11 ms·

Can we know what animals are thinking?

166 points by _dps 9y ago

lngnmn 9y ago
No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve. Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language. Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.
- _dps 9y ago
  Unless you use an extremely narrow definition of "thinking" (yours is not commonly accepted among animal researchers, and is IMO too tautological to be useful), this is clearly disproven by decades of animal cognition research. Animals can form future-oriented plans, engage in risk management activities, can remember inventories of items stored in safekeeping locations, develop "cultural" dialects to their vocalization patterns, and much more. You can find a good start on the current state of the research here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
  - lngnmn 9y ago
    Definition of thinking, like definition of sex, or any other biological trait cannot be broadened. That would yield nonsense. Thinking implies language. Without language it is feeling. Period. Learning from experience, map making and even planning, as one might see in case of machine learning and other branches of AI, does not require thinking. It is a lower level of activity, relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.
    - Simon_says 9y ago
      A lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?
      - lngnmn 9y ago
        Yes, it is another kind of activity. To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".
        Simon_says 9y ago
        You're coming to this discussion with an unjustified assertion that thinking is very narrowly defined and then circularly showing that other kinds of things that neurons can do are not "thinking" because they don't fit the definition. In the huge space of all possible kinds of cognition, humans have only ever occupied the tiniest sliver. There's modes of thought out there that we can't conceive of.
        psyc 9y ago
        To ask "what is this mammal thinking" is self-evidently closer to asking "what is that mammal thinking" than it is to "what is that computer thinking".
        srtjstjsj 9y ago
        Those are good questions with unknown answers. Another good question is "what people are thinking?"
    - _dps 9y ago
      Google gives me the following two definitions for "think": 1. have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something. 2. direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas Neither seems to mention language as a pre-requisite. In any case, you seem to have strong beliefs contrary to my understanding of animal research, so I will not bother you further. Have a good day.
      - lngnmn 9y ago
        Google 'belief' and 'idea' too.
    - yulker 9y ago
      Is this the clinical or technically precise definition of what thinking is? Or is it your own definition?
    - sgt101 9y ago
      If a man is robbed of language by some misadventure, then is she robbed of thought?
    - eighthnate 9y ago
      > relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition. You mean like the patterns the puffer fish creates to attract mates? https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU
      - srtjstjsj 9y ago
        Can wind think? https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=is...
        eighthnate 9y ago
        Does wind recognize the pattern? You are missing the part where the female fish see the pattern and decide whether to mate with the fish...
    - csomar 9y ago
      You are being downvoted because you are making strong claims without having anything to back it up. You are free to have your own definitions of things but people like to have the same. This helps in carrying on a useful conversation.
      - roceasta 9y ago
        Yes. To be fair I think most people here want animals to be able to think (and for other humans to think that animals can think) because they want animals to be protected from humans.
    - dTal 9y ago
      Why don't you just call what you are talking about "language", instead of contradicting what literally everyone else means by "thinking"?
    - EliRivers 9y ago
      Thinking implies language. Just plain incorrect. I will now present as much evidence for my statement as you presented for yours: As you can see, it's a pretty ineffective technique and since you're starting from the overwhelming minority position, you're going to have to do a lot better. Everything I'm saying here comes across as passive-aggressive childish bullshit, but in this case it's also true.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Citation needed.
  - lngnmn 9y ago
    Philosophy 101.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      More like Tautology 101: Circular Reasoning.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  > Animals don't think, because thinking requires language and abstract brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve. Animals certainly can think. And they have limited language, certainly not as complex as ours, but they are capable of communicating with each other. Just because humans are much smarter doesn't mean animals don't think. > Look at toddlers to grasp what it means. Toddlers certainly think, though not on the same level as older children and adults. And certainly many animals like chimps, pigs and crows can think better than toddlers. > Animals only feel. If animals only felt and couldn't think, how can they think to use tools? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-crow-nearly-died-out-before-we-knew-it-uses-tools/499724/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-cro... https://youtu.be/DDmCxUncIyc https://youtu.be/DDmCxUncIyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals https://youtu.be/5Cp7_In7f88 https://youtu.be/5Cp7_In7f88
- sddfd 9y ago
  It's quite convenient to think that, because we eat animals. I'm not a vegetarian, I enjoy steak and pork chops a lot. But I think animals, especially cows and pigs, are more conscious of their existence than we like to think. I tend to agree that speech plays a central role in how our thoughts are organized, but I think the importance of being able to articulate oneself /with language/ as a measure of consciousness and intelligence is generally overestimated.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    I don't see how it would be "convenient", since it doesn't seem necessary that an animal be conscious for us to require ourselves to not harm it out of a moral concern. Babies are either unconscious or have a very low degree of consciousness, but infanticide is still morally abhorrent.
    - sddfd 9y ago
      I agree that there is a moral aspect to eating sentient being, whether they are conscious or not. Your argument, however, is mixing the aspects of consciousness, and cannibalism in the form of infanticide. To me, that doesn't seem to be fair.
      - tpeo 9y ago
        Hey, I didn't say anything about eating the baby! You're the one thinking about it. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. What do you find unfair about the example?
- tpeo 9y ago
  I find it funny that you're being downvoted to shit for holding an opinion which actually was quite common in the philosophy of mind, and which hasn't been quite yet superseded. Or at least I guess so, because nothing in philosophy ever really is. The identification of thought (or rather reason) with language was explicitly advocated by Descartes in part V of the Discourse on the Method, where he suggested a test for distinguishing a perfect automaton from a human being. It's a view more often associated with him, but other early modern thinkers such as Locke, Leibniz and Kant made similar statements. But in each case they were also more concerned with abstract thought, rather than just the general information processing that all animals do.
  - lngnmn 9y ago
    Exactly. Information processing is information processing, and thinking is a process which is based on a language. Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc. People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.
    - tpeo 9y ago
      Honestly, I don't think it's such of an issue. If there's a real difference between the kind of information processing that occurs within a cell from that which occurs within the brain, it doesn't really matter what it is called. Of course, the language within any field matters to the practitioners in that field. Things can be as easy or as hard to understand as the strictness and clarity of the language in that field allows it. But what do I mean is that, if any expression in a field ever fell in to such a degree of obscurity as to be said to have "lost all meaning", whatever it described still might be independently rediscovered later on. So meaning isn't something that needs to be formulated into a categorical imperative, or otherwise we might lose it forever. Striving towards clarity and towards a discriminating usage of words is a practical rule, not a moral one. Plus, arguing definitions is never a sound choice.
    - srtjstjsj 9y ago
      Your ongoing mistake is that you are obsessed with a specific word choice "thinking", and not paying any attention to what the word represents.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  Why does thinking require language? Besides for you defining it as such. Ancient Inuits may have said flying requires feathers.
- EliRivers 9y ago
