[PBS][Nature] Are Animals Intelligent?
Bobby D. Bryant
few repeats over the next week.
"Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology and
incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal welfare."
More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
Funnily enough, after watching a cat stalk a bird when I was out for my
morning walk I was tempted to start a "don't tell me cats don't think"
thread today.
--
Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas
Derelict_Philosopher
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/publications/learnconcepts/chapter3.pdf
Steve B.
"Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote in message
news:pan.2003.06.01....@mail.utexas.edu...
All animals obviously have to deal with their ever changing environment in
real-time, but one has to think there is something fundamentally different
about human intelligence -- something that's not just a matter of degree,
such as processing power, but more of a new feature altogether. Think about
dolphins.
What impresses me about animal thought is the ability of animals to deal
with situations that they shouldn't be programmed for. What does a dog
think of a car or truck? Does he think of it as a beast of burden which
their master is riding inside (which I would think should be another alien
concept for a dog). If so, why would they pee on it?
I would think that animals divide everything into a "dead thing" category
(landscape, trees, rocks) and a "living thing" category (another animals,
insects). Creatures evade detection by other creature by emulating "dead
things". So I can't imagine where a motor vehicle would fit into an
evolutionarily designed concept scheme.
The most interesting thing is that regardless of what environment you put
an animal in, if it can survive it can react. There's always some thing the
animal feels is the thing to do. Animals never seem to "overload" when
faced with totally alien situations. The deer in the headlights seems to be
an exception, but I would think that's more of a programmed response than a
sensory overload for the simple fact that few animals do it.
--
Steve
You can throw a horse in a pond, but you can't make him swim.
Richard Uhrich
> "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote in message
> news:pan.2003.06.01....@mail.utexas.edu...
>
>>Sorry for the short notice -- this runs at 7pm in my viewing area, with a
>>few repeats over the next week.
>>
>>"Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
>>possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology
>>
> and
>
>>incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
>>natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal welfare."
>>
>>More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
>>
>>
>>Funnily enough, after watching a cat stalk a bird when I was out for my
>>morning walk I was tempted to start a "don't tell me cats don't think"
>>thread today.
>>
>
> All animals obviously have to deal with their ever changing environment in
> real-time, but one has to think there is something fundamentally different
> about human intelligence -- something that's not just a matter of degree,
> such as processing power, but more of a new feature altogether. Think about
> dolphins.
OK, I thought about them, and I concluded there is *no* fundamental
difference between their intelligence and ours. My wife and I like to
take a lunch to the San Diego Zoo and watch the gorillas, chimps and
orangutans watch us through the glass walls of their enclosures. Friday
I saw an orang strip the leaves off a branch, carry it around for a
while, then poke it in holes in an artificial termite mound. I know Jane
Goodall first discovered tool use in chimps decades ago, and I heard
recently of reports of tool use in orangs. A neighbor kid (in his 30's)
works there and saw the late Ken Allen tie a knot once.
Hey, watch the show if you can. It isn't on tonight in my area.
>
> What impresses me about animal thought is the ability of animals to deal
> with situations that they shouldn't be programmed for. What does a dog
> think of a car or truck? Does he think of it as a beast of burden which
> their master is riding inside (which I would think should be another alien
> concept for a dog). If so, why would they pee on it?
>
> I would think that animals divide everything into a "dead thing" category
> (landscape, trees, rocks) and a "living thing" category (another animals,
> insects). Creatures evade detection by other creature by emulating "dead
> things". So I can't imagine where a motor vehicle would fit into an
> evolutionarily designed concept scheme.
>
> The most interesting thing is that regardless of what environment you put
> an animal in, if it can survive it can react. There's always some thing the
> animal feels is the thing to do. Animals never seem to "overload" when
> faced with totally alien situations. The deer in the headlights seems to be
> an exception, but I would think that's more of a programmed response than a
> sensory overload for the simple fact that few animals do it.
>
> --
> Steve
>
> You can throw a horse in a pond, but you can't make him swim.
>
>
>
>
--
Richard Uhrich
---
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. --
Charles Darwin
dkomo
>
> Steve B. wrote:
>
> > "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote in message
> > news:pan.2003.06.01....@mail.utexas.edu...
> >
> >>Sorry for the short notice -- this runs at 7pm in my viewing area, with a
> >>few repeats over the next week.
> >>
> >>"Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
> >>possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology
> >>
> > and
> >
> >>incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
> >>natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal welfare."
> >>
> >>More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
> >>
> >>
> >>Funnily enough, after watching a cat stalk a bird when I was out for my
> >>morning walk I was tempted to start a "don't tell me cats don't think"
> >>thread today.
