Our biggest problem which has not been solved yet is human inability to ask questions in non-anthropocentric way. For example, when we investigate self-awareness in dolphins we use mirrors (by the way, one recent project failed to replicate the much cited and discussed mirror self-recognition study). We are visual species, dolphins are not, many live in very murky waters with limited visibility.Why are they expected to pass mirror self-recognition test? Can we measure self-recognition without mirrors?
It is even worse with cetacean signals. Their system is nothing like human language; to begin with, it is very fast, it is so fast that dolphins could distinguish separate clicks in a sound that consists of 100s clicks which we perceive as one continuous "squeaky door" sound. Then they have 2 areas in their brain associated with auditory processing (unlike in humans and other mammals that have just one).
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.h...
On top of that, small corpus callosum means that two hemispheres are more independent in dolphins than they are in humans. This should have at least some effect on how they "think".Finally, "seeing" world through sound, and being able to make 2 (maybe even more) sounds at once independently only adds to the "alien" complexity of cetacean species.
Anyone who has seen a spectrogram of a dolphin pod vocalizing will testify: they rarely shut up! There is a constant chatter going on, apart from echolocation. It must have some meaning, evolution would not tolerate such waste of energy for nothing.We have been investigating dolphins cognition and communication since 1960s, we still do not know what they "think" or "say" and it could be partially due to our tendency to compare them to us, expecting something similar.
Reminds me of a similar test with dogs. By default, they didn't do well at the mirror test, but then scientists wondered whether they were simply more focused on smell rather than sight. So they came up with a smell based version of the same test, which the dogs passed.
"No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other"
This was a fun read in general, but I think it's particularly interesting to consider some of its implications in the context of trends in AI (to be clear, the article has nothing to do with AI).
I think the excerpt above is rapidly becoming true for current generation ML/AI systems (I'm leaving aside the question of qualia [0], since we are still unclear how to evaluate that question even for animals).
To the extent the above becomes true, I think it's an interesting contrast to the implied point behind Dijkstra's famous "swimming submarine" analogy:
"The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."
The submarine "swims", but almost none of that activity could be mapped onto how a human swims. As the structure of ML/AI systems starts to mimic what we believe we know about the neuroscience of the brain, the question of whether machines are "thinking", and what that might mean about thought in general, is very interesting.
>The submarine "swims", but almost none of that activity could be mapped onto how a human swims.
Along similar lines Hubert Dreyfus famously said "current claims and hopes for progress in models for making computers intelligent are like the belief that someone climbing the tree is making progress toward reaching the moon."
The problem with this way of thinking is that the fundamental principle in question gets conceded like it's no big deal. If you grant that I can swim, that I can climb a tree, even an inch, you've already given me absolutely everything. Of course further progress will be hard, but it won't be forbidden by some kind of transcendent philosophical principle.
So with the submarine example, we might "swim" differently, but we can both navigate through water. What would be cause for concern in the sense of raising some fundamental limitation would be if we discover that the place we want to go simple isn't accessible by any "submarine" we could ever build, or that the place we want to go isn't to be found in the "water."
I prefer to re root the question into primitive (as in thermodynamically) survival. Everything in our system inherited millions of years of response to chaos and sustaining self structure. Machines are thinking already, above average person logical ability. The issue is elsewhere. All we do, even logical processes emerged from that legacy of survival. That's where I draw a line between animal life forms (including us) and machines, even advanced ones.
The question, to me, is whether machines will ever have consciousness, or whether consciousness is just "what it feels like to have a cortex". We assume that machines will have consciousness some day, but what if we had a machine that could do many things as well as a human, but didn't consider itself "alive"?
Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0].
On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to suggest that the "movie playing in your head" would not emerge from any number of transistors and wires connected to each other.
On the other hand, it's not clear how you can argue that what goes on in our own heads is physically any different. So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. And if that's the case, it raises all sorts of ethical questions about the creation of artifacts that might (some day) exhibit consciousness. And, of course, there are already many ethical questions about how we treat animals in the here-and-now.
> So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter.
Doesn't seem like they're mutually exclusive. I mean, I'm pretty confident I can interact with some matter and produce another human. If or how God plays a role seems to be the unknown factor.
There's no observable effects to distinguish conscious and unconscious molecule. Having a definition that can't be used for experimental validation is not useful.
There's no observable evidence for an internal experience in humans either. Each person just extrapolates that belief from their own consciousness. That is what got us into the silly position that animals don't possess consciousness in the first place.
We can talk for hours about consciousness in the sense "what it is like to be bacterium", and it will lead us nowhere, or, better to say, it will lead us all over the place. Ask different philosophers.
On the other hand we can agree that we can sufficiently easily distinguish conscious and unconscious human, dog or other mammal. From here we can study which parts of a brain participate in conscious activities, and maybe generalize it for species further away from us.
I define consciousness as the property of having an internal experience.
It would be better to describe someone "unconscious" as unresponsive. You don't know that they are not having an internal experience at that moment in time. Even if they told you later that they weren't having an internal experience, that only tells you that they have no memory an internal experience, it does not prove that no such experience occurred.
I quit pursuing philosophy as an academic matter when I realized that these sorts of conflations are at the root of most philosophical debates. In fact, I'll go ahead and state that the single most contested subject in modern philosophy is the definition of the word "is".
- Would other intelligent species consider our AI machines alive?
- Would other intelligent species consider -us- alive?
----
Suppose we build some robots, that know how to learn on their own, teach each other, process raw materials and construct copies (and better versions) of themselves from it.
And we send them to an uninhabited planet far away.
Decades later, they have a "civilization" of their own, and are colonizing other planets, all on their own.
Would they, to an external observer looking for intelligent life, fail to meet any of the criteria for it? If yes, how?
----
Suppose there's an alien species that "sees" in a much wider spectrum than we do; from ultraviolet to infrared, and can see light polarity and perceive billions of more colors than us.
They can also innately detect magnetic waves and other phenomena, so they can "feel" way more than humans do.
Their natural lives also last for far longer than humans, so their thoughts and plans span decades and centuries, and their minds can casually consider enormous scopes without any effort...
A different question is whether consciousness is something desirable in machines. As an exercise in playing with that question, Peter Watts' fiction is hard to beat.
As one distillation he presents goes, first-contact comes about because of our emissions being noticed. But the reason for the contact is the content of the messages - intelligent but not-conscious beings receive them, find them difficult to process because they are mostly self-referential silliness only a conscious mind could worry about, and conclude they are informational attacks.
Maybe machines shouldn't be conscious, because consciousness is a waste of resources.
Some form of awareness of its own existence is required for a machine to be operating efficiently. Otherwise it can plan to use materials of its own "brain" as an intermediate step.
The way you're using consciousness conflates the human mind (which I would argue fits your definition of "what it feels like to have a cortex") and the property of experiencing existence.
Animals might have a very different mind, but I'm quite certain they experience their existence.
Every day walking though the stables I give the ponies some mints. I am fairly certain judging from their behaviors that when they see me they are thinking 'Mints!'.
One day, when I found the dog looking excitedly down a drain I said 'Rats!'. Now if I say 'Rats?' she goes and looks. I know she is thinking - 'I lost a rat down there once and I'd desperately love to make its acquaintance again'.
I do not think that there is much difference between the way we and other animals think. We get confused in the same way and even subconscious things like 'infectious yawn' see to pass freely to the horse and the dog and back to me. Some people have a hard time accepting that animals do think and whereas I recognize the easy peril of anthropomorphising subjects - I also suspect a political unwillingness and discomfiture in accepting animal intelligence.
While the particularities may be interesting, much of what's said isn't surprising (though for Cartesians, it may be, and the author does throw Descartes' name around a few times). There is a great deal of confusion about this subject and a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). For those who do want some perspective, I recommend starting with Feser's introductory book "Philosophy of Mind" [0] as well as a series of blog posts he's written on the subject (such as [1] and [2], as well as a blog post with a long list of links on the subject and related subjects [3]).
> ... a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc).
I feel like this is, intentionally or not, aimed at least 80% at my comments :)
Would you mind giving me some quick pointers on what the "errors" are? I can assure you that, though I may well be wrong, I have read several books on philosophy of mind and many more on cognitive science research. Despite that I'm struggling to see anything I said that would have been controversial at the time I was taking those courses in university.