  AH, you again. I think I recall you went off on a long thread about this not so long ago. You posit (without proof) that if a creature has no language, it cannot think, because only the parts of the brain that deal with language are capable of thinking. There is a large amount of experimental evidence showing some animals planning for the future, imagining what other creatures will do based on what they have seen, making tools, saving tools for the future to deal with predicted future situations, solving puzzles they've never seen before (did they learn to solve puzzles they've never seen before from experience?), beating humans in gestalt tests, communicating via sign language (how about those animals? They communicate via sign language; do they think?), and various other things that by any sensible definition are the product of mental processes everyone else here considers "thought". It seems that as far as you are concerned, "thinking" is defined as something to do with language. Everyone else is using a different definition. If you clearly explained your definition of "thinking", perhaps this will turn out to all be a misunderstanding and you're actually saying something completely different. Simply stating over and over that without language there is no thought does not help your case, as everyone else here considers that to be trivially falsifiable by the animals they see doing things that must be the product of thought.
- wetpaws 9y ago
  I believe you never had a cat and did not have a chance to see them expressing complex abstract ideas like "let me out to the patio right now or else".
_dps 9y ago
"No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other" This was a fun read in general, but I think it's particularly interesting to consider some of its implications in the context of trends in AI (to be clear, the article has nothing to do with AI). I think the excerpt above is rapidly becoming true for current generation ML/AI systems (I'm leaving aside the question of qualia [0], since we are still unclear how to evaluate that question even for animals). To the extent the above becomes true, I think it's an interesting contrast to the implied point behind Dijkstra's famous "swimming submarine" analogy: "The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." The submarine "swims", but almost none of that activity could be mapped onto how a human swims. As the structure of ML/AI systems starts to mimic what we believe we know about the neuroscience of the brain, the question of whether machines are "thinking", and what that might mean about thought in general, is very interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
- StavrosK 9y ago
  The question, to me, is whether machines will ever have consciousness, or whether consciousness is just "what it feels like to have a cortex". We assume that machines will have consciousness some day, but what if we had a machine that could do many things as well as a human, but didn't consider itself "alive"?
  - _dps 9y ago
    Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0]. On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to suggest that the "movie playing in your head" would not emerge from any number of transistors and wires connected to each other. On the other hand, it's not clear how you can argue that what goes on in our own heads is physically any different. So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. And if that's the case, it raises all sorts of ethical questions about the creation of artifacts that might (some day) exhibit consciousness. And, of course, there are already many ethical questions about how we treat animals in the here-and-now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
jbuzbee 9y ago
Obligatory: https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d56e747675bfd1a7d4e29306e27d2b32d0_1.jpg https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d...
- ronjouch 9y ago
  Obligatory SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3864 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3864
- csomar 9y ago
  I'd disagree and say that animals do in fact "talk" or convey meaning. I have raised multiple dogs and with time your understand their needs: I want to eat, I want to play, I want to show you something (or alert you of something). These are the three things that most dogs will learn to convey to you. We consider that animals are of a lesser species so that we can take advantage of them without any "legal or moral" consequences. Like we eat animals on a regular basis. We do deadly trial medicines on them. We raise animals against their will (like birds) and cage them.
  - dTal 9y ago
    >We raise animals against their will To be fair, I don't remember being asked either.
leoharsha2 9y ago
No. They don't. Animals live in the moment and understand causal relationships within time and space. They don't abstract their thoughts and form assemblies or sciences or write histories. Though they understand causal laws better than humans sometimes. Hence you can't teach an animal like you would a human. But you can train an animal. This works on habit, not on abstract thought. Both animals and humans can be trained. Both have habit. Humans live by codes and formulas and religions, all are related to thought,animals don't. Man, through abstract concepts lives in the future and the past, the animal only in the present. Man is led by error, animals don't err. Both animals and man are susceptible to illusion. This is how you trap an animal in the wild. You don't led him into capture by lies or falsehood.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  What about the team problem solving experiment ? I remember two monkeys improvising a distributed solution to pull ropes in the right order and time to get access to some food.
- KekDemaga 9y ago
  This crow really appears to be thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop
  - lisper 9y ago
    Great apes too. http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/05/clever-puzzle-solving-orangutans/ http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/05/clever-puzzle-solving-or...
  - dispo001 9y ago
    the body language is awesome
  - raarts 9y ago
    Maybe it only appears to be, but in fact it's some animal form of ML. Hard to say I guess.
b6 9y ago
Whatever the thing or force is that is looking out of my eyes and just knowing, it is also looking out through the eyes of animals, to whatever extent possible. Of course this is non-falsifiable.
nthcolumn 9y ago
Every day walking though the stables I give the ponies some mints. I am fairly certain judging from their behaviors that when they see me they are thinking 'Mints!'. One day, when I found the dog looking excitedly down a drain I said 'Rats!'. Now if I say 'Rats?' she goes and looks. I know she is thinking - 'I lost a rat down there once and I'd desperately love to make its acquaintance again'. I do not think that there is much difference between the way we and other animals think. We get confused in the same way and even subconscious things like 'infectious yawn' see to pass freely to the horse and the dog and back to me. Some people have a hard time accepting that animals do think and whereas I recognize the easy peril of anthropomorphising subjects - I also suspect a political unwillingness and discomfiture in accepting animal intelligence.
gamad 9y ago
I'm always afraid that if I knew what my cat was thinking I'd be disappointed. Like "I wonder if I can kill and eat him?"
- csomar 9y ago
  Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    As someone who gets chased by a dog at least once a month on my daily commute I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me. Maybe a couple are just trying to herd me but I think you underestimate their prey drive.
    - XorNot 9y ago
      A lot of cities have a feral cat problem. Very few have a feral dog problem, because a feral dog problem rapidly becomes a feral dog pack problem, and it turns out a pack of feral dogs is pretty good at hunting people.
      - csomar 9y ago
        Yeah, I live in a third world and the government regularly clean the place out of "aggressive" dogs. I do have dog packs just near my residence and sometimes it's like 7-8 dogs just in front of entry. But they are not aggressive and only pregnant females will follow humans and peg for food. If the municipality doesn't clean the area it would be a "real" danger against kids.
    - csomar 9y ago
      I'm pretty sure they are not (unless it is a pitbull or something). Most breeds of dogs will not attack humans. They are aware of the difference in physical strength. Also, if they are real aggressive, I assume a catastrophe has already happened or is in the making (especially with a child?). The authorities have not intervened yet?
mouzogu 9y ago
I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. To claim that animals do not think has no basis outside of our own condescending perspective. If we cannot prove one way or another then I feel my position is the more rational and should be the default position.
- interfixus 9y ago
  Exactly. I have enormous difficulty understanding how anybody could fail to hold this view.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gruez 9y ago
  >I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. *x* can *y*, as *z* is a subset of *x*, and *z* can *y*. See the issue here?
  - mouzogu 9y ago
    I never said my position was logical, just rational so far as it's based on my limited subjective reasoning.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      Some animal don't have a nervous system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge and some have a system that is extremely simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian . Saying that they can "think" is extending the concept too much, and will not be a useful concept.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    You left out the quantifiers. ∃ x : X . x can y ⇐ ∃ z : Z . z can y ∧ ∀ z : Z . z : X In English: There are X that can y because there are Z that can y and all Z are X. Nothing contradictory there. While it is not always clear what the intended quantifiers are, it is usually best to choose the interpretation that doesn't make a statement trivially false.
Xcelerate 9y ago
As someone who isn't a vegetarian (and who feels guilty eating bacon if I start thinking about it too much), I can't help but to wonder if eating meat will be considered the "barbaric" practice of this generation for future generations. I'm sure previous generations didn't consider their barbaric practices to be such at the time.
- doomslay 9y ago