> >>
> >
> > All animals obviously have to deal with their ever changing environment in
> > real-time, but one has to think there is something fundamentally different
> > about human intelligence -- something that's not just a matter of degree,
> > such as processing power, but more of a new feature altogether. Think about
> > dolphins.
>
> OK, I thought about them, and I concluded there is *no* fundamental
> difference between their intelligence and ours.
Sure, just like there's no fundamental difference between the first
4-bit microprocessor Intel invented back in the 70's and the latest
Pentium 4.
Just don't try to do any image processing with the 4-bit'er or use it
with a Web browser.
Richard Uhrich
No fundamental difference; just scale of integration and speed.
Ian H Spedding
bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu says...
Cats are smart enough to let people do it for them.
Ian
--
Ian H Spedding
dkomo
The difference in the microprocessors is a good analogy to the
difference in brains between humans and gorillas, chimps and
orangutans. The processors are quite alike in that they use the same
basic intruction set and have common subunits such as registers,
instruction decoders, and ALU's. And yes, the two processors differ a
great deal in scale of integration and speed. But the Pentium has a
number of hardware features that the 4-bit'er doesn't have like
intruction pipelines, memory prefetch, branch prediction units, cache
memory, address translation tables for virtual memory, multiple
floating point and integer arithmetic units, etc.
Thus the two processors not only differ in speed, but in structure as
well. The same is possibly true of the difference in the brains
between humans and the higher primates. Humans not only have more
neurological mass to think with, but our brains contain special
features that the apes don't have. Hence it appears that our general
intelligence is of a different order of magnitude.
For dolphins, the analogy would be a specialized microprocessor called
a DSP, or digital signal processor, found in most home audio equipment
these days. This chip is extremely fast at carrying out the
computations involved in audio signal processing, but isn't so good at
general computing.
John Thomas Grisham
> few repeats over the next week.
>
> "Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
> possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology and
> incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
> natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal welfare."
>
> More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
>
It's not really a question of "if" they think, but what they perceive.
Oddly, their perception must be much better than ours. When they see
us coming, they flee.
They don't flee because we're more intelligent or because they've seen
us catch them and eat them (a preditor), they flee because they
perceive us to be freaking crazy. They are 100% correct. We are
delusional (everything belongs to us). We are self-absorbed (I have to
chop down the rain forests, I need toothpicks, pencils and other wood
products). We are completely irresponsible (i.e., industrial polution,
National Debt, SUVs, etc.). In a single glance, they perceive us very
accurately (unpredictable wackos).
We measure intelligence by our standard. Animals aren't delusional
enough, self-absorbed enough or irresponsible enough for us to
consider them, intelligent. If, they became so, then we have to
destroy them as a danger to us and/or the environment. A "double
standard" is the perfect manifestation of human intelligence.
JTG 6/02/03
Richard Uhrich
I like your analogy, but does it amount to Steve B's "something
fundamentally different [about human intelligence] -- something that's
not just a matter of degree, such as processing power, but more of a new
feature altogether"? You conclude both the newer CPUs and the human
brain have "special features" which result in an "order of magnitude"
improvement. I would argue that the anatomical and functional
differences between a snail's brain and a mouse's far exceed the
differences between a chimp and human. And I've worked in 8085 machine
language and optimized C subroutines with 80x86 Assembly and see no
*fundamental* difference. I would call the change from vacuum tubes and
switches to solid state devices, especially integrated circuits (such as
the Intel 4004), as truly *fundamental*. I fail to see a comparable leap
in human brains from other apes.
dkomo
The difference in the microprocessors is a good analogy to the
Steve B.
"Richard Uhrich" <uhr...@san.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3EDB7FCE...@san.rr.com...
In your analogy you're dealing with a fundamental difference in
*technology*, not function/feature. It seems that the function of processor
speed can, in principle, be represented by a value and measured in all
things with brains. Processor speed might be higher in humans than chimps,
but is it responsible for the difference in intelligence? Is it only
matters of degree in certain properties like processor speed that allow us
to learn languages, remember social security numbers, invent schemes of
deception, attribute thoughts to others, make plans, invent creative
solutions, pursue art, and so forth?
If I was to try and locate a fundamental difference between animal and
human intelligence, I would say projection is one. No other species has
been observed with the ability to project a set of thoughts to other
creatures. Sure they read emotional and social signals from others but
that's different. That's different than calculating if certain original
conceptional entites should be attributed to other animals. Projection
seems to be representative of more basic properties. Those of memory
retention and logical dexterity.
