This Tiny Fish Can Recognize Itself in a Mirror. Is It Self-Aware?

Crows can fashion simple tools - and use them to dig a treat out of a bottle or a hole....and the majority of zoologists who work wtih animals as a career believe our failure to communicate with various species is proof of our limitations...not theirs.

Claude can recognize himself in a mirror, it's believing what he see's that's the problem.

Lol. We humans devise an intelligence test by which we hold other animals accountable. That doesn't sound too intelligent.

The mirror self-awareness test relies on senses humans have. We cannot know how non human animals experience their environment. Dogs, for example, experience much of their world by means of smell, which is many times more sensitive than ours. Perhaps they recognize themselves and other animals primarily by that sense. If so, that wouldn't be a test any human is likely to pass.

If it's hard enough to imagine how other mammals see the world, how could we expect to understand how creatures that live underwater must experience it?

There are many things we know, now, that people thought we would never discover the answers to. At some level, isn't the quest to understand things that are currently beyond the scope of our accumulated knowledge, one of the main tenets of scientific research?

Whether we find the answers or not may not be of paramount importance in any particular research project because in many cases, the research leads to other fascinating bits of discovery that are a unexpected, yet oftentimes extremely consequential byproducts.

I have been constantly amazed at some of the most obscure facts that science has unearthed, concerning creatures, large and small - on land and in the oceans of the world. Since I don't have the intellectual capacity to understand the processes used to establish these facts, I'm not in a position to find any observed and stated discovery as absurd or seemingly arrogant at a species level.

This is not presented as an argument for or against anyone's position or belief system. It's offered as nothing more than a personal observation.

Cheers.

I don't know if the fish knows that it's looking at itself in the mirror.