  God I hope not. People are already ridiculously detached from nature, we don't need to go even further away from nature. I think there is a real movement and push back against all this political correctness and endless 'feelings' based discussion thankfully.
- gregcrv 9y ago
  Some cultures considered the practice of eating animals to be barbaric already more than 2000 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism
- newscracker 9y ago
  You might enjoy watching this comedy mockumentary titled "Carnage". [1] It was available on Vimeo for free, but am unable to find the link. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)
- cryodesign 9y ago
  I think it will be. People of the future will look at this time the same way we look back to when it was accepted to have human slaves. Medicine (and millions of other people) has already proven that we don't need meat to survive. We have plenty of alternatives now. But we are addicted to meat - because it gives us pleasure. But then you have to ask yourself, is it OK for sentient beings to horribly suffer for us[1], so we can experience some pleasure that could be easily achieved by consuming alternative foods[2] and shifting our perception. Consuming meat is also not the best way to efficiently feed the world. Here is what Dr Neil Barnard says about bacon: Power Foods for the Brain (17min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ONFix_e4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ONFix_e4k [1] Earthlings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2oizSsmUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2oizSsmUs (I challenge you to watch this and not think 'WTF') [2] Beyond Meat - great presentation by Ethan Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8jfiaLCPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8jfiaLCPY
danielam 9y ago
While the particularities may be interesting, much of what's said isn't surprising (though for Cartesians, it may be, and the author does throw Descartes' name around a few times). There is a great deal of confusion about this subject and a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). For those who do want some perspective, I recommend starting with Feser's introductory book "Philosophy of Mind" [0] as well as a series of blog posts he's written on the subject (such as [1] and [2], as well as a blog post with a long list of links on the subject and related subjects [3]). [0] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851684786 https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Fes... [1] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.... [2] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-conscious-in-other-news-sky.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-consciou... [3] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-roundup.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-ro...
- _dps 9y ago
  > ... a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). I feel like this is, intentionally or not, aimed at least 80% at my comments :) Would you mind giving me some quick pointers on what the "errors" are? I can assure you that, though I may well be wrong, I have read several books on philosophy of mind and many more on cognitive science research. Despite that I'm struggling to see anything I said that would have been controversial at the time I was taking those courses in university.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    You are not likely to get an answer. This is a style of comment that is quite common in discussions where there are philosophical issues. The defining features are an assertion that someone is wrong, followed by a long list of general references, with the unstated implication that the alleged error will be corrected somewhere within them. The authors of such comments are careful not to take a position that can be debated, and in this case, the comment's author has been especially careful in avoiding giving clues that might indicate specifically what he objects to. This style is also seen in discussions where religion is raised, where it is used to avoid questions like why an omnipotent and benevolent creator thought smallpox was a good idea.
monktastic1 9y ago
For some reason I am reminded of this section from Sam Harris's Waking Up: See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try. Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. The vast majority of us do not even know what we are thinking. I'm not sure there's much correlation with intelligence, either. If this sounds absurd to you, I can only recommend you try out meditation for a while until you see how disconcertingly true it is. One day I hope the Economist publishes: Can we know what we are thinking? The inner lives of our species may be a lot richer than science once thought
- remir 9y ago
  It is quite shocking to realize that we're not the owners of the thoughts inside our mind, even the thoughts beginning with "I" ("I'm stupid", "Oh shit I will be late!", "I hate this fucking job!", etc). We identify with these thoughts, believing we are their originator, but it's the biggest illusion of all.
  - gaius 9y ago
    Are you referring to bicameralism?
    - remir 9y ago
      I'm only referring to my own experience.
- peepopeep 9y ago
  Are you saying there are people who meditate and can free their mind of any thought? I tried this "exercise" and could not "not think" for the life of me.
WalterBright 9y ago
I know what my cat is thinking. He's plotting to sell me to the cat food factory.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
roceasta 9y ago
>Chaser, a border collie, knows over 1,000 words. She can pull a named toy from a pile of other toys. This shows that she understands that an acoustical pattern stands for a physical object. I don't think it quite shows this. Collies and human toddlers use words (and are used by words) without understanding what they're doing or what the meaning of language is. The understanding comes later, growing over time as we attempt to explain our behaviour to ourselves. (Including reading what other people have to say about language.)
- auggierose 9y ago
  You are confusing different meanings of the word "understanding" here. I am sure you too understand many things intuitively that you don't understand in a reflected way.
  - roceasta 9y ago
    Here is the sense I mean to convey. When a fridge light comes on, does the fridge 'understand' anything? Does it know anything? No, the process is just automatic. Objects such as books can contain knowledge without understanding anything because they don't have minds. The design of the fridge embodies knowledge about human needs, for example the need to hand-select food accurately at night. However there is neither understanding nor intuition anywhere inside that cold box about the relationship between the door opening and the light coming on. Similarly, words, which are a type of meme (the type that can be pronounced) can exploit brains to make copies of themselves, without any understanding of this going on in those same brains. Btw, none of this implies that animals can't think, or don't have minds, or that we shouldn't honour them. Actually I honour my fridge too...
- srean 9y ago
  The lines that follow makes a stronger case -- Remarkably, if told to fetch a toy with a name she has not heard before placed in a pile of known, named objects, she works out what is being asked for. Betsy, another border collie, will bring back a photograph of something, suggesting she understands that a two-dimensional image can represent a three-dimensional object.
arthurwinter 9y ago
I find it incredible that in 2017 people still debate if animals can think. You just need to interact with one or more dogs to understand that they think, and in most cases they think much better than humans. Lately seeing what humans did and still do to planet Earth, and what they do to each other based on completely made up topics like religion or plain material topics like skin color is making me wonder if humans can really think, or we just pretend to. I stopped eating animals this year, after I finally realized how cruel the entire food industry is, AND how damaging it is to the environment. If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals, the minimum thing they can do is looking forward preserving and taking care of fellow animals that were not "gifted" more abilities.
- Koshkin 9y ago
  > if animals can think Well, it is not an easy question to answer. First off, everyone would agree that humans, apes, dogs, squirrels, spiders - all "think" in essentially different ways. This is important. Humans, for example, think mostly in terms of the language (words, phrases) - the way they would talk to other people (or post on Facebook, for that matter). Other animals do not do that. From that perspective, computers are closer to humans than animals. Again, this is an important difference that cannot be ignored. It would help if we had different words for these different levels of "thinking", but we don't.
  - aleksei 9y ago
    Can you point to some to research on the subject? I would think it's not at all clear in which manner animals think, be it in terms of a language or not. Even for humans language may just be a layer on top of thought, and in fact there are those who claim not to think in any specific language.
    - gaius 9y ago
      This is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you want to do more reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
blackRust 9y ago
I would always recommend _Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_ by _Frans de Waal_, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-en...
Koshkin 9y ago
What if, on the outside, thinking is a unitary process, similar to (but not the same as) processes in quantum mechanics. When you observe a result (of someone's mental process; e.g. the dog ended up biting you), you could say "oh, I know what you were thinking", but all you know is in fact the current state of their mind, and, just like in a quantum mechanics, that state will persist (the dog will keep trying to bite you) unless you give it (the process) some time to become unitary again. After that, a new observation may yield a different result.
