/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6977202]

Guys how do animals think? I just can't wrap my head around it. Can someone explain it in laymans terms? I'm having trouble understanding how it works. Like can a chimp rationally and independently think with logic? Obviously not a scale like we do but how then?

People say things like African Grey Parrots have the mental capacity of a 5 year old human. Do they mean this figuratively or to an extent?

Not just chimps like pic related either, but all kinds of animals. Snakes, Alligators, birds, chimps etc etc

[Anonymous No.6977205]

How do humans think?

[Anonymous No.6977209]

>>6977205
Fuck man this is mind fucking me. It's annoying. I just can't comprehend something like a snake that is pre-programmed to do nothing but eat.

[Anonymous No.6977243]

>>6977209
"I'm hungry I'm hungry I'm hungry I'm sleepy I'm slee... I'm horny I'm horny I'm horny I'm hungry I'm hungry I'm hungry"

[Anonymous No.6977253]

What do you mean "how?" Like the physical workings of the brain? You know humans are animals too, right?

[Anonymous No.6977256]

>>6977209
The major difference between what you would consider thinking (ie hearing the words I'm typing in my head before my fingers can put them in the post) and how an animal's mind works is symbolic representation.

You can look at a chair, desk and computer, and know what to do. You know what those things are without having to directly say the words, sit down and turn on a computer because you've been taught what these things are and how they work. Animals also recognize the objects in their world, they can be taught how things work, even complex systems (google crows and coins). The difference is humans have language and words for everything. Animals do not. There is no "thinking" in the sense of an internal monologue, just a recognition of the things in the world and a decision making process.

And it isn't that animals cannot learn language, who knows what whale song means, for example, but also just a dog. Teaching a dog to sit on command is rudimentary language. When you say sit, they understand the word, and the action represented by that word.

[Anonymous No.6977263]

>>6977256
Interesting

People who are deaf have no inner monologue and do not hear words but rather think of them and what they do. Are animals sort of like that?

[Anonymous No.6977270]

>>6977202
basically
>muh feels

[Anonymous No.6977275]

When I was 9 I computed the likely probability of the christian god, yaweh, and determined, in the face of eternal punishment that it was unlikely he exists.

I was getting close by 5,

African grey parrots may have the computational abilities of a 5 y.o human, but they do not have the cortical structure and hardware.

A parrot could for sure detonate the planet by activating nuclear weapons, but they could not calculate the value of such an action, in relation to the cosmos and the prosperity of the initial microbial organisms from which we all are derived.

[Anonymous No.6977280]

>>6977275
hardware=organisation*

A computer without the appropriate operating system, and optimization of hardware is orders of magnitude lower than that with these things.

OP, read about the prefrontal cortex, in depth.

[Anonymous No.6977293]

>>6977263
Deaf people think in a more visual manner (think sign language), the thought processes of animals is much more rudimentary

[Anonymous No.6977356]

>>6977202
I've seen enough evidence for:

>Linguistic determinism
>Rational thought in lower mammals and birds

To conclude that all animals posses a rudimentary linguistic capacity that may or may not be based on auditory signals. This capacity is greatly expanded in humans obviously, perhaps due to Chomsky's theorized "unbounded merge" of concepts within the brain, but as >>6977256 said, a key element is abstraction and, I would add, metaphor/pattern matching.

[Anonymous No.6977383]

>>6977202

This question is being answered by connectomics and the various cognitive computing groups, especially IBM's. If you wait a few years you will probably get an actual answer (and may be much less comfortable with eating mammals)

[Anonymous No.6977386]

>>6977383
I don't think so.

[Anonymous No.6977394]

>>6977386
hey, don't get me wrong. I'd be happy if you were ground into MRE chow and fed to syrian refugees. But the kinds of meat-eating I'd like to see more of will probably not happen in my lifetime.

[Anonymous No.6977402]

Schopenhauer wrote fairly extensively on the subject of animal cognition. In his writings he attempted to lay down in concrete terms the difference between human cognition and animal cognition. This he did by separating the various faculties which appear in each.

In the first place, he identified sensibility. This is the capacity for an organism to feel stimulus and react thereto. It is essential to perception, but not (!) identical therewith. Humans share this faculty with all the animals.

He then identified the faculty known as Understanding. This is a most crucial faculty which, belonging to the intellect, translates the rough material of sensation into complex and intelligible mental pictures know as representations.

It is crucial to note again that sensation is not the same as intuitive perception, which is what the Understanding enables. In no way does a world extended in space, enduring in time and causally governed just walk into one's head. Definite laws must be applied to the coarse material furnished by the nerves and sensory organs in order to make their data intelligible as an external world full of objects and movement. From the mere sensation of different points on my hand being stimulated, I cannot form any notion that a rope is being drawn across it. Similarly, from the mere impression of light rays on my retina, I can no way reach the mental image of a table or a chair without the Understanding translating this impression for me.

