61–70 of 140 posts
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I think there is a big difference between gift and payment. Your article is on skinnerian conditioning to train crows to pay for peanuts. In this article the crows got peanuts whether they gave gifts or not. They just decided to give gifts. No training occured.
Perhaps in the mind of the crows, they are giving gifts as a reward. In effect, training the human (in the article).
A lot of people refuse to believe that animals (or birds) can show any kind of advanced thinking. "Oh, the crow was probably carrying something in its beak; it saw the peanut, and dropped the thing in its beak" is their explanation. I'm sorry, but animals are far more perceptive than they're given credit for. Also, how do you explain this? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5NuBk5_Izc
I blame this on the "DreamWorks Effect", animators have done such a good job giving animals human traits and emotions that millinials+ really can't help but be animists.
Also, you may want to have a look at The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness that was published for the Francis Crick memorial conference at Cambridge University.
“The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”
http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious...
Hoaxes involving children and/or their magical gifts: http://tempr.org/54ef57337b951.html
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> The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking. I think the article (and probably the podcast? haven't listened yet) make too big a deal of this. We don't know that the crows realized that the lens cap belonged to those people. Perhaps they just saw it as another neat thing to gift. Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it t…
Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it to a place that smelled similarly. Can you do that?
https://books.google.de/books?id=Z7g-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA105&lpg=P...
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> The final example though, where a Crow returns the camera-lens cap to the family requires some pretty advanced thinking. I think the article (and probably the podcast? haven't listened yet) make too big a deal of this. We don't know that the crows realized that the lens cap belonged to those people. Perhaps they just saw it as another neat thing to gift. Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it t…
Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it to a place that smelled similarly. Can you do that?
Maybe not, but then, humans have a pretty poor sense of smell compared to lots of other animals.
Hoaxes involving children and/or their magical gifts: http://tempr.org/54ef57337b951.html
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More here: http://www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/brain/ The particular bird matching that number, Clark's Nutcracker, looks well studied. This paper discusses them caching 30,000 seeds, but not in 30,000 separate locations, it concludes that they locate at least 1,000 locations by memory: http://www.auburn.edu/academic/classes/biol/7560/folkerts/hu... (that author seems to have done much field work studying the bird) Anothe…
The paper you linked to mentions them caching seeds in all manner of different locations. I wonder if they have some form of algorithm unknown to us to determine a good location, rather than choosing randomly. That would aid a lot in 'remembering' locations of the caches.
Whenever someone asserts that mammalian-equivalent intelligence is incredibly unlikely to arise twice, I like to point towards very intelligent and social birds, like crows - who are capable of performing advanced mental feats without a neocortex .
nature rarely does anything just once. if it can happen once it can almost certainly happen more than once, and almost certainly does happen more than once.
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I blame this on the "DreamWorks Effect", animators have done such a good job giving animals human traits and emotions that millinials+ really can't help but be animists.
I used to have a similar theory but personification of animals has been a part of human storytelling since the beginning of time. I'm just unsure if modern CGI is any more compelling in forming lasting notions of animism than, say, Bambi was.
Belief systems like Shinto are animist, where you think things like rivers and trees and rocks and the different winds are conscious and have souls.
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Perhaps they smelled the family on it, and just returned it to a place that smelled similarly. Can you do that?
Most people never try. Feynman found he could, to some extend. https://books.google.de/books?id=Z7g-BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA105&lpg=P...