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A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

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Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#81
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Children are literally little humans. They have enormous brainpower, they just lack the experience they need to use it properly.

That and their brains are insanely malleable. As someone who contemplated learning Irish as an adult, I have to say that their brains can do things ours simply can't. And I learned Hungarian (and Portuguese) as a kid.

Adults can actually learn language much more quickly then children in my opinion.

The only issue is that there’s a critical window in there that shapes your accent.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#82
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…

> I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony. I don't think that cephalopods are arrogant when they eat other creatures, although I suppose they may be gluttonous. Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?

>Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?

For some, morality isn't fungible or based on the morality or others (animal or human). If someone is a thief and willing to rob you, does that mean its okay for you to steal from them? It seems reasonable to me to hold a personal code of ethics and standards that isn't dependent (or at all related) to the ethics and standards of others (if any).

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#83

As someone who trained my dog to sit and wait for me outside a shop while I got coffee, which was a similar delayed gratification and I didn't even use treats, I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.

> I think science might be underestimating just how stupid human children are.

Human children are stupid by design (well, evolution). Language, culture, and technology are overtaking genetics as the more effective information transfer mechanism. As we shed our instincts to make room for learning, human children will be born more and more stupid over time. It's a trade-off: At the same time, human adults will have greater capacity for smarts. It is the increasing stupidity at birth which enables us to learn so much into adulthood.

Animals without developed language haven't been able to afford this progress. They are smarter than human children from birth, but are unable to learn as much. So while your dog outperforms a human child at waiting outside the store, it will never have the capacity for art, mathematics, nor engineering, no matter how hard you train it. Humans on the other hand, can be trained quite a bit.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent commenter has probably, like me, heard that pigs are remarkably intelligent. I haven't heard the same of cows. That may very well be a skewed understanding, but it's likely why they choose that grouping.

Personally, I don’t see cows as very different from dogs. They’re just as social and emotional as dogs are. Intelligence wise, dogs are probably a bit smarter. But how much, I don’t know, they don’t seem that radically different.

I suspect you have more experience than I, and I know my imagining is poorly founded!

I think pigs have just received enough good PR recently that they come to mind as another particularly intelligent animal.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I don’t see cows as very different from dogs. They’re just as social and emotional as dogs are. Intelligence wise, dogs are probably a bit smarter. But how much, I don’t know, they don’t seem that radically different.

I suspect you have more experience than I, and I know my imagining is poorly founded! I think pigs have just received enough good PR recently that they come to mind as another particularly intelligent animal.

Maybe the size also helps? Closer to a dog or a cat, cows are not.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The realization that animals in factory farms have a capacity to suffer, and are undoubtedly subjected to this suffering for the majority of their lives, has made me cut my meat consumption from every meal to occasionally on the weekends. Would love to cut it out completely but have not mustered the willpower to do so. I think personally owning a pet dog and realizing they aren't biological machines simply responding…

What if the suffering could somehow be guaranteed not to occur? Since that seems to be your only (main?) reason to give up meat, would you go back to eating it if the suffering didn't happen? I think the parent comment to yours is more about avoiding meat because of compassion to the intellect/consciousness. Rather than avoiding meat in order to eliminate any suffering that may occur during "production" of it. I'm cu…

Why care about the suffering, but not about the extinguishing of a life? If the moment to moment experience of a thing has value, but the thing's actual existence does not, why should (humane) murder not be legal? I do implore you to wake up -- you are deluding yourself for the sake of the pleasure.

Death is a form of suffering. Whether the creature you kill knows it lives only to die for you, whether it can see and understand some aspect of its cage or not, you took it before its time. It is all the same wrong in the end.

Now, eating an animal that died of natural or uncontrollable causes, or using for-real excess milk or eggs? Sure, fine. But those are not at all sustainable activities at a population level. We have to do things to animals that cause real harm to ever get enough of those products to sell them, even if we treat the animals way better overall. (And it's still better to push for better treatment than to do and feel nothing!)

My own mental backflip: I do still eat meat, because I'm a selfish and horrible person. I accept my complicity in the evil. But I also know my own choices will not meaningfully change demand patterns, so I allow myself the pleasure of the flavours I grew up eating, and try not to dwell on it too much. Even the Buddha was said to eat meat if it was what was served -- but of course, would request not to be served it!