If you increase those two properties in chimps, you will probably get
projecting chimps. Memory retention will give them the ability to store
less important (?) informational structures such as "Bibbles ate all the
bananas" for longer periods of time. Logical dexterity will give them the
ability to cross-reference those concepts with concepts like "Gubgub is
looking for the bananas" and make conclusions like "Gubgub will not find
them". So at the moment, I can't think of anything that humans can do that
could not result from an increase of an existing property in chimps.
But I'll keep thinking about it.
Steve B.
"Ian H Spedding" <ian_sp...@lineone.net> wrote in message
news:MPG.19454524f...@news.CIS.DFN.DE...
Ain't smert 'nough to 'void my shutgun.
Hiero5ant
--
People think that epilepsy is divine simply because they don't have any idea
what causes epilepsy. But I believe that someday we will understand what
causes epilepsy, and at that moment, we will cease to believe that it's
divine. And so it is with everything in the universe. --Hippocrates
"Steve B." <sburke_r...@heartland.net> wrote in message
news:bbg649$90lfa$1...@ID-195893.news.dfncis.de...
Not so:
http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00001042/00/preston_de_waal.html
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/context/337726/0
http://www.janegoodall.org/chimp_central/chimpanzees/similarities/blurring.h
tml
Richard Uhrich
I'd say yes. All you can point to is differences in ability. Don't
forget that animals *do* have rudimentary communication skills, can
count and handle simple arithmetic, practice deception on one another,
return to areas where food is about to ripen, fabricate simple tools,
are fascinated with paints and cosmetics, and so forth.
>
> If I was to try and locate a fundamental difference between animal and
> human intelligence, I would say projection is one. No other species has
> been observed with the ability to project a set of thoughts to other
> creatures. Sure they read emotional and social signals from others but
> that's different. That's different than calculating if certain original
> conceptional entites should be attributed to other animals. Projection
> seems to be representative of more basic properties. Those of memory
> retention and logical dexterity.
Even popular TV documentaries have shown chimps sneaking off to copulate
when the alpha male is preoccupied. One even involved mating with the
female hiding behind a fallen tree, the male looking over the tree at
the dominant and looking totally innocent. Others have failed to give
the typical food call, and tried to hog it all.
Have you read of the monkeys in northern Japan, where one female
discovered how to wash sand off sweet potatoes and separate sand from
rice by throwing it on a puddle? (The rice floats.) The others, except
the older ones, began using these techniques, too.
Have you seen the footage of mother chimps teaching their young to crack
nuts? The actual technique varies in different nearby chimp cultures.
>
> If you increase those two properties in chimps, you will probably get
> projecting chimps. Memory retention will give them the ability to store
> less important (?) informational structures such as "Bibbles ate all the
> bananas" for longer periods of time. Logical dexterity will give them the
> ability to cross-reference those concepts with concepts like "Gubgub is
> looking for the bananas" and make conclusions like "Gubgub will not find
> them". So at the moment, I can't think of anything that humans can do that
> could not result from an increase of an existing property in chimps.
>
Agreed. In fact, they already project and have good memories. You should
watch the documentary.
> But I'll keep thinking about it.
>
> --
> Steve
>
> You can throw a horse in a pond, but you can't make him swim.
>
>
>
>
--
Richard Uhrich
Again, I like the analogy, but don't think it is Steve B's *fundamental*
difference. In fact, it could be argued that dolphins and bats, with
their DSPs, are fundamentally different from us apes.
Steve B.
"Hiero5ant" <vze4...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:F%QCa.41008$fT5....@nwrdny01.gnilink.net...
....
If I'm wrong, PBS needs to update their facts. Some of what I read from
those links directly contradicts what they say.
Steve B.
I find the rice thing hard to believe, but I'll take your word for it. The
nut thing is pretty interesting too.
> > If you increase those two properties in chimps, you will probably get
> > projecting chimps. Memory retention will give them the ability to store
> > less important (?) informational structures such as "Bibbles ate all
the
> > bananas" for longer periods of time. Logical dexterity will give them
the
> > ability to cross-reference those concepts with concepts like "Gubgub is
> > looking for the bananas" and make conclusions like "Gubgub will not
find
> > them". So at the moment, I can't think of anything that humans can do
that
> > could not result from an increase of an existing property in chimps.
> >
>
>
> Agreed. In fact, they already project and have good memories. You should
> watch the documentary.
