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What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. When I was with

by ajuc 2y ago

What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. When I was with my dog in my parents' house and said "spacer" (walk in Polish) - he was happy and jumped around in anticipation, bringing the leash. He did the same in my grandparents house even though we weren't going to the same place - he just wanted to go on a walk doesn't matter the area. What's your explanation that does not involve abstracting the action from the concrete area and time? Another example - my sister trained our other dog to bring her plush toys on command. She hidden them in house and said "szukaj" (search) and then rewarded the dog with a clicker and/or a treat when the dog brought her the toy. It takes several steps (first you hide the toy very close and then you hide it outside of view). Also you reward the dog with the clicker on intermediate successes like getting the toy without bringing it to the owner. Anyway - one time my sister lost one glove when we were on a walk with that dog. She noticed only when we were returning from the fields. She gave the dog the other glove to sniff and said "szukaj". Ciri (our dog) went back a few hundred meters searching for the glove and found it and brought it back. There are smarter and dumber dogs (Ciri was probably the smartest dogs we ever had) - but the ability to generalize and reason is obviously there. Like - I can't imagine an unbiased scientist having a dog for extended period of time and not seeing it. Dogs also have theory of mind (I've seen Ciri bury a bone in one place, wait for our other dog - Jaskier - to go home, and rebury it elsewhere). Dogs also know which things are forbidden, and know that the things that are forbidden - aren't forbidden when nobody's there to see them do it :) We also had a pretty aggressive dog before that - Kuba - which used to pursue neighbors cat when it came to our backyard. The backyard was fenced, and when the cat could see our dog - he wouldn't come. So our dog pretended to be asleep or hidden and waited for the cat to come, then he pursued it up a tree and waited under the tree till we came to free the cat. This requires reasoning. It shouldn't be surprising - these are social animals that hunt in packs, cooperate, play pack politics, and need to reason about others in their pack and about the prey. How would they survive as a species if they had to invent pack tactics from scratch every time they hunted? Obviously they can generalize. I find most of these arguments against animals thinking either incredibly naive or biased. Like some people actually argue dogs are "meat automatons" with no capacity to think whatsoever. It's like fishers saying fish can't feel pain :/

gspencley 2y ago
> What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. Your example of the leash and the concept of "walking" is an excellent point. To answer your question, all proper nouns are not abstract by definition. Your name refers to you, specifically and concretely, it does not refer to the concept of "person" or "people." But to take this further, imagine the following thought experiment: You have a newborn infant, and you isolate them from the rest of the world (remember this is a thought experiment, so we are not bound by ethical considerations for this purpose). You show them 3 identical staplers. You call the first one "Foo", the second one "Bar" and the 3rd one "Baz." An infant might, on their own as they grow and mature, start to abstract and conceptualize a concept of a logical grouping here. They might observe that Foo, Bar and Baz have similarities and, being humans, they might even come up with some kind of verbal or non-verbal cue to reference this abstract concept. But for a while at least, these are individual concretes. If all they ever see is one single concrete "stapler", they may learn to associate the word with the concrete and never even think about abstracting it. But if they do start to abstract it upon observation of similar "things" ... to what degree are non-humans capable of doing that? You provide a lot of good evidence that dogs can to some degree. But to what extent? What are the limitations? These are unanswered questions in both science and philosophy. I hope I answered your question, as it was a valid one. I'm not giving answers to these hypotheses and philosophical conjectures. I'm saying that this is something that is still not quite figured out yet.
- ajuc 2y ago
  > I hope I answered your question It was mostly rethorical, but thanks :) BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions too and prove some reasoning capability. At first infants don't realize objects exist. They just see shapes and react to them. When something disappears from their view - it's the same as if it stopped existing. That's why you can play peekaboo with them and not bore them. To abstract from "a shape that sometimes appears, moves and disappears" to "an object that exists over time even when it's not visible" is a pretty impressive generalization. If AI was able to do it on its own I would be impressed at least. I'd even say it's more impressive than the next step (generalizing from "mom' and "papa" to "person"). Of course we have hardware in our brains dedicated for this stuff and it's probably not conscious reasoning that gets us the object permanence. And we don't remember it in any case. So we take it for granted. But when you think about it the generalization from "sensations in my eyes" to "objects in the world" is a pretty big one.

by ajuc 2y ago

gspencley 2y ago

> What would it even mean in practice for them to think about concrete "walking" instead of the abstract concept? Verbs are inherently abstract. Your example of the leash and the concept of "walking" is an excellent point. To answer your question, all proper nouns are not abstract by definition. Your name refers to you, specifically and concretely, it does not refer to the concept of "person" or "people." But to take this further, imagine the following thought experiment: You have a newborn infant, and you isolate them from the rest of the world (remember this is a thought experiment, so we are not bound by ethical considerations for this purpose). You show them 3 identical staplers. You call the first one "Foo", the second one "Bar" and the 3rd one "Baz." An infant might, on their own as they grow and mature, start to abstract and conceptualize a concept of a logical grouping here. They might observe that Foo, Bar and Baz have similarities and, being humans, they might even come up with some kind of verbal or non-verbal cue to reference this abstract concept. But for a while at least, these are individual concretes. If all they ever see is one single concrete "stapler", they may learn to associate the word with the concrete and never even think about abstracting it. But if they do start to abstract it upon observation of similar "things" ... to what degree are non-humans capable of doing that? You provide a lot of good evidence that dogs can to some degree. But to what extent? What are the limitations? These are unanswered questions in both science and philosophy. I hope I answered your question, as it was a valid one. I'm not giving answers to these hypotheses and philosophical conjectures. I'm saying that this is something that is still not quite figured out yet.

ajuc 2y ago
> I hope I answered your question It was mostly rethorical, but thanks :) BTW I think the concrete proper nouns we use (like "Eve") are actually abstractions too and prove some reasoning capability. At first infants don't realize objects exist. They just see shapes and react to them. When something disappears from their view - it's the same as if it stopped existing. That's why you can play peekaboo with them and not bore them. To abstract from "a shape that sometimes appears, moves and disappears" to "an object that exists over time even when it's not visible" is a pretty impressive generalization. If AI was able to do it on its own I would be impressed at least. I'd even say it's more impressive than the next step (generalizing from "mom' and "papa" to "person"). Of course we have hardware in our brains dedicated for this stuff and it's probably not conscious reasoning that gets us the object permanence. And we don't remember it in any case. So we take it for granted. But when you think about it the generalization from "sensations in my eyes" to "objects in the world" is a pretty big one.