awareness

// Here are some examples of what might be some of the attributes of awareness in order to flesh this out a bit more. Perhaps there is also a connection to 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order cybernetics. // //The Coconut octopus, chimps and corvids appear to have some sort of spatial awareness// Huffard first noticed the coconut octopus, //Octopus marginatus//, dancing along the sand in 2000, while helping a film crew obtain octopus footage off the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The octopus, with a head about two inches long, lives on the sandy bottom in water some 20 to 30 meters (60 to 100 feet) deep, among lots of sunken coconuts, and even hides out in the shells of coconuts, drawing two halves around it to hide. Its weird walking behaviour, no doubt noticed by numerous other divers, has apparently never been analysed in the scientific literature, she said. [] Dr Mark Norman, head of science at Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and one of the authors of the paper, said: "It is amazing watching them excavate one of these shells. They probe their arms down to loosen the mud, then they rotate them out." After turning the shells so the open side faces upwards, the octopuses blow jets of mud out of the bowl before extending their arms around the shell - or if they have two halves, stacking them first, one inside the other - before stiffening their legs and tip-toeing away. []

// But there is also at the very least the appearance of being aware of other awareness’s //
== The other type of octopus //[Octopus aculeatus],// which camouflages itself as algae in tropical waters from Indonesia to Australia, looks like a sea monster scooting along the sea floor on two legs. Huffard filmed this creature off Australia's Great Barrier Reef easily rolling over rocks and other obstacles. ==  …To camouflage itself, it sometimes coils its two front arms and raises them in a pose that somewhat resembles algae. Both Huffard and Full are interested in how these octopuses control their unusual form of bipedal locomotion. Recent articles shed light on this. Israeli scientists have reported that octopus arms execute incredibly complex curling and bending motions even when cut off. Apparently a nerve ganglion in each arm can send clock-like signals down the arm to produce rhythmic movements, such as bends propagating down the arm, irrespective of whether there is a head and brain to control them. Similar movements seem to be involved in two-legged walking. [] A team working in the Republic of Congo discovered that the chimps are crafting brush-tipped "fishing rods" to scoop the insects out of their nests Lead researcher Crickette Sanz, from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said: "They have invented a way to improve their termite-fishing technique." They then pulled the herb stems through their teeth, which were partially closed, to make the brush and they also attended to the brush by sometimes pulling apart the fibres to make them better at gathering the termites," Dr Sanz added.   Further research revealed that a stem with a frayed tip collected 10 times more termites than a pointed probe.   []  … a team from the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) presented four captive rooks with a set-up analogous to … //[Aesops]// fable.    The birds were shown a clear tube containing a small amount of water. Floating upon it was an out-of-reach worm. And a pile of stones was positioned nearby. Dr Nathan Emery, co-author of the paper, from QMUL, said: "The rooks have to put multiple stones in the tube until the worm floats to the top." And the four birds did just that. Two, called Cook and Fry, raised the water-level enough to grab the floating feast the very first time that they were presented with the test, while Connelly and Monroe were successful on their second attempt. Footage of the experiments shows the rooks first assessing the water level by peering at the tube from above and from the side, before picking up and dropping the stones into the water. The birds were extremely accurate, using the exact number of stones needed to raise the worm to a height where they could reach it. In another experiment, the rooks were presented with a similar scenario. This time they were given a combination of small and large stones. Overall, Dr Emery told BBC News, the rooks opted for the larger ones, raising the worm to the top of the tube more quickly. He said: "They are being as efficient as possible." And when given a choice between a tube filled with water and another filled with sawdust, the birds were more likely to opt for the liquid-filled tube. The only other animals reported to have solved an Aesop-like problem are orangutans. [] // Presumably there is some sort of meta-awareness going on here as the birds are aware of another bird’s awareness. Is it possible that there may be some sort of correlation between meta-awareness and spatial/tool use. // … group living can also lead to deceptive behaviour - and western scrub jays (//Aphelocoma californica//) can be the sneakiest of the bird-bunch. Mr Bird says: "If they are being watched, they will hide their food, but they will do some 'fake hides' as well - so they'll put their beak in the ground, but not place the food. It's a bit like a confusion strategy. "Sometimes, if they are being watched, then they'll even go back and hide the food again."   While the birds' social intelligence has continued to impress, it is perhaps their physical intelligence, and in particular their tool use, that has stirred the most interest. Recent studies reveal that corvids' tool-use may at least rival, and even surpass, that of primates, such as chimpanzees. And one species in particular possesses an extraordinary ability - the New Caledonian crow (//Corvus moneduloides//), which is found on the Pacific island of New Caledonia. Russell Gray and his colleagues from the department of psychology at the University of Auckland have studied this species extensively, and were the first to discover that the birds were crafting tools in the wild. Professor Gray tells BBC News: "They do some really complex looking things. "We have seen that they take a whole branch, chop off the side branches and hone away at the end to create a hook, which they use to get grubs." Other experiments carried out at field stations have even shown that the birds will use a number of different tools to reach a tasty snack. The researchers were testing how New Caledonian crows selected tools by presenting them with a small bucket filled with some food, which was placed in a well, and pieces of wire, some straight and some with a hook at the end. The aim was to see whether the crows would select the bent wire to retrieve the treat-laden bucket.   