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Can we know what animals are thinking?

medium.economist.com

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Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#41

Post by _jal »

StavrosK wrote: post #3
_dps wrote: post #2

"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…

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"?

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#42

Post by _dps »

danielam wrote: post #39

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 introdu…

> ... 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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#43

Post by _jal »

csomar wrote: post #29
gamad wrote: post #28

I'm always afraid that if I knew what my cat was thinking I'd be disappointed. Like "I wonder if I can kill and eat him?"

Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.

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?"

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#44

Post by lisper »

KekDemaga wrote: post #25
leoharsha2 wrote: post #17

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 trai…

This crow really appears to be thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop

Great apes too.

http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/05/clever-puzzle-solving-or...

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#46

Post by monktastic1 »

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

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#47

Post by dboreham »

_jal wrote: post #43
csomar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#48

Post by Simon_says »

lngnmn wrote: post #19
Simon_says wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?

Yes, it is another kind of activity. To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#49

Post by interfixus »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #36

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.

Exactly. I have enormous difficulty understanding how anybody could fail to hold this view.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#50

Post by psyc »

lngnmn wrote: post #19
Simon_says wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?

Yes, it is another kind of activity. To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".

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".
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