We share Understanding with all the highly evolved animals that also boast a nervous centre or brain. As far as the world of appearances goes, many animals see as we do: some better (humans are trichromats, whereas many bird species are tetrachromats) some worse (many animals are colorblind and have poor visual acuity). Vision is however not the only way in which spatial relations can be grasped. Echolocation is an example of a completely different system which produces a mental 'image' of the outside world.

(cont)

[Anonymous No.6977403]

>>6977394
You are a fucking pussy if you would stop eating meat just because mammals might have higher thought processes.

[Anonymous No.6977406]

>>6977394
>>>/reddit/

[Anonymous No.6977411]

>>6977403
how fat are you if you get this mad when someone thinks out loud about maybe not eating hamburgers all the time?

[Anonymous No.6977414]

>>6977411
I'm so fat I can actually see my abs. And you are still a pussy.

[Anonymous No.6977420]

>>6977402

do continue

[Anonymous No.6977424]

>>6977402

Thus we share sensibility and Understanding with most animals.

What separates humans from all but the very cleverest animals, he said, is the ability to create representations of representations, known as concepts; and also the ability to manipulate and think through these concepts.

What is a concept? Fundamentally, it is a representation which corresponds to no one thing exactly, but to many things approximately. Under the heading of a concept, we can subsume any number of individual representations: if I think for instance of the concept 'Home, Dwelling' I may picture a house, an apartment, a mansion, or indeed a cave, a straw hut, a treehouse, etc. Thus the existence of a more general concept allows us to identify what is similar in many different representations, and what is unique to each. The more general we make a concept, the less useful it becomes.

The ability to create and manipulate concepts (or concept spheres) he called the faculty of Reason, and it is restricted to human beings and the very cleverest animals. It is Reason which accounts for the astonishing celerity of human cognition, as well as our highly elaborate systems of language.

But Reason cannot operate alone. It requires Understanding to supply it with representations from the empirical world, and it requires the help of another faculty to mediate between it and the Understanding, and this faculty is called Judgment.

Judgment has a twofold function. The first and main function is to mediate, to pass information from the intuitive side (Understanding) to the abstract side (Reason). In this way, intuitive perceptions become abstract ideas, which can then be sorted into the appropriate concept spheres. This process also works in reverse, where the faculty of Reason is looking for a particular representation to suit a concept sphere it has invented.

(cont).

[Anonymous No.6977439]

>>6977424

The second function of Judgement is to allow comparisons between the many different concept spheres generated by Reason. To recognize that one particular concept sphere overlaps another, or that two concept spheres have no relationship whatsoever, is a function of Judgment. From this remarkable faculty alone comes all the things unique to human cognition: creativity, science, art, language, foresight, and so on. For Judgment allows us to exist intellectually in the empirical world while simultaneously holding counsel in another world, separate and apart from this. Thus it may be said that human beings are the only species that possesses a true grasp of causality: whereas the animals merely follow the succession of events, we are able to comprehend why one event follows on another. Schopenhauer admitted that the very cleverest animals might also possess some inkling of these special relationships, but they are mostly incapable of acting on them. In this respect he points to the Yellow Baboons, which will sit beside a man-made fire to warm themselves, but never think to replenish the fire with fresh logs. They are incapable of grasping the relationship between fire and fuel.

The brute, he said, is a prisoner of the present moment. It acts, as we do, on motives; but human beings are different in that we are capable of acting on motives whose object is immaterial, abstract and remote. He saw all creatures being governed by the law of necessity and acting necessarily on motives; but whereas the motives which move an animal must always be physically present in some form or other (the sight or smell of prey, the sound of danger, the feeling of cold), the motives which move humans can be completely abstract. He thus compared the motivation of animals to coarse ropes that drag them along to their next action, whereas the motivations of man resemble fine wires that are invisible to the naked eye.

(cont)

[Anonymous No.6977458]

>>6977439

The ability to deliberate, to sum up one's feelings, to survey matters past and future, is fundamentally what distinguishes us from animals insofar as cognition is concerned.

Humans perform most of their conscious, voluntary thought through the medium of language. Indeed, it is very hard for sophisticated thought to take any other form than this, just it is nearly impossible to communicate anything complex without resorting to language. The faculties of Reason and Judgment are so essential to human life that we are really quite incapable of imagining life without them. The infant, in whom these faculties are still developing, is by all accounts helpless and unable to tell us what it thinks or feels, except by wailing.

To try and picture the way animals think, the best thing is to study how they behave. Simply dissecting and scanning the animal brain will not give many clues, because such examination is essentially one-sided: it takes the third person objective perspective on cognition, which can only tell us very little about the first person subjective.

