
Pavlov’s Rat: Scientists Demonstrate That Rats Have Imaginations - DiabloD3
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/pavlovs-rat-scientists-demonstrate-that-rats-have-imagination
======
asciimo
“But what about human reasoning is truly a human-unique feature and what
aspects are shared with our nonhuman relatives?"

Doesn't it make sense that much of human cognition is shared by other animals?
We share common ancestors and countless physical traits.

~~~
DiabloD3
The problem is there has been thousands and thousands and thousands of pages
written about cognition (human or otherwise) since the mid 1800s.

Ultimately, I'm not even totally convinced human cognition exists: explain to
me how we're not just some sort of weird behavior exhibited by a massively
parallel pattern matching engine; our ability to match patterns is the basis
of all of our culture, our language, our everything.

We're organic regular expressions.

~~~
lotsofmangos
_explain to me how we 're not just some sort of weird behavior exhibited by a
massively parallel pattern matching engine_

The very question would seem to assume that one can be cognisant of an
explanation.

~~~
proksoup
An explanation being a description of the repeated pattern that was recognized
and condensed into an explanation using pattern matching?

~~~
lotsofmangos
No, probably it would involve explaining why that is bollocks. But I may be
biased by the illusion of cognition.

