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Author Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O  (Read 13000101 times)

scriver

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138090 on: September 18, 2018, 12:46:57 pm »

"Babies are cute" is an instinctual reflex, a visceral feeling, how you interpete it is an opinion, the feelings are present BEFORE your self-representation with linguistic tools.

So are all my opinions too though.
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138091 on: September 18, 2018, 12:56:34 pm »

-snip-
« Last Edit: January 18, 2019, 02:35:23 pm by dragdeler »
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138092 on: September 18, 2018, 01:02:07 pm »

Quote
an extremely smart dog

The problem is that a sufficiently smart dog would learn to understand language just by being exposed to it. Painstakingly teaching each animal to learn a list of commands is all that's really possible. Dogs cannot use abstract reasoning to communicate with other dogs in novel ways. A dog can't come up with a sign and teach another dog that sign, in other words. It just doesn't happen.

The point is, it's arrogant to think that they just need us to come along and show them how. If dogs had the mental ability for that, they'd have worked out how to do it millions of years before we even existed.

"intelligent" and "smart" are the wrong metric. Humans don't just have abstract "smartness" that allows us to learn and utilize language, we have very specific custom brain circuitry which allows us to do that efficiently.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2018, 01:12:34 pm by Reelya »
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138093 on: September 18, 2018, 01:09:08 pm »

How many humans have learned to speak dolphin yet?
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138094 on: September 18, 2018, 01:13:46 pm »

How many humans have learned to speak dolphin yet?

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Dunamisdeos

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138095 on: September 18, 2018, 01:14:18 pm »

Far Side is the best.
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138096 on: September 18, 2018, 01:15:31 pm »

Dolphins, like Humans, would have specific brain-circuitry that evolved to deal with their language use. The category error is to assume that some generic "smartness" automatically bestow language abilities. So, there's no reason to expect that just because humans and possibly dolphins have complex languages that cats and dogs can be taught complex languages, even above-average intelligence cats and dogs.

dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138097 on: September 18, 2018, 01:25:31 pm »

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« Last Edit: January 18, 2019, 02:35:16 pm by dragdeler »
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Dunamisdeos

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138098 on: September 18, 2018, 01:35:22 pm »

The very interesting argument for free will/no free will aside, that is a poor example against because I can choose to eat anyway even though my stomach hurts.

Also, intelligence refers to the ability to retain and utilize knowledge in a practical fashion, so saying that a cat is not intelligent enough to use language because it lacks the ability to retain and comprehend its purpose is a valid statement.
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138099 on: September 18, 2018, 01:52:16 pm »

Quote
if we did teach some rare specimen to use some language, and that if there is a huge mass of animals that understand some language. They could theoretically. I agree with category error, but in our pipedreams, we were asking for a PERSON, weren't we ?

Yeah we were talking about whether they can be person-ized. But how does rote-teaching a large number of dogs to sit, fetch, beg or even 165 commands (which is supposedly how many distinct words a very smart dog can learn) make them "people" any more than they are now?

Memorizing a bunch of words and having been painstakingly trained to do a specific action for each one is only a crude zombie-like imitation of the type of language manipulation skills that we'd be talking about for a reasonable definition of "person" that does not already include dogs. Dogs are already a "person" in the sense that they are sentient beings.

The more rigorous definition of "person", as a being that can conceptualize it's own existence as a member of a society and make decisions appropriately, isn't approachable no matter how many individual words a creature can be taught to memorize. That needs abstract thinking.

Some examples given for animal abstract thinking could be correct, but some of them are easily debunked based on what we know about hard-wired human thinking.

For example, the first example given for "abstract thinking" in dogs, is that dogs can recognize a dog of any breed, so dogs must have some abstract cognitive notion of dog-ness. However, humans have a specific neural circuit that exists to recognize human faces, and humans who have just that neural circuit damaged have a recognized disability where cannot recognize other despite otherwise being very intelligent and accomplished in other areas of their lives. This proves that the mental task of identifying a fellow human isn't due to abstract reasoning skills, it's due to custom circuitry that evolved for that single purpose.

Hence, dogs almost certainly also use hard-wired circuits that are designed to recognize fellow dogs, rather than using abstract thought to determine this. There's no reason to believe it's a rational abstract thought process behind the ability, because that specific ability in humans is not determined by rational abstract thought processes.

When humans who've lost the face-recognition subroutine try and recognize a face, they're trying to do it through using abstract reasoning against the flow of raw sensory data, and they do so really badly. What this shows is that brains very rarely deal with raw sensory data, they deal with data in forms that have been manipulated by custom brain circuitry that evolved over millions of years for specific tasks. Teaching a non-language animal human language is like the face-blindness person trying to recognize faces. The animal doesn't lack "intelligence" they lack the custom circuitry that allows even the dumbest humans to do this processing.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2018, 02:20:43 pm by Reelya »
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LordBaal

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138100 on: September 18, 2018, 02:07:17 pm »

Don't dogs know that other dogs are dogs by scent?
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138101 on: September 18, 2018, 02:08:22 pm »

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« Last Edit: January 18, 2019, 02:35:08 pm by dragdeler »
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138102 on: September 18, 2018, 02:22:55 pm »

I already said that dogs can be called a person now.

The original point I was replying to was that by teaching them language we can make them a "person". I didn't make that choice of term. Obviously, any sentient being can be said to be a person already, so whatever the original poster who said "person" in this thread meant was clearly something different to that.

In that case, we're clearly talking about something other than concrete thinking. For example, could you teach a dog that there are 7 days in a week, and that today is Wednesday and have them just infer that tomorrow is Thursday from a set of rules?
« Last Edit: September 18, 2018, 02:34:30 pm by Reelya »
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dragdeler

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138103 on: September 18, 2018, 02:32:25 pm »

-snip-
« Last Edit: January 18, 2019, 02:35:00 pm by dragdeler »
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Reelya

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Re: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O
« Reply #138104 on: September 18, 2018, 02:37:40 pm »

My main point was about animal education, I didn't comment on anything neanderthal-related.

Summarizing my main points: a lot of the human stuff we assume we can do "because I is smart" is in fact customized brain circuitry that filters out all the raw sensory data, and humans who have to deal with the raw data due to brain damage are quickly overwhelmed and "intelligence" is of no use. This goes for face-recognition and almost certainly for language processing. This explains why you get heaps of otherwise dumb-as-rocks people who have quite advanced language processing skills, and why you get examples of super-intelligent people who are terrible at language processing (those brain centers aren't working properly). Animals who haven't evolved to do language processing must process the raw data using conscious reasoning, and conscious reasoning isn't sufficient for the task, even in humans.
« Last Edit: September 18, 2018, 02:41:43 pm by Reelya »
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