7 ms·
No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve. Sig
by 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 agoUnless 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 agoDefinition 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 agoA lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?
- lngnmn 9y agoYes, 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 agoYou'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 agoTo 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 agoThose are good questions with unknown answers. Another good question is "what people are thinking?"
- _dps 9y agoGoogle 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 agoGoogle 'belief' and 'idea' too.
- yulker 9y agoIs this the clinical or technically precise definition of what thinking is? Or is it your own definition?
- sgt101 9y agoIf 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 agoCan 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 agoDoes 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 agoYou 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 agoYes. 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 agoWhy don't you just call what you are talking about "language", instead of contradicting what literally everyone else means by "thinking"?
- EliRivers 9y agoThinking 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 agoCitation needed.
- 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 agoIt'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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoHey, 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 agoI 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 agoExactly. 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 agoHonestly, 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 agoYour 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 agoWhy does thinking require language? Besides for you defining it as such. Ancient Inuits may have said flying requires feathers.
- EliRivers 9y agoAH, 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 agoI 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".