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Arguably, a game that relied on increasingly complex arithmetic could become viral among birds. Geometry (lines and circles) would be next. When we school hors
by motohagiography 4y ago
Arguably, a game that relied on increasingly complex arithmetic could become viral among birds. Geometry (lines and circles) would be next.
When we school horses, we use circles and straight lines because those things don't exist in nature, but horses can learn them with instruction and repetition, and then we use those figures as a foundation or baseline to refine subtle deviations from the figures so that the horse can learn to interpret our intent from our physical cues in the context of a baseline figure. What dressage is really is the construction of a physical language with another being who has a completely different brain and existential experience, from the first principles of geometry. People go on about horse dancing and spiritual woo, but almost two decades in, this is what I have been able to derive from it. Master riders will tell you it's a science as much as an art, and it usually takes many years to sink in why they would say that, but like constructing a language with birds to teach each other, while they may not articulate it, with guidance, animals can absolutely experience and percieve geometry, and based on that shared apprehension, we can build on it to relate in very sophisticated ways that come to resemble language.
The idea isn't crazy. I practice it more days than not. :)
- IIAOPSW 4y agoI suppose its only fair that crows should understand geometry in terms of "how the man walks".
- motohagiography 4y agoI'd say if you could get a crow to fly in a circle, and then in a straight line, that is sufficient to establish your intentions of: right and left, bigger and smaller, longer and shorter, forward and sideways, faster and slower, more and less, listening and freely, and then combinations of those. Given that's 16 instructions in all, in 8 groups of a-or-b, a language that formed programs of combinations of each of them (without memory or state) would be pretty rich. Once you add abstraction to that, (something we're not sure about in animals), we're into some very complex behaviour and instructions in a way of relating. Communication with animals is very achievable in this model. What's not clear is how to express higher order abstractions in the model once you have those basics built up from geometry. Assistance dogs are "trained," to do tasks for their owners like opening doors, assisting with dressing, finding objects, etc. These are abstractions over the above instructions, and combined with them, we're well into relating to another being anyway.
- IIAOPSW 4y agoNot going to lie I was just making a pun on geometry phrase "how the crow flies". The short answer is that to build abstractions, you need words that represent sets of possibilities, not just specific things. words like "anywhere", "anyone", "somewhere" etc. You also need some set-builder logic words like negation and union and disjunction. Basically you need to be able to substitute a regex matching pattern in place of a literal specific shape instruction. The genius of language is that it can transmit partial information just as well as the whole.