You are not likely to get an answer. This is a style of comment that is quite common in discussions where there are philosophical issues. The defining features are an assertion that someone is wrong, followed by a long list of general references, with the unstated implication that the alleged error will be corrected somewhere within them. The authors of such comments are careful not to take a position that can be debated, and in this case, the comment's author has been especially careful in avoiding giving clues that might indicate specifically what he objects to.
This style is also seen in discussions where religion is raised, where it is used to avoid questions like why an omnipotent and benevolent creator thought smallpox was a good idea.
I wasn't intentionally aiming at your comments, but some of what I wrote does seem to concern, at least loosely, some of the things you've written. As you can imagine, philosophical issues usually can't be resolved in a comment section, hence the links to material that addresses a couple of these issues. But for starters, the problem of qualia is neither here nor there. I will note that the problem is rooted in a Cartesian metaphysical tradition that persists even among materialists, though they are in an even worse place than their dualist counterparts. Whereas Cartesian dualists could at least defer to the res cogitans as the "substrate" in which qualia exist, materialists--having dropped the res cogitans while maintaining a more or less Cartesian res extensa--cannot hope to account for qualia because the res extensa, by definition, precludes qualia. The only recourse is to reexamine those broadly Cartesian metaphysical presuppositions, something few materialists seem to be doing. Putting aside the cryptodualisms of some of the more sophisticated materialists, perhaps one of the more annoying things you'll see is the invocation of "emergence" as a magical cure-all to any of the problems facing materialism.
Another issue is what seems to be the claim that when accounting for consciousness, you've either got religion or a (reductionist) materialism. Nonsense. Aristotelians have always held that animals are both composed of matter[0] and conscious. One area Aristotelians and materialists differ is their concept of matter. The materialist's concept of matter is the reason why Descartes denied non-human animals consciousness. He understood that without the res cogitans--which he denied non-human animals--the impoverished res extensa he presupposed could not "support" consciousness. Aristotelianism avoids the problem without having to take refuge in substance dualism.
[0] The exception is man. While most faculties of human beings are understood to be material, the exception is the intellect. Why? Because the intellect engages in abstraction. If matter is concrete and particular ("this red apple"), and universals existing apart from particulars are abstract ("redness"), then the intellect, in which they reside, cannot be material. Compare this with the imagination which always deals with images and thus particulars.
Boy there is a lot in Feser’s work to unpack. I haven’t gotten through all of the links you posted yet, but the crux of his argument (and evidently the argument Thomists make) is that humans are different because we are capable of abstract reasoning and logic whereas animals are not. Do you suppose animals really are not capable of these two mental faculties? Abstraction seems more difficult to dissect but it does not seem too farfetched to imagine that animals are capable of making future plans based on an understanding of cause and effect. Don’t you think that implies some level of logical reasoning? I know Feser’s views are not necessarily indicative of your own but I would appreciate your opinion
Didn't Alex the parrot[0] prove that at least one animal is capable of abstraction? He could identify by type specific objects he'd never seen before and make distinctions based on color or amount.
Personally, I have not read Feser. I would recommend PMS Hacker's book "Human Nature: A Categorical Framework", which, from reading Fraser's blog posts, I see moves along similar lines. The philosophy of mind is a topic I'm quite interested in, so I think I can respond to some of your questions.
> humans are different because we are capable of abstract reasoning and logic whereas animals are not. Do you suppose animals really are not capable of these two mental faculties?
We need to ask, in what sense and depth are animals able to express that form of reasoning and logic? Humans do so at unique levels through language. There is a layer of reasoning and following logic that can be expressed by being shown by doing, like preparing, but there is another, higher form, that can be expressed by being said through language, like planning. The former is continually in the present. It does involve a kind of thinking and a kind of intelligence. But unlike the latter form, which expresses an understanding, and therefore the ability to express in language, the past and future tenses, there is no expression of why it is being done. That expressing of why, that kind of expression of reasoning, animals lack and humans are capable of through language.
Language is not just some thing we slap over thought. It is an ability that, through its use, expresses the concepts and limits of our thoughts. It is the animate expression of our thinking, that is the collection of our rational and cogitative faculties that define us as persons rather than animals.
It's not so much that animals lack reasoning or logic (that is the view of a crude Behaviorism), it is that humans are capable of the same and far more unique expressions of reasoning and logic than animals, so much so that humans are unique from animals as a result.
I don't have an fully thought out position, but I will say that without abstraction, you couldn't talk about logic or reasoning as these deal in abstract concepts.
I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. To claim that animals do not think has no basis outside of our own condescending perspective. If we cannot prove one way or another then I feel my position is the more rational and should be the default position.
Right. And to phrase your point in a way that relates to the concern of anthropocentrism that often comes up in these contexts: what could be more anthropocentric than thinking that thinking belongs exclusively to humans?
People are so worried about projecting human qualities onto non-human things that they go the opposite extreme and assume that a whole range of qualities gets to be claimed as exclusively belonging to humans.
You're trying to explain why you think animals can think. The desire and the ability to explain things, and not thinking per se, is (I guess) what distinguishes humans from animals.
> The desire and the ability to explain things, and not thinking per se, is (I guess) what distinguishes humans from animals.
But how do you know that animals have no desire or ability to explain things to each other, at least amongst their own species? We may not be able to read it, but it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, we already know that a parent can 'teach' its offspring that something is dangerous, for example among elephants this is even fairly easily observable.
Gorillas have apparently never asked a question. They've learned sign language, so this is an interesting distinction. If they had the desire or ability to ask questions, presumably they'd have done so. https://medium.com/@bleistern/why-dont-apes-ask-questions-9f...
I'd be interested to know the original sources and the rigor of the tests, though.
>They can’t conceptualize that there could exist a mind of thoughts and feelings outside their own.
Presumably they don't have a concept of their own mind either. And this is despite being quite sophisticated and hosting a bunch of memes related to things like tool-use:
I don't. It's a guess. But I do think our ability to explain things comes not just from our genes but from our culture, and culture is something animals haven't yet developed.
If you watch some programs on orcas, many scientists describe different pods as having distinct cultures, where culture is a set of intellectual achievements collected and passed down generationally. This comes in the form of different vocalizations and hunting techniques.
I appreciate your answer since I find this fascinating;
> and culture is something animals haven't yet developed.
I know they don't have movies and such, but they do seem to have dialects, activities and behaviours based on various, (including location-based) factors even among the same kind of animals that one could classify that collection as being a 'culture' of theirs, no?
I think this mindset of trying to map everything 1:1 to humans might be robbing us of a greater understanding of the universe in general, like looking at planets that have water and an atmosphere of some kind as with probably having life. There is no need for other kinds of life to need water or oxygen per se, so why we seem to be focused almost exclusively on it?
We know that humans go to great lengths to teach our ways of communication to animals, but we are aware of no such initiative from animals to teach humans their means communication. Maybe we are the only species that is interested in inter-species communication, or maybe we are just too stupid to recognize it when it comes from other animals, or maybe such high level intelligence doesn't exist in other species.
∃ x : X . x can y ⇐ ∃ z : Z . z can y ∧ ∀ z : Z . z : X
In English: There are X that can y because there are Z that can y and all Z are X. Nothing contradictory there.
While it is not always clear what the intended quantifiers are, it is usually best to choose the interpretation that doesn't make a statement trivially false.
What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.
Another example: we ask whether animals are 'conscious' or not, or we declare ex cathedra that certain animals are conscious, all the while without being able to explain what consciousness is, or what qualia are, or how these work.
If we could then we'd know if the question made sense.
I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.
There's a sci-fi-ish short story in The Mind's I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I) about a robot which scuttles around, when stroked it glows, then when it is hurt it mewls and flashes its lights, and so on. It's meant to question whether we can really know what any other animal is thinking (the machine is supposedly programmed like a regular computer, so we know it has no real feelings).
Of course this applies to robots, but not necessarily to animals, where we know they are constructed similarly to ourselves and so likely have feelings similar to ours although there are questions to what degree.
As someone who isn't a vegetarian (and who feels guilty eating bacon if I start thinking about it too much), I can't help but to wonder if eating meat will be considered the "barbaric" practice of this generation for future generations. I'm sure previous generations didn't consider their barbaric practices to be such at the time.
