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They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some for

They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings. Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value. Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.

treme 2y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY my fav elephant behavior: appreciating music
- tetrisgm 2y ago
  Oh thanks for reminding me!
- kirubakaran 2y ago
  Here's Jazz for Cows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI
complaintdept 2y ago
There's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them and left.
- xenospn 2y ago
  Won’t the sweaters snag easily tho?
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    Would have to be kevlar to snag on something that is 8 ton.
- klyrs 2y ago
  https://globalnews.ca/news/3242559/elephant-sweaters-india/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3242559/elephant-sweaters-india/
hosh 2y ago
I guess my view of consciousness is different -- all living beings having consciousness, but perhaps not specifically in the form of the human mind or intellect. These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some of those.
- r2_pilot 2y ago
  If you're looking for a specific word: umwelt.
  - hosh 2y ago
    I know that word, and it is one way of describing what I was talking about, but it is not what I meant. My actual worldview is a superset of "all living beings are conscious". For example, I don't necessarily think that consciousness emerges from biology or complex interaction of matter. Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of consciousness and the world though.
    - rrgok 2y ago
      Neither I believe that consciousness emerges from biology or other things. I believe it is the other way around: it is from consciousness that emerges everything. Sadly, we somehow confuse consciousness with the identity or individuality (ego). I believe the ego is just one modality (or subset) of consciousness.
ziggyzecat 2y ago
for everything our logic is, it's not our main way of creating value. it's the one way we survive, hand in hand with a lot of ignorance. this planet has far more patience for us than we have for ourselves.
explaingarlic 2y ago
If they can paint, then so can I. And it took me years to learn how to do decent stickmen! Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.
- throwaway290 2y ago
  Sapiogenesis is pretty easy. I heard some people have to make an effort to avoid it.
- ben_w 2y ago
  > we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime My dad was born before the first transistor was built, and died in 2014. When he was born, reasonable people thought they'd never see a nuclear chain reaction, never see supersonic flight, never see space flight, never have men walking on the moon. In his lifetime, even after the invention of the computer, reasonable people thought they would never in their lifetime have a machine beat the best human chess player. One of his specific anecdotes was about "fitting all of Shakespeare's works on a ball bearing". Even as late as 2004, the script writers for "I, Robot" considered it sensible to have that memetic Will Smith line "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" — my dad never saw Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, but he would have if he'd lived the average life expectancy. No matter what exactly it is that you mean by "intelligent" such that it excludes what computers already demonstrate, a lifetime is a long time, and a lot can change.
  - explaingarlic 2y ago
    A lot of the velocity you listed was not as quick as it seems. Supersonic flight is a question of manufacturing processes more than anything; we could always scale engines to make more power, just that making them light while being producible to a specific degree of accuracy was difficult. Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and implemented successfully in 1945. Of course nobody would have thought of it - just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one. It's a question of looking at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings. We didn't put a stupid amount of effort into nuclear fission relative to how much it changed the world - I'm willing to bet that more cost has been put into r&d for office furniture than for the nuclear bomb. Chess is a simple game of calculation, not a sign of intelligence. It merely reflects the ability to calculate, which is the strength of scalable computers. It just so happens that we came up with computers and they work well in this space - there's no telling of things we haven't discovered because we haven't thought to implement anything to do with them. Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis. I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.

treme 2y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qQOGCyRbY my fav elephant behavior: appreciating music

tetrisgm 2y ago
Oh thanks for reminding me!
kirubakaran 2y ago
Here's Jazz for Cows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKDu6cdXLI

complaintdept 2y ago

There's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them and left.

xenospn 2y ago
Won’t the sweaters snag easily tho?
- bamboozled 2y ago
  Would have to be kevlar to snag on something that is 8 ton.
klyrs 2y ago
https://globalnews.ca/news/3242559/elephant-sweaters-india/ https://globalnews.ca/news/3242559/elephant-sweaters-india/

hosh 2y ago

I guess my view of consciousness is different -- all living beings having consciousness, but perhaps not specifically in the form of the human mind or intellect. These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some of those.

r2_pilot 2y ago
If you're looking for a specific word: umwelt.
- hosh 2y ago
  I know that word, and it is one way of describing what I was talking about, but it is not what I meant. My actual worldview is a superset of "all living beings are conscious". For example, I don't necessarily think that consciousness emerges from biology or complex interaction of matter. Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of consciousness and the world though.
  - rrgok 2y ago
    Neither I believe that consciousness emerges from biology or other things. I believe it is the other way around: it is from consciousness that emerges everything. Sadly, we somehow confuse consciousness with the identity or individuality (ego). I believe the ego is just one modality (or subset) of consciousness.

ziggyzecat 2y ago

for everything our logic is, it's not our main way of creating value. it's the one way we survive, hand in hand with a lot of ignorance. this planet has far more patience for us than we have for ourselves.

explaingarlic 2y ago

If they can paint, then so can I. And it took me years to learn how to do decent stickmen! Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.

throwaway290 2y ago
Sapiogenesis is pretty easy. I heard some people have to make an effort to avoid it.
ben_w 2y ago
> we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime My dad was born before the first transistor was built, and died in 2014. When he was born, reasonable people thought they'd never see a nuclear chain reaction, never see supersonic flight, never see space flight, never have men walking on the moon. In his lifetime, even after the invention of the computer, reasonable people thought they would never in their lifetime have a machine beat the best human chess player. One of his specific anecdotes was about "fitting all of Shakespeare's works on a ball bearing". Even as late as 2004, the script writers for "I, Robot" considered it sensible to have that memetic Will Smith line "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" — my dad never saw Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, but he would have if he'd lived the average life expectancy. No matter what exactly it is that you mean by "intelligent" such that it excludes what computers already demonstrate, a lifetime is a long time, and a lot can change.
- explaingarlic 2y ago
  A lot of the velocity you listed was not as quick as it seems. Supersonic flight is a question of manufacturing processes more than anything; we could always scale engines to make more power, just that making them light while being producible to a specific degree of accuracy was difficult. Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and implemented successfully in 1945. Of course nobody would have thought of it - just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one. It's a question of looking at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings. We didn't put a stupid amount of effort into nuclear fission relative to how much it changed the world - I'm willing to bet that more cost has been put into r&d for office furniture than for the nuclear bomb. Chess is a simple game of calculation, not a sign of intelligence. It merely reflects the ability to calculate, which is the strength of scalable computers. It just so happens that we came up with computers and they work well in this space - there's no telling of things we haven't discovered because we haven't thought to implement anything to do with them. Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis. I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.