--
Bobby D. Bryant
> If I was to try and locate a fundamental difference between animal and
> human intelligence, I would say projection is one. No other species has
> been observed with the ability to project a set of thoughts to other
> creatures. Sure they read emotional and social signals from others but
> that's different. That's different than calculating if certain original
> conceptional entites should be attributed to other animals. Projection
> seems to be representative of more basic properties. Those of memory
> retention and logical dexterity.
>
> If you increase those two properties in chimps, you will probably get
> projecting chimps. Memory retention will give them the ability to store
> less important (?) informational structures such as "Bibbles ate all the
> bananas" for longer periods of time. Logical dexterity will give them
> the ability to cross-reference those concepts with concepts like "Gubgub
> is looking for the bananas" and make conclusions like "Gubgub will not
> find them". So at the moment, I can't think of anything that humans can
> do that could not result from an increase of an existing property in
> chimps.
>
> But I'll keep thinking about it.
FWIW, I have long held a conjecture that the difference in human and
chimpanzine ability to process complex sentences arises in the amount of
working memory available to keep track of the loose ends of the sentence
as it is being formed or received.
Notice that many linguists work with the idealization that grammars
support unboundedly deep recursive embeddings of structures such as
relative clauses, but in reality humans can only deal with sentences a few
layers deep without counting on their fingers or writing the sentence
down. That's what makes me think that working memory is absolutely
critical as a linguistic resource, and that the amount of WM available
will show up as a bound on linguistic competence.
Richard Uhrich
> "Richard Uhrich" <uhr...@san.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:3EDBE5B7...@san.rr.com...
>
>>Have you read of the monkeys in northern Japan, where one female
>>discovered how to wash sand off sweet potatoes and separate sand from
>>rice by throwing it on a puddle? (The rice floats.) The others, except
>>the older ones, began using these techniques, too.
>>
>>Have you seen the footage of mother chimps teaching their young to crack
>>nuts? The actual technique varies in different nearby chimp cultures.
>>
>
> I find the rice thing hard to believe, but I'll take your word for it. The
> nut thing is pretty interesting too.
>
A quick Web search yields
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/anthro/lifetrees.html
The Primates: Life in the Trees
From the series "Life on Earth" With David Attenborough
<quote>
The Japanese macaque has dense fur to get through Japan's harsh winters.
They don't hibernate, so need food every day. Sometimes the only thing
to do is to burrow through snow to get to it. One group uses volcanic
hot springs to keep warm.
Macaques live all over Japan. Take the macaques on Koshima- it's an
offshore island, so they're isolated and are therefore different than
the mainland macaques. Scientists wanted to study them. To entice them
out, the scientists began offering them sweet potatoes. One female began
to take them to a pool and wash them. Then her close family began doing
it, and now all the monkeys on the island wash their sweet potatoes.
Then they all began to wash them in the sea, even when they were already
clean. Only the old didn't do this new behavior; The young learned from
their mothers while clinging to their backs, but the old didn't pick it
up. The scientists really wanted to study the monkeys, but every time
they gave them sweet potatoes, the monkeys ran off to wash them. So,
they offered rice, figuring the monkeys would take a while to pick it up
off the sand, but the same girl grabbed big handfuls of rice and sand
and took it down to the water. When she threw it in the water, the rice
floated and the sand sank, and she skimmed the rice off the surface of
the water. Soon all the other ones began to do it too. Although usually
a term reserved for human societies, this is a shared culture.
</quote>
Richard Uhrich
Transcript at
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript802.html
Excerpt:
MR. LINDEN: Well, I got interested in the question of cognition and
language when I heard about the ape language experiments nearly 30
years ago. And I thought, gee, that?s interesting. Chimps aren?t
supposed to be able to do that. And one single anecdote sort of led me
to do this book, The Parrot?s Lament, when I heard about an orangutan
who had escaped from a zoo in Omaha way back in the 1960s, at about
the time that the apes were doing the language experiment. This orang
was hiding a wire between its lip and gum, using the wire to pick a
lock, get out of its cage, and then hiding the wire again. And it did
this three times, at least, before it was caught and they discovered
how it was getting out, and where it was hiding the wire. And that
involved tool use and tool making, you know, keen powers of
observation to understand how the locking mechanism worked, deception,
a whole suite of higher mental abilities, and it was doing it despite
the best attempts of its keepers to keep it in the cage. So there was
no possibility of queuing or imitation.