rwmj 9y ago
There's a sci-fi-ish short story in The Mind's I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I) about a robot which scuttles around, when stroked it glows, then when it is hurt it mewls and flashes its lights, and so on. It's meant to question whether we can really know what any other animal is thinking (the machine is supposedly programmed like a regular computer, so we know it has no real feelings). Of course this applies to robots, but not necessarily to animals, where we know they are constructed similarly to ourselves and so likely have feelings similar to ours although there are questions to what degree. It's actually online here: https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of-mark-iii-beast.html https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of-ma...
- nur0n 9y ago
  Basically the animal analog of the turing test?
tanilama 9y ago
What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.
- roceasta 9y ago
  Another example: we ask whether animals are 'conscious' or not, or we declare ex cathedra that certain animals are conscious, all the while without being able to explain what consciousness is, or what qualia are, or how these work. If we could then we'd know if the question made sense. I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cetalingua 9y ago
Our biggest problem which has not been solved yet is human inability to ask questions in non-anthropocentric way. For example, when we investigate self-awareness in dolphins we use mirrors (by the way, one recent project failed to replicate the much cited and discussed mirror self-recognition study). We are visual species, dolphins are not, many live in very murky waters with limited visibility.Why are they expected to pass mirror self-recognition test? Can we measure self-recognition without mirrors? It is even worse with cetacean signals. Their system is nothing like human language; to begin with, it is very fast, it is so fast that dolphins could distinguish separate clicks in a sound that consists of 100s clicks which we perceive as one continuous "squeaky door" sound. Then they have 2 areas in their brain associated with auditory processing (unlike in humans and other mammals that have just one). https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.h... On top of that, small corpus callosum means that two hemispheres are more independent in dolphins than they are in humans. This should have at least some effect on how they "think".Finally, "seeing" world through sound, and being able to make 2 (maybe even more) sounds at once independently only adds to the "alien" complexity of cetacean species. Anyone who has seen a spectrogram of a dolphin pod vocalizing will testify: they rarely shut up! There is a constant chatter going on, apart from echolocation. It must have some meaning, evolution would not tolerate such waste of energy for nothing.We have been investigating dolphins cognition and communication since 1960s, we still do not know what they "think" or "say" and it could be partially due to our tendency to compare them to us, expecting something similar.
- CM30 9y ago
  Reminds me of a similar test with dogs. By default, they didn't do well at the mirror test, but then scientists wondered whether they were simply more focused on smell rather than sight. So they came up with a smell based version of the same test, which the dogs passed. http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the-test-of-consciousness http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the-test...
Balgair 9y ago
Almost any 'wet lab' research neuroscientist will tell you that we know more about what the rats and mice are thinking than any other animal, including their spouse ;)
WalterBright 9y ago
People have bred dogs for all sorts of characteristics. But nobody has tried breeding them for intelligence. There a few individual dogs that have vocabularies of hundreds of words. What could be achieved if people selected for that? Uplift?
newhere420 9y ago
Can we know what humans are thinking?
hliyan 9y ago
While I appreciate your sentiment, perhaps we should limit our discussion to the cognitive abilities of animals, and not get side tracked into a debate about their sentience and the morality of killing them for nutritional needs.
ddingus 9y ago
As I was growing up around animals, I had an insight derived from my interactions with a particularly adept cat. She had an affinity with people and made an effort to communicate. Vocalizations confused me. There isn't enough information in them to encode all of her demonstrated use cases. Maybe I could not hear everything. Wondered about that for a while. One day, it sort of hit me: Cats, at least, are missing a layer of abstraction. To them, thought is very nearly action. We experience a similar thing when we reach mastery of some manual skill. You just do it, not think about it, then think about doing it, then do it. Cats do not appear to present a facade like we can and do. They simply present as they are. Given this, a "meow" isn't so much an encoding of thoughts as much as it is a signal to pay attention right now. Like a context tag of sorts. It does also contain some emotional information, urgency, concern, fear, pain. When the cat chooses to vocalize, what it is doing is making its current context known, and marking that as important. A meow near the door may sound almost identical to one by the food bowl, for example. In both cases, say there is urgency: I want out, or I need to eat. We hear the cue to pay attention, and we see the context, may be a tail movement, or a walk or dance, and process the emotion to get a sense of what the cat wanted to communicate to us. We have a layer or few, where how we present may be contrived, or managed and or very different from our other thoughts and state. They don't. Thoughts are actions, their lives are stories. Since that time, I have found my ability to understand cats has improved. When we get it, they will often make more of an investment. The dialog is surprisingly rich. Other animals seem to do similar things. Body language is significant. How they position themselves, where they do that, dancing, other things all contribute to what can be fairly complex expressions. They are similar to us. They think their thoughts, they feel a lot of things, they bond, and they often can make plans, and or understand a lot of the world around them. Much of their thought appears to be spatial, emotional, boundaries, and other necessary things. And when around us, they pick up more, have reasons to do and think more, given we actually do interact with them. Yes they think. And it's complicated for some animals, less so for others. I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster. By faster, I mean their rate of perception seems much quicker than mine. And they have profound capabilities, such as hearing my call amidst so much noise it should not be possible. Maybe their simple nature and speed brings a type of attention we do not generally have. Dogs and smell. To them, a sequence of smells, for example, is like sights for us on a road trip. We go somewhere special, and the dog rolls in some crap. Why? To bring the story back to the pack. And when all the smelling and such is done, the others will know if they too ever go there, or that one member did and stuff happened, such as food, or a hunt. My take on all this. I remain completely unable to understand insects, for example. They are just too different. But most common animals? Yeah they think, they make choices, they have preferences, seek comfort, bond with others, all that good stuff beings are into and or need. Someone would have to make a hell of a case to move me off that understanding.
noiv 9y ago
Can't remember who first said: "A sentence is a formatted thought", however there is a lot of evidence how language shapes our thinking. It even includes distinguishing colors. Maybe we should first find out how we think and then build a theory what thinking is in general.
known 9y ago
Unlike Animals, Humans have Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);
- rleigh 9y ago
  I've seen examples of all these in nature, even studied and discussed them as part of my undergraduate degree. Humanity is not special in any of these respects.
mannykannot 9y ago
Whenever this topic arises, a subset of comments are devoted to differing definitions of 'consciousness'. Here, you can find definitions as diverse as 'only entities capable of language are conscious' and 'any entity that reacts to its environment is conscious'. This is not very helpful - note that neither of the above definitions tell us anything useful about consciousness; if anything, they are ways to avoid discussing the issues that we don't have answers to. I think it is more helpful to put aside the definition of consciousness, and begin by regarding 'awareness' as a continuum, though one that displays some significant qualitative differences across its breadth, such as: Entities that have hard-wired responses to their environment. Entities that can learn responses. Entities that have some sort of internal model of their environment. Entities whose models include themselves. Entities that are aware of their own models, at least to some degree. Entities that believe others have the same capability (i.e. having a theory of mind). Entities that can communicate their models to similarly-capable others. A continuum is probably simplistic (though still useful), given that recent experiments seem to be showing species capable of a mix of the above responses, depending on circumstances. The idea of a continuum seems consistent with evolution: To me, it seems unlikely that, for example, language popped into existence, fully-formed, in one species, but there is a gap in the record: there does not seem to be a living species demonstrating the transition to the level of awareness that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees.