I think it will be. People of the future will look at this time the same way we look back to when it was accepted to have human slaves.
Medicine (and millions of other people) has already proven that we don't need meat to survive. We have plenty of alternatives now.
But we are addicted to meat - because it gives us pleasure. But then you have to ask yourself, is it OK for sentient beings to horribly suffer for us[1], so we can experience some pleasure that could be easily achieved by consuming alternative foods[2] and shifting our perception. Consuming meat is also not the best way to efficiently feed the world.
"..you have to ask yourself, is it OK for sentient beings to horribly suffer for us, so we can experience some pleasure that could be easily achieved by consuming alternative foods and shifting our perception"
One can readily see that the answer to this question is "yes" even when the suffering is that of humans, much less animals.
Many people readily consume products that are created in sweatshops, that are the product or cause of wars and/or environmental damage that has severe (and often deadly) consequences on other humans. Most people don't really care enough to change their consumption habits.
Out of sight, out of mind is a maxim many live by both when they eat and when they buy. Few people want to look in to the proverbial sausage factory or slaughterhouse to find out how their food is made, or in sweatshops to find out how their clothes are made. May if they did they'd change their consumption habits, but most don't really want to. They'd rather bury their head in the sand and enjoy their life. As long as they or their loved ones don't directly suffer the consequences, they effectively couldn't care less how their pleasure was got.
Or we will look back at at vegans and see them as an extreme version of a normal healthy adult. Much the same way we place healthy values on skinny people when taken to the extreme it becomes unhealthy and counter productive.
If animals can think and they eat other animals perhaps they will be able to teach us why it may be an acceptable choice.
* Veganism isn't about health[1]. It's about avoiding exploitation of other sentient and intelligent beings and reducing suffering on many levels.
* The difference between us and other animals is that we have the ability of critical thinking. We can change our attitude and mind when presented with new information. A lion can't do this (also, a lion needs meat to survive, modern humans don't).
There is a great quote by Aaron Swartz[2] and in that vein I encourage you to watch the videos that were posted in this thread - you might be surprised.
[1] "Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose.[...]"
[2] “Think deeply about things. Don’t just go along because that’s the way things are or that’s what your friends say. Consider the effects, consider the alternatives, but most importantly, just think.”
What is your take on the morally of eating plants. Plants are living creatures some would say sentient beings. Recent research is showing they feel pain, communicate with other plants. Do they deserve the same protection?
Good question. Imagine plants feel pain like other animals and like we do. If our objective is to avoid suffering and environmental damage as much as possible, which one would you choose:
1) Eat animals and plants. Remember the animals you eat also eat plants. This creates maximum suffering and damage.
2) Eat plants only. This creates less suffering and damage than option 1.
To answer your question though, if it's scientifically proven that plants are sentient and feel pain like we do (i.e. suffer) then I would only eat what plants produce (e.g. nuts, legumes, apples, etc) rather than the plant itself (e.g. carrots).
If it's scientifically proven that plants are sentient and feel pain (I'm dropping the like conjunction because that's pushing it past the breaking point), you'd prefer keeping them alive in perpetuity to continually rip off their genitals over killing them outright?
Personally, at least until we can efficiently synthesize arbitrary dietary proteins, fats, and fibers, I'll keep using my computer built from rare earths mined with exploited workers to post about the delicious, factory-slaughtered chicken I just ate.
Plants are living organisms. Before we go into any kind of debate that presupposes that plants are "creatures", "sentient" or "feel" anything, you are going to have to provide a whole lot of explaining, backed by the same amount of citations.
Of course plants exchange signals with their environment. And of course they are alive. Of course they behave with purpose (they do things which further their cause of reproducing, as is expected of evolved organisms).
This doesn't imply at all that they are sentient or have feelings, which is what we care about (or should, in any case) when we discuss harming or protecting other living things.
Of course, there are other considerations such as ecological, but that's not what we're discussing here.
If people of the future consider eating meat to be barbaric, I think it will more likely be a response to the fact that meat consumption is not scalable. Think of it like Aesop's fable about the fox and the (presumably sour) grapes.
In truth, if we offer animals a good life and harvest them in a compassionate manner, the ethical arguments against eating meat are weak.
People also underestimate the capacity for plants to feel. Plants in conventional monoculture farms are much more susceptible to pets and disease. Disease susceptibility is a fairly universal response to sustained stress in animals, so it seems reasonable to me that the conditions we are keeping plants in cause them distress as well. Just because plants "think" on long time-scales using gene regulation (plant biochemistry is incredibly complex) rather than short term activation of neurons doesn't mean their experience is any less salient.
I find that being a vegetarian for moral reasons is quite delusional.
We, humans, are inflicting much more suffering to flora and fauna by the simple fact of participating in the industrial modern lifestyle. Buying food at the supermarket, using the internet, travelling, AC, and pretty much any activity we can think of.
The underlying problem is that to sustain 7+ billion people we need industrialisation which requires massive amounts of resources (energy, land, minerals, etc). The modern lifestyle doesn't help either.
Just because it's not enough doesn't mean it's delusional.
I'm a vegetarian partly out of compassion for the animals who might be eaten and partly because of the other harmful effects of industrialized meat production.
In addition, I don't own a car and try to avoid non-human-powered transportation in general, I use air conditioning extremely sparingly despite living in Louisiana, I avoid buying crap I don't need online or in person, and I choose my foods and their sources carefully.
These are all personal choices, and I'm sharing them not to lecture or to be holier than thou. I'm just trying to say this: Maybe the correct reaction to "being a vegetarian alone won't save the world," is "I should be thoughtful about all the ways my choices impact the world" rather than "I'll have the 72oz steak."
No offense, but the hard reality is that those things don't have much of an impact in emissions.
I was like you a few years ago. Even left the world and moved to an off the grid cabin for a year until I realized I was only trying to feel better about myself.
Everything that we do, like using the internet, is still consuming massive amounts of energy and resources. From manufacturing the computer(s) you are using, to networking.
Energy consumption for example is the number one cause of CO2 emissions, not transportation, and certainly not the food industry.
Agriculture and forestry is listed as the second largest sector with 24% of GHG emissions, second to energy production at 25% so I'm not sure where you're getting that information in your second link.
Animal agriculture is a huge drain on resources and the environment. There's clear cutting of the Amazon for cattle feed and grazing. Cows and cattle emit huge amounts of methane, many times more potent in climate change than CO2. Nearly a quarter of ice free land in the world is dedicated to animal ag.
Some estimates put 20 kg of grain for a single kg of beef. That is not efficient.
> Agriculture and forestry is listed as the second largest sector
That second sector includes quite a few things. For example deforestation for non livestock agriculture, city building, etc. None of which are alleviated by vegetarianism.
Also note this:
> This estimate does not include the CO2 that ecosystems remove from the atmosphere by sequestering carbon in biomass, dead organic matter, and soils, which offset approximately 20% of emissions from this sector.
So in practice this 24% is really 19.2%, and less than that is really caused purely by livestock.
> Some estimates put 20 kg of grain for a single kg of beef. That is not efficient.
Indeed, but chicken or pork produce less emissions than fruits or even dairy products.
> Does that mean we shouldn't try be consious in limiting our consumption and be damage we inflict on others?
Sounds good in theory.
In practice if you care about suffering, you should realise that agriculture is one of the biggest environmental disasters of the last couple thousands years. Agriculture has destroyed (and destroys) entire ecosystems.
And before you argue about organic agriculture: that would not feed 7 billion people. Maybe aquaponics / hydroponics could save the world, but it remains to be seen.
If you do really care about emissions and your impact on the planet you could do a number of things like not having kids and getting out of the industrial lifestyle. Many have done it (I tried and failed). Otherwise there is really no moral high ground in vegetarianism.
Well except that meat is a much larger factor in global warming than anything else in our diet. You can't just choose to not participate in modern industrial life, but you can easily choose to not eat meat.
> You can't just choose to not participate in modern industrial life
Why not? Try to not be part of the throwaway culture, avoid falling for gimmicks and new toys and try to build a environmental Friendly lifestyle. It's not perfect but it's perfectly possible to escape the modern lifestyle to a huge degree
Why not? Because while a small number of individuals can make the choice, humanity as a whole can not. We can certainly reduce needless waste, but without industrial food production most of the planet would quickly starve, and that's not an acceptable option. We don't need to like the situation, but there are simply too many people to make non-industrial production of food and other material needs possible.
