Animal magic: why intelligence isn’t just for humans
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
At that point I decided if got this spectacular show, he can enter my house and do whatever he wants.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316452505
It's really, really good. :)
BUT! The book and Tchaikovsky is still brilliant; he did a great job "thinking outside the box" by creating a thought experiment of "how would human-like skills, like reading, develop over time in non-human-like creatures, like spiders" - I'm pointing to the balls of spiderweb as "books".
Tchaikovsky himself used to study zoology and had a focus in insects. Coincidentally he just turned 50 yesterday. Happy birthday to him!
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/spiders-are-much-sma...
Aside from that, I sometimes like to toss foreign objects in spider webs. For example, I'll toss a piece of a leaf into a web. The spider will quickly come over, work some magic for a few seconds, and then the leaf is suddenly untangled and floats away. It's really interesting to see how quickly they're able to remove unwanted objects from their webs to keep them clean.
I think the idea of alternative 'qualia spaces' here is being used to say, essentially, that other creatures might have radically different subjectivities to the point that we would struggle to recognize them or make analogies to them, but that there would still clearly be subjective experiences for them.
This idea is captured well in the difference between the terms "personnel" and "human resources". The former feels much more like treating people as individuals, with needs, concerns, and abilities that are unique to the person vs. treating people as inconvenient and unreliable machines that need to be drugged into submission to the needs of the machine.
They are a spider with very good eyesight. That allows them to interact with us way easier than other spiders and insects.
There are a few living on the outside wall of my building and sometimes they get get stuck in my sinks. They appear to have a good memory, at first they would avoid my hand now they seem to expect that I will be there to get them out and jump on me almost immediately.
I have heard they make great pets, the only issue is their short lifespan means you will need to let them breed if you want to keep them for a long time.
I guess all that to say, I find myself shocked by how little regard people have for the intelligence of other animals.
Maybe it's just luck. If they were to taste good their faith could be different.
But many people report they do!
" Texturally it's similar to goat or pork. Almost like chicken but stringier. Same color as pork, same general fattiness.
That's where the similarities end. Granted both times were in seaside towns, but the flavor was akin to the way it smells when you open a can of tuna. Fishy, pungent and strong. Basically cat tasted like cheap cat food smells. "
If people readily accepted the intelligence of many mammals, much less other animals, they would have to confront some very serious cognitive dissonance and moral dilemmas.
That said, I've found many dog folks are super dismissive of the idea of cats being smart and I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps part of the problem is the sheer stubbornness of cats, you can't force them to do anything if they decide they don't want to do it.
Not sure about that, lot of people are completely fine with human being killed for several reasons (punishment for robbery just to give you an example).
Life survives on life. Something died so that you could live today. I think about that often, and I think that growing up confronting the reality of surviving as a person by eating food that was once alive in a very immediate way helps me not take food for granted and to always be grateful for the daily sacrifices that are made so that I can live.
In my will, I have outlined that I want my body to be put into a burlap sack with no embalming fluid and be returned to earth as soon as possible after my death so that I can be part of the same chain of life for other living things. Life lives by the death of other living things. We cannot change that, but we can at least be grateful and present with that reality.
Saying a prayer doesn’t change anything. You didn’t give the animal the best life you could. You gave it the best life until you decide you wanted to consume it for your pleasure. Not survival, pleasure.
And vegans are well aware that life consumes life. Vegans consume living things. They just don’t consume living things which are capable of terror or depression and suffering.
Say a prayer all you want, but harming an animal when you don’t need to is the act of abusing an animal for pleasure. I can say a prayer and be remorseful and thank a dog for its sacrifice after I put it in a dog fight and it got ripped apart, but that’s still animal abuse. It’s still wrong. And like eating animals in the developed world, it’s for pleasure.
We were not wealthy and did not have a store close enough to run to every day for fresh produce. We took care of our animals because we relied on them for our survival. We did not take that for granted, and we did not do it for pleasure.
I understand that in an urban environment, surrounded by bountiful food (most of which is raised in other countries and is only available, out of local season, because of a complex web of global trade) the idea of killing and eating an animal can seem cruel or unnecessary. But your lack of experience of true poverty and lack of access to that sort of bounteous and constant source of non-animal products does not make all meat eaters inhumane and uncaring.
I find your broad, general statements of moral superiority because of your vegan lifestyle to be ignorant and a result of having grown up in opulence and wealth, surrounded by bounty and options, with little reflection or concern for those who did not grow up in those circumstances, or consideration as to whether they could still be moral and respectful in their desperation and struggles to survive.
There is no moral obligation in a situation with a lack of choice. However, the VAST majority of people are not in situations where animal products must be eaten to survive.
But are you in that situation now? Do you need to eat animals to survive? If not, why do you do it?
We are called to walk the Royal Path, and for those in the workaday world, that includes eating meat sometimes, and not eating meat sometimes. Regardless of what we are eating, however, we offer prayers of gratitude and thanksgiving and sorrow for living by the death of other living things.
