/an/ — Tiny fish species possesses self-awareness

>>5114217 (OP)
Literally everything with a noticeably centralized brain is “self aware” no matter how conditioned they are to reflections. As in, it must know it exists to handle basic concepts like self grooming, property, territory, and more advanced navigation than bumping into things. At one point people became fond of this idea that animals are hilariously large compilations of if-then-else statements but its actually simpler, evolutionarily and biologically, for it to just know it exists and figure out how to serve its own needs.

The number of small little retards like fish and ants passing the mirror test is a huge hint that everything bigger that failed it was actually self aware and either uninterested in touching/removing the spot or wasnt used to mirrors and had a stronger fear instinct overriding consideration.

The real question is if they think about thinking or just know they exist

I wonder how many people are olfactory self-aware

>>5114242
Having been to a TCG store before: very few.

>>5114221
>it must know it exists to handle basic concepts like self grooming, property, territory
Couldn't those just be instinct and basically automated without the animal understanding why it's doing what?
>more advanced navigation than bumping into things
I'm not sure. I don't think you need self awareness to see a wall and avoid it. Computer programs can do that.

>>5114267
>it could be a giant conflagration of case statement logic so surely it is
it makes you feel more comfortable if it is but its easier to just make part of a brain bigger until rudimentary consciousness emerges than it is to hone mechanistic behavioral pathways, considering how evolution actually works. then the brain can hone pathways on its own instead of waiting for the genetic dice roll.

>>5114267
Understanding (or thinking you understand) your own behaviors is thinking about thought and even humans tend to be wrong about it
Simple self awareness is knowing you exist and are not someone else
Being self aware means knowing you are walking and where in space and time you are, but not necessarily why

>>5114269
>it makes you feel more comfortable if it is
I don't really care and I agree that a lot of animals are smarter than we give them credit for. I just don't think that self awareness is a hard requirement for shit like grooming and territory like you said. Those are relatively simple actions and ideas that could be automated through instinct. Not saying the necessarily are, but just arguing against the point that they can't be.
>but its easier to just make part of a brain bigger until rudimentary consciousness emerges than it is to hone mechanistic behavioral pathways, considering how evolution actually works
Yeah makes sense. A bunch of if-else statements will approach the complexity of basic counsciousness anyway but they'll completely fail in a new scenario that a conscious being would be able to improvise in.

>>5114271
>Simple self awareness is knowing you exist and are not someone else
>Being self aware means knowing you are walking and where in space and time you are, but not necessarily why
That's not wrong, but I don't think it's the definition people typically think of when they hear the term. By that definition a pathfinding algorithm is self aware.

File: ResizedImage_2026-04-05_17-47-50_6395[1].jpg (314 KB, 791x1408)

My cat not only recognizes herself in the giant mirror next to her cat tree, but she also likes to look at it from different angles and spies on me with it.

>>5114276
A pathfinding algorithm never knows where it is and that it is. You probe its state to determine how the algorithm has progressed up to that point.

A self aware animal is familiar with its own state as a fact. It contains the pathfinding algorithm, the observer, and the probing mechanism all at once.
It can also want, not just… progress. That’s a common trait, desiring.

It just doesn’t have to know or ask why it does something or wants something.

>>5114285
>A pathfinding algorithm never knows where it is and that it is. You probe its state to determine how the algorithm has progressed up to that point.
Well true. I guess I meant more so an NPC that's running the algorithm. The NPC knows its own XYZ coordinates and velocity. That would technically fit your definition of self awareness.
>It can also want, not just… progress. That’s a common trait, desiring.
True, but that's going beyond the definition you posted.

>>5114221
It's not really relevant. Everyone wants to pretend animals are dumb to justify mistreatment.
>>5114283
OP's test is also probably heard to measure because there's intelligence within species. Some cats are smart, some are retarded. Probably lots of other species where they happened to test dumb ones.

>>5114289
Sorry you don’t get it bruv. Being too literal is an incelmaxxed cope for gigaplebs that can’t nuancemog brainlets.
In other word, I didnt’t just expound, I clarified. The reference to desire wasn’t beyond the concept I put forth. It was beyond your limited interpretation of it.
–.
*sips wine*
*pets cat*

You now remember 6yo children in africa failed to recognize their own reflections

>>5114283
Kitty!

>>5114217 (OP)
This fish species is more intelligent than any cat

>>5114217 (OP)
Wrasses (Labridae) in general are intelligent fishes

>>5114217 (OP)
Fish possess consciousness. This has been proven repeatedly.

