4 ms·
Like Searle's Chinese Room, but with a cat in it, where observing it or asking it to do anything at all necessarily yields nothing, because it's a cat. Searledi
by motohagiography 5y ago
Like Searle's Chinese Room, but with a cat in it, where observing it or asking it to do anything at all necessarily yields nothing, because it's a cat. Searledingers Catbox?
But more generally I'd ask the question of, if you can train a conscious animal to execute 8 brainfuck instructions (+, -, <, > , etc..), could they also develop a writing system and express higher order languge concepts? Asking why animals don't write assumes they can't, as maybe we just need some kind of intermediate symbolic phoneme concept, as though - like BF for computation, there are some basic unit instuctions that you can combine and parse into anything, and if a border collie can distinguish words for hundreds of different things, I'd wonder if what we're missing is a set of metaphors that represent this underlying core instruction set.
Things like musical notation and knitting stitch patterns are also thought to be Turing complete, so it implies the representation doesn't matter for computation, and computation is sufficient for representing most things, so the idea of finding some underlying instruction set for producing languages across species seems both fantastic yet loosely plausible.
- simonh 5y agoI'm sure you could train dogs, monkeys, or parrots to reasonably reliably perform logical operations. From that you could build a simple processor, but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much. It's not so much getting them to do the tasks, it's getting them all to reliably do them at the same time in synchronisation. Of course as with the guy in the Chinese Room that doesn't speak Chinese, none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing.
- lloeki 5y ago> none of the individual animals would have any idea what the overall system was doing Strike "animals" out, and it sounds like any worker in a big enough org. (Maybe I should stop reading Kafka)
- _jal 5y ago> but the error rate might be too high for it to scale much That just means you need a redundant array of parrots operating in parallel, with a regulator to detect different answers to the same problem and retry.
- VLM 5y agoThere's a classic Charles Stross short story where, to spoil the story, some old men apparently "randomly" playing a board game to pass the time, are performing combinatorial magick to fight a demonically possessed ... well don't want to spoil the entire story. The background of the story is magick is real and based on math and computer logical operations and such. cstross used to post here occasionally and worked as a sysadmin in the olden days. Anyway, aside from fantasy/sci fi stories, the interesting analogy with the story is just because I'm not smart enough to debug the system given no blueprints or explanation, does not mean an anthill is not running some novel and possibly interesting computational problem. Or bees nest or giant fungal mycelia in the dirt or herds of lobsters. There are randomness detection and evaluation algos (distantly related to compression algos) and now that we have big data I suspect the next decades will have those algos rubbed up against big data and we'll discover interesting things about hive insects and what the hive is thinking as opposed to what individual insects are thinking. Or run it on dolphins or ancient human dwelling architecture.
- Ruthalas 5y agoCan you share the name of that short story?
- Zircom 5y agoNot sure of the exact short story he's referring to, but it must take place in his Laundry Files series https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Laundry_Files He also has another series which he just finished that is very good as well about a family with the ability to step between diffrent timelines that's an interesting deconstruction of the trope. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_Princes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merchant_Princes ********Spoilers******* . . . While it starts as starts as a fantasy series, it eventually comes out their magic abilities are remnants of advanced nanotech from an interdimensional empire. Apparently a publisher he didn't like working with had the rights to his next Scifi series, so he had to start it as fantasy to get around the contract.
- VLM 5y ago
- crooked-v 5y agoThere are several Youtube channels where people gradually train cats and dogs to use boards full of buttons (20+ buttons in some cases) to communicate their wants. It definitely seems to work in general but doesn't make the animals any less themselves... one of the funnier examples being a video of a cat repeatedly pressing the "outside" button, staring at a yard full of snow, and then stalking back and pressing the "mad" button several times. Simple compound phrases (for example, "play friend" or "love grandma") are fairly common, but any kind of actual syntax is basically nonexistent.
- thechao 5y agoAll of the videos of these kinds I've seen were clearly fake.
- crooked-v 5y agoHere's one example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGMTesZlKa0Lokb7ZNqOJXQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGMTesZlKa0Lokb7ZNqOJXQ And another: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEa46rlHqEP6ClWitFd2QOQ