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Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#141

Post by xcambar »

edgyquant wrote: post #112
ocimbote wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph. I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article... Probably a bit of both, as always. That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, grea…

Why do you hate animal cognition ?

Oh no! Not a pet peeve!

I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike!

Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#142

Post by xcambar »

OJFord wrote: post #107
ocimbote wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph. I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article... Probably a bit of both, as always. That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, grea…

Pet peeve ?

Oh no! Not a pet peeve!

I always thought pet peeve meant a hobby, a specific point of interest, not something you dislike!

Sorry for the mistake, I'm glad I've fixed this though! :D

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#143

Post by emodendroket »

numpad0 wrote: post #51
krylon wrote: post #20

The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it. I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that t…

I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion. Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished every other species that showed intelligence by eating them, which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact that it’s often small birds that shows intelligence is also interesting. They’re among hardest to hunt.

> I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion.

Well, riddle me this. In this thread people are marveling at animals doing things like using automatic doors and opening bags of chips. Who would be impressed if a human did these things? I don't exactly find myself persuaded by these examples that actually animal intelligence is just like human intelligence.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#144

Post by wraptile »

IntrepidWorm wrote: post #109
bobthechef wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reaction to quantity does not imply the concept of number.

Surely it implies an ability to count incrementally, which is all OP was implying? The dog does not have to abstract the concept of '3' to be able to count- it's still very interesting.

> Surely it implies an ability to count incrementally

Not necessarily. It could be just ability observe scale not individual numbers. i.e. 3 bags look big enough amount of bags for a walk not that there are 3 bags. Would the dog not come when 4 bags are taken? What if 2 bigger bags are taken? It's kinda hard to deduce anything from this anecdote other than the dog seems to understand a pattern.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#145

Post by lngnmn2 »

dang wrote: post #57
lngnmn2 wrote: post #8

Is there a website where this kind of bullshit does not reach the front page? Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution. Also counting is an association (pairing) with instances of an abstract concept of a number which requires a language and a culture. Okay, may be some visual cues, but not zero. Please c…

Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't have to keep banning you? If you'd make your substantive points thoughtfully, we'd appreciate it. The problem with the way you're posting is that it pushes the forum further in the crap direction which is already the internet default, which we're trying to stave off here—not for moral reasons but simply because it's uninteresting. https://hn.algolia.com/?…

How does one show a flaw in a proof or a logical argument? A single contradiction or a plain error is enough. This is the core of science - a single flaw is enough to throw away the whole argument. Not just that, having the lack of basic understanding been exposed, a "scientist" should be marked as incompetent.

Yes, you systematically ban people like me and have narcissistic imposters and bullshitters instead. Millions of them.

This is the consequence of eradication of anonymity and heavy policing to comply with current idiotic pseudo-intellectual narrative of safe spaces or how do you justify it.

The next step would be enforced gender-neutral pronouns or something equally nonsensical.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#146

Post by lngnmn2 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #62
lngnmn2 wrote: post #8

Is there a website where this kind of bullshit does not reach the front page? Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution. Also counting is an association (pairing) with instances of an abstract concept of a number which requires a language and a culture. Okay, may be some visual cues, but not zero. Please c…

"Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution." [citation needed] Also, bird brains are very different from ours and knowledge of brain centers in mammals cannot be easily transferred to birds. In another universe, a bird with your attitude could claim that flight requires feathers and thus non-birds cannot i…

My friend, the whole "study" is based on false assumptions and consist of interpretation of the data in the way which confirms these assumptions. This is not even science, this is some blog posting kind of crap.

Every bit of observable behaviour could be explained in terms of habitual behaviour and physical pattern matching, exactly what a trained NN will do - it will perfectly accurately separate patterns which corresponds to different quantities, while posses no notion of any abstract concepts whatsoever.

Animals pattern match, but do not have abstract concepts. Well, enzymes do pattern matching but not counting.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#147

Post by srean »

sellyme wrote: post #133
srean wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. My personal take is that its possible, predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic representation ? Its not clear that they do.

> Even the question whether one can 'think' of something without having a linguistic representation is a topic of active debate. This seems fairly trivially true just based on how common it is for someone to have 100% full understanding of a concept and then be completely incapable of remembering the word describing it, or even a phrase that conveys a decent approximation.

Linguistic representation can deal with what's-the-word-again place holders though. So, not being able to recall the name of an object or concept does not prevent linguistic thinking.

Re: Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero

#149

Post by agumonkey »

zestyping wrote: post #68
agumonkey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crows do team work to figure out machines monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition) beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.

I have been training the crows in my neighbourhood to solve puzzles. They visit me every day now. One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm super curious! Thanks!

I guess it's not team work per se .. I forgot the details when I wrote the message above

this TED talk https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_...

with a peanut machine to attract them and regularly make the setup more intricate to see if they manage to find the metaphorical key to get more seeds. more like crowd strategy search ?

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