>>5114221
fpbp

>>5114221
Fish are intelligent:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/these-fish-know-when-youre-watching-them/

>>5117671
Mammalfags and birdfags always be coping

>>5117671
Don't underestimate fish:

This shows that the individual steps in nest building are innate, but cichlids only become master nest builders through practice. Remarkably, fish that were given another chance at nest building after a whole year without access to snail shells still displayed the skills of practiced architects and did not have to start from scratch—they were able to remember what they had learned even after this long period.

The researchers also explored whether the fish could adapt to unexpected challenges to their nest-building program. They exposed the fish to 3D-printed, sinistral snail shells. These shells are extremely rare in nature and are a mirrored version of the natural shell of right chirality. Amazingly, after just a short time the fish learned to simply change direction, rotating the shell counterclockwise rather than clockwise into the sand as they do for dextral shells.

"For a long time, it was assumed that nest building consisted of purely innate behavioral patterns. But studies in birds and our own research show that cognitive abilities such as learning, remembering and adapting also play important roles," says Swantje Grätsch, project leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence and first author of the study.

https://phys.org/news/2026-04-underwater-architects-cichlids-reveals-hardwired.html

""Accordingly, we were able to show that during nest building in cichlids, brain regions homologous to the mammalian hippocampus are active, which is known to be responsible for precisely these abilities. We are only just beginning to understand how complex this goal-directed behavior and the underlying processes in the brain really are."

>>5117671
>>5118734
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-damselfish-lines-regional-accents.html

Courtship calls among two species of fish commonly found on Australian coral reefs have been described, and researchers say their "accents" can vary significantly between regions. Scientists led by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and the Center for Marine Science and Technology (CMST) at Curtin University combined audio and visual tools to study two closely related Damselfish species—Dascyllus aruanus and Dascyllus reticulatus—finding they each produce distinct courtship pulse sounds. Characterizing variation in fish sounds associated with reproduction improves scientists' ability to detect species remotely and, in some cases, measure spawning success.

Researchers found the sounds varied strongly between two reef locations featured in the study, indicating that factors such as local dialects and environmental conditions, may influence how sounds are produced by the small black and white fish. The findings are published in Scientific Reports.

Recording and attributing the pulse sounds of the damselfish for this study was a difficult task. Many fish sounds remain undocumented because it is hard to attribute the cacophony of sounds on biodiverse places like coral reefs to individual species, or to their particular behaviors.

>>5114221
Goddamnit, finally someone who gets it.

>>5119001
Try looking at these studies, fag:

>>5117671
>>5118734
>>5118812

>>5114217 (OP)
Why do chuds get so mad at the thought that fish are intelligent?

>>5114217 (OP)
Fish were here before mammals and they will be here after mammals

>>5119337
What if I drink all the world’s water? Then what, smart guy?

>>5119374
the humans would perish because they can't survive without water

>>5118812
Fish acoustics is crazy, theres ~36,000 species and so far ~1000 were confirmed to produce sound which are mostly unique to their respective species

>>5120153
Source for this claim?

>>5120178
>Looby, A., Erbe, C., Bravo, S. et al. Global inventory of species categorized by known underwater sonifery. Sci Data 10, 892 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-023-02745-4

admittedly, I think I took the 36000 species count from a different article that counts extant species, regardless this is a good article that reviews articles that confidently identified sound production.

>>5114221
you don't have an aquarium, do you?

>>5114217 (OP)
People seething itt are just mad the fish passed the test while cats didn't

false flagging toxohead up above ^

>>5114221
A big issue with this debate is that is entirely sight dependent. Even something like a dog, who has pretty good eyesight and can identify things by sight, doesn't treat it as its primary sense for a lot of things. If an object doesn't SMELL like its favorite ball, then it is not is favorite ball. It doesn't matter to the dog if it looks like the ball.
Similarly to humans, if something looks like your mom, you think its your mom even if its some alien body snatcher with a completely different scent.
It'd be like putting a mostly blind man in front a mirror and declaring he's not aware because he can't identify himself in the mirror. Well duh, because the blind man (or dog) doesn't use sight as the primary sense identifier.

>>5120599
not false flag. A cat would not be able to complete the same complex tasks that a cleaner wrasse can.

>>5114217 (OP)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-tiny-fish-check-themselves-out-in-a-mirror-before-deciding-whether-to-fight-180985061/

Bluestreak cleaner wrasse set up “cleaning stations” on the reefs, then wait for other fish to show up so they can eat the parasites. They also have good memories and can recognize more than 100 different “clients.”

