Not entirely sure if I'm repeating what was said in the lecture now,
or even if I understood it fully (but somehow I don't feel alone).
With Sean's broken wing display (well, it wasn't HIS display, but it
was his example), isn't this just an example of fixed action patterns?
If so, the issue of other minds doesn't really enter the picture. If it
were the case that a bird knows the snake is a predator (rather than a
landslide), I find it unlikely that ALL birds exhibit the same display.
They are essentially faced with a problem to solve. Surely some
creativity would be evident and other ways of protecting the nest would
emerge. The fact that they don't leads me to think that it is just an
evolutionary response elicited by an appropriate stimulus.
Of course, I'm not saying that birds don't have minds, but this
example doesn't show that they do.
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