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Author Topic: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)  (Read 79581 times)

Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #480 on: September 28, 2019, 08:24:45 pm »

Quote from: www.rebekkahniles.com › 2012/03 › word-box-sapience-vs-sentience
"Sapience," noun of sapient, is the ability to think, and to reason. It may not seem like much a difference, but the ability to reason is tied more closely to sapience than to sentience. Most animals are sentient, (yes, you can correctly say your dog is sentient!) but only humans are sapient.

How would one know if other animals could reason? What does thinking with reasoning look like on an fMRI vs non reasoning thinking?
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Telgin

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #481 on: September 28, 2019, 08:50:41 pm »

I doubt anyone can provide a rigorous definition of sapience, but it's vaguely just going to be the thing that separates us from animals, whatever you wish that to be.  And yeah, even that's poorly defined since things like many apes straddle the line or are even on our side of the line.

I haven't read the article so I don't know what the article is even arguing, but I do at least approve of people educating on the difference between the words sentience and sapience.  It bugs me irrationally when people get them mixed up.
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Qassius

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #482 on: September 28, 2019, 08:54:40 pm »

Quote from: www.rebekkahniles.com › 2012/03 › word-box-sapience-vs-sentience
"Sapience," noun of sapient, is the ability to think, and to reason. It may not seem like much a difference, but the ability to reason is tied more closely to sapience than to sentience. Most animals are sentient, (yes, you can correctly say your dog is sentient!) but only humans are sapient.

How would one know if other animals could reason? What does thinking with reasoning look like on an fMRI vs non reasoning thinking?
We can look at brain activity, but we can't know if there is cognition occurring. EEGs and what have you could give us a detailed look at activity, but we can never know what exactly is going on. This is where the definition of reason comes into play, does brain activity in the frontal lobe or an analog truly display value judgments being made? Can reason occur without such structures as we understand them in humans?

We might say a dog has some rudimentary sense of ethics (and therefore reason/sapience?), but when do we distinguish a dog feeling bad after knowing it did something its owner didn't like and reasoning that they did an immoral act? Then one must wonder whether such a distinction is even important.
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #483 on: September 28, 2019, 09:07:32 pm »

So we can't know, and we tend to assume we are "better" in some way because we like to think we are different? Sounds like humans to me, there was a point where we thought we were unlike animals and were seperate fromthem. What if we think we are better because we developed agriculture? Ants and termites do agriculture too? I wonder if they think similarly about other arthropods? Though a colony of ants/termites is more like a multibodily entity, like how humans are multicellular organisms, the queens and drones act as the "gametes" of the "body" while the workers are like somatic cells. Selection happening on the colonial level rather than the individual level, called "colony selection"

This gets me thinking, are humans entering something similar with cultural selection? I don't think we are there yet because most individuals have the ability to reproduce. Eusociality is interesting to learn about

I found a paper talking about how eusociality may have evolved more than once in wasps
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Reelya

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #484 on: September 29, 2019, 12:20:19 am »

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ethical-dog/

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EVERY DOG OWNER knows a pooch can learn the house rules—and when she breaks one, her subsequent groveling is usually ingratiating enough to ensure quick forgiveness. But few people have stopped to ask why dogs have such a keen sense of right and wrong. Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates regularly make the news when researchers, logically looking to our closest relatives for traits similar to our own, uncover evidence of their instinct for fairness. But our work has suggested that wild canine societies may be even better analogues for early hominid groups—and when we study dogs, wolves and coyotes, we discover behaviors that hint at the roots of human morality.

Morality, as we define it in our book Wild Justice, is a suite of interrelated other-regarding behaviors that cultivate and regulate social interactions. These behaviors, including altruism, tolerance, forgiveness, reciprocity and fairness, are readily evident in the egalitarian way wolves and coyotes play with one another. Canids (animals in the dog family) follow a strict code of conduct when they play, which teaches pups the rules of social engagement that allow their societies to succeed. Play also builds trusting relationships among pack members, which enables divisions of labor, dominance hierarchies and cooperation in hunting, raising young, and defending food and territory. Because this social organization closely resembles that of early humans (as anthropologists and other experts believe it existed), studying canid play may offer a glimpse of the moral code that allowed our ancestral societies to grow and flourish.

If a dog is groveling to be forgiven for doing something, this shows a high level of emotional reasoning. They're aware they did something wrong, but it's wrong to say "but they only want to avoid punishment" as if that's the bar for reasoning.

What's going on here is

(1) the dog knows they did something wrong, which shows they're aware of the past, and they seem to be aware of the distinction: once you pooped on the floor, you can't un-poop

(2) they're aware of consequences - which proves they're aware of the future, too, which means they can imagine themselves in the future, and things happening to them, such as being smacked, and they wish for that not to happen.

(3) they know that you are the punisher, so they know that you know that they did something wrong. But ... importantly they know that you're not always the punisher. Even when you have that rolled up newspaper in your hands they're thinking about possible futures.

(4) the groveling behavior indicates that they're aware that their behavior can affect your behavior, so that proves that they understand social consequences and that they can affect the future, by affecting your emotional state, which means you won't actually whack them with the newspaper.