Last year, researchers also showed that bluestreak cleaner wrasse could recognize themselves in photos after looking at their reflection in a mirror.

Scientists wanted to explore the bluestreak cleaner wrasse’s self-awareness on an even deeper level, so they set up a series of new experiments.

In the first phase, researchers placed a bluestreak cleaner wrasse inside a clear fish tank. Then, they held photos against the glass showing bluestreak cleaner wrasses of varying sizes—some that were 10 percent larger than the fish in the tank, and some that were 10 percent smaller. No matter which photo the scientists showed, the bluestreak cleaner wrasse inside the tank tried to attack it.

Next, the team repeated the same experiment but added a mirror to the tank. The fish checked out their own reflection before deciding whether to fight—and they would only battle photos of smaller intruders, not larger ones.

To scientists, this suggests that bluestreak cleaner wrasse are capable of understanding their own body size, as well as how their body size stacks up against a rival.

“This was unexpected because we had an image that this fish always shows aggression against rivals, regardless of size,” says study co-author Taiga Kobayashi.

There are no mirrors in the wild, so the findings also suggest that cleaner wrasse adapted and learned to use the mirror as a self-preservation tool. This discovery can “help clarify the similarities between human and non-human animal self-awareness and provide important clues to elucidate how self-awareness has evolved."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujy9EmUzN4E

>>5120604
>If an object doesn't SMELL like its favorite ball, then it is not is favorite ball. It doesn't matter to the dog if it looks like the ball.
that could just mean that smell is that much of an important factor to it that it is what makes the ball its favourite ball, even if the dog knows that its technically the same object. it's like when you have a favourite piece of clothing but you change the color

>>5121160
much more impressive than any cat

>>5114221
you sound like the retard if you think fish can't be smarter than some mammals

>>5120819
>>5121160
> Some fish can resolve relative sizing up. That makes them better than cats.
How dumb are you, precisely? There's garden snakes that can do this. It is likely that every single mammalian carnivore does it. We all naturally fear/feel on edge around large animals precisely because our brain always runs a "is this large enough to be a threat" routine in the background, it's the basic process of determining if something is dangerous or not.
You are literally trying to pretend cats don't know fear. That's how retarded your position is.

>>5122466
The wrasse can use a mirror to compare relative sizes despite never encountering a mirror in its native habitat. A cat sees its reflection in a mirror and attacks it because it's stupid enough to think it's another cat despite being exposed to mirrors for centuries via domestication.

>>5122468
A fearless cleaner wrasse almost nothing ever hurts is not going to have the self preserving primal stress reaction of a solitary mesopredator (predator and also prey) aka cat.

Plenty of cats get used to mirrors and admire themselves in them. So do dogs. And cows.

The mirror test is flawed. Get the fuck over it. The science itself is flawed. Ancient cavemen had a better understanding of animal awareness than materialist sceptics.
>bbbut science and logic!
Dont believe your lying eyes believe the leaps of logic, cherry picked data points and poor experimental design of some abject failure that couldn’t hack it in the hard sciences sure

>>5122475
Cleaner wrasse do occasionally get eaten by predators which is why they have to be discerning about who their clients are and commit relevant details to memory. Their self-preservation strategy just happens to select for higher intelligence than a cat's.

>>5122468
And how do you know the cat isn't running a relative size up calculation on its image in a mirror? Why is a kitten having a reaction to something that will never happen in the wild, to which he has never been selected for, dumber for it than a fish *not* reacting to it and just running the exact same set of behavior it would always run no matter what?

>>5122551
>And how do you know the cat isn't running a relative size up calculation on its image in a mirror?

Because there's no evidence that's the case. Even the Ancient Egyptians had mirrors. How long do cats need before they figure out what a mirror is?

>>5122555
>>5122539
You must be the anticatschizo that other retard accuses everyone of being

There are plenty of cats that get used to mirrors and use them. They default to freaking out because another cat would hurt them before they had a chance to figure out if it was a reflection or not.

The mirror test is NOT a valid measure of self awareness and never will be. Its sole purpose is providing the results that are convenient for atheist moralizers trying to invent an animal value hierarchy that fits their preconceptions.

