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Justin Gregg, "If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity" (Little, Brown, 2022)
00:30:38
An interview with Justin Gregg
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Welcome to the New Books Network hello.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very much looking forward to this conversation with Dr. Justin Gregg about his book titled if Nietzsche Were a what Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity. The book came out in 2022 with Little Brown in the United States and is about to come out in early 2023 with Hodder in the UK. So this is a fabulous time to be talking all about this book that thinks about human intelligence and to what extent is it actually a good thing for humanity as a species? Or maybe there's actually more liability in it than we commonly assume? So Justin, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast to tell us about your book.
- [02:18]
Dr. Justin Gregg
It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Miranda, Wonderful.
- [02:22]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could you start us off before we get into the book itself by telling us a bit about you and explaining kind of how you came to write this book?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yes. I'm a senior research associate with the Dolphin Communication Project. So that's a Florida based organization studying dolphin behavior, primarily communication. I'm also an adjunct professor at St. Francis Xavier University, where I give a seminar on the concept of animal minds. So I teach a lot about the subjects that appear in this book. So I've done a lot of public sort of outreach over the years to talk about animal behavior and intelligence, especially dolphins. So the idea for the book really came from the fact that I'm always sort of trying to nudge people to rethink their relationship to animals. And that means essentially elevating their ideas about how smart animals are, therefore how worthy they are. And I'm usually just telling people, trying to convince them by telling them really interesting facts about animal intelligence. But for this book, I'm like, you know, maybe we can just flip that whole narrative and instead of trying to elevate animals, we say, well, let's think of what we're elevating them toward. Maybe human intelligence isn't something that's even good in the first place. So if we see animals acting like humans, maybe that's a bad thing. So that was sort of the premise for the book and why I wrote.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It, and a very useful encapsulation of kind of the main point of the book that I'm sure we'll get to in more detail. But I do want to talk a little bit about the title. Right. You work in dolphin communication and the title talks about a narwhal. So can you tell us a little bit about kind of how you came to choose the narwhal for the title? And yeah, sort of tell us a little bit about the. If Nietzsche were a narwhal possibility here.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, well, I really wanted to use Nietzsche as the example of a very intelligent human whose intelligence was making him miserable, because we all know that Nietzsche was a bit miserable. And he actually wrote about the subject of looking at animals and kind of envying them for the way that they think. So I wanted him in the title. He's a jumping off point. And then I needed an animal to compare them to. And of course, I think of marine mammals as a dolphin guy. And narwhal jumped out because it alliterates perfectly if Nietzsche were a narwhal. So I could really have chosen any animal because the idea was simply all non human animals compared to humans. But then narwhal was right there for the taking. It's in my wheelhouse.
- [04:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. It does sort of roll off the tongue nicely and definitely visually jumps out on a bookshelf. So let's kind of delve into the book. There's obviously a lot of pieces of it and as you said, kind of quite a lot of really interesting facts about different animals throughout the book. And unfortunately, I don't think we're really going to be able to get into every single one of them. But hopefully we can kind of do some justice to the main points and the obvious sort of starting point which what is the value of human intelligence? What do we even mean by intelligence? Why is this a question that you're arguing we need to think about?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, the core really is that is this idea of what intelligence is and what it's worth. And so I sort of evaluate the worthiness toward the end of the book and in the beginning I try and define it and I don't provide a actual definition. I sort of explain that in all the different fields that study intelligence, whether or not that's AI or. Or humans, human intelligence or animal intelligence, we have a variety of definitions that really only fit in that field. So there is no sort of unifying definition. We all sort of just know what it means when we're talking about it. And when we see examples of animals acting in an intelligent kind of way, so displaying some form of sophisticated cognition, what we usually mean is that their cognition resembles human cognition, and that always makes us interested. And so the unspoken assumption is that thinking like a human is good or interesting in some sort of way. And so that was the thing I wanted to focus on, like, are we sure that thinking like a human is even good, whatever good might mean? So then I had to frame this concept of good both in biology and sort of in ethics throughout the book.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And one of the ways that you talk about kind of human intelligence being distinct is the ability or the predilection or either one of kind of asking why, not just what's happening, but why is this happening? Kind of wondering what might come next, or wondering why this happened before, etc. Which again, I think is one of those things that we don't really think that much about, we just sort of take for granted. But I'm wondering if you can kind of take us into what you delve into in the book of that quality, I suppose, of being able to ask why or wanting to ask why we might think of that as kind of inevitably a good thing. Unless it's a toddler who won't stop doing it.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Is it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Is there a biological or ethical advantage of asking why?