Regardless, I know full veganism is the only actually ethically justifiable choice, and I believe and hope it will one day be the only realistic or acceptable choice for all of us. I will advocate for it (I hope) strongly whenever I can. No being deserves any part of what we do to them for food, and most people have pretty awful reasons to continue to eat meat; often literally at the level of, "animals can't suffer!", or, "humans are a higher being!", which is a mind-blowingly horrific thing to understand people will assert even after being given the evidence. I find the dismissive attitude appalling and try to get friends to at least see it in its real light.

Personally, once I catch wind that the tide toward veganism is beginning to turn, or that we somehow achieved affordable ethically lab-grown cheap muscle+fat tissue meats, I'll gladly turn that page. Or, once the horror again resurges strongly enough to overcome the value of shepherd's pie, thanksgiving ham, or a hamburger.

It's not much of an intellectual position, but it's all I've got. I ask that you at least be honest with yourself: the beings you eat have suffered for your pleasure.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our dog will howl along with some of the emergency vehicle sirens. Remarkably similar to the particular siren that is sounding outside. (We live on a 4 lane parkway an easy walking distance from a major hospital, so we get different sirens from many different jurisdictions. She'll sing (edit: said sign before) along or in back-and-forth with about 1/3 of the distinct sirens.)

She also can sign? That's amazing!

dogs sign walls and trees all the time

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#88
post #35

I agree with the main thesis of the article, stated in the first paragraph. That idea of ”how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence” . I think folks in modern times are less & less prone to thinking animals are ‘dumb’. But 1 or 2 generations ago this was not the case. I think humans for a long time have regarded animal intelligence in an inferior light. Cephalopods have proven to to b…

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…

Most of it is learned behaviour. There is nothing natural about it for children, but conditioning and culture largely makes us who we are as humans.

So I don't see the need to look down on yourself for realizing something new. It wouldn't be new if it was totally familiar. However, the knowledge itself is thousands of years old, and also evolving.

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#89
There are implications of certain recent discoveries. Not to be mysterious, I'm talking about Levin's lab.[1] All cells "think" using the same bio-molecular machinery as neurons. Neurons are just denser and faster.

-> Intelligence is ambient.

All cells think, and all collections of cells (from biofilms and stomatolites on up) think. In computer terms all cells use compatible protocols and processors and the living world is a kind of biological internet ("Wood-Wide Web").

-> All life shares one mind.

Whatever mind is, if you believe it "runs on" the physical substrate of cellular internet, then our minds are not separate from the minds of other living things. This would explain a lot.

When I bring this up people often object that this is anthropomorphism, but don't see it that way. Since all living tissue is intelligent, I see humans as the anthropomorphism of that ambient intelligence of the biosphere.

-> The biosphere is the result of "intelligent design": it's own.

From early on, the evolution of life would have become (more deeply) self-referential through mental feedback, meaning that the advent of intelligence itself becomes a factor in the further evolution of life. Things like the great switch-over from anaerobic to aerobic metabolism and the concomitant massive increase in atmospheric oxygen may well have been deliberate choice on the part of the global mind. In any event, the reductive mechanistic view of "dumb" life is faulty. Earth is Solaris.

Now this changes nothing about evolution. It's still a chemical tautology with no purpose, and adaptive pressure doesn't stop just because cells can think. ("Science does not remove the terror of the gods.") The Earth as a single being still has to navigate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". Gaia is mortal. Part of the reason living systems seem so wildly inefficient (an illusion) is that they are so inconceivably resilient. (Efficiency vs. inefficiency is meaningless in evolution: there is no purpose so there can be no measurement of efficiency.)

[1] "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698

Re: A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed for Human Children

#90
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe I underestimated animal intelligence, and as an extension of that, animal consciousness. I have no proof that animals are intelligent or sentient or whatever. I do however have no reason to assume otherwise. As a result I’ve stopped eating meat almost entirely, and I suspect I’ll eliminate it entirely eventually. I still eat fish and shellfish. I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for dec…

> I struggle to understand how I disregarded animal minds for decades, but I suspect it can be reduced to arrogance, convenience, and gluttony. I don't think that cephalopods are arrogant when they eat other creatures, although I suppose they may be gluttonous. Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals you refrain from eating?

> Why hold yourself to a higher standard than you hold the animals"

This cannot be how you approach morality. Animals routinely do horrific things to each other. Would you ever ask someone that question outside of a conversation on whom we kill to eat?

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