[Mind's Eye] artifactuality

Intentional agency is not limited to human beings. For example, in a
recent experiment a New Caledonian crow called Betty bent a piece of
straight wire into a hook and used it to lift a bucket containing food
from a vertical pipe (Weir at al., 2002). The action required for the
solution of Betty's problem, bending a metal wire into the form of a
hook, was quite "unnatural", and apparently an instance of
intelligent, goal-directed action. Betty's hook may be regarded as a
simple artifact made for the purpose of gaining access to the food
bucket. Tool manufacture has also been observed among animals in the
wild, for example, chimpanzees strip leaves off twigs detached from
branches of trees and use the twigs for reaching termites or ants.
(Beck 1980, 117.)

Beck, B. B., 1980, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use and Manufacture of
Tools by Animals, New York and London: Garland STPM Press.
Weir, A., Chappell, J., and A. Kacelnik, 2002, 'Shaping of Hooks in
New Caledonian Crows', Science, 297: 981.

The term "artifactualiity" has to do with the intention of an artist
to produce a work of art for the art public. I'd generally rather
watch animals (and possibly talk to plants) than out up with terms
like "artifactuality". There is some kind of 'constructive force' in
nature that human ingenuity clearly doesn't match - bumping and
grinding produces offspring in a way we can't match in vitro. Just
when we think we're so smart, a bunch of chimps turn up and learn
stuff with numbers better than us. I'm always amazed to see a
creature specialised to tap only one tree's sap, and then floored to
discover there's another that lives by drinking the 'pee' produced as
the first creature drinks the sap.

It seems the more we discover, the more there seems an
'intentionality' other than to do with an individual human
consciousness (or set of them). Chimps do art and religion- at least
putatively and certainly better than me. Dolphins may well protest
they would paint much better pictures, but can't get over the problems
of perennially wet canvas. One other planets, dinosaurs not hindered
by asteroid annihilation may be the finest artists of all. Maybe this
is why I think art is for the birds?

I'm struck that a fish out of water dies rather than transmutes in
evolution, though one can envisage stuff happening in the margins and
we can see evolution in real time (lizards and tails in the West
Indies, bacterial transformations and increasingly in lab experiments
with DNA, cell membranes and substrates).

I want to know what before the crow makes the crow bend hooks. What
we can see of intentionality before human intentions. Get out an snap
some on your camera now Jenkins - yes you boy! And sleep at the front
of class not the back next lesson!