- [07:23]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, that's a good question. Because on one hand, like causal inference, that's what. Why is the interest in why things happen? So what causes things to happen? That's That's a hallmark of the human species. Other animals don't do that to the same extent, if ever. They get just fine by just fine with learned associations. But once you start asking what causes things to happen, that then becomes the basis for science and engineering and us having created what we now see in the modern world. Medicine, you know, vaccines, the ability to send satellites into space. So everything that we've created that it really is quite exceptional and remarkable is directly attributable to this interest in asking why our capacity for causal inference. So that's a fact. But then the question is, well, are those things good? And that's a difficult question because obviously vaccines are good because they've saved a lot of lives, they've prevented a lot of suffering. But then a lot of the things that humans invent with this capacity for asking why also include, you know, guns, nuclear weapons, the capacity for committing terrible acts of violence and genocide on scales absolutely unprecedented in the animal kingdom. And that's generally not good because it creates a lot of suffering. So like everything in the book, when I find something interesting that humans do that animals don't to the same extent, it's always a double edged sword. There's, there's great benefit and then there's great misery that comes of it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So similarly, you look at lying. Can animals lie? Is lying something that sets humans apart? And I was wondering if you could maybe tell us about the extent to which animals lie. I think maybe that section of the book was perhaps my. I found the most fascinating for the examples that you gave from the animal kingdom.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, lying and deception, and depending on how you define it, is rather ubiquitous in terms of animal communication. Just, you know, even flowers will lie in a sense that you'll have like a Venus fly trap that looks like a yummy place to land if you're a fly. And then it actually isn't and it, and it eats the fly. So just from the very get go, as soon as communication sort of cropped up in the, in the animal kingdom, you have deception. So you might define something like deception as transmitting a signal, a communicative signal that has false information to another creature to sort of get that creature to alter its behavior. So you want it, if you're a Venus fly trap, you want it to land so you can eat it. So deception, and I give a lot of examples in the book, comes in more complicated forms. Like I talk about the, the cuttlefish in there, I love that example. But then what humans do is we are able to take that deception ability that's baked into all biology to a different level. And I define that as lying, which is intentionally transmitting false information for the express purpose of getting another creature to believe something that's not true. And it's this concept of belief that sets humans apart, because humans, through theory of mind, have the ability to guess as what other humans might think and believe. So we're interested in the thoughts of others, and therefore we're interested in manipulating the thoughts of others, getting them to believe false information for our own, you know, nefarious purposes. So, yes, lying is in various forms, found throughout the animal kingdom, but we really do take it to a different level in that sense.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that that distinction is really important to kind of understand because we do sort of lump it all together. But actually, there's sort of different mechanisms happening for different purposes.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
That's true. And you think of like a possum playing dead. And that's a form of deception. It's providing false information about its state of decay to a potential predator. And so if for a cognitive psychologist looking at that and calling that lying, that would raise some red flags, because then that would mean that the possum would have to know something about the predator's state of mind. Like, oh, I know that I'm fooling this predator because it believes something that's not true, and that's probably not what's happening, because that behavior crops up sort of automatically without much thought in just very specific contexts. So peeling apart the difference between those two things really gets at the heart of what is different about human cognition and non human animal cognition a lot of the time.
- [11:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Speaking of playing dead, that kind of leads me quite nicely to another section of the book where you talk about death wisdom. First, can you tell us a bit more about kind of what this is and what this can look like?
