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UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

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Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#121

Post by kingkawn »

q1w2 wrote: post #102
alecst wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…

Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers. The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to…

Anything invoking “ultimates” is a fever dream of people who have lost sight of life for an obsession

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#122

Post by menzoic »

q1w2 wrote: post #102
alecst wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…

Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers. The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to…

Even AI will be influenced by external stimulus. If it's interacting with the world, then it has to have external stimulus.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#123

Post by toper-centage »

jdavis703 wrote: post #117
elif wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

After 14 years of eating a plant-based diet my partner got a cat. Then I started buying the cat raw meat. Shortly after I became an omnivore again. I still try to minimize meat for my own health and the climate, but it’s hard to argue about the ethics of meat eating while feeding an obligate carnivore.

That's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#124

Post by jdavis703 »

toper-centage wrote: post #123
jdavis703 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After 14 years of eating a plant-based diet my partner got a cat. Then I started buying the cat raw meat. Shortly after I became an omnivore again. I still try to minimize meat for my own health and the climate, but it’s hard to argue about the ethics of meat eating while feeding an obligate carnivore.

That's my main argument against flexitarianism. You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance. It's part of what stops me from adopting an animal, specially a cat.

> You can't be "kinda vegan" without leaving your brain in permanent stress due to dissonance.

To be honest, a lot of meat still tastes kind of gross to me. Give me fried tofu over baked chicken in a salad. Heck if I’m just having a a boring burger for a random lunch on a Tuesday, give me an Impossible patty over some crappy fast food beef.

That said if there’s a dish that’s enhanced by meat (say a Wagyu steak or a pastrami sandwich) then sure, I’ll eat that a few times a week.

At least so far, this hasn’t caused me any stress.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#125

Post by toper-centage »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #108
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

> Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human In humans, humour is a debugging process, which is fundamentally rational . The very fact that a statement can be correct or erroneous is the basis of language and therefore education and social evolution. > there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals Evolution is true. But... the ESA and NASA have sent a space telesco…

Is there any fundamental difference between poor people and rich people other than their privilege and riches? Could poor people send a space telescope to space?

Human animals have very similar tools to those of other social animals. We're just privileged to somehow be able to stack up our experiences to create science and technology. But isolated tribes in the amazon could never send telescopes to space.

So we're only special due to our circunstance. Our bodies are barely fit to stand and walk all day, we're pushing the limits of where we're supposed to live, and our diets are all wrong. But we make it work because our ancestors developed knowledge sharing to a global level.

Were just very lucky priviledged apes.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#126

Post by lm28469 »

q1w2 wrote: post #102
alecst wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…

Studying AI has given me a lot of perspective of human intelligence. It's pretty incredible the way that a system that was designed as a basic input/output sensory/reflex system has gotten so complex that we still cannot model it with supercomputers. The numbers of connections and configurations of neurons is staggering, and still well beyond the neat matrix-array-based of modern AI. ...but at the core, I've come to…

Until it's there it's 100% sci-fi. We've been through a few AI hype cycles already and the most advanced AI is still dumb as fuck compared to a 3yo kid.

We might be on a completely wrong path with our current approach too, difference of degree vs difference of kind, we don't know much about the brain and so far our binary way of computing isn't really promising, especially not in term of mimicking or surpassing the human brain, it might just not be the right tool.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#127

Post by lm28469 »

psbp wrote: post #71
elif wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also curious that we feed an animal that laughs (cows) to an animal that doesn't laugh (cats) and somehow construct logic to justify it all morally. I find myself in that weird cult, despite personally having an animal free diet for decades.

I eat animals, and probably will for the rest of my life, but I do think it's one of those aspects of daily life that we'll look back on as extremely barbaric.

The only barbaric thing about it imho is the scale and way we do it, not the process of eating meat in itself. There is a big difference between eating 300gr of cheap meat from a shady slaughterhouse every day vs once in a week piece of meat hunted by a local friend.

But that's capitalism for you, we basically have meat factories now, we have to make it cheap and in mass quantities no matter the "moral" aspect of it

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#128

Post by stremrn8 »

alecst wrote: post #98
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

There’s one major distinction between humans and animals: language. Not like “me want banana” language like in apes but like fully “ideas within ideas within ideas” language, with recursion and case and noun classes and all that. It’s incredible. It’s astonishing. We are like gods compared to other animals. And ever since we have had language (not even that long — ~50k years or so) we have been using it to tell stori…

No post body was provided.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#129

Post by NegativeLatency »

InitialLastName wrote: post #104
hutzlibu wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As soon as we learn how to cultivate some good quality meat in-vitro, we will stop killing animals and start to pretend to be different from the barbaric previous generations." In the very long term maybe. But even if cheap, good quality artifixial meat becomes avaiable by tomorrow - killing animals for meat simply out of tradition - will go on a long time.

Sure, but that's the case with all traditions. Plenty of things that westerners see as barbaric (slavery, ritual genital mutilation, institutionalized torture) are still common in the developed world (and often openly endorsed by western governments). Edit to add: The bigger picture is that for a set of practices, even if they still occur on a smaller scale than in the past, that's probably strictly an improvement.

As a circumcised male who is disappointed that Guantanamo bay is still holding prisoners I’d suggest that the west still does many of the things you mentioned.

Re: UCLA Study Finds Laughter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

#130

Post by lm28469 »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #108
Tepix wrote: post #52

There are often discussions about what makes humans special and things like self-awareness, humour, sarcasm, tool usage, ethics etc are brought forward. I think there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals. We've merely reached an intelligence threshold that allowed us to develop better languages and writing and that means knowledge can be collected and passed on much much better. Lau…

> Laughter is yet another trait some might see as typically human In humans, humour is a debugging process, which is fundamentally rational . The very fact that a statement can be correct or erroneous is the basis of language and therefore education and social evolution. > there are hardly any fundamental differences between humans and other animals Evolution is true. But... the ESA and NASA have sent a space telesco…

> In humans, humour is a debugging process

I always find it amusing that we evolved brains, developed computers to crudely mimics our brain, created words to describe said computers and we now use these words on us as if we were computers ourselves... it's almost insulting, we're not computers. Your memory has nothing to do with ram/ssds, your brain isn't a cpu, these are all one way over simplified analogies

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