166 points by _dps 9y ago

No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve. Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language. Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.

_dps 9y ago
Unless you use an extremely narrow definition of "thinking" (yours is not commonly accepted among animal researchers, and is IMO too tautological to be useful), this is clearly disproven by decades of animal cognition research. Animals can form future-oriented plans, engage in risk management activities, can remember inventories of items stored in safekeeping locations, develop "cultural" dialects to their vocalization patterns, and much more. You can find a good start on the current state of the research here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
- lngnmn 9y ago
  Definition of thinking, like definition of sex, or any other biological trait cannot be broadened. That would yield nonsense. Thinking implies language. Without language it is feeling. Period. Learning from experience, map making and even planning, as one might see in case of machine learning and other branches of AI, does not require thinking. It is a lower level of activity, relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.
  - Simon_says 9y ago
    A lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?
    - lngnmn 9y ago
      Yes, it is another kind of activity. To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".
      - Simon_says 9y ago
        You're coming to this discussion with an unjustified assertion that thinking is very narrowly defined and then circularly showing that other kinds of things that neurons can do are not "thinking" because they don't fit the definition. In the huge space of all possible kinds of cognition, humans have only ever occupied the tiniest sliver. There's modes of thought out there that we can't conceive of.
      - psyc 9y ago
        To ask "what is this mammal thinking" is self-evidently closer to asking "what is that mammal thinking" than it is to "what is that computer thinking".
      - srtjstjsj 9y ago
        Those are good questions with unknown answers. Another good question is "what people are thinking?"
  - _dps 9y ago
    Google gives me the following two definitions for "think": 1. have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something. 2. direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas Neither seems to mention language as a pre-requisite. In any case, you seem to have strong beliefs contrary to my understanding of animal research, so I will not bother you further. Have a good day.
    - lngnmn 9y ago
      Google 'belief' and 'idea' too.
  - yulker 9y ago
    Is this the clinical or technically precise definition of what thinking is? Or is it your own definition?
  - sgt101 9y ago
    If a man is robbed of language by some misadventure, then is she robbed of thought?
  - eighthnate 9y ago
    > relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition. You mean like the patterns the puffer fish creates to attract mates? https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU
    - srtjstjsj 9y ago
      Can wind think? https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=is...
      - eighthnate 9y ago
        Does wind recognize the pattern? You are missing the part where the female fish see the pattern and decide whether to mate with the fish...
  - csomar 9y ago
    You are being downvoted because you are making strong claims without having anything to back it up. You are free to have your own definitions of things but people like to have the same. This helps in carrying on a useful conversation.
    - roceasta 9y ago
      Yes. To be fair I think most people here want animals to be able to think (and for other humans to think that animals can think) because they want animals to be protected from humans.
  - dTal 9y ago
    Why don't you just call what you are talking about "language", instead of contradicting what literally everyone else means by "thinking"?
  - EliRivers 9y ago
    Thinking implies language. Just plain incorrect. I will now present as much evidence for my statement as you presented for yours: As you can see, it's a pretty ineffective technique and since you're starting from the overwhelming minority position, you're going to have to do a lot better. Everything I'm saying here comes across as passive-aggressive childish bullshit, but in this case it's also true.
coldtea 9y ago
Citation needed.
- lngnmn 9y ago
  Philosophy 101.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    More like Tautology 101: Circular Reasoning.
eighthnate 9y ago
> Animals don't think, because thinking requires language and abstract brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve. Animals certainly can think. And they have limited language, certainly not as complex as ours, but they are capable of communicating with each other. Just because humans are much smarter doesn't mean animals don't think. > Look at toddlers to grasp what it means. Toddlers certainly think, though not on the same level as older children and adults. And certainly many animals like chimps, pigs and crows can think better than toddlers. > Animals only feel. If animals only felt and couldn't think, how can they think to use tools? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-crow-nearly-died-out-before-we-knew-it-uses-tools/499724/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-cro... https://youtu.be/DDmCxUncIyc https://youtu.be/DDmCxUncIyc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals https://youtu.be/5Cp7_In7f88 https://youtu.be/5Cp7_In7f88
sddfd 9y ago
It's quite convenient to think that, because we eat animals. I'm not a vegetarian, I enjoy steak and pork chops a lot. But I think animals, especially cows and pigs, are more conscious of their existence than we like to think. I tend to agree that speech plays a central role in how our thoughts are organized, but I think the importance of being able to articulate oneself /with language/ as a measure of consciousness and intelligence is generally overestimated.
- tpeo 9y ago
  I don't see how it would be "convenient", since it doesn't seem necessary that an animal be conscious for us to require ourselves to not harm it out of a moral concern. Babies are either unconscious or have a very low degree of consciousness, but infanticide is still morally abhorrent.
  - sddfd 9y ago
    I agree that there is a moral aspect to eating sentient being, whether they are conscious or not. Your argument, however, is mixing the aspects of consciousness, and cannibalism in the form of infanticide. To me, that doesn't seem to be fair.
    - tpeo 9y ago
      Hey, I didn't say anything about eating the baby! You're the one thinking about it. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. What do you find unfair about the example?
tpeo 9y ago
I find it funny that you're being downvoted to shit for holding an opinion which actually was quite common in the philosophy of mind, and which hasn't been quite yet superseded. Or at least I guess so, because nothing in philosophy ever really is. The identification of thought (or rather reason) with language was explicitly advocated by Descartes in part V of the Discourse on the Method, where he suggested a test for distinguishing a perfect automaton from a human being. It's a view more often associated with him, but other early modern thinkers such as Locke, Leibniz and Kant made similar statements. But in each case they were also more concerned with abstract thought, rather than just the general information processing that all animals do.
- lngnmn 9y ago
  Exactly. Information processing is information processing, and thinking is a process which is based on a language. Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc. People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.
  - tpeo 9y ago
    Honestly, I don't think it's such of an issue. If there's a real difference between the kind of information processing that occurs within a cell from that which occurs within the brain, it doesn't really matter what it is called. Of course, the language within any field matters to the practitioners in that field. Things can be as easy or as hard to understand as the strictness and clarity of the language in that field allows it. But what do I mean is that, if any expression in a field ever fell in to such a degree of obscurity as to be said to have "lost all meaning", whatever it described still might be independently rediscovered later on. So meaning isn't something that needs to be formulated into a categorical imperative, or otherwise we might lose it forever. Striving towards clarity and towards a discriminating usage of words is a practical rule, not a moral one. Plus, arguing definitions is never a sound choice.
  - srtjstjsj 9y ago
    Your ongoing mistake is that you are obsessed with a specific word choice "thinking", and not paying any attention to what the word represents.
oh_sigh 9y ago
Why does thinking require language? Besides for you defining it as such. Ancient Inuits may have said flying requires feathers.
EliRivers 9y ago
AH, you again. I think I recall you went off on a long thread about this not so long ago. You posit (without proof) that if a creature has no language, it cannot think, because only the parts of the brain that deal with language are capable of thinking. There is a large amount of experimental evidence showing some animals planning for the future, imagining what other creatures will do based on what they have seen, making tools, saving tools for the future to deal with predicted future situations, solving puzzles they've never seen before (did they learn to solve puzzles they've never seen before from experience?), beating humans in gestalt tests, communicating via sign language (how about those animals? They communicate via sign language; do they think?), and various other things that by any sensible definition are the product of mental processes everyone else here considers "thought". It seems that as far as you are concerned, "thinking" is defined as something to do with language. Everyone else is using a different definition. If you clearly explained your definition of "thinking", perhaps this will turn out to all be a misunderstanding and you're actually saying something completely different. Simply stating over and over that without language there is no thought does not help your case, as everyone else here considers that to be trivially falsifiable by the animals they see doing things that must be the product of thought.
wetpaws 9y ago
I believe you never had a cat and did not have a chance to see them expressing complex abstract ideas like "let me out to the patio right now or else".

