51–60 of 72 posts
Here we go again anthropomorphizing creatures that live 1-2 years by misrepresenting data for clicks.
Octopuses are crazy smart and theres tons of evidence for it; not sure where this comment comes from even if the article is mediocre.
Here we go again anthropomorphizing creatures that live 1-2 years by misrepresenting data for clicks.
What aspect of it is anthropomorphizing? Do you mean the phrase "bouncing the ball" because it is not literally bouncing a ball? Nothing else in the article jumped out at me as ascribing human-specific behavior to octopuses. Also, I don't follow what lifespan has to do with anything. Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most…
Nope, it's about the common octopus. That is what Octopus vulgaris is. Yes, I did read it.
> Rats live about 2 years, yet they are dramatically more human-like (exhibiting higher intelligence, more play behavior, etc.) than most other animals
Rats are not popularly deemed "highly intelligent" animals, unlike octopi. If we thought them to be on their level we wouldn't be sharing these articles all the time.
> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning." The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to s…
Agreed. This is like building a little den out of nearby objects, which seems to be at sub-mammal levels? Even birds that didn’t get the best grades do this. They picked an extremely mediocre example by octopus standards. Play is more interesting but this happens with primitive mammals as well, like squirrels and such. And fish, btw. It feels like pop-sci journalism is always assuming animal behavior is orders of mag…
I would go further and claim that basically everybody holds the assumption that animal cognition lives on a scale of not sophisticated to very sophisticated, and also that human cognition holds the top spot on this scale, and that therefor anything else is below us in sophistication.
The idea that conscious thoughts are what makes our cognitive abilities so good is merely an assumption. It's very possible that in million year of evolution humans evolve a way to do everything we do today on instinct without the need for energy hungry consciousness. That would probably allow the brain to become much smaller and efficient over time.
With our assumptions we would conclude that the smaller brain and instinctual behaviors would signify a less sophisticated brain.
I've just finished Blindsight by Peter Watts - a First Contact sci fi. This discussion echoes it. Take that as a book recommendation, if you will.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Treating an animal well sometimes does not mean that the animal was treated well. It's nice that the cows you're talking about are given lots of access to pastures, but that doesn't mean that anything else can be done to the animal without it qualifying as disrespectful or unkind. I can't think of another situation in which one could choose to kill an animal for pleasure at 10% it's lifespan, and think that this was…
When a lion kills a gazelle on the savannah, is that "kind and respectful"? No, it's just part of the "circle of life". Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc). If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?
Here we go again anthropomorphizing creatures that live 1-2 years by misrepresenting data for clicks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a lion kills a gazelle on the savannah, is that "kind and respectful"? No, it's just part of the "circle of life". Humans also interact with their environment and eat non human life forms (plants, cows, etc). If we prove that trees have consciousness, will we need to stop killing them as well? Where does it end?
Where it should end is with humans creating engineered (whether genetic-engineered, or using fungi, etc. is irrelevant) foods and materials such that we don't need to be farming, brutalizing, and killing animals and plants on industrial scales, deforesting vast regions to graze cattle, etc.. We are likely generations away from that, but it does seem to be the direction we're headed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but I do always feel weird when I hear any living thing called effectively a thoughtless automaton. I feel very weird about this too. This de facto assumption that organisms are mechanisms first, that "higher-order" experiences we are familiar with as humans are at best "emergent" from these mechanisms--I wish people would understand that this is fundamentally as much a belief system , an article of faith, as the m…
Occam's razor does support the mechanistic view. It is certainly necessary to explain the entire world, and it is sufficient to explain intelligence. So by Occam's razor we should accept it is the best explanation of intelligence. That doesn't mean we have to give up on understanding the mechanism. Nor does it mean we shouldn't try to find out if it isn't a sufficient explanation. But calling it an unsupported belief…
I agree it would be going too far to call it an unsupported belief system. I don't think I implied that it's unsupported, but it is a belief system. My point is that even with support, the underlying, unproven or unprovable assumptions should not be glossed over.
I'm skeptical that we have a mechanistic explanation of intelligence. I think we have sensible-but-unproven hypotheses, partially supported by observations, for how intelligence might evolve/arise. There's a lot of hand-waving between mechanistic principles and an outcome of general intelligence. One can imagine Occam's razor applying, if the hand-waving eventually resolves to something coherent. Until then, it's a combination of good science and fantasy.
Intelligence is just one of many human experiences that are believed/assumed to have mechanistic explanations. We should be careful to recognize the assumptions, however sound they may seem, and not turn them into dogma.
> "Since the octopus was not reacting to any existing threat, but rather in anticipation of one, it had demonstrated foresight and planning." The journalist is hopefully misunderstanding a more correct explanation by the scientists. That most certainly isn't demonstration of foresight and planning. Nature is perfectly capable of encoding that sort of information as an instinctual response. Something like [trying to s…
The author (Toomey) is Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he teaches courses in writing and in the history of science.