Can we know what animals are thinking? • Hacker News Board

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#91

Post by srtjstjsj » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:52 PM UTC

csomar wrote: post #34

jdavis703 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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?

> unless it is a pitbull

"pitbull" isn't a dangerou breed, it is a correlation signal for a psychotic owner that torture dogs to make them violent.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#92

Post by pmoriarty » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:53 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #65

Xcelerate wrote: post #38

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 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 requir…

"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?

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#93

Post by srtjstjsj » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:54 PM UTC

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".

Those are good questions with unknown answers. Another good question is "what people are thinking?"

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#94

Post by srtjstjsj » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

eighthnate wrote: post #24

lngnmn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pat…

> relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition. You mean like the patterns the puffer fish creates to attract mates? https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU

Can wind think?

https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=is...

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#95

Post by roceasta » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:55 PM UTC

>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.)

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#96

Post by srtjstjsj » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:56 PM UTC

lngnmn wrote: post #67

tpeo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Exactly. Information processing is information processing, and thinking is a process which is based on a language. Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc. People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.

Your ongoing mistake is that you are obsessed with a specific word choice "thinking", and not paying any attention to what the word represents.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#97

Post by EliRivers » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 6:58 PM UTC

lngnmn wrote: post #12

_dps wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vocalizati…

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 pat…

Thinking implies language.

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#98

Post by remir » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 7:03 PM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #46

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 medita…

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#99

Post by arthurwinter » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 7:07 PM UTC

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.

Re: Can we know what animals are thinking?

#100

Post by smokeyj » Sat, Aug 26, 2017, 7:15 PM UTC

_dps wrote: post #4

StavrosK wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ei…

> 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.