- [11:59]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yes. So the idea. And there's. There's philosophers out there that talk about this and animal cognition experts. Susanna Monceau, she's. I quote her in the book. And she talks about this idea a lot, about what animals understand about death. And she has this minimal concept of death. And this would be something that pretty much any animal would have, which is the ability to distinguish the difference between a living and a dead thing. So that. That is something that arguably rather ubiquitous. You might even find that insects. You can make a great argument that insects can learn what death is to some extent. But then what humans have, what most other species probably do, not even other great apes, is the ability to understand that we ourselves will inevitably one day die so that you personally will die. And that. That is unavoidable. That is something that seemingly only humans, so far the evidence suggests only humans have that death wisdom capacity. And as I'm sure you might agree, that is front and center in a lot of people's minds and it drives a lot of people's behavior and it's certainly, you know, at the center of a lot of our cultural and social practices.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And is that a benefit? Does that help humans that we have this death wisdom that other animals don't, or does it create challenges?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, well, that's a great question. And there's so much research on that, the impact that it has on culture and whether or not that is a good or a bad thing, because it does drive us to create things. It create, you know, possibly even our religious practices. A lot of this is. Is created in the face of this problem of mortality. But also just artistic projects. You know, you want to write a. I might want to write this book, for example, so that my great, great grandchildren will a piece of my. My thinking and my mind and my personality that they can sift through. So it's a sort of immortality project. I leave something behind after my death. So death wisdom creates a lot of beautiful works of art on one hand. On the other hand, it's obviously wrapped up in a lot of psychological and mood disorders and depression itself. And it is thoughts of. Of suicide are wrapped up in these concepts of death wisdom. So it creates a lot of misery for a lot of people. And in just sort of a general sense, it really is a bummer to know that you're going to die. I give the example of my daughter in the book, and around the age of six or seven, when she first understood, she had this sort of flash of insight that she was going to die. And she thought about what death was and she was crying in her bedroom and I had to console her. And that was just a terrible moment for me as a. As a dad, because I had no real comforting words for her. And, you know, six months beforehand, she had never thought about it, and she was much happier. And then pretty much ever since that moment, she's 14 now and she still talks about it. It's a part of her life, and it's a sad part of her life, I think.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
And yet, as you said, lots of things have been created because of it. So quite a difficult sort of question to resolve.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah. I mean, there can't possibly be a scientific answer to it. It really is your personal sort of relationship to it so personally for me, like even in the book I struggle whether or not I think it is a good thing because it does produce all that beauty. But I just, I came down on, on the side of like, no, it really is kind of a, a bummer. Maybe I would personally be better off without it, or at least my daughter would. But I mean, but there's a great argument to say like, no, it really does give you an appreciation for what, what you have being alive in the moment. So it can produce a lot of benefit as well. So I think it's sort of a personal relationship to the concept as opposed to a species wide answer.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
On the other hand, when it comes to human morality, you do argue in the book that it kind of sucks.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yes, that's right.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can you take us through that perspective, please?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Well, that's it. Because we often think of, or when people talk sort of casually about morality, we always think of that as the domain of our species and our species alone. But there's so much great research to show that a lot of animal species have concept of fairness. For example, we see that famous study by Franz Dual with the monkey in the cage getting a reward that's less than its cage mate for doing the same work. And it gets angry, it's upset because it feels like it's not being treated fairly. So there's a great argument to be made that the origins of moral thinking, ethical thinking, are to be found in many other species. And then there's the study of normativity, the norms that guide animals behavior that sort of stop them from behaving in certain ways when they're in a social group that's kind of universal. But again, what humans do is they take that sort of foundational base of morality or normativity and then they create morality on top of it. And that is when you, when you look at all those ideas of equity and normativity in animals and then you think about them, you co define them, you make them a formal statement as to what you should and what you shouldn't do and why. And then you can rationalize why it's okay to do one thing and not another thing. And generally that's good because you have, you know, you create laws that stop people from doing bad things, but you also create, and there are a few examples in the book, you create a societal sort of explanation as to why it's okay to go to war with another country or to commit genocide, for example. And those are all things that you have decided you've rationalized through Your moral thinking are okay to do for some reason. So what's weird about human morality is that it leads us sometimes down very dark paths where we can rationalize abysmal terrible behavior that creates a lot of suffering. So in that sense, I say it kind of sucks just because it can lead to a scale of misery and destruction that you simply don't find in the animal kingdom with their normative systems within one species.