OP was talking about internet, cars, travelling, AC, refrigerators, etc. not about consumerism. You can definitely not participate in consumerism, but you'd still be using much more electricity than anyone 50 years ago.
That is not what your link says at all. The second largest category is animal agriculture and forestry at 24% of global GHG emissions, the largest is power at 25%.
Animal agriculture is extremely destructive. Forestry being in that category, one of the biggest causes of deforestation is expansion of cattle grazing and feed lands, especially in the Amazon.
> Greenhouse gas emissions from this sector come mostly from agriculture (cultivation of crops and livestock) and deforestation. This estimate does not include the CO2 that ecosystems remove from the atmosphere by sequestering carbon in biomass, dead organic matter, and soils, which offset approximately 20% of emissions from this sector.
Not only the number includes crop agriculture, but also deforestation is caused by quite a large number of factors.
Estimated 80% of the GHG emissions in deforestation to be caused by animal ag.
It's important to understand the claims your making if you're going to state that animal again is not a significant portion of that 24%. As much as it seems like you'd like to deny, animal agriculture is a substatial driver of man made climate change.
"I find that being a vegetarian for moral reasons is quite delusional. We, humans, are inflicting much more suffering to flora and fauna by the simple fact of participating in the industrial modern lifestyle."
If one can't save everything, one must save nothing?
You are right, farming could be more sustainable and less destructive (see vertical farm, aeroponics etc).
But it's been proven that producing meat requires more resources than producing plant based foods. So if we truly care about feeding 7+ billion people, then we would reduce our meat consumption or move to a plant based diet completely. This is one thing each of us can directly do something about - by simply buying different foods. You should watch that presentation by Beyond Meat founder Ethan Brown.
Also, when talking about moral reasons, this is not just about minimising the suffering of animals. What do you think seeing animals being killed, sliced open alive etc day in day out does to the human psyche - you can find out here: http://scholar.colorado.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2157... - also see this quote [1].
If you couldn't get any other job other than working in a slaughterhouse or food prep shop and they both pay the same - which job would you pick? Would you want to kill animals every day or rather wash, cut, peel fruits and veg every day?
Our buying choices do matter.
[1] "The worst thing, worse than the physical danger is the emotional toll. If you work
in that stick pit for any period of time, you develop an attitude that lets you kill
things, but doesn’t let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that’s walking
around down in the blood pit with you and think, God, that really isn’t a badlooking
animal. You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come
up and nuzzled me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them-beat them
to death with a pipe. I can’t care (Dillard, p. 398, 2008). "
As I hope you can see we have bigger problems to worry about.
> What do you think seeing animals being killed, sliced open alive etc day in day out does to the human psyche
My grandparents killed animals on their farm regularly. Not only they were good moral people, but their way of life was much more sustainable and respectful of the planet than any of us here.
By focusing on something that shocks you personally you are missing the whole picture.
But why can't we act on multiple fronts? We can do many things to reduce our carbon foot print, and choosing not to eat meat or reducing it is one of those things.
Also, the way we farm animals now a days is completely different to when your grand parents farmed them. Using factory farming to feed the world is just not sustainable.
Look, I get it - most people can't give up meat, we're addicted to it and it's also cultural. But what we can do is giving a signal to the market that we demand better, by choosing to buy alternatives that are better on many fronts, like Beyond Meat etc.
That's why I really admire the work by Ethan Brown, he's trying to create meat using plant protein. You should watch the presentation by him I posted earlier - you might find it interesting.
Yes, as long as we don't forget where the big problem really lies and we also act there.
I've met quite a number of vegetarians that believe that not eating meat is the solution to all problems. Of course they fly to Thailand for their yoga retreat, buy food at supermarkets, buy products that have been transported all over the world, and a very long etcetera. It's easy to ride on the moral high ground of vegetarianism blindly ignoring every other facet of our modern lifestyle. From a seemingly benign Google search, to watching a movie at the theatre.
I don't like to touch this subject but another big and controversial issue is having kids. Every kid we put on this planet will produce a number of tons of CO2. About 7 on average, about 20 for a US kid.
If you multiply that glass of water times a million - it will have an impact. Every Little Helps so they say here.
Also, what is the point of having a moral high ground? It doesn't accomplish anything. Even if some people's motivation for not eating meat is to feel morally superior, it shouldn't be a deciding factor for others to not eat meat.
For me personally it's about values[1]. I remember watching Star Trek as a kid and I think Riker said something along the lines that humanity doesn't enslave animals anymore[3]. We need a vision for the future and not oppressing and exploiting other beings for our own culinary pleasures is a good value to have I think.
We don't have to wait until the 24th century either. The future is already here, it's easier now than ever to choose not to kill animals, there are so many other delicious recipes[2] out there - if one would invest the time to research this.
And in terms of having kids - I think it was Hans Rosling who said that birth rates seem to fall in the developed countries. Also, imagine we would show a toddler how his sausages etc are made - from beginning to end. How do you think small kids would react if they knew what actually happens to peppa pig and friends? Why don't we show our kids the process of producing meat?
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[1] Best quote on this is from Dr Alex Hershaft. Holocaust survivor and FARM founder. He drew many similarities between what the Nazis did and what we do to farm animals. His story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7dZv43A0g0
His quote:
"[...]It's about us. It's about who we are, how we treat the least defensible, the most oppressed, the weakest in our society. What does it say about us?"
You guys have both made some good points here. However imo, you are kind of arguing past each other. (I hope you are not offended by my critique)
I think pier25's point is we should spend our time advocating for the most important issues. See the forest, dont focus on one tree. It is true that beef has a large impact, but maybe time would be better spent advocating renewable energy subsidies and or carbon taxes? You can only complain so much before people get sick of you right? :P However I think their point was weakened by the anecdotes about vegetarians who do other unsustainable things and calling them delusional.
I think cryodesign's point is that every little bit counts. The forest is made up of trees after all. And it easier to avoid meat than it is to invent renewable power that can provide base load.(well I love meat, but I have been reducing my beef consumption) I think they focused too much on how it feels. You can humanely kill an animal imo. As someone who grew up on a farm, I found the quote about killing them with a pipe unbelievable.
Hey, thanks for chiming in, not offended at all, these discussions are good.
In terms of what happens on animal farms and slaughter houses, you should check out the 'Earthlings' documentary I posted. Most meat that is consumed comes from factory farms. Those places are hell holes.
In terms of humanely killing, I think it's an oxymoron, the same way that 'humane oppression' is an oxymoron. Animals don't want to be killed. Humans don't need meat anymore to survive, so why are we continuing to oppress and exploit these beings? Could you kill and slaughter an animal? If not, why demand that others do it for you?
I see more and more people waking up to this fact and researching this and finding out that everything they believed was misguided, e.g. needing meat to be strong etc. One of the strongest person (Patrick Baboumian) on the planet is vegan, and more athletes are also becoming vegan.
If we create more demand for plant based foods, we will see more options in stores. Here in Europe, even Aldi and Lidl have vegan products now.
Fully agreed. I try to buy from small markets. And local and organic, If not (and well I live in a rich country) at least fair trade. I avoid companies and doughter companies that act evil to the environment, don't drive car, don't use a AC not even at 40 degree in bangkok, and I try to bring my own shopping bag. I probably do less environmental damage than the average hipster vegetarian /vegan
I honestly don't think we will stop eating meat. What I hope is that people will get more and more into more sustainable meat production. I don't see any issue eating local demeter meat which is classes over the EU organic label.
For some reason I am reminded of this section from Sam Harris's Waking Up:
See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try.
Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought.
The vast majority of us do not even know what we are thinking. I'm not sure there's much correlation with intelligence, either. If this sounds absurd to you, I can only recommend you try out meditation for a while until you see how disconcertingly true it is.
One day I hope the Economist publishes:
Can we know what we are thinking?
The inner lives of our species may be a lot richer than science once thought
It is quite shocking to realize that we're not the owners of the thoughts inside our mind, even the thoughts beginning with "I" ("I'm stupid", "Oh shit I will be late!", "I hate this fucking job!", etc).