But Betty astonished researchers when she selected a straight piece of wire and then used her beak to bend it into a hook so she could pull up the bucket of food. When she was later tested with just the straight wire, Betty repeatedly bent it into hooks - and other experiments with aluminium strips revealed how she would bend, shorten and lengthen the material to get to her food. This was the first time that any animal had been seen to make a new tool for a specific task, without an extended period of trial-and-error learning. Mr Bird says: "The interesting thing is that they can do so many of these clever things that primates can do - sometimes they can do them even better. But their brain is completely different from the mammalian brain.    "They don't have the area of the mammalian brain that is thought to be the area of intelligent cognition - the neocortex. "Interestingly, they have another area, the nidopallium, that might do the same job." As scientists try to understand this, the research is also driving forward some more fundamental questions about intelligence. Christian Rutz, who also works for Oxford's behavioural ecology group, says: "There are such enormous semantic issues. How do you define intelligence? How do you define what it means to understand something?" We have to be careful with ascribing intelligence to seemingly impressive behaviours, he says. He explains: "Not everything that looks smart to the human observer is actually smart. "For example, take orb web spiders. These animals build sophisticated structures for foraging, but would we call this behaviour 'intelligent'? Probably not."  [] // It occurs to me that tma’s can often be constructed as hooks. // A University of Auckland study has revealed that New Caledonian crows can use separate tools in quick succession to retrieve an out-of-reach snack.   …New Caledonian crows are renowned for their tool-making ability. The birds (//Corvus moneduloides//), which are found on the South Pacific island of New Caledonia, use their bills to whittle twigs into hooks and cut and tear leaves into barbed probes that can extract bugs and grubs from crevices.   …The crows were presented with:   Alex Taylor, lead author of the paper, said: "The creative thing the crows did was to use the short stick to get the long tool out of the box so that they could then use the long stick to get the meat."   Russell Gray, another author of the paper, told the BBC News website: "What is most amazing is that most of them did this on the first trial. "The first time we gave them the problem, six out of seven tried to do the right thing. "They took the little tool and they tried to get the big tool out, which we had made quite hard to reach, and four out of the six managed to get the big tool out and then use this to get to the food."  In another experiment, the positions of the long and short twigs were reversed. The team found that all apart from one crow briefly attempted to use the long twig to try to retrieve the short twig from box before quickly correcting their mistake and using the long twig to directly access the food.   The team believes that because the birds were able to solve the problem on their first attempt they were using analogical reasoning rather than trial and error. Analogical reasoning is the process of solving a problem using experience gained from solving related previous problems. Professor Gray said: "The birds were making an analogy: instead of using a tool to get food they used the tool to get another tool to get the food." "It might explain why the New Caledonian crows - out of all the crow species in the world - only these crows routinely make and use tools," he said. [] // Interpretations of awareness often include the ability to be aware of ones-self. // Some birds react when shown a mirror, but it is unclear if they know they are looking at their reflection, German experts wrote in Plos Biology journal. Dr Helmut Prior, from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, and his colleagues carried out a series of tests on five hand-reared birds. In one test, the researchers placed yellow and red stickers on the birds in positions where they could only be seen in a mirror. On seeing their reflections, the magpies became focused on the stickers as they tried to reach them with their claws and beaks. On several occasions, they succeeded in scratching the stickers off, which put an end to this behaviour. Black stickers placed on the birds' bodies did not elicit the same response. When no mirror was present, the magpies took no notice of the stickers. "We do not claim that the findings demonstrate a level of self-consciousness or self-reflection typical of humans," the researchers wrote in Plos Biology. "The findings do, however, show that magpies respond in the mirror and mark test in a manner so far only clearly found in apes, and, at least suggestively, in dolphins and elephants. "This is a remarkable capability that is at least a pre-requisite of self-recognition and might play a role in perspective taking." []
 * Chimps improving fishing rods  **
 * Crows have shown that two tools are better than one when it comes to problem solving, scientists say. **
 * A scrap of meat, which was tucked away, out of reach, in a box;
 * A small twig, which was too short to reach the food;
 * And another longer twig, which was long enough to reach the food, but was locked away well out of bill-grabbing range in another box.