- [18:13]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
One thing that I thought was really interesting about this section of the book was kind of putting those pieces together in a way that I'm not sure I'd seen before, but also kind of the particular example you use from the animal kingdom around homosexuality. Would you mind sort of explaining that example in this context?
- [18:31]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah. So sort of well known to people study animal behavior is the idea that homo homosexual same sex behavior in the animal kingdom is pretty widespread and normal pretty much for any species you look at. And whether or not that's actual sexual behavior or just a pair bonded, you know, same sex couple of albatrosses, for example, it's fairly standard stuff. And what I point out in the book is there are no social systems where you will find one animal within one species, within one social group punishing another of its group for engaging in same sex behavior because it's not seen as a problem within any animal social groupings. And then you, of course, you turn to humans and you have, you know, very a long history in different parts of the world, currently happening right now, of people codifying morality and saying, like, no, homosexuality is a problem for these reasons, and then committing atrocious acts against LGBTQ community because they have a moral position against homosexuality, which when you compare it to the animal kingdom is strange because that sort of moralizing and suffering doesn't occur there. So I argue in the book that homophobia itself is unique to humans and therefore quite unnatural in the sense that you don't find it in the animal kingdom and it really only seems to produce misery and bad biological outcomes as opposed to positive biological outcomes. So, yeah, so that's my example of how human morality can lead us down strange paths where we create misery for huge swaths of our population for seemingly no good reason.
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- [20:47]
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- [20:58]
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- [21:05]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for explaining that. I think it's a really interesting instance of a difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom that maybe we don't always think about moving kind of forward through the book, I suppose. Can you tell us about prognostic myopia and why it's a danger to the species?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah. That is a term that I define as the human capacity to think about and alter the future, sometimes very far into the future, coupled with a weird inability to not care about what happens in the future. So, of course, all of biology has historically only really been focused on solving problems in the moment or in the very near future, things like finding food and shelter and a mate, et cetera. And humans have a capacity for episodic foresight and mental time travel to think about the future, to place themselves in the future and imagine different scenarios. Arguably, some animals do that as well, but certainly not to the extent that we do. So we can think about 30 years down the future and decide to save for our retirements or whatever it might be and plan for that future. But we're still stuck with that same biology that we've always had, which is most of our emotional energy is focused on decisions made in the here and now. So we simply don't have a feeling of importance given to a decision about the future that we do for the moment, which means we don't make very good future decisions because they're often. They're only intellectual decisions. They're not driven by emotion. And emotion, of course, is the core of. Of making good decisions a lot of time in the moment. So that weird disconnect creates a lot of strain, I think, when it comes to humans making bad decisions.
- [22:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So then, given all of this and kind of some of the areas where it definitely seems like human cognition may not necessarily be beneficial, and some of the areas where it's kind of. It depends and it's hard to tell, would Nietzsche have been better off as a narwhal? Would humans be better off if we had a different animal's brain?
- [23:16]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah. And it's it is difficult to answer that really. And so it's it really another sort of a personal answer. Once again, for me personally, I feel like throughout his lifetime, and I make this argument in the book, Nietzsche was probably quite miserable for a lot of different reasons, but one of them was certainly his ability to overthink the nature of his reality and the nature of morality and why he was on this earth and what was the point of it all. And so that caused him a lot of suffering for sure, compared to, for example, maybe you have a cat or I have chickens, they don't suffer from those sort of existential questions. And so there's an argument to be made that on balance, my chickens or my cat would live a life that is slightly happier or maybe much more happy than, than Nietzsche. So doing all of that thinking, using all these abilities we've been talking about, like the ability for causal inference or death wisdom, I don't think is making him happier in the end. So there could be an argument to say, like Nietzsche would be better off as a narwhal or any other animal, and perhaps all of us would be better off as another animal. And that's simply to say if we lacked some of these capacities, we might generally be happier. But of course the counter argument is yes, but then we wouldn't have ever invented vaccines or done all these other things that have made us happier and healthier. And of course that's true. So it really is just where you would draw the line on balance as to whether or not these intelligence, the intelligence that we have is benefiting us. I'm not so sure. I don't know where you would come down on it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm not the one who wrote the book, so thankfully I don't have to answer that at this very moment.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
That's true. My editor forced me to make a decision or I wouldn't have done it either.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Fair enough. Speaking of kind of a bit of the behind the scenes of the book, is there anything. You're obviously quite expert in these topics, right? You teach on it, you've worked on it on quite a long time. But was there anything that you came across in the research or writing of the book that you found surprised you?
