Reviews
If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness by Stephen Budiansky
bookwomble's review against another edition
3.0
It's been a few years since I read this, but from memory it's a behaviourist's view of the mentation and emotional world of animals and of the human capacity to anthropomorphise, projecting conscious intent and emotional values on mechanistic stimulus/response processes.
I vacillated about buying into the 'animal as machine' concept, but ultimately it doesn't fit with my experience of animals, at least not the higher ones. While I wouldn't impute the full human range of emotions to animals, I do believe that they are on a spectrum of feeling with us, and not in a completely different order of experiencing. Perhaps I'm deluding myself.
My understanding of evolution is that it proceeds in incremental steps, building on previous developments to produce more adaptive characteristics. It therefore seems unlikely to me that the human way of perceiving the world is entirely without precedent. The alternative, I guess, is that humans, too, are stimulus/response mechanisms with delusions of grandeur but, again, that doesn't entirely match my own experience which, in the end, is all I have upon which to base a judgement.
I vacillated about buying into the 'animal as machine' concept, but ultimately it doesn't fit with my experience of animals, at least not the higher ones. While I wouldn't impute the full human range of emotions to animals, I do believe that they are on a spectrum of feeling with us, and not in a completely different order of experiencing. Perhaps I'm deluding myself.
My understanding of evolution is that it proceeds in incremental steps, building on previous developments to produce more adaptive characteristics. It therefore seems unlikely to me that the human way of perceiving the world is entirely without precedent. The alternative, I guess, is that humans, too, are stimulus/response mechanisms with delusions of grandeur but, again, that doesn't entirely match my own experience which, in the end, is all I have upon which to base a judgement.
More...