We identify with these thoughts, believing we are their originator, but it's the biggest illusion of all.
Are you saying there are people who meditate and can free their mind of any thought? I tried this "exercise" and could not "not think" for the life of me.
What if, on the outside, thinking is a unitary process, similar to (but not the same as) processes in quantum mechanics. When you observe a result (of someone's mental process; e.g. the dog ended up biting you), you could say "oh, I know what you were thinking", but all you know is in fact the current state of their mind, and, just like in a quantum mechanics, that state will persist (the dog will keep trying to bite you) unless you give it (the process) some time to become unitary again. After that, a new observation may yield a different result.
Whenever this topic arises, a subset of comments are devoted to differing definitions of 'consciousness'. Here, you can find definitions as diverse as 'only entities capable of language are conscious' and 'any entity that reacts to its environment is conscious'.
This is not very helpful - note that neither of the above definitions tell us anything useful about consciousness; if anything, they are ways to avoid discussing the issues that we don't have answers to.
I think it is more helpful to put aside the definition of consciousness, and begin by regarding 'awareness' as a continuum, though one that displays some significant qualitative differences across its breadth, such as:
Entities that have hard-wired responses to their environment.
Entities that can learn responses.
Entities that have some sort of internal model of their environment.
Entities whose models include themselves.
Entities that are aware of their own models, at least to some degree.
Entities that believe others have the same capability (i.e. having a theory of mind).
Entities that can communicate their models to similarly-capable others.
A continuum is probably simplistic (though still useful), given that recent experiments seem to be showing species capable of a mix of the above responses, depending on circumstances.
The idea of a continuum seems consistent with evolution: To me, it seems unlikely that, for example, language popped into existence, fully-formed, in one species, but there is a gap in the record: there does not seem to be a living species demonstrating the transition to the level of awareness that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees.
>Chaser, a border collie, knows over 1,000 words. She can pull a named toy from a pile of other toys. This shows that she understands that an acoustical pattern stands for a physical object.
I don't think it quite shows this. Collies and human toddlers use words (and are used by words) without understanding what they're doing or what the meaning of language is. The understanding comes later, growing over time as we attempt to explain our behaviour to ourselves. (Including reading what other people have to say about language.)
You are confusing different meanings of the word "understanding" here. I am sure you too understand many things intuitively that you don't understand in a reflected way.
Here is the sense I mean to convey. When a fridge light comes on, does the fridge 'understand' anything? Does it know anything? No, the process is just automatic.
Objects such as books can contain knowledge without understanding anything because they don't have minds. The design of the fridge embodies knowledge about human needs, for example the need to hand-select food accurately at night. However there is neither understanding nor intuition anywhere inside that cold box about the relationship between the door opening and the light coming on.
Similarly, words, which are a type of meme (the type that can be pronounced) can exploit brains to make copies of themselves, without any understanding of this going on in those same brains.
Btw, none of this implies that animals can't think, or don't have minds, or that we shouldn't honour them. Actually I honour my fridge too...
Remarkably, if told to fetch a toy with a name she has not heard before placed in a pile of known, named objects, she works out what is being asked for. Betsy, another border collie, will bring back a photograph of something, suggesting she understands that a two-dimensional image can represent a three-dimensional object.
Can't remember who first said: "A sentence is a formatted thought", however there is a lot of evidence how language shapes our thinking. It even includes distinguishing colors.
Maybe we should first find out how we think and then build a theory what thinking is in general.
People have bred dogs for all sorts of characteristics. But nobody has tried breeding them for intelligence. There a few individual dogs that have vocabularies of hundreds of words. What could be achieved if people selected for that?
While I appreciate your sentiment, perhaps we should limit our discussion to the cognitive abilities of animals, and not get side tracked into a debate about their sentience and the morality of killing them for nutritional needs.
Almost any 'wet lab' research neuroscientist will tell you that we know more about what the rats and mice are thinking than any other animal, including their spouse ;)
As I was growing up around animals, I had an insight derived from my interactions with a particularly adept cat. She had an affinity with people and made an effort to communicate.
Vocalizations confused me. There isn't enough information in them to encode all of her demonstrated use cases. Maybe I could not hear everything. Wondered about that for a while.
One day, it sort of hit me: Cats, at least, are missing a layer of abstraction. To them, thought is very nearly action. We experience a similar thing when we reach mastery of some manual skill. You just do it, not think about it, then think about doing it, then do it.
Cats do not appear to present a facade like we can and do. They simply present as they are.
Given this, a "meow" isn't so much an encoding of thoughts as much as it is a signal to pay attention right now. Like a context tag of sorts. It does also contain some emotional information, urgency, concern, fear, pain.
When the cat chooses to vocalize, what it is doing is making its current context known, and marking that as important.
A meow near the door may sound almost identical to one by the food bowl, for example. In both cases, say there is urgency: I want out, or I need to eat.
We hear the cue to pay attention, and we see the context, may be a tail movement, or a walk or dance, and process the emotion to get a sense of what the cat wanted to communicate to us.
We have a layer or few, where how we present may be contrived, or managed and or very different from our other thoughts and state.
They don't. Thoughts are actions, their lives are stories.
Since that time, I have found my ability to understand cats has improved. When we get it, they will often make more of an investment. The dialog is surprisingly rich.
Other animals seem to do similar things. Body language is significant. How they position themselves, where they do that, dancing, other things all contribute to what can be fairly complex expressions.
They are similar to us. They think their thoughts, they feel a lot of things, they bond, and they often can make plans, and or understand a lot of the world around them.
Much of their thought appears to be spatial, emotional, boundaries, and other necessary things. And when around us, they pick up more, have reasons to do and think more, given we actually do interact with them.
Yes they think. And it's complicated for some animals, less so for others.
I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster.
By faster, I mean their rate of perception seems much quicker than mine. And they have profound capabilities, such as hearing my call amidst so much noise it should not be possible. Maybe their simple nature and speed brings a type of attention we do not generally have.
Dogs and smell. To them, a sequence of smells, for example, is like sights for us on a road trip. We go somewhere special, and the dog rolls in some crap.
Why?
To bring the story back to the pack. And when all the smelling and such is done, the others will know if they too ever go there, or that one member did and stuff happened, such as food, or a hunt.
My take on all this. I remain completely unable to understand insects, for example. They are just too different.
But most common animals? Yeah they think, they make choices, they have preferences, seek comfort, bond with others, all that good stuff beings are into and or need.
Someone would have to make a hell of a case to move me off that understanding.
RE: I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster.
I like the way you put this and I had similar experiences.
If we'd just take some time to get to know those type animals we regard as food, maybe we wouldn't put them in the 'They're just dumb animals' box.
Unlike Animals, Humans have Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);
I've seen examples of all these in nature, even studied and discussed them as part of my undergraduate degree. Humanity is not special in any of these respects.
I'd disagree and say that animals do in fact "talk" or convey meaning. I have raised multiple dogs and with time your understand their needs: I want to eat, I want to play, I want to show you something (or alert you of something). These are the three things that most dogs will learn to convey to you.
We consider that animals are of a lesser species so that we can take advantage of them without any "legal or moral" consequences. Like we eat animals on a regular basis. We do deadly trial medicines on them. We raise animals against their will (like birds) and cage them.
I find it incredible that in 2017 people still debate if animals can think. You just need to interact with one or more dogs to understand that they think, and in most cases they think much better than humans.
Lately seeing what humans did and still do to planet Earth, and what they do to each other based on completely made up topics like religion or plain material topics like skin color is making me wonder if humans can really think, or we just pretend to.
I stopped eating animals this year, after I finally realized how cruel the entire food industry is, AND how damaging it is to the environment.
If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals, the minimum thing they can do is looking forward preserving and taking care of fellow animals that were not "gifted" more abilities.
> If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals
Sorry, what?
Humans are only capable of conceiving of religion and destroying the planet because they are more intelligent than other animals. I'm not a religious person, but it's a bit offensive to imply humans that believe in religion are less intelligent than canines, don't you think? And animals don't destroy the planet because, for the most part, they're incapable of it - many species frequently do things that destroy their ecosystem, they are simply limited in their ability to do it rapidly. It's not as though lions have a righteous crusade against depleting all the gazelle, or beavers against destroying forests to build dens. If they could amplify their activity by leveraging the intelligence we have they would oversaturate their environments too.