Another excerpt:
MR. WATTENBERG: And Lisa Stevens was telling me, when we talked to her
at the zoo, about the deceptive qualities of the macaque monkeys, and
told of an incident when the alpha male wasn?t looking one of the
subordinate males went off with one of the females behind a screen for
the purpose of copulation, and the female purposefully didn?t make her
normal mating sounds lest they be discovered. Obviously, I couldn?t
let this program go by without repeating that sort of an incident. But
that?s pretty intricate behavior, a) you?re sort of sneaking off and
b) you?re not only sneaking off, but you?re kind of covering up.
Again, it sounds like Washington.
Matt Silberstein
<sburke_r...@heartland.net>:
>
>"Richard Uhrich" <uhr...@san.rr.com> wrote in message
>news:3EDBE5B7...@san.rr.com...
[snip]
>> Even popular TV documentaries have shown chimps sneaking off to copulate
>> when the alpha male is preoccupied. One even involved mating with the
>> female hiding behind a fallen tree, the male looking over the tree at
>> the dominant and looking totally innocent. Others have failed to give
>> the typical food call, and tried to hog it all.
>>
>> Have you read of the monkeys in northern Japan, where one female
>> discovered how to wash sand off sweet potatoes and separate sand from
>> rice by throwing it on a puddle? (The rice floats.) The others, except
>> the older ones, began using these techniques, too.
>>
>> Have you seen the footage of mother chimps teaching their young to crack
>> nuts? The actual technique varies in different nearby chimp cultures.
>
>I find the rice thing hard to believe, but I'll take your word for it. The
>nut thing is pretty interesting too.
I don't know if this is directly relevant, but it is the single
most wonderful fact I have come across in as long as I can
remember. Chimps, not all chimps just some tribes, dance in the
rain. Think of that, some chimps have developed a particular
cultural attribute of celebrating rainfall.
We are not alone.
[snip]
--
Matt Silberstein TBC HRL OMM
We are not here to judge other people,
we are just here to be better than they are.
Richard Uhrich
I've seen that on TV. I've wondered if it's a religious rite.
Matt Silberstein
<uhr...@san.rr.com>:
Lucky you. I have not. Do they look happy?
>I've wondered if it's a religious rite.
I hope so.
puppe...@hotmail.com
[snip]
> products). We are completely irresponsible (i.e., industrial polution,
> National Debt, SUVs, etc.). In a single glance, they perceive us very
> accurately (unpredictable wackos).
Indeed, humans are crazy. They think animals know anything about
debt, polution, etc. etc.
Socks
Richard Uhrich
I don't know. I thought they looked angry! Here's an interesting Web site:
http://www.janegoodall.org/chimp_central/chimpanzees/behavior/rain_dance.html
>
>
>>I've wondered if it's a religious rite.
>>
>
> I hope so.
>
Religion and/or awe? From above page:
"I have discussed these displays at length with Dr. Goodall over the
years. One of the most interesting and scrutinized events I have
recorded on video was a waterfall display performed by the alpha at the
time, Freud . Freud began his display with typical rhythmic and
deliberate swaying and swinging on vines. For minutes he swung over and
across the eight to 12-foot falls. At one point, Freud stood at the top
of the falls dipping has hand into the stream and rolling rocks one at a
time down the face of the waterfall. Finally, he displayed (slowly, on
vines) down the falls and settled on a rock about 30 feet downstream. He
relaxed, then turned to the falls and stared at it for many minutes. It
was one of those times that I would give body parts to know what was
going through a chimp's mind. Dr. Goodall and I have seen several events
in which the participants seemed to ponder or consider the natural event
to which they were reacting."
>
> --
>
> Matt Silberstein TBC HRL OMM
>
> We are not here to judge other people,
> we are just here to be better than they are.
>
>
--
John Wilkins
That would fit in with the argument that the working memory of humans
evolved largely to deal with the group dynamics of reciprocal altruism
in a largeish sort of troop. Language capacity would be pleiotropic on
that if the basic functions existed already in the hominoid clade.
Aboitiz, F. 1995. Working memory networks and the origin of language
areas in the human brain. Med Hypotheses 44 (6):504-506.
Aoki, K., and M. W. Feldman. 1989. Pleiotropy and preadaptation in the
evolution of human language capacity. Theor Popul Biol 35 (2):181-194.
Milinski, Manfred, and Claus Wedekin. 1998. Working memory constrains
human cooperation in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science USA 95:13755-13758.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., J. Murphy, R. A. Sevcik, K. E. Brakke, S. L.
Williams, and D. M. Rumbaugh. 1993. Language comprehension in ape and
child. Monogr Soc Res Child Dev 58 (3-4):1-222.
--
John Wilkins
"And this is a damnable doctrine" - Charles Darwin, Autobiography
dkomo
Actually, I should have said *orders* of magnitude improvement: the
difference between a chimp using a stick to dig out termites and
humans putting spacecraft into orbit. Many orders of magnitude.
