not cancel each other.
What we know
The story lets an animal practice stay an animal practice. Wonder does not require a eulogy.
What we cannot know
A protocol is not a soul. Failure to satisfy our test is not vacancy. The rest remains with the creature.
Distant echoes
Echo
Late analytic philosophy · Princeton, on the page of *The Philosophical Review*
What is it like to be a bat?
The gathering can be measured. The experience, if there is one, cannot be entered by the experiment. Both sentences can be true.
One question remains
Other minds · How do we know when another being is experiencing anything at all?
If the useful description is danger-learning, what, if anything, is left over that still looks like care, and who is the leftover for?