Your definition of intelligence seems to be moralistic, not empirical. Moreover it's inconsistent - I'm inferring that you don't eat animals now because you believe they're intelligent, and it's cruel. What's your opinion on animals consuming other animals if they're so intelligent?
Circling back to your opening claim: dogs do not think "better" than humans for any definition of "think" that primarily involves executive reasoning skills. Our prefrontal cortex development directly contributes to our superlative intellectual ability.
Cruelty depends on knowing what is moral and choosing to do something immoral. In this case, humans are cruel for knowing animals are sentient yet still subjecting them to horrible conditions and painful lives just to satisfy our pallette. The lion is not cruel for eating the zebra because it is necessary for its survival.
We are lucky to be here. Gotta make the most of it. IMO a good place to start: to value the other surviving animals on this planet. You could travel 10,000 light years but you will find them only on Earth.
> You could travel 10,000 light years but you will find them only on Earth.
(sorry for the Reddit'ism, but:) This. That sentence is subtly and unexpectedly profound.
Imagine having developed interstellar or even intergalactic travel, and after having colonized multiple solar systems, we find that life isn't so rare after all, but the specific lifeforms on Earth were.
What if we find that each life-bearing planet has its own unique creatures, not to be found anywhere else in the infinity of the Universe, and we may never again see the creatures we wiped out here on Earth?
I agree with your overall sentiment. But just because there aren't animals on your plate, doesn't mean they weren't killed in bringing food to your plate. For example, published studies show that at least 25 times more sentient animals are killed per kilogram of useable protein when producing industrial wheat and other grain [1].
Not eating animals isn't enough. You have to find ethically sourced food. So ironically, eating meat from animals raised on pasture causes less animal cruelty than eating industrial wheat / grain-based food.
I think explicitly or implicitly, vegetarians try to not eat sentient beings, but the story is more complicated because there is a scale for that, with plants being at the bottom of the scale, and mice further up the scale, and then cows, and finally humans.
So in this perspective, does the article you linked to really make sense?
Why compare one macronutrient like protein? That seems like a way to spin the data to reach the authors prejudices. A better metric would be calories, because that's a better indicator of how much is needed to feed a person. Also it's a little unfair to equate a mouse killed in the field to a cow tortured since birth and then slaughtered and possibly skinned and gutted alive.
Animals aren't "eco-friendly" because they're intelligent; if they're eco-friendly at all, it's because they're too dumb to do otherwise. Many animals (cf invasive species) are extremly destructive.
Many animals exhibit a much greater degree of tribalism than humans. Consider wild canid species like wolves. Tribalism in humans isn't "made up" either, it makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective even if it's possibly not as useful today.
While I agree with some parts, the overall message sounds like a pseudoscience.
Only because you have negative feelings toward some people and some actions - you cannot compare this to the whole society. The problem is with the system that allows bad people to be in power. Not with the society in general.
While the world is not in the best shape, it is not a disaster as well. Show me any other invasive species that will on purpose creating areas, where animals, with no use to us, are protected and can live freely.
Your message literally categorizes all people, even the good ones. Apocalyptic thinking like that can do only bad, not good. I would suggest for you to look at the good things that we do as well. Center your position a bit and hear both sides of the story.
As of not eating meat. There are ways to eat meat that is not from the "cruel industry". Supporting small, local farmers can help the local community and allow you to eat healthily and animals that have roamed freely and enjoyed their lives. But this requires doing some research, driving and time, which people do not want to sacrifice.
Such meat you mention toward the end makes up such a small fraction of a percent of all meat production that its almost not worth considering. Not to mention that such meat production is not scalable and would never be able to satisfy the current western pallette for meat.
While I partly agree I do not suppose all of sudden 50% of society will turn in to food like this.
This is a solution to all the people that have a problem with the evil food industry. There is enough for everyone. What I am saying, there are more than two options. Also, if more people would eat such a products and prices would rise a bit, I bet a lot of people would start using their unused farm land for such a purpose.
Also, I think it would lead to new "Amazon for farmer products" start-up arising.
What I meant to say is that it's infeasible to grow all meat free-range from an environmental perspective. Factory farmed meat has a smaller impact on the environment.
First an anecdote. I was laying on the floor in my bedroom and my dog wanted to come in. I told her not to, she stood with her front paws at the entrance for half a second, did a 180 degree turn, body inside the room and started to walk in backwards. I'll never forget that.
I agree with what you say but have yet managed to stop eating them. They taste good. Hopefully one day I'll manage to grow some more backbone.
Whether they communicate or not, of course they do. At a different level, obviously. Who's fault is it for not being able to understand? Theirs because "we" are smarter? That's arrogant. Heck, we have trouble communicating with each other properly.
And... I can't remember what the other comment below was talking about and I'm going to have lunch.
To end, can't remember exactly how to search for it. It went something along the lines of "2014 Cambridge [something]". Where several scientists and other fellow people smarter than myself signed a treaty stating animals are conscious. If I remember correctly.
> Hopefully one day I'll manage to grow some more backbone.
No pressure, but personally I spent a few hours watching documentaries on Netflix and I completely flipped from "logically plants are more efficient" to "I will avoid animal products as much as possible/practical". You may have a different experience, but it's extraordinary how much effort is put into keeping consumers unaware of where these products come from.
Well, it is not an easy question to answer. First off, everyone would agree that humans, apes, dogs, squirrels, spiders - all "think" in essentially different ways. This is important. Humans, for example, think mostly in terms of the language (words, phrases) - the way they would talk to other people (or post on Facebook, for that matter). Other animals do not do that. From that perspective, computers are closer to humans than animals. Again, this is an important difference that cannot be ignored. It would help if we had different words for these different levels of "thinking", but we don't.
> First off, everyone would agree that humans, apes, dogs, squirrels, spiders - all "think" in essentially different ways.
I wouldn't, and a lot of the other comments on this story imply that they wouldn't, either. As an example, when I think, it's not usually in the form of words until I try to map my thoughts and feelings into a more concrete form. I'm particularly conscious of this because I frequently wrack my mind looking for the word that closest matches the thought that I'm trying to convey. The thought itself starts in a wordless form.
I can force my thoughts into an "audible" internal monologue, and I do when I'm reading, writing, or conversing, but it's a relatively forced way of thinking for me.
An insect's "thinking" consists mostly of following instincts and some acquired reflexes. There's (much, much) more to the human thinking than that, and there are a few levels of consciousness in between.
If you'd stuck to that in the original post, I would've upvoted and moved down the thread. I was replying to the stronger claims that things like other advanced mammals "all think in essentially different ways", and your characterization of the nature of human thought.
Can you point to some to research on the subject? I would think it's not at all clear in which manner animals think, be it in terms of a language or not. Even for humans language may just be a layer on top of thought, and in fact there are those who claim not to think in any specific language.
I have a pet theory (hypothesis?) that infant amnesia is due to acquisition of language. When you gain language and start thinking in it, you lose the ability to meaningfully access memories made beforehand.
This theory is likely at least partially correct, mostly because of what we figured out from kids born deaf. I can't remember where I read this stuff, though:
It used to be society thought a deaf person also meant you had low IQ. The signs were everywhere. It winds up that sign language was the key to not having a low IQ. It is almost like you need to learn the language of your brain.
> and in most cases they think much better than humans.
>Lately seeing what humans did and still do to planet Earth,
>If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals,
My brain knows this is just someone being snarky on the internet. But I keep running into this line of bizarre reasoning and I can't resist talking about it. I'm becoming more and more paranoid that someone actually says this non-ironically.
Obviously Charles Manson is more intelligent than a hamster. That's just a plain fact. Bad/good, warm/cold, bland/savory, smart/dumb - these are different spectra...
People are smarter than animals. This enables thermonuclear annihilation and so on.
A lot of people confuse their ability to engage in metacognition with some kind of global intelligence, and ability to fully control themselves in a non-animalistic way.
Needless to say, they're wrong, proven wrong for the reasons you've described.