And these are easily observable differences. Your "differences in
degree" rather than in kind, as it were. Seems like a lot of people
are taken with displays of simple intelligence in animals that are a
foreshadow of human intelligence. Not me. When the day comes that a
chimp can solve a partial differential equation with boundary
conditions using Fourier transforms that's when I'll be impressed with
animal intelligence. Or when orangs can build structures as large and
tall as the World Trade Center towers, and then knock them down again
with behemoth flying machines.
> I would argue that the anatomical and functional
> differences between a snail's brain and a mouse's far exceed the
> differences between a chimp and human. And I've worked in 8085 machine
> language and optimized C subroutines with 80x86 Assembly and see no
> *fundamental* difference. I would call the change from vacuum tubes and
> switches to solid state devices, especially integrated circuits (such as
> the Intel 4004), as truly *fundamental*. I fail to see a comparable leap
> in human brains from other apes.
I checked in a number of books on brain science I had on hand and
could find no descriptions of any special features in the human brain
that give us an orders of magnitude boost in intelligence over the
rest of the animal world. But as I stated before, this difference in
intelligence is easily observable by comparing what animals can
accomplish with their minds versus what we can accomplish with ours.
Rather, every book I looked into emphasized the similarity of
structure among all mammalian brains, from mouse to man. The major
difference among species is in size of the brain, and presumably as a
result, in cognitive processing power. Patricia Smith Churchland, in
_Brain-Wise_, p. 202, showed a drawing of various primate brains drawn
to scale with the frontal cortex shaded. The difference in size
between the human brain and the chimp brain is *substantial*, the
chimp brain appearing to be only about half the size of the human.
The gibbon brain is *tiny* in comparison to either.
In _Life Evolving_ Christian de Duve states:
"The cortex is the seat of consciousness; only signals that pass
through it give rise to mental experiences." -- p. 210
And:
"It is remarkable that the structure of the cortex is essentially the
same throughout the vertebrate series. What changes is its surface
area, which reaches 2,200 cm^2 for the human cortex, forcing it to
make numerous infoldings, or convolutions, in order to fit within the
skull. The surface area of the cortex is about 500 cm^2 in
chimpanzees. In rats, it is four to five cm^2, which, corrected for
body weight, would amount to 180 cm^2 for a human-sized rat. It goes
on diminishing as we move down the animal scale, but there is the
beginning of a cortex as soon a true brain becomes distinguishable.
Even in fish, there is a small cortical area, mainly linked with
olfactory centers, which are particularly developed in these
animals." -- p. 210
So, the difference between fishing termites with a twig and sending
men to the moon is produced by that difference between the chimp
cortex of 500 cm^2 and the human of 2,200 cm^2. Obviously we have a
highly nonlinear result here, with an explosion of emergent properties
-- for example, the ability to think abstractly as in advanced
mathematics, whereas the chimp can at best count small numbers of
bananas.
In sum, it looks like at the moment it's a difference in degree and
not a difference in kind when it comes to human/animal intelligence.
It appears to be your "scale of integration and speed" that is
powering the human ability to think. A much better "processor" than
our animal cousins possess.
But stay tuned for further developments. I personally believe that
our knowledge of how the brain operates is stunningly deficient. I
think that as we discover more we will in fact find that humans have
cortical subunits that animals don't that produces our orders of
magnitude more powerful intelligence. Processing power alone is too
generic to account for the fact that we as a species think pretty much
alike. There must be common structures buried within all those
convolutions of the cortex which we have yet to uncover.
John Wilkins
I don't think the difference lies in brain structure - the combinatorial
complexity of human culture over chimp and other animal structure lies
in our ability to parallel process culture via linguistic symbolic
networking, rather than serially processing culture via individual
learning and imitation. This gives us a cultural state space of almost
unlimited complexity (basically, whatever we are individually capable of
generating to the power of the number of individuals in the culture,
with suitable degradation for losses in transmission; someone who can do
that sort of abstract math can fill in the bothersome details :-).
--
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
dkomo
[snip much]
>
> I don't think the difference lies in brain structure - the combinatorial
> complexity of human culture over chimp and other animal structure lies
> in our ability to parallel process culture via linguistic symbolic
> networking, rather than serially processing culture via individual
> learning and imitation. This gives us a cultural state space of almost
> unlimited complexity (basically, whatever we are individually capable of
> generating to the power of the number of individuals in the culture,
> with suitable degradation for losses in transmission; someone who can do
> that sort of abstract math can fill in the bothersome details :-).