_dps 9y ago

"No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other" This was a fun read in general, but I think it's particularly interesting to consider some of its implications in the context of trends in AI (to be clear, the article has nothing to do with AI). I think the excerpt above is rapidly becoming true for current generation ML/AI systems (I'm leaving aside the question of qualia [0], since we are still unclear how to evaluate that question even for animals). To the extent the above becomes true, I think it's an interesting contrast to the implied point behind Dijkstra's famous "swimming submarine" analogy: "The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim." The submarine "swims", but almost none of that activity could be mapped onto how a human swims. As the structure of ML/AI systems starts to mimic what we believe we know about the neuroscience of the brain, the question of whether machines are "thinking", and what that might mean about thought in general, is very interesting. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

StavrosK 9y ago
The question, to me, is whether machines will ever have consciousness, or whether consciousness is just "what it feels like to have a cortex". We assume that machines will have consciousness some day, but what if we had a machine that could do many things as well as a human, but didn't consider itself "alive"?
- _dps 9y ago
  Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0]. On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to suggest that the "movie playing in your head" would not emerge from any number of transistors and wires connected to each other. On the other hand, it's not clear how you can argue that what goes on in our own heads is physically any different. So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. And if that's the case, it raises all sorts of ethical questions about the creation of artifacts that might (some day) exhibit consciousness. And, of course, there are already many ethical questions about how we treat animals in the here-and-now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

jbuzbee 9y ago

Obligatory: https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d56e747675bfd1a7d4e29306e27d2b32d0_1.jpg https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d...

ronjouch 9y ago
Obligatory SMBC: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3864 http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3864
csomar 9y ago
I'd disagree and say that animals do in fact "talk" or convey meaning. I have raised multiple dogs and with time your understand their needs: I want to eat, I want to play, I want to show you something (or alert you of something). These are the three things that most dogs will learn to convey to you. We consider that animals are of a lesser species so that we can take advantage of them without any "legal or moral" consequences. Like we eat animals on a regular basis. We do deadly trial medicines on them. We raise animals against their will (like birds) and cage them.
- dTal 9y ago
  >We raise animals against their will To be fair, I don't remember being asked either.

leoharsha2 9y ago

No. They don't. Animals live in the moment and understand causal relationships within time and space. They don't abstract their thoughts and form assemblies or sciences or write histories. Though they understand causal laws better than humans sometimes. Hence you can't teach an animal like you would a human. But you can train an animal. This works on habit, not on abstract thought. Both animals and humans can be trained. Both have habit. Humans live by codes and formulas and religions, all are related to thought,animals don't. Man, through abstract concepts lives in the future and the past, the animal only in the present. Man is led by error, animals don't err. Both animals and man are susceptible to illusion. This is how you trap an animal in the wild. You don't led him into capture by lies or falsehood.

agumonkey 9y ago
What about the team problem solving experiment ? I remember two monkeys improvising a distributed solution to pull ropes in the right order and time to get access to some food.
KekDemaga 9y ago
This crow really appears to be thinking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop
- lisper 9y ago
  Great apes too. http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/05/clever-puzzle-solving-orangutans/ http://www.neatorama.com/2007/07/05/clever-puzzle-solving-or...
- dispo001 9y ago
  the body language is awesome
- raarts 9y ago
  Maybe it only appears to be, but in fact it's some animal form of ML. Hard to say I guess.

b6 9y ago

Whatever the thing or force is that is looking out of my eyes and just knowing, it is also looking out through the eyes of animals, to whatever extent possible. Of course this is non-falsifiable.

nthcolumn 9y ago

Every day walking though the stables I give the ponies some mints. I am fairly certain judging from their behaviors that when they see me they are thinking 'Mints!'. One day, when I found the dog looking excitedly down a drain I said 'Rats!'. Now if I say 'Rats?' she goes and looks. I know she is thinking - 'I lost a rat down there once and I'd desperately love to make its acquaintance again'. I do not think that there is much difference between the way we and other animals think. We get confused in the same way and even subconscious things like 'infectious yawn' see to pass freely to the horse and the dog and back to me. Some people have a hard time accepting that animals do think and whereas I recognize the easy peril of anthropomorphising subjects - I also suspect a political unwillingness and discomfiture in accepting animal intelligence.

gamad 9y ago

I'm always afraid that if I knew what my cat was thinking I'd be disappointed. Like "I wonder if I can kill and eat him?"

csomar 9y ago
Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  As someone who gets chased by a dog at least once a month on my daily commute I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me. Maybe a couple are just trying to herd me but I think you underestimate their prey drive.
  - XorNot 9y ago
    A lot of cities have a feral cat problem. Very few have a feral dog problem, because a feral dog problem rapidly becomes a feral dog pack problem, and it turns out a pack of feral dogs is pretty good at hunting people.
    - csomar 9y ago
      Yeah, I live in a third world and the government regularly clean the place out of "aggressive" dogs. I do have dog packs just near my residence and sometimes it's like 7-8 dogs just in front of entry. But they are not aggressive and only pregnant females will follow humans and peg for food. If the municipality doesn't clean the area it would be a "real" danger against kids.
  - csomar 9y ago
    I'm pretty sure they are not (unless it is a pitbull or something). Most breeds of dogs will not attack humans. They are aware of the difference in physical strength. Also, if they are real aggressive, I assume a catastrophe has already happened or is in the making (especially with a child?). The authorities have not intervened yet?

mouzogu 9y ago

I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. To claim that animals do not think has no basis outside of our own condescending perspective. If we cannot prove one way or another then I feel my position is the more rational and should be the default position.

interfixus 9y ago
Exactly. I have enormous difficulty understanding how anybody could fail to hold this view.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
gruez 9y ago
>I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. *x* can *y*, as *z* is a subset of *x*, and *z* can *y*. See the issue here?
- mouzogu 9y ago
  I never said my position was logical, just rational so far as it's based on my limited subjective reasoning.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    Some animal don't have a nervous system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge and some have a system that is extremely simple https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian . Saying that they can "think" is extending the concept too much, and will not be a useful concept.
- yorwba 9y ago
  You left out the quantifiers. ∃ x : X . x can y ⇐ ∃ z : Z . z can y ∧ ∀ z : Z . z : X In English: There are X that can y because there are Z that can y and all Z are X. Nothing contradictory there. While it is not always clear what the intended quantifiers are, it is usually best to choose the interpretation that doesn't make a statement trivially false.

