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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

#171

Post by theoriu234 »

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…

> We are like gods compared to other animals.

The linguistic ability of most Humans is at the level of GPT3 - probably why statistical approaches work so well in NLP.

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

#172

Post by q1w2 »

burnished wrote: post #157
q1w2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be interested by neuromorphic hardware. The basic observation is that animal computation and silicon computation operate in very different ways. Animals use lots of neurons that perform comparatively poorly (slow, not deterministic) that are sparsely connected, but have a high degree of parallelism. Compared to say a computer chip, which uses relatively few components that all operate at very high speeds wi…

Neurons in your brain have tens of thousands of connections each, and are not limited to the current AI design where all connections are laid out in a neat linear layers for matrix operations.

Squishy human brains connect in all directions - there's no "layer" to every thought. It creates feedback loops, intricate pathways, as well as direct connections.

Modern AI tech is fundamentally dumbs down intelligence by this notion of layered matrix operations.

It is done for scalability because matrices can be computed easily on a GPU, but it's not the same architecture.

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

#173

Post by q1w2 »

menzoic wrote: post #122
q1w2 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I mean to say is that we are driven by stimulus. ...whereas they might be driven by some purely internal notions.

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

#174

Post by wcarron »

meowface wrote: post #166
jdavis703 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe you should reduce suffering, it would be better for you to quickly kill a chicken and eat it. Otherwise, a cat, bird of prey or other animal might kill that chicken. And cats are cruel killers that slowly torture their prey before eating them.

This is the primary argument I see hunters use to justify hunting as an ethical form of killing, in contrast to factory farming. Obviously it's better to kill someone or something quickly and painlessly than slowly and painfully, but I don't buy this argument. If you truly had that motivation, you would be saving that chicken from predation and finding a sanctuary or home for it, and/or you'd be encouraging mass huma…

Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this:

> The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

Into this:

> The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

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

#175

Post by lordnacho »

wyre wrote: post #155
lordnacho wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, in some ways I regard myself as a pre-abolition slave owner/user (analogy breaks down somewhat, is it the farmer who is the slave owner?). I get the feeling society will change and this thing that used to be common will slide towards being seen as despicable, worthy of having your statue thrown in the water. Originally I was reducing my meat intake for health reasons but thinking about it more and more it…

In regards to your loophole I’m reminded of the pretty famous Yellowstone study that showed when wolves are not artificially reduced by hunting their entire environment stabilized. Or is your loophole inferring that animals should be hunted so they can avoid their natural fate? Knowing that animals run away from their hunter I would think their natural fate is preferable to the animal than getting shot and killed.

Of course in the moment they don't want to be killed, but they are going to get killed either by the hunter or a predator.

I guess what I mean is that (in short), animals that are bred to be eaten didn't have to exist in the first place, we are literally creating them and making them suffer, both in life and in death. So we're creating suffering out of nothing.

Animals that live in the wild are gonna meet a bad end regardless, so how much are we creating that suffering?

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

#176

Post by dragonwriter »

wcarron wrote: post #174
meowface wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the primary argument I see hunters use to justify hunting as an ethical form of killing, in contrast to factory farming. Obviously it's better to kill someone or something quickly and painlessly than slowly and painfully, but I don't buy this argument. If you truly had that motivation, you would be saving that chicken from predation and finding a sanctuary or home for it, and/or you'd be encouraging mass huma…

Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this: > The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals. Into this: > The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

The sole reason vegetable eaters find eating vegetables justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-animal life forms.

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

#177

Post by leafmeal »

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…

More about language, apparently, not all languages have that "ideas within ideas within ideas" property you were talking about. The Pirahã language of an indigenous people in Brazil is the counter example. This New Yorker article talks about it and the fascinating effects it had on the field of linguistics. Before its discovery most linguists, Led by Chomsky, believed having recursion in our grammars set humans apart from all other animals. Pirahã showed this might not be the case.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interprete...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language

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

#178

Post by Melatonic »

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…

I always wonder how the hell I would think or solve even simple problems without language. It seems extremely foreign.

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

#179

Post by wcarron »

dragonwriter wrote: post #176
wcarron wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boom, someone finally said it. However, I think you can just turn this: > The sole reason - the necessary and sufficient reason - hunters find hunting justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals. Into this: > The sole reason meat-eaters find eating meat justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-human animals.

The sole reason vegetable eaters find eating vegetables justifiable is they attribute no moral value to the lives of non-animal life forms.

Uhh, yeah? That was my point. Food has no moral value. It's just food.

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

#180

Post by heresie-dabord »

lm28469 wrote: post #130
heresie-dabord wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> I always find it amusing that [...]

Egg zachary. You are amused by something, you explained where you think you see an error.

You can choose a different verb to avoid "debug", but you just provided a suitable illustration of humour as an application[1] of reason.

[1] tech pun not intended, but fitting

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