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Well, I'll tell you what surprised me, and it is thoroughly unrelated to anything that I have been doing, and that is after I published the book and people started reading it, I had a lot of emails from people who would write in and say, oh my gosh, that section on Aphantasia, I had no idea that was a thing. I also have aphantasia, and that I, despite the fact the book is not about that, that was just a sort of one paragraph anecdote I had in there. That seems to be the thing that people have picked out of it and talked to me the most about. And that was a bit surprising.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's interesting.
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Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah. So aphantasia, for those who might not know, is the inability to consciously generate images in your mind. So visual images, but also other sensory modalities, like you can't imagine a smell or a sound, but we usually think of it as vision while you're awake. So you can't picture an apple. You might know that you're thinking about an apple, but you can't picture it as if it were an image. And so I have aphantasia. I cannot do that. And it took me until my early 40s to realize that people really do see images in their minds, like a hallucination. In fact, like 95% of the population can do that. And that sounds strange to me. So, yeah, I included that example in the book to say that just because, like, an animal might not have a language capacity or a causal inference, it doesn't mean that their conscious minds aren't filled with information. Just like I don't have the ability to imagine those things, but it doesn't change the nature of my consciousness.
- [27:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Thank you for sharing that. It's always interesting to see kind of what surprises the person who's closest to the book.
- [27:06]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, yeah, that was. I have to say it was. I had expected all sorts of questions about the, you know, my arguments as to whether or not death wisdom was a good or a bad thing, but I. But it's the Aphantasia thing that seems to have tripped people up the most.
- [27:20]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
All right, well, I only have one last question, and it does always seem a bit unfair to ask because obviously we interview new books. That's the whole premise of the podcast. So people have usually just finished this big piece of work, and of course now I'm going to ask about the next thing. But in your case, it's even more so because the book hasn't even come out in the UK yet.
- [27:40]
Dr. Justin Gregg
That's right.
- [27:41]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
But I still do want to ask, is there anything you've got your eye on to work on next?
- [27:47]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Yeah, well, I, you know, I was trying to use this book as a jumping off point to ask big questions about the future and what human, the, you know, what civilization might look like in relation to some of these things. That I'm talking about like prognostic myopia. So I thought about that, but then like this Aphantasia thing that I just mentioned, that is, that keeps cropping up and I, it's a, it's only been around for about 10 or 15 years, like officially that term, and really been sparking some, some research into it. So it's a brand new field. And I thought, well, maybe, maybe I can write a book about that. So that's the thing I've been kicking around in my mind, which is in one sense completely outside of my wheelhouse, because I don't, I don't study cognition along those lines. I study animal cognition, but it is again, it is related because what I find interesting is people always think of animals as visual thinkers. You know, Temple Grandin has, has written extensively about the fact that she's a visual thinker. And we think of animals as, as, you know, if they're not using language to solve problems or think about their lives, they probably use visualizations. And for me, that doesn't make any sense because I don't visualize. And so I don't think there's any reason to say that other species also use visualization as a thinking modality at all. And that gets into a bigger question of, well, what even is thinking? What, what is the language of thought? And that's, that's an area that is, interests me. So you can relate Aphantasia directly to animal cognition in that sense. So anyway, these are just sort of half formed ideas in my head, but I thought that would be an interesting book subject.
- [29:24]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that does sound interesting. Well, when that becomes a full book and it's all completed and released and everything, we'll have to have you back to tell us all about it. But in the meantime, listeners can read the book that we've been discussing, which again is titled if Nietzsche Were a what Animal Intelligence Reveals about Human Stupidity out in the US under Little and Brown and 2022, coming out with Hodder in the UK in early 2023. Justin, thank you so much for being with us on the podcast.
- [29:52]
Dr. Justin Gregg
Marinda, thanks. This has been an awful lot of fun, so I apprec.