Xcelerate 9y ago

As someone who isn't a vegetarian (and who feels guilty eating bacon if I start thinking about it too much), I can't help but to wonder if eating meat will be considered the "barbaric" practice of this generation for future generations. I'm sure previous generations didn't consider their barbaric practices to be such at the time.

doomslay 9y ago
God I hope not. People are already ridiculously detached from nature, we don't need to go even further away from nature. I think there is a real movement and push back against all this political correctness and endless 'feelings' based discussion thankfully.
gregcrv 9y ago
Some cultures considered the practice of eating animals to be barbaric already more than 2000 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_vegetarianism
newscracker 9y ago
You might enjoy watching this comedy mockumentary titled "Carnage". [1] It was available on Vimeo for free, but am unable to find the link. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnage_(2017_film)
cryodesign 9y ago
I think it will be. People of the future will look at this time the same way we look back to when it was accepted to have human slaves. Medicine (and millions of other people) has already proven that we don't need meat to survive. We have plenty of alternatives now. But we are addicted to meat - because it gives us pleasure. But then you have to ask yourself, is it OK for sentient beings to horribly suffer for us[1], so we can experience some pleasure that could be easily achieved by consuming alternative foods[2] and shifting our perception. Consuming meat is also not the best way to efficiently feed the world. Here is what Dr Neil Barnard says about bacon: Power Foods for the Brain (17min) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ONFix_e4k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_ONFix_e4k [1] Earthlings - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2oizSsmUs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc2oizSsmUs (I challenge you to watch this and not think 'WTF') [2] Beyond Meat - great presentation by Ethan Brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8jfiaLCPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8jfiaLCPY

danielam 9y ago

While the particularities may be interesting, much of what's said isn't surprising (though for Cartesians, it may be, and the author does throw Descartes' name around a few times). There is a great deal of confusion about this subject and a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). For those who do want some perspective, I recommend starting with Feser's introductory book "Philosophy of Mind" [0] as well as a series of blog posts he's written on the subject (such as [1] and [2], as well as a blog post with a long list of links on the subject and related subjects [3]). [0] https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Feser/dp/1851684786 https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward-Fes... [1] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.... [2] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-conscious-in-other-news-sky.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-consciou... [3] http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-roundup.html http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-ro...

_dps 9y ago
> ... a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). I feel like this is, intentionally or not, aimed at least 80% at my comments :) Would you mind giving me some quick pointers on what the "errors" are? I can assure you that, though I may well be wrong, I have read several books on philosophy of mind and many more on cognitive science research. Despite that I'm struggling to see anything I said that would have been controversial at the time I was taking those courses in university.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  You are not likely to get an answer. This is a style of comment that is quite common in discussions where there are philosophical issues. The defining features are an assertion that someone is wrong, followed by a long list of general references, with the unstated implication that the alleged error will be corrected somewhere within them. The authors of such comments are careful not to take a position that can be debated, and in this case, the comment's author has been especially careful in avoiding giving clues that might indicate specifically what he objects to. This style is also seen in discussions where religion is raised, where it is used to avoid questions like why an omnipotent and benevolent creator thought smallpox was a good idea.

monktastic1 9y ago

For some reason I am reminded of this section from Sam Harris's Waking Up: See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try. Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. The vast majority of us do not even know what we are thinking. I'm not sure there's much correlation with intelligence, either. If this sounds absurd to you, I can only recommend you try out meditation for a while until you see how disconcertingly true it is. One day I hope the Economist publishes: Can we know what we are thinking? The inner lives of our species may be a lot richer than science once thought

remir 9y ago
It is quite shocking to realize that we're not the owners of the thoughts inside our mind, even the thoughts beginning with "I" ("I'm stupid", "Oh shit I will be late!", "I hate this fucking job!", etc). We identify with these thoughts, believing we are their originator, but it's the biggest illusion of all.
- gaius 9y ago
  Are you referring to bicameralism?
  - remir 9y ago
    I'm only referring to my own experience.
peepopeep 9y ago
Are you saying there are people who meditate and can free their mind of any thought? I tried this "exercise" and could not "not think" for the life of me.

WalterBright 9y ago

I know what my cat is thinking. He's plotting to sell me to the cat food factory.

deleted 9y ago
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roceasta 9y ago

>Chaser, a border collie, knows over 1,000 words. She can pull a named toy from a pile of other toys. This shows that she understands that an acoustical pattern stands for a physical object. I don't think it quite shows this. Collies and human toddlers use words (and are used by words) without understanding what they're doing or what the meaning of language is. The understanding comes later, growing over time as we attempt to explain our behaviour to ourselves. (Including reading what other people have to say about language.)

auggierose 9y ago
You are confusing different meanings of the word "understanding" here. I am sure you too understand many things intuitively that you don't understand in a reflected way.
- roceasta 9y ago
  Here is the sense I mean to convey. When a fridge light comes on, does the fridge 'understand' anything? Does it know anything? No, the process is just automatic. Objects such as books can contain knowledge without understanding anything because they don't have minds. The design of the fridge embodies knowledge about human needs, for example the need to hand-select food accurately at night. However there is neither understanding nor intuition anywhere inside that cold box about the relationship between the door opening and the light coming on. Similarly, words, which are a type of meme (the type that can be pronounced) can exploit brains to make copies of themselves, without any understanding of this going on in those same brains. Btw, none of this implies that animals can't think, or don't have minds, or that we shouldn't honour them. Actually I honour my fridge too...
srean 9y ago
The lines that follow makes a stronger case -- Remarkably, if told to fetch a toy with a name she has not heard before placed in a pile of known, named objects, she works out what is being asked for. Betsy, another border collie, will bring back a photograph of something, suggesting she understands that a two-dimensional image can represent a three-dimensional object.

arthurwinter 9y ago

I find it incredible that in 2017 people still debate if animals can think. You just need to interact with one or more dogs to understand that they think, and in most cases they think much better than humans. Lately seeing what humans did and still do to planet Earth, and what they do to each other based on completely made up topics like religion or plain material topics like skin color is making me wonder if humans can really think, or we just pretend to. I stopped eating animals this year, after I finally realized how cruel the entire food industry is, AND how damaging it is to the environment. If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals, the minimum thing they can do is looking forward preserving and taking care of fellow animals that were not "gifted" more abilities.

Koshkin 9y ago
> if animals can think Well, it is not an easy question to answer. First off, everyone would agree that humans, apes, dogs, squirrels, spiders - all "think" in essentially different ways. This is important. Humans, for example, think mostly in terms of the language (words, phrases) - the way they would talk to other people (or post on Facebook, for that matter). Other animals do not do that. From that perspective, computers are closer to humans than animals. Again, this is an important difference that cannot be ignored. It would help if we had different words for these different levels of "thinking", but we don't.
- aleksei 9y ago
  Can you point to some to research on the subject? I would think it's not at all clear in which manner animals think, be it in terms of a language or not. Even for humans language may just be a layer on top of thought, and in fact there are those who claim not to think in any specific language.
  - gaius 9y ago
    This is called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis if you want to do more reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

blackRust 9y ago

I would always recommend _Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_ by _Frans de Waal_, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-en...