>>5122555
>Because there's no evidence that's the case.
There is no evidence fishes are aware of the values that are taken in account in setting their behavior. If you can overmine proofs, I can undermine them.
>How long do cats need
Anecdotal : I have raised 7 cats in my life (I'm 42), I've never had one freak out on its image in the mirror. Jump scares, surely. But then again I've had jump scares walking into a room with a reflective surface I didn't expect, caught my reflection on the side, that doesn't mean I couldn't use a mirror to size up the difference in size between me and something else.
They do seem to lose interest in mirrors very quickly, and don't appear to care about their own reflected image as much as you'd expect from such a vain animal.
This is a very very dumb line of argument. You've reduced self-awareness to the product of cognitive processing, even if cats were to fail a single identifiable task, it wouldn't suggest they are dumber than something that can resolve it. Cats could have a thousand overriding behaviors sets in that means they fail this simple test. Because they don't need to succeed it, or rather, because its more valuable to fail it and succeed at others. Domestic cats are pretty much the perfect example of the expected brain-to-mass ratio in a mammalian carnivore, with no deviation. They aren't dumb, they just aren't smart, by our skewed standards. I couldn't start estimating by what amount the brain of a cat dwarfs that of a fish, but I'm confident its a lot.
There's just so many assumptions hidden behind your argument it would take a 500 page essay to identify them all.

>>5122627
>There is no evidence fishes are aware of the values that are taken in account in setting their behavior.

Yes, there is. See:

>>5121160

>>5122690
No, this is evidence that the fish is capable of equating the image in the mirror to itself, not that he has awareness that this requires inferential steps. This could all be done reflexively by cognitive circuitry which never manifest in any other way to the fish than as what sets its behavior. Perhaps the fish doesn't even recognize itself, but a "sibling shape", and attacks purely as a reflexive defensive tactic (hyper-aggression does work, depending on the animals in question, statistically).
And still no evidence to suggest cats fail this test, or could not accomplish its equivalence.
AND further, no attempt to address the fact that if this is a test for self-awareness, then there's no reason to discount the dozens of other forms of cognitive self-awareness found in animal life. Any form of continuity or mereology established or pointed out by a cognitive process is a contributing factor to your self-awareness.

>>5114217 (OP)
Anyone who pretends there is a cutoff for "sentience" is a midwit who wants to feel superior or abuse animals.

Spiders, rats, birds, and other small insects can all have friendly relationships with humans. If you dont agree you're a retard.

>>5122818
Behold! A redditor! Can you explain why 5 year old African humans can't pass the OP test?

The mirror test should have remained where it was designed: human children's mental developement progress

It is absolutely not a good measure of self awareness in animals. The cleaner wrasse's unique lifestyle where grooming has a special importance makes it "pass". Yes it is self aware and so are all fish. You realy need to do mental acrobatics to strip animals of conciousness.

>>5122910
>Behold! A redditor!
You do realize I agree fishes are self-aware, right? That, if you wish to adopt the definition set by OP (and it isn't "wrong", its just one among many, and "self-aware" is an essentially hazy term), then insects, fishes, birds and all mammals are self-aware, and possibly lower down.
I doubt spiders can be "friendly", but not that they are somewhat aware.
>>5122910
>Can you explain why 5 year old African humans can't pass the OP test?
Hypothesis : they do not have, on average, the attention span required to properly interpret generic linguistic instructions. I would like to test if they fail to use the mirror when given non-specific instructions by their parents, and specific instructions (so, a scenario like the fish, where they have to solve the issue by personal inference, and one where the parent explicitly asks the kids to identify himself in a mirror, and then compare to results from non-related instructors and observers.)
>>5122920
>You realy need to do mental acrobatics to strip animals of conciousness.
Not really? I mean, with all we know now, not recognizing that most animals on our scale have to be self-aware is pretty grotesque. But some living beings have a world made up of 2~3 things. A fly's behavior is mostly set by a cluster of 12 neurons set with binary values (smells good/feels the right temperature/humidity = go toward).

Mammalcels SEETHING in this thread

>>5123140
>A fly's behavior is mostly set by a cluster of 12 neurons set with binary values (smells good/feels the right temperature/humidity = go toward).
Household insects also have different flight or flight tendencies. (learned the hard way trying to film closely in a tropical country)

>>5123200
>Household insects also have different flight or flight tendencies.
Yes, that insects can have their behavior set by a very small number of neurons (as in, less than a 100) doesn't mean they'll all produce the same behavior at all times. Neurons set and updates their signal firing value at all time, so even a completely programmatic being could show some degree of adaptability in its actions.
Given the relative simplicity of some beings and that computionalist models were pretty much the first that seemed to reach the level of "hard scienc-ism" required for a field to be thought of seriously, it isn't at all that surprising that we thought the cut off for consciousness was higher than "insects".

>>5122930
lmao stupid cat doesn't even recognize its own reflection