Well, I didn't think of this, but it does seem to be a compelling
explanation. In different words, it's our ability to communicate with
each other that leads to an exponential network effect that drives
overall human intelligence to greater levels.
But you can't dispense with brain structure so easily. Otherwise, how
can you explain the observation in everybody's favorite (except mine)
pop anthropology book, _Guns, Germs and Steel_, that the New Guinea
tribesman is just as intelligent as the European/American young urban
professional. The culture of a New Guinea tribe is not nearly as rich
in cognitive stimulation as it is in modern society. No DVD's or
Internet, for example.
John Wilkins
They are intelligent in as much as we are - they can hook into the
largely external culture with the appropriate linkages (linguistic
"connections" to continue the computer network analogy). Think of
culture as a kind of massive Beowulf Cluster.
The basic equipment of the Homo sapiens brain and language tools evolved
well before massive culture enabled us to go to the moon and build twin
towers (in our or Tokein's world). These are shared. The *only* relevant
cognitive difference between ethnic groups is the shared learning and
benefit of prior experience we have in our cultures. Cultures are to
brains as computer programs are to transistors on IC chips.
Richard Uhrich
The human brain has evolved by natural selection. No miracle happened in
the 5 or so million years that separate us from the chimps. As of 10,000
years ago, we could paint pictures in caves and hunt well. Perhaps
bonobos and orangs aren't as far behind us as you think.
But I'll definitely stay tuned. I've been fascinated by this for 40 years.
Bobby D. Bryant
Thanks for the references. I've added them to the list of stuff I'll
never live long enough to read...
John Thomas Grisham
It's like "Art"... I know what I like and dislike.
JTG 6/04/03
Michael Painter
"dkomo" <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in message
news:3EDACF3D...@cris.com...
> Richard Uhrich wrote:
> >
> > Steve B. wrote:
> >
> > > "Bobby D. Bryant" <bdbr...@mail.utexas.edu> wrote in message
> > > news:pan.2003.06.01....@mail.utexas.edu...
> > >
> > >>Sorry for the short notice -- this runs at 7pm in my viewing area,
with a
> > >>few repeats over the next week.
> > >>
> > >>"Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
> > >>possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology
> > >>
> > > and
> > >
> > >>incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
> > >>natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal
welfare."
> > >>
> > >>More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>Funnily enough, after watching a cat stalk a bird when I was out for
my
> > >>morning walk I was tempted to start a "don't tell me cats don't think"
> > >>thread today.
> > >>
> > >
environment in
> > > real-time, but one has to think there is something fundamentally
different
> > > about human intelligence -- something that's not just a matter of
degree,
> > > such as processing power, but more of a new feature altogether. Think
about
> > > dolphins.
> >
> > OK, I thought about them, and I concluded there is *no* fundamental
> > difference between their intelligence and ours.
>
> Sure, just like there's no fundamental difference between the first
> 4-bit microprocessor Intel invented back in the 70's and the latest
> Pentium 4.
>
> Just don't try to do any image processing with the 4-bit'er or use it
> with a Web browser.
It would be possible and there is a web browser available for the Commodore
Pet.
And, as with the chips, there is a continuum from simplest to most powerful.
Overall we are probably the brightest but many animals have unique problem
solving and observation powers beyond us.
Maybe the porpoise I saw do something one day was one in a million but I'd
bet not one in a billion humans would have done what it did.
It was chasing a fish down a beach line in very shallow water. I jumped into
the water in front of the fish.
The fish did a 180 and went back up the beach. The porpoises did a 90 and
went about 50 yards out to sea - in about two seconds.
Then it went back up the beach and chased another fish down the beach.
I jumped.
Fish did a 180.
Porpose never paused and had lunch.
I jumped
dkomo
Boy, I bet that's a speed burner.
> And, as with the chips, there is a continuum from simplest to most powerful.
> Overall we are probably the brightest but many animals have unique problem
> solving and observation powers beyond us.
> Maybe the porpoise I saw do something one day was one in a million but I'd
> bet not one in a billion humans would have done what it did.
>
> It was chasing a fish down a beach line in very shallow water. I jumped into
> the water in front of the fish.
> The fish did a 180 and went back up the beach. The porpoises did a 90 and
> went about 50 yards out to sea - in about two seconds.
> Then it went back up the beach and chased another fish down the beach.
> I jumped.
> Fish did a 180.
> Porpose never paused and had lunch.
> I jumped
"There is a line among the fragments of the Greek poet Archilocus
which says,
'The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.'"