While I appreciate your sentiment, perhaps we should limit our discussion to the cognitive abilities of animals, and not get side tracked into a debate about their sentience and the morality of killing them for nutritional needs.
Whatever the thing or force is that is looking out of my eyes and just knowing, it is also looking out through the eyes of animals, to whatever extent possible. Of course this is non-falsifiable.
Cats do, in fact, snack on deceased owners. Whether they enjoy it, I can't say.
When I had a cat, I'd fairly frequently wake up with her staring at me, sitting on my chest in the "breath stealing" position. I always imagine her inner dialog being something like, "Morning! Are you dead yet? Can I eat your eyes? OK, not dead yet. Scratch my nose?"
Long ago I had a large orange cat. He would sit on my chest to wake me up. If I didn't wake up he would hook the end of one of his claws into that sensitive piece of flesh the lies between the nostrils, and pull hard. I'm pretty sure he would have eaten me too if I didn't respond to that stimulus.
As someone who gets chased by a dog at least once a month on my daily commute I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me. Maybe a couple are just trying to herd me but I think you underestimate their prey drive.
I don't know if you're being flippant or not, but the desire to eat humans has long been bred out of the domestic animal gene pool (and, frankly, out of most of the wild animal gene pool as well). The dogs who are chasing you almost certainly just want to establish their dominance over you and defend their territories. It's also possible that they want to play.
But any dog that is chasing you, or any other human, needs to be put on a leash. You should have a chat with the dog's owner and point out to them, politely but firmly, that an off-leash dog chasing people s serious liability risk for them. And if the dog doesn't have an owner you should call you local animal control.
A lot of cities have a feral cat problem. Very few have a feral dog problem, because a feral dog problem rapidly becomes a feral dog pack problem, and it turns out a pack of feral dogs is pretty good at hunting people.
Yeah, I live in a third world and the government regularly clean the place out of "aggressive" dogs. I do have dog packs just near my residence and sometimes it's like 7-8 dogs just in front of entry. But they are not aggressive and only pregnant females will follow humans and peg for food.
If the municipality doesn't clean the area it would be a "real" danger against kids.
I'm pretty sure they are not (unless it is a pitbull or something). Most breeds of dogs will not attack humans. They are aware of the difference in physical strength.
Also, if they are real aggressive, I assume a catastrophe has already happened or is in the making (especially with a child?). The authorities have not intervened yet?
No. They don't. Animals live in the moment and understand causal relationships within time and space. They don't abstract their thoughts and form assemblies or sciences or write histories. Though they understand causal laws better than humans sometimes. Hence you can't teach an animal like you would a human. But you can train an animal. This works on habit, not on abstract thought. Both animals and humans can be trained. Both have habit. Humans live by codes and formulas and religions, all are related to thought,animals don't. Man, through abstract concepts lives in the future and the past, the animal only in the present. Man is led by error, animals don't err. Both animals and man are susceptible to illusion. This is how you trap an animal in the wild. You don't led him into capture by lies or falsehood.
Deep neural networks aren't aware of changes in their own performance, because their cannot remember or compare their own current performance to the one in the past.
Thus humans at least cannot be pure DNN ML algorithm.
RNNs have error propagation thru time, but connections' weight changes aren't represented as neuron activations and therefore aren't accessible to the neural network itself. That is RNNs aren't aware that they learn too.
Thus humans cannot be pure RNN ML algorithm.
Naturally, humans implement some learning algorithm. The question is which algorithms are capable of which sides of thinking.
Deep neural networks aren't aware of changes in their own performance, because their cannot remember or compare their own current performance to the one in the past.
What are you talking about? Awareness of the changes is the point of such techniques as momentum or early stopping.
The part of a system which monitors these changes (well, it mostly monitors single number, performance on a test set) isn't represented in the network itself.
You can train dialogue NLP system as much as you wish, but you'll never get answers to a question "Have you learned this training set already?" which correlate with whether performance on the test set have plateaued.
I wouldn't call it awareness. We are certainly aware that one part of the system monitors another part, the system itself isn't.
I'm still not following you. What does the question "have you learned this training set already?" even mean? You measure a training set accuracy, and you compare it against the corresponding test set accuracy. It's trivial to add the code that monitors this correlation to your model. Then you can even have the model make adjustments to the learning process based on what it observes (e.g. deploy more regularization to reduce overfitting, etc).
I was trying to show that humans can't be purely relying on certain kinds of ML algorithms because those algorithms can't provide properties which we observe in our thought processes.
> It's trivial to add the code that monitors this correlation to your model.
Yes, but while it's not there we can't say that the model is aware of the process of its own learning. The question serves as an experimental test of system's awareness of the process of its own learning.
All in all, I tried to make poorly defined terms like "awareness" and "the way humans think" a little bit more technical.
What about the team problem solving experiment ? I remember two monkeys improvising a distributed solution to pull ropes in the right order and time to get access to some food.
No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve.
Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language.
Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.
Unless you use an extremely narrow definition of "thinking" (yours is not commonly accepted among animal researchers, and is IMO too tautological to be useful), this is clearly disproven by decades of animal cognition research.
Animals can form future-oriented plans, engage in risk management activities, can remember inventories of items stored in safekeeping locations, develop "cultural" dialects to their vocalization patterns, and much more. You can find a good start on the current state of the research here
Definition of thinking, like definition of sex, or any other biological trait cannot be broadened. That would yield nonsense.
Thinking implies language. Without language it is feeling. Period.
Learning from experience, map making and even planning, as one might see in case of machine learning and other branches of AI, does not require thinking. It is a lower level of activity, relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.
You are being downvoted because you are making strong claims without having anything to back it up. You are free to have your own definitions of things but people like to have the same. This helps in carrying on a useful conversation.
Yes. To be fair I think most people here want animals to be able to think (and for other humans to think that animals can think) because they want animals to be protected from humans.
Google gives me the following two definitions for "think":
1. have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something.
2. direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas
Neither seems to mention language as a pre-requisite. In any case, you seem to have strong beliefs contrary to my understanding of animal research, so I will not bother you further.
Just plain incorrect. I will now present as much evidence for my statement as you presented for yours:
As you can see, it's a pretty ineffective technique and since you're starting from the overwhelming minority position, you're going to have to do a lot better.
Everything I'm saying here comes across as passive-aggressive childish bullshit, but in this case it's also true.
You're coming to this discussion with an unjustified assertion that thinking is very narrowly defined and then circularly showing that other kinds of things that neurons can do are not "thinking" because they don't fit the definition.
In the huge space of all possible kinds of cognition, humans have only ever occupied the tiniest sliver. There's modes of thought out there that we can't conceive of.
To ask "what is this mammal thinking" is self-evidently closer to asking "what is that mammal thinking" than it is to "what is that computer thinking".
> Animals don't think, because thinking requires language and abstract brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve.
Animals certainly can think. And they have limited language, certainly not as complex as ours, but they are capable of communicating with each other.
Just because humans are much smarter doesn't mean animals don't think.
> Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.
Toddlers certainly think, though not on the same level as older children and adults. And certainly many animals like chimps, pigs and crows can think better than toddlers.
> Animals only feel.
If animals only felt and couldn't think, how can they think to use tools?
AH, you again. I think I recall you went off on a long thread about this not so long ago. You posit (without proof) that if a creature has no language, it cannot think, because only the parts of the brain that deal with language are capable of thinking.
There is a large amount of experimental evidence showing some animals planning for the future, imagining what other creatures will do based on what they have seen, making tools, saving tools for the future to deal with predicted future situations, solving puzzles they've never seen before (did they learn to solve puzzles they've never seen before from experience?), beating humans in gestalt tests, communicating via sign language (how about those animals? They communicate via sign language; do they think?), and various other things that by any sensible definition are the product of mental processes everyone else here considers "thought".
It seems that as far as you are concerned, "thinking" is defined as something to do with language. Everyone else is using a different definition. If you clearly explained your definition of "thinking", perhaps this will turn out to all be a misunderstanding and you're actually saying something completely different.
Simply stating over and over that without language there is no thought does not help your case, as everyone else here considers that to be trivially falsifiable by the animals they see doing things that must be the product of thought.
It's quite convenient to think that, because we eat animals.
I'm not a vegetarian, I enjoy steak and pork chops a lot.
But I think animals, especially cows and pigs, are more conscious of their existence than we like to think.
