
Can Animals Reason? - yters
https://mindmatters.ai/2019/05/can-animals-reason-my-challenge-to-jeffrey-shallit/
======
gus_massa
> _Shallit is denying the obvious. That animals can think only about concrete
> things, and not about abstract ones, is obvious. All of our experience with
> animals tells us this. It’s even more obvious when we consider just what it
> means to think abstractly._

The article uses "obvious" too many times. I think that it is obvious that
animals can think, and I think that the level of thinking in other animals is
not as good as the level of thinking in humans. Now that we have two obvious
different opinions, we should make an experiment to determine who is right.

> _Oddly, Shallit assumes that the existence of the soul is a matter for
> empirical science to investigate, akin to the existence of chloroplasts or
> asteroids._

We have experimental evidence of the existence of chloroplasts and we have
experimental evidence of the existence of asteroids. To be sure that souls are
real we obviously need experimental evidence of them instead of handwaving.

~~~
yters
1\. You both agree that animals can think. The question is in what manner? Dr.
Egnor recommends experiments in his other writing on that site.

2\. I agree with you here. I don't think Dr. Egnor should handwave away the
need to test for a soul.

~~~
gus_massa
If you redefine "Reason" with a narrow enough definition, you can make that
only humans satisfy the definition.

Can a submarine swim?
[https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/edsger_dijkstra_201166](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/edsger_dijkstra_201166)

~~~
yters
And likewise, if we define "Reason" broadly enough, then anything can satisfy
the definition, even nothing :D

The real question is what is the correct definition of "Reason"?

~~~
gus_massa
I agree. There was a recent article that said that electrons were conscious,
but it used a definition of conscious so wide that I think it included rocks
and probably empty space.

Anyway, a good definition of "Reason" should probably include chimpanzees,
elephants, dolphins, and probably octopus and parrots.

~~~
yters
Yes, for some sense of thinking it is clear animals deliberate between
options, which should be at least a necessary component of "reasoning".

However, the big question in the linked article is whether this sort of thing
is sufficient for the kind of abstract reasoning that humans regularly engage
in. I would argue choosing between "run" or "fight" is different than choosing
between "saving" and "spending". The latter requires an understanding of
abstract principles and some mathematics, whereas the first decision can be
based purely on weighing one's feelings.

------
nabla9
The author, Michael Egnor is a neurosurgeon and intelligent design supporter.

'Thinking the Way Animals Do: Unique insights from a person with a singular
understanding.'
[https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html](https://www.grandin.com/references/thinking.animals.html)

>A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make
associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not
thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think." People with
autism and animals both think by making visual associations. These
associations are like snapshots of events and tend to be very specific. For
example, a horse might fear bearded me n when it sees one in the barn, but
bearded men might be tolerated in the riding arena. In this situation the
horse may only fear bearded men in the barn because he may have had a bad past
experience in the barn with a bearded man.

~~~
yters
>Several years ago I devised a little test to find out what style of thinking
people use: Access your memory on church steeples. Most people will see a
picture in their mind of a generic "generalized" steeple. I only see specific
steeples; there is no generalized one.

Yet, she identifies all these pictures of steeples as the same thing, which is
an abstraction of the particulars. That is different than only associations
between particulars in animal thinking.

Also, take care you are not making the genetic fallacy by referencing Dr.
Egnor's background:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_fallacy)

~~~
nabla9
> Identifies all these pictures of steeples as the same thing

Associatively with no verbal toughs.

Artificial neural networks can do the same. Understanding that two things
belong to the the same category does not require language.

~~~
yters
It's essentially the same thing. A word is a label on a category.

I'd also argue that what neural networks do is not the same thing as humans
inferring categories from instances.

1\. We prefeed the NNs with categories and examples. The main work is already
done by the human.

2\. What the NN learns from cat pictures is not 'cat', but a bunch of trivial
visual features that happen to correlate with a bunch of cat pictures in a
very brittle manner. Not at all like what happens when humans learn 'cat' from
a few instances, and then can recognize cats everywhere in a huge variety of
settings and transformations (as I'm learning with my toddler).