ć‚ saiah Berlin
Richard Uhrich
> "dkomo" <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in message
> news:3EDACF3D...@cris.com...
>
......
>>Just don't try to do any image processing with the 4-bit'er or use it
>>with a Web browser.
>>
>
> It would be possible and there is a web browser available for the Commodore
> Pet.
>
And I wrote a program for an ATARI 400 which drove a plotter to scan
photographs. Instead of a pen, it moved a light sensing diode. The ATARI
digitized each pixel. When the image was fully scanned, a histogram was
generated, contrast was enhanced to maximize the range, and then a dot
matrix printer plotted each pixel as an array of pseudo random dots. In
short, I had a digital black and white copier. It wasn't bad! A single
photo typically took about 7 hours.
Richard Uhrich
> Sorry for the short notice -- this runs at 7pm in my viewing area, with a
> few repeats over the next week.
>
> "Can animals think? Do they have feelings? This series explores the
> possibilities of the animal mind, drawing upon a revolution in biology and
> incorporating science, pet owners, circus trainers, movie clips, and
> natural history in an exploration of animal thought and animal welfare."
>
> More info at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/animalmind/index.html
>
>
> Funnily enough, after watching a cat stalk a bird when I was out for my
> morning walk I was tempted to start a "don't tell me cats don't think"
> thread today.
Tonight at 8 PM in San Diego! TV Guide:
Nature
Inside the Animal Mind: Are Animals Intelligent?
60 min.
Can animals think or feel emotions? Are they conscious of who they
are? This three-part series seeks answers to longtime series host
George Page's question: ?How much are animals like us??
In some ways, quite a lot. Part 1 is full of examples of rats,
elephants and birds referring to their ?mental maps.? In addition to
this, a dolphin is seen following a command in a way that clearly
indicates it understood the command. And, in an amazing monkey-see,
monkey-do segment, an orangutan in Borneo washes clothes after it
watches a person doing the same thing. ?Is this just aping,? asks
narrator Steve Kroft, ?or does this animal understand what it is
doing??
Suzanne
there is, or was a room of birds attached to the
restaurant separated from us by a glass or a screen.
I saw this little bird fly down behind a big pigeon and
stand behind him as the pigeon was eating something
on the ground. The pigeon's tail was sticking out toward
the little bird and the little bird looked up to see if the
pigeon was looking at him, which he wasn't. Then the
little bird stomped on the tail of the pigeon and flew
away to a "tree" that had no leaves that was put in there
for the birds to rest on. He was high up and he looked
down at the pigeon. We could see him doing this. The
pigeon, in feeling that someone stepped on his tail,
looked around to see who did that. He saw no one.
So he turned back around and went on eating. The
little bird then flew back down and did the same thing
again and again. By then people in the restaurant were
seeing this and they were laughing about it. At least the
ones near the bird room were. Finally, the pigeon saw
who was doing that, and he took out after that little
bird. When he did, that little bird flew away, and sat
quickly between some other birds and began singing
as though he had been sitting there for some time. The
pigeon either saw him and ignored him, but he flew
back down to eat, and here came that little bird again.
This time, the pigeon turned around and he confronted
the little bird and just looked at him. The little bird looked
intimidated and sort of just walked away non-chalantly.
The pigeon kept watching him for a while and finally the
little bird kept his distance. Now that is one of many
things that I've observed about animals appearing to
me to "think." I think that if someone does not think
that they can think, they just haven't spent much time
around them, possibly. Personally, I think that one of
the reasons we have animals is so that we can see
ourselves in them. This little bird was either
heckling the big bird, or just playing with him, I
don't know which, but I think it is obvious that he had
intelligence.
>
On another occasion, we went to an aquarium in Florida
called Marineland, formerly Marine Studios up North of
Daytona in St. Augustine. My children were little and my
boy was 11. We went into a room that had a large tank
in the center of it, and the people could walk around the
tank. It had a manatee in it. That manatee saw my son
standing close to him, and the other people were further
back. The manatee looked at my son and started clowning
for him. He went around the tank and when he came back
around, he was on his back under the water, looking at
only my son. Then he went around again, and when he
came back, he was on his side but swimming that way,
looking at my son. Each time he circled the tank, he came
back by in an obviously playfully different pose, and was
entertaining that little boy. The crowd was going wild
laughing at this and clamping their hands over their
mouths because they did not want to stop the action or
make a noise that would disturb this process. My son
was enthralled with this behavior and later said that the
manatee seemed to be showing off to him. That he was.
He was aware that this was a child somehow and he
seemed to be doing just that.
>
Suzanne