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Comment by bmdavi3 | Hacker News Reader

Does a lion born in a zoo understand it's being held captive by (in comparison) super intelligent humans? When it's tranquilized, does it know this isn't a normal thing for a lion? When the caretaker throws food out or pets it, does the lion have the capacity to think about it in any other way than what it means right now for the lion - food, feels nice, etc?

If there's a correspondingly more intelligent alien species hanging out on our planet with us, would / could we even hope to know?

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Lions are also unaware of radio waves. We could be unaware of self-organizing ripples at the scale of subatomic particles. That's a life form that could efficiently colonize the universe hitching rides on rocks.

What if the Universe is the "zoo", only created to contain us?

But Lions don't appear to have any abstraction ability, or reflective thought. By that I mean you as a human can imagine yourself thinking about some hypothetical situation, as well as consider what kind of evidence would support a given hypothesis.

I think this might have actually happened (apocryphal?), but just imagine if you took humans from another country and put them in a zoo. They would surely figure it out, based on the evidence at hand.

Definitely agree.

Just like how a lion or a chimpanzee wouldn't make a convincing zoo for another lion or chimp, a human could figure out they're in a zoo made by another human.

But when you make a zoo for an animal that isn't on your level, you can figure out what's needed to satisfy it (even if it's really crappy compared to their normal environment).

So if something smarter than us by an order of magnitude or more made a zoo for us, it would be a much more elaborate and convincing zoo, and I'm not sure we'd figure it out.

If we are talking super-advanced, it wouldn't even need to be a physical zoo. Just mess with enough of our brains enough to make us not want to do certain things and we'll stay on this rock forever.

How exactly do we know they dont have reflective thought? Or at least any less reflective thought than your average human. Not really sure how to test that. I know there is the mirror test but what if there are different types of reflective thought and they just missed the boat on that by a little but have other kinds of thoughts?

Franz Kafka proposes this kind of scenario in "Investigations of a dog."

yes.

Edit: Ok. This is a common argument (well apart from the "living on earth with us" bit which requires some Doctor Who levels of mind-wiping so let's discount that.

Lions see humans in the zoo, and they see the walls of theie prison. Lions definitely have had psychological problems in the worst run zoos so it is fair to say they are affected and aware.

Are they aware of the concept of zoo? Equally unlikely. And the next question is how much more intelligent is a human to a lion. the answer is not comforting to us as a species.

I'm not sure where the corresponding boundary would be exactly, since we do seem to be on the verge of exploring other planets, but you could say that we also understand where it is we're allowed to roam - the surface of Earth. And we aren't free of psychological problems.

Interesting philosophical proposition, have an upvote.

It also speaks to the limitations of our senses and the way we experience the world.

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