Many animals demonstrate both astonishing intelligence and astonishing stupidity. The African Gray parrot appears to understand the concept of 0, and also some basic syntax. One such parrot was able, when it was asked how it had gotten from one room to another, to reply that it 'flyed' there, demonstrating that it recognized a past-tense verb must have some different ending than a present tense one. Obviously the nuances of English escaped its appreciation, because we would say it 'flew' there, but this is astonishing all the same.

[Anonymous No.6977588]

>>6977263
I'm not deaf and I think in this manner. I've never had an internal monologue unless I'm typing or reading. I don't understand people who say they think in a language. I feel like they're just translating their thoughts into English and mistakenly believing that the original thought was an English sentence, rather than a concept that they quickly translated.

[Anonymous No.6977659]

>>6977202
When comparisons are made between an animal and a something-year-old child, they are referring to some restricted notion of cognitive ability. With Alex (the parrot), they're referring to things like vocabulary size, object permanence (knowing that things still exist when we can't see them), and counting objects. That doesn't mean it has the same sophistication with emotions, time, imagination, and other things that we expect from children (though it may have some abilities with them).

What it's like to be a parrot — obviously, I don't know. I don't really remember what it was like to think as a five-year-old human.

[Anonymous No.6977764]

>>6977202
Chimps can stop to figure out a solution to a problem, then implement it. If that matches your idea of "thinking rationally" then I guess they can. They don't talk themselves through shit like we often do, but there are plenty of tasks we complete without resorting to words.

[Anonymous No.6977810]

>>6977458
What kind of data would falsify this model?

[Anonymous No.6977893]

>>6977458
>The ability to deliberate, to sum up one's feelings, to survey matters past and future, is fundamentally what distinguishes us from animals

Would you mind clarifying those three things? What distinguishes "summing up" one's feelings from merely "expressing" or "acknowledging" them? What does it mean to survey matters past and future? What counts as deliberating?

These sound like commonplace behaviors like "weighing options to make a decision" and "altering past behavior to obtain a different result" but dressed up to appear uniquely human.

[Anonymous No.6977950]

>>6977403
>i eat meat because im manly

edgy as fuark

[Anonymous No.6977957]

>>6977810
i dunno, mr robot. why dont you suggest something and add to the discussion.

[Anonymous No.6978024]

>>6977957
There's no discussion if it's just a bunch of pseudo-intellectual wank. Real scientists present theories that can be falsified, philosophy would do well to follow suit.

[Anonymous No.6978062]

>>6978024
Real scientists also don't dismiss things they don't understand just because they don't understand them. If only there were any here.

[Anonymous No.6978070]

>>6978062
>Y-Yeah well... UR DUMB!!!
Fuck off, child.

[Anonymous No.6978076]

>>6978070
Mature.

[Anonymous No.6978258]

>>6977458

Not OP but thanks for the interesting read

[Anonymous No.6978267]

>>6977202
They think just like a child thinks who doesn't understand language yet. They have emotional impulses that outweigh each other.

[Anonymous No.6978306]

>>6977403
I thought he was supporting anthropophagy. I don't. Do you know how unhealthy human flesh is?

[Anonymous No.6978351]

>>6978306
its really not unhealthy, at all, as long as you cook everything thoroughly and dont eat the brain

[Anonymous No.6978372]

Exactly like you do, but much more simply (unless you happen to have downs, then only a little more simply) and without language tossed in.

>>6977588
I think this is exactly right. The mind is a big web of associations and concepts of all sorts, language is the uppermost layer and the part we use to linearize our thoughts so we can speak them. Part of the problem might be in definitions though, I think some people think of "thought" as specifically "verbalized thought", though it's easy to confirm that thought goes deeper than the verbal: Surely everyone has had the experience of having an idea or understanding something, but being unable to word it. Or even more simply, forgetting a word for something. You know what you're thinking of, you know its properties, there's no ambiguity, you've just lost the label, which does not entail losing your thought about the thing itself.

[Anonymous No.6978475]

>>6978372
Even with Downs I would think still a lot more simply unless it's very severe, Downies can even get driver's licenses.

[Anonymous No.6978773]

>>6977209
do you have a problem understanding NPCs in a video game? you could program a snake as a finite state machine with enough skill.

[Anonymous No.6978782]

http://youtu.be/MjRdxuByd2g

[Anonymous No.6978811]

>>6977209
It's not "programmed". It knows when it has to eat when it feels hungry, just like you. The difference is that it can't connect that feeling with larger abstract concepts like e.g. "I am hungry. I want to eat. Food is a word, also called "Essen" in German or "Tabemono" in Japanese. It provides you with nutrients. If I eat too much food, I'll get fat, so maybe I'll skip this meal."
or
"I feel horny. I want to fuck. But I don't want to catch an STD, so I better use a condom. My fetishes are also really embarrassing."
Things like that. If it weren't for the rational, abstract human mind you'd be just as "robotical" as regular animals (presumably animals have some limited "willpower" as well).
You actually know perfectly well how an animal thinks because you go through those same emotions every day.