Koshkin 9y ago

What if, on the outside, thinking is a unitary process, similar to (but not the same as) processes in quantum mechanics. When you observe a result (of someone's mental process; e.g. the dog ended up biting you), you could say "oh, I know what you were thinking", but all you know is in fact the current state of their mind, and, just like in a quantum mechanics, that state will persist (the dog will keep trying to bite you) unless you give it (the process) some time to become unitary again. After that, a new observation may yield a different result.

rwmj 9y ago

There's a sci-fi-ish short story in The Mind's I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I) about a robot which scuttles around, when stroked it glows, then when it is hurt it mewls and flashes its lights, and so on. It's meant to question whether we can really know what any other animal is thinking (the machine is supposedly programmed like a regular computer, so we know it has no real feelings). Of course this applies to robots, but not necessarily to animals, where we know they are constructed similarly to ourselves and so likely have feelings similar to ours although there are questions to what degree. It's actually online here: https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of-mark-iii-beast.html https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of-ma...

nur0n 9y ago
Basically the animal analog of the turing test?

tanilama 9y ago

What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.

roceasta 9y ago
Another example: we ask whether animals are 'conscious' or not, or we declare ex cathedra that certain animals are conscious, all the while without being able to explain what consciousness is, or what qualia are, or how these work. If we could then we'd know if the question made sense. I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg

deleted 9y ago

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cetalingua 9y ago

Our biggest problem which has not been solved yet is human inability to ask questions in non-anthropocentric way. For example, when we investigate self-awareness in dolphins we use mirrors (by the way, one recent project failed to replicate the much cited and discussed mirror self-recognition study). We are visual species, dolphins are not, many live in very murky waters with limited visibility.Why are they expected to pass mirror self-recognition test? Can we measure self-recognition without mirrors? It is even worse with cetacean signals. Their system is nothing like human language; to begin with, it is very fast, it is so fast that dolphins could distinguish separate clicks in a sound that consists of 100s clicks which we perceive as one continuous "squeaky door" sound. Then they have 2 areas in their brain associated with auditory processing (unlike in humans and other mammals that have just one). https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.h... On top of that, small corpus callosum means that two hemispheres are more independent in dolphins than they are in humans. This should have at least some effect on how they "think".Finally, "seeing" world through sound, and being able to make 2 (maybe even more) sounds at once independently only adds to the "alien" complexity of cetacean species. Anyone who has seen a spectrogram of a dolphin pod vocalizing will testify: they rarely shut up! There is a constant chatter going on, apart from echolocation. It must have some meaning, evolution would not tolerate such waste of energy for nothing.We have been investigating dolphins cognition and communication since 1960s, we still do not know what they "think" or "say" and it could be partially due to our tendency to compare them to us, expecting something similar.

CM30 9y ago
Reminds me of a similar test with dogs. By default, they didn't do well at the mirror test, but then scientists wondered whether they were simply more focused on smell rather than sight. So they came up with a smell based version of the same test, which the dogs passed. http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the-test-of-consciousness http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the-test...

Balgair 9y ago

Almost any 'wet lab' research neuroscientist will tell you that we know more about what the rats and mice are thinking than any other animal, including their spouse ;)

WalterBright 9y ago

People have bred dogs for all sorts of characteristics. But nobody has tried breeding them for intelligence. There a few individual dogs that have vocabularies of hundreds of words. What could be achieved if people selected for that? Uplift?

newhere420 9y ago

Can we know what humans are thinking?

hliyan 9y ago

While I appreciate your sentiment, perhaps we should limit our discussion to the cognitive abilities of animals, and not get side tracked into a debate about their sentience and the morality of killing them for nutritional needs.

ddingus 9y ago

As I was growing up around animals, I had an insight derived from my interactions with a particularly adept cat. She had an affinity with people and made an effort to communicate. Vocalizations confused me. There isn't enough information in them to encode all of her demonstrated use cases. Maybe I could not hear everything. Wondered about that for a while. One day, it sort of hit me: Cats, at least, are missing a layer of abstraction. To them, thought is very nearly action. We experience a similar thing when we reach mastery of some manual skill. You just do it, not think about it, then think about doing it, then do it. Cats do not appear to present a facade like we can and do. They simply present as they are. Given this, a "meow" isn't so much an encoding of thoughts as much as it is a signal to pay attention right now. Like a context tag of sorts. It does also contain some emotional information, urgency, concern, fear, pain. When the cat chooses to vocalize, what it is doing is making its current context known, and marking that as important. A meow near the door may sound almost identical to one by the food bowl, for example. In both cases, say there is urgency: I want out, or I need to eat. We hear the cue to pay attention, and we see the context, may be a tail movement, or a walk or dance, and process the emotion to get a sense of what the cat wanted to communicate to us. We have a layer or few, where how we present may be contrived, or managed and or very different from our other thoughts and state. They don't. Thoughts are actions, their lives are stories. Since that time, I have found my ability to understand cats has improved. When we get it, they will often make more of an investment. The dialog is surprisingly rich. Other animals seem to do similar things. Body language is significant. How they position themselves, where they do that, dancing, other things all contribute to what can be fairly complex expressions. They are similar to us. They think their thoughts, they feel a lot of things, they bond, and they often can make plans, and or understand a lot of the world around them. Much of their thought appears to be spatial, emotional, boundaries, and other necessary things. And when around us, they pick up more, have reasons to do and think more, given we actually do interact with them. Yes they think. And it's complicated for some animals, less so for others. I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster. By faster, I mean their rate of perception seems much quicker than mine. And they have profound capabilities, such as hearing my call amidst so much noise it should not be possible. Maybe their simple nature and speed brings a type of attention we do not generally have. Dogs and smell. To them, a sequence of smells, for example, is like sights for us on a road trip. We go somewhere special, and the dog rolls in some crap. Why? To bring the story back to the pack. And when all the smelling and such is done, the others will know if they too ever go there, or that one member did and stuff happened, such as food, or a hunt. My take on all this. I remain completely unable to understand insects, for example. They are just too different. But most common animals? Yeah they think, they make choices, they have preferences, seek comfort, bond with others, all that good stuff beings are into and or need. Someone would have to make a hell of a case to move me off that understanding.

noiv 9y ago

Can't remember who first said: "A sentence is a formatted thought", however there is a lot of evidence how language shapes our thinking. It even includes distinguishing colors. Maybe we should first find out how we think and then build a theory what thinking is in general.

known 9y ago

Unlike Animals, Humans have Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);

rleigh 9y ago
I've seen examples of all these in nature, even studied and discussed them as part of my undergraduate degree. Humanity is not special in any of these respects.

mannykannot 9y ago

Whenever this topic arises, a subset of comments are devoted to differing definitions of 'consciousness'. Here, you can find definitions as diverse as 'only entities capable of language are conscious' and 'any entity that reacts to its environment is conscious'. This is not very helpful - note that neither of the above definitions tell us anything useful about consciousness; if anything, they are ways to avoid discussing the issues that we don't have answers to. I think it is more helpful to put aside the definition of consciousness, and begin by regarding 'awareness' as a continuum, though one that displays some significant qualitative differences across its breadth, such as: Entities that have hard-wired responses to their environment. Entities that can learn responses. Entities that have some sort of internal model of their environment. Entities whose models include themselves. Entities that are aware of their own models, at least to some degree. Entities that believe others have the same capability (i.e. having a theory of mind). Entities that can communicate their models to similarly-capable others. A continuum is probably simplistic (though still useful), given that recent experiments seem to be showing species capable of a mix of the above responses, depending on circumstances. The idea of a continuum seems consistent with evolution: To me, it seems unlikely that, for example, language popped into existence, fully-formed, in one species, but there is a gap in the record: there does not seem to be a living species demonstrating the transition to the level of awareness that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees.