
Animal Minds: The new anthropomorphism - Petiver
http://www.chronicle.com/article/Animal-Minds/237915
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bbctol
The gaps between animal understanding and human awareness are just as
fascinating as the similarities, and I'm glad that someone's reminding us to
push back on the "They're just like us!" narrative of how animals minds must
work. One of the more influential texts I read in college was Daniel
Povinelli's work on whether or not chimpanzees understand weight, basically
concluding: they don't, at all. Scientists tried for thirty years to train
chimpanzees to recognize weight as a separate property of an object, and
failed spectacularly.

It's such a basic component of what it is to be aware of the world, and yet
it's complex enough it seems a uniquely human faculty. Chimpanzees can sort
objects by color, size, or shape, but not weight! how similar to humans can
their internal experience be? (Or, of course, what aspects of the world are we
missing that would be obvious to a slightly more complex intelligence?)

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figure8
> Or, of course, what aspects of the world are we missing that would be
> obvious to a slightly more complex intelligence?

Also, there are surely aspects of the world we miss which are probably clear
to chimps or even insects.

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andrewl
Richard Hamming said "Just as there are odors that dogs can smell and we
cannot, as well as sounds that dogs can hear and we cannot, so too there are
wavelengths of light we cannot see and flavors we cannot taste. Why then,
given our brains wired the way they are, does the remark, _Perhaps there are
thoughts we cannot think,_ surprise you?"

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kevhito
Because Turing completeness?

But certainly, there are no doubt emotions, habits, moral concepts, and even
"thoughts" that are thoroughly foreign to humans. Not impossible, just
foreign.

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pygy_
Turing completeness requires infinite discrete time steps and memory.

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taneq
This is one of those things that seems to end up being seen as very black-and-
white by all parties. Animals are either "nothing like us" or "just like us",
rather than "have varying degrees of psychological similarity to humans and,
almost orthogonally, varying degrees of capability."

There's also a huge variation between humans, in what ways we seem to perceive
and reason about the world, which seems to get swept under the rug with "5 out
of 7 people did X" type studies.

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woodandsteel
>The ethologist and author Marc Bekoff thinks primary emotions — including
fear, joy, happiness, jealousy, anger, love, pleasure, sadness and grief — are
probably widespread and that hewing too closely to abstract description could
become a form of what he calls "anthropo-denial."

In humans, each of these emotion terms refers to the cognition that a
situation is of a certain sort, and calls for a certain type of response. So
for instance "fear" refers to the cognition that a situation is such that
there is a fairly high probability that something highly contrary to one's
vital interests will occur, and calls increased vigilance and possibly action
to prevent the feared event.

Animals make many or all of the same situational differentiations, with much
the same behavioral responses, and so it seems appropriate to say they have
the same emotions as humans, , or at least a good part of them.

By the way, I think that the idea that animals are mere mechanisms without
minds comes from philosophies such as cartesian dualism, and also some
religious doctrines, and so is not scientific.

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billforsternz
I think recognising that you, personally, are a smart primate is probably the
key step to developing a rational world view. Since I explicitly took that
onboard I've been suspicious of any concepts founded on the idea that humans
and animals are separate and incompatible categories. Concepts like
"anthropomorphism".