I tend to agree that speech plays a central role in how our thoughts are organized, but I think the importance of being able to articulate oneself /with language/ as a measure of consciousness and intelligence is generally overestimated.
I don't see how it would be "convenient", since it doesn't seem necessary that an animal be conscious for us to require ourselves to not harm it out of a moral concern.
Babies are either unconscious or have a very low degree of consciousness, but infanticide is still morally abhorrent.
I find it funny that you're being downvoted to shit for holding an opinion which actually was quite common in the philosophy of mind, and which hasn't been quite yet superseded. Or at least I guess so, because nothing in philosophy ever really is.
The identification of thought (or rather reason) with language was explicitly advocated by Descartes in part V of the Discourse on the Method, where he suggested a test for distinguishing a perfect automaton from a human being. It's a view more often associated with him, but other early modern thinkers such as Locke, Leibniz and Kant made similar statements.
But in each case they were also more concerned with abstract thought, rather than just the general information processing that all animals do.
No one would have objected to a comment like: "One school of philosophy holds that thinking is inherently linguistic, so in that sense animals probably can't think."
People are objecting to the unsubstantiated, doctrinaire, insistence on this very narrow definition to the exclusion of all others, including the ones used by people who research animal cognition for a living.
I don't see why anyone should exclusively care what Descartes has to say about it when we have an additional 400 years of science after his death that suggests he didn't have the whole picture.
I'm not really biased one way or the other on the upthread conversation, however I think you'll find the Descartes' thinking continues to underlie a great deal of what we call modern science (or more precisely: our defining interpretation of universal phenomenon) and many of the applications that come with that.
You can find great nuggets in modern work just as you can find great nuggets in older work, too. It's not that disposable!
Why should they object to it, though? If an unsubstantiated claim can't be said to be anything other than an opinion, then it's just his opinion. Plus, it doesn't really matter whether he was being "doctrinaire" or not, because nothing was actually being imposed of me. I'm not being forced to subscribe to this view, I'm not being threatened (e.g. with getting a low grade, being fired, being burned at the stake). And I doubt he would have insisted in his view, too, if it weren't for the response it caused.
Furthermore, I don't believe anyone should exclusively care about Descartes' thought on the matter, whether in the light of contemporary science or not. I just tallied my thoughts as they came, really. But I do believe that there's a way to reply to comments which maximizes the likelihood of there being at least some degree of mutual understanding and which minimizes the likelihood of conflict, and that is to have a charitable, unassuming reading of the comment in question, and to not take offense. And that people should either have that, or not to discuss at all. Else, they might as well talk to the wind.
The whole exchange of comments we have in mind, for instance, was to little or no benefit to everyone involved, being little else than comments of "uh huh" and "nuh huh" back and forth.
OP literally started their comment with "No." and followed it up with 3–4 blanket assertions.
Slatestarcodex has a comment policy (http://slatestarcodex.com/comments/) that I think is very relevant here too because I think that's how people implicitly judge most comments—"If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary."
OP's statement was not 100% true so it should at least have been necessary / relevant AND kind / humbly put. It wasn't kind.
People should be thought as being free to speak their mind in whatever way it suits them. Not because they should, but because they will. And when the time comes, it's up to me whether to make an issue of it or not. And in so far as I know, I'd rather not.
It has nothing to do with being kind. It has a lot do do with contributing to the discussion with something useful. Just asserting things without any evidence is not useful and thus downvoted to make more room for more useful comments nearer where people would see them, that's all.
I disagree that a comment has to be sourced to be a contribution to the discussion. Whether or not something can be a contribution depends entirely on what people expect from comments. If all I expect is to have a little bit of thought, it doesn't really need to pack on citations, and even a question might suffice.
Which might sound dilletante-ish, but isn't really out of place for anyone reading a pop-sci article on animal cognition during a Saturday evening, on their spare time.
As for downvoting or upvoting, I've never seen any actual evidence that either does anything useful.
There's a difference between a comment stating an opinion having no citations, (I think that...) and one supposedly stating facts, (You cannot have...). At least if we want HN to maintain a higher quality of discussion than 4chan.
Honestly, I don't think it's such of an issue. If there's a real difference between the kind of information processing that occurs within a cell from that which occurs within the brain, it doesn't really matter what it is called.
Of course, the language within any field matters to the practitioners in that field. Things can be as easy or as hard to understand as the strictness and clarity of the language in that field allows it. But what do I mean is that, if any expression in a field ever fell in to such a degree of obscurity as to be said to have "lost all meaning", whatever it described still might be independently rediscovered later on. So meaning isn't something that needs to be formulated into a categorical imperative, or otherwise we might lose it forever. Striving towards clarity and towards a discriminating usage of words is a practical rule, not a moral one.
Plus, arguing definitions is never a sound choice.
I am using the definition from the times of Descartes. Perhaps I missed the moment when the word "thinking" began to refer to arbitrary cognitive processes.
I will try one more time.
The rules of logic require precise definitions (as best as we currently able to produce) and to follow the rule of substituting equal for equal only. The socially constructed memes cannot be substituted for definitions, no matter what hipsters would write in blog posts.
Thinking, as in "I think" or "I am" or how Descartes put it "I think therefore I am", is based on a language. Language is required for thinking and abstract thinking and reasoning. Language comes before the notion of "I". Before any abstractions.
Argumentation is quite straightforward. Human languages has been evolved together with related brain centers and this process took alot of time. There is a fundamental gap between association of sounds or cries with some sensory patterns and ability to say "I am". How long it took? Some primates are capable of learning very rudimentary sign language after years of rigorous training, but they are incapable of developing of (or even grasping) the notion of "I" on their own. Now you might see the gap.
I would argue that language comes prior to abstract reasoning and abstract thinking, and that they have been evolved together in a mutually recursive relationship. Think of the mutual recursion of #'eval and #"apply as the best example of mutual recursion I know.
Thinking, I would say, started with a primitive, rudimentary language and then related brain circuitry has been selected by evolution. Social evolution and biological evolution together.
One could see the very process of emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness in babies as a gradual process parallel (or rather based on) language acquisition. The fundamental difference is, of course, that all necessary brain centers are already developed and encoded in DNA (but they are still has to be trained).
This line of arguments is for justifying and supporting the postulates of Descartes about fundamental difference between a human and an animal (creationist nonsense aside). To put it another way - there is not a single scientifically proven contradictions with his definitions.
I would spare you from a lecture on basic linguistics - there are much better figures in the field. The only reference I would like to make is to the postulate of Chomsky, that language acquisition is a process, similar to growing of an organ. So, the story about Evolution is applicable to a capacity as it is applicable to any organ or a subsystem.
So, thinking in its classic definition is the capacity based on a language. It is implemented in corresponding brain centers and related circuitry and is impossible as ability without underlying lower level machinery which takes long and unique path to evolve.
As far as we know, no species went to the same evolutionary pathway which humans did to evolve even a rudimentary natural language in linguistic sense (uniform, rule-governed, arbitrary composition).
So, animals cannot think the way humans do.
BTW, in this chain of reasoning I have demonstrated the kind of thinking no animal is capable of and, hopefully, why it is so.
I believe you never had a cat and did not have a chance to see them expressing complex abstract ideas like "let me out to the patio right now or else".
It is even worse with cetacean signals. Their system is nothing like human language; to begin with, it is very fast, it is so fast that dolphins could distinguish separate clicks in a sound that consists of 100s clicks which we perceive as one continuous "squeaky door" sound. Then they have 2 areas in their brain associated with auditory processing (unlike in humans and other mammals that have just one). https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.h...
On top of that, small corpus callosum means that two hemispheres are more independent in dolphins than they are in humans. This should have at least some effect on how they "think".Finally, "seeing" world through sound, and being able to make 2 (maybe even more) sounds at once independently only adds to the "alien" complexity of cetacean species.
Anyone who has seen a spectrogram of a dolphin pod vocalizing will testify: they rarely shut up! There is a constant chatter going on, apart from echolocation. It must have some meaning, evolution would not tolerate such waste of energy for nothing.We have been investigating dolphins cognition and communication since 1960s, we still do not know what they "think" or "say" and it could be partially due to our tendency to compare them to us, expecting something similar.