So they're aware of possible futures and they're reasoning on the best way to select the future they want, and they've decided that manipulating you emotionally is the best way to action that. Sounds pretty intelligent to me.
« Last Edit: September 29, 2019, 12:28:08 am by Reelya »
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #485 on: September 29, 2019, 02:56:11 am »

Yes. I think some humans have the habit of assuming only humans are intelligent. I always find this odd. Lots of animals have brains. Nematodes aren’t born knowing which bacteria are good or bad, they learn by experience
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dragdeler

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #486 on: September 29, 2019, 05:27:14 am »

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« Last Edit: November 23, 2020, 07:58:48 pm by dragdeler »
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #487 on: September 29, 2019, 12:09:09 pm »

We might say a dog has some rudimentary sense of ethics (and therefore reason/sapience?), but when do we distinguish a dog feeling bad after knowing it did something its owner didn't like and reasoning that they did an immoral act? Then one must wonder whether such a distinction is even important.


Ultimatively, there is no morality, only positive and negative reinforcement. To me it is without a question that mammals and most birds have sapience, actually it's a much better word than conscience consciousness, which is by definition allready contentious in a human setting. I wouldn't say reason though, I think by that we strictly imply dialectic. But there are even cultures (which is the continuation of evolution by other means) besides the human ones; the thing is they're difficult to spot because they all take place entirely non-verbally and as such are obviously prehistoric. Who knows who would have invented scripture second if it wasn't for apes.
Yes. But what do you mean by dialectic reasoning? It’s possible to think without saying what is being thought, it’s possible to reason without saying the path for the reasoning. I don’t know what dialectic reasoning is, I thought it might have had something to do with dialog. About scripture, that is symbols, right? I wonder if it would be possible for humans to teach other animals that symbols can mean things, and maybe they could produce symbols as representations of objects AKA writing? Just thoughts
« Last Edit: September 29, 2019, 12:11:30 pm by Naturegirl1999 »
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dragdeler

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #488 on: September 29, 2019, 12:34:21 pm »

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« Last Edit: November 23, 2020, 07:58:53 pm by dragdeler »
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #489 on: September 29, 2019, 12:45:44 pm »

We allready did, there are apes that use sign language, other have been to taught to use a keyboard with about 300 words on it. (kanzi the chimpanzee, koko the gorilla etc)


Quote
It’s possible to think without saying what is being thought, it’s possible to reason without saying the path for the reasoning.

I see what you mean but I would classify that more as intuition, in the sense that in one is familiar enough with the thought process to not having to "think each word out loud"... It's fair to assume that hawks do something comparable when they dive. Dialectic would be more like the hawk talking to itself: it is as if my body was built to do this, so why should I ever bother to hunt any other way?
Ah
We can’t read thoughts from entities other than ourselves, so we can’t say for sure other animals don’t think to themselves in this manner.
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Naturegirl1999

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dragdeler

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #491 on: September 29, 2019, 01:54:26 pm »

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« Last Edit: November 23, 2020, 07:58:58 pm by dragdeler »
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Reelya

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #492 on: October 17, 2019, 05:06:28 am »

This is kinda interesting:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-zoo-blob/paris-zoo-unveils-the-blob-an-organism-with-no-brain-but-720-sexes-idUSKBN1WV2AD

Quote
PARIS (Reuters) - A Paris zoo showcased a mysterious new organism on Wednesday, dubbed the “blob”, a yellowish unicellular small living being which looks like a fungus but acts like an animal.

This newest exhibit of the Paris Zoological Park, which goes on display to the public on Saturday, has no mouth, no stomach, no eyes, yet it can detect food and digest it.

The blob also has almost 720 sexes, can move without legs or wings and heals itself in two minutes if cut in half.

“The blob is a living being which belongs to one of nature’s mysteries”, said Bruno David, director of the Paris Museum of Natural History, of which the Zoological Park is part.

“It surprises us because it has no brain but is able to learn (...) and if you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David added.

The blob was named after a 1958 science-fiction horror B-movie, starring a young Steve McQueen, in which an alien life form - The Blob - consumes everything in its path in a small Pennsylvania town.

“We know for sure it is not a plant but we don’t really if it’s an animal or a fungus,” said David.

“It behaves very surprisingly for something that looks like a mushroom (...) it has the behavior of an animal, it is able to learn.”

It's this stuff btw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physarum_polycephalum

Quote
Physarum polycephalum has been shown to exhibit characteristics similar to those seen in single-celled creatures and eusocial insects. For example, a team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers have shown P. polycephalum can solve the Shortest path problem. When grown in a maze with oatmeal at two spots, P. polycephalum retracts from everywhere in the maze, except the shortest route connecting the two food sources. When presented with more than two food sources, P. polycephalum apparently solves a more complicated transportation problem. With more than two sources, the amoeba also produces efficient networks. In a 2010 paper, oatflakes were dispersed to represent Tokyo and 36 surrounding towns. P. polycephalum created a network similar to the existing train system, and "with comparable efficiency, fault tolerance, and cost". Similar results have been shown based on road networks in the United Kingdom and the Iberian peninsula (i.e., Spain and Portugal). Some researchers claim that P. polycephalum is even able to solve the NP-hard Steiner minimum tree problem.

EDIT: it's also unclear what they mean by "720 sexes". This is a single-celled organism. How do they even define a sex for one of those?
« Last Edit: October 17, 2019, 05:15:17 am by Reelya »
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Naturegirl1999

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #493 on: October 17, 2019, 05:20:57 am »

Reuters is a news organization, not a scientific journal. I'm not sure where they got "sexes" either. Time to check sources...I can't find their source list, do they have sources?
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dragdeler

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Re: Science Thread (and !!SCIENCE!! Thread!)
« Reply #494 on: October 17, 2019, 05:27:52 am »

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« Last Edit: November 23, 2020, 07:59:02 pm by dragdeler »
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