Crows and kids

Our link is to an article on experiments with wild crows. My point here is beyond the conclusions the scientists and bloggers may have made.

The setup is that crows who have not been in a laboratory setting before could not figure out how to extract food from the plastic box with levers, setup in the laboratory. 

Here is how Ed Yong put the point----
quote
These two abilities—understanding causality, and using that understanding—seem so simple and mundane to us that it feels weird to lay them out, and weirder still to separate them. But they are separate. That much becomes clear when you study an animal that can do one of these things and not the other.end quote

What the study purports to conclude is that without the experience of successfully using their problem solving abilities, they cannot repeat and extend their problem solving. Read the article.

In fact, this study is much more interesting.  Not surprisingly little attention is paid to the moment crows or humans DO get the connection between cause and effect. That is because the study, as is typical of much natural science, begs the question of origins.Ignoring this question leads to the idea that crows in the wilderness never have a moment of insight about causality, and that babies come out of the womb with an abstract idea of this connection. Rather silly if you draw out these conclusions. 

And origins is exactly where this study took me. The question of whether essence precedes existence (what the study calls "understanding causality, and using that understanding") is the tawdry story of 20th century philosophy. But that is really an aside. 

What Yong calls the ability to 'understand causality' I am calling, rather vulgarly and more broadly, a moment of mystical insight, that is.essence --that which can directly perceive something, say the fact of causality. 

What the blogger calls applying the principle of causality, I am calling existence in the way that term was used in 20th century philosophy, that is a life of words. 

And the exciting possibility to which this study points is not only that the moment of insight comes before the typical cascade of words that unravel and develop that insight -- but that you can see this on a scale beyond that of the human.

And if you want to extend the crow story the implications of this study concern the wordless and the wordfull. One would not have thought this mystical goal extended to the creatures without verbal capacity. But maybe it does!!!!!!!!!!!!!