If I were an Orthodox Christian monk, I would follow the restrictions I listed above all the time because those foods are known to enflame the passions, but are more necessary when one is working for a living and raising a family. I would spend much more time in prayer than my current schedule allows, however, but that is not my path at this time.
If I'm interpreting this correctly, you're saying you eat meat for 2 reasons. The first is that not doing so would make you too prideful, and the second is because it's in the "Royal Path", which we are called to.
I think the pigs, sheep, chickens, etc. would prefer you feel a little prideful, compared to what happens to them when you eat to them [1]. As for the "Royal Path" can you elaborate? Why does the Royal Path condone violence against non-humans?
It seems unfair to me that sentient animals need to die in your very personal battle with pride. Do you not see that as unfair?
Also, are you prideful when you abstain from eating baboon? Or when you abstain from eating hippopotamus, or giant squid? Why is it that pridefulness comes from abstaining from pig and chicken, but not any other animals you already don't eat?
I don't think this will make sense to you, and I understand why it wouldn't, but I trust the traditions of my faith, and the teachings of the Church Fathers in my tradition, more than I trust my own judgement.
The "higher path" in Orthodoxy is the monastic life, which includes not eating meat, dairy, eggs, (and only rarely eating olive oil and wine), but I am not a monk. And the "lower path" in Orthodoxy is to live in the world and to fast from those things for more days during the year than not. I follow the liturgical calendar, and I follow the teachings of my faith because I trust the accumulated wisdom of my faith more than I trust my own judgement, because I lack discernment and spiritual maturity. May God have mercy on us all. Please forgive me for not having a clearer or more satisfying answer for you.
That said I think it's important to remember that eating meat is not about you or me, it's about the animals we are (not) eating. The animal doesn't care about our reasons. If you imprisoned a cat and some days you tortured it and some days you left it alone, the cat would not care why. It could not even understand why and causing it pain for one's own spiritual growth seems, respectfully, prideful to me. There is no ethical middle path between sometimes torturing a cat and sometimes not. Probably if you told your priest about an imprisoned cat you were sometimes torturing he would tell you to release it immediately.
I'm sorry that I compared what you feel to be a religious necessity to eat meat to torturing a cat. That was disrespectful. Discussions on eating meat should be less all-or-nothing. For example there is a tremendous amount of food wasted in the U.S., including animal products: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/22890292/food-waste-meat-.... Reducing food waste is something I think everyone can support.
I also agree that the "all or nothing" kind of tone that many people who advocate against eating meat takes is a hard line to sell. A "try a plant-based meal once a week" would be a much easier sell.
assessment of intelligence is often based on comparing animal intelligence to human intelligence. Dogs are adept at communicating in ways that humans understand. Cats, on the other hand, have an unhuman mind, and don't seek empathy the way dogs do. They do it in a cat way. To understand the intelligence of animals, truly, we should let go of our notions of human intelligence, and seek to enter animal perception as it is; not to correlate our perceptions with theirs, which would limit our understanding.
A cat sees its master do the same things, and says "How my master loves me! I must be God."
Cats are worse at communication as they evolved to be more solitary.
They are not as well domesticated as dogs, so humans cannot read them as well as they can dogs without training themselves in cat communication. Domestication has altered the dog on the physiological level to communicate with humans. Among other things, dogs have extra eye muscles that allow them to emote in ways humans instinctually understand.
Cats will shit on your pillow if they are unhappy with the environment for some reason. That's particularly disturbing.
I have a cat and three dogs as pets and it's interesting to see how they all interact with us and with the world differently. Even the three dogs are unique. They are all different breeds and very different in size, so it's interesting to see what they have in common and what is unique to the individual dog.
That's a territorial insecurity thing, though, right? It's not a protest or revenge.
It is definitely naturally disturbing to humans, though.
Most people love to share outrage over abuse of conventional pets or bizarre and seemingly psychotic behaviour of eating dogs yet feel nothing to the slaughter of a pig. It is my opinion that most people ignore and switch “off” at these discussions as a way to maintain plausible deniability. Like people get mad at PETA showing videos on the street of slaughterhouses in a “how dare you” sort of way but really I’m of the attitude of how dare they.
Cows are very intelligent, have long term memories, and feel desolation when their calves are taken away from them. Cats as well. The whole cats vs dogs argument is just mega weird to me and like you say really emphasizes the cognitive dissonance at play in most people who consider themselves kind to animals yet eat meat.
I don’t have such optimism towards people. Look at how poorly we treat each other. If we actually had some strong empathetic tendencies as a species we wouldn’t kill each other. There are many species which don’t. Instead I’ve got a coworker who’s gladly told me about killing his cows calves in front of their mothers and all manner of other things. “Because I’m a vegan.” And he revels in those mother cows suffering. Something like around 1/100 of humans (or males?-googled) are psychopaths.
I don’t worry about a super intelligence spawning from AI and wiping out humanity. At best that’s just projection. I figure a super intellect is equally or more likely to be benevolent since nonzero sum games require cooperation (or something like this). If that’s wrong then at least I suspect a super intelligence would see cooperation as greater than decimation.
That being said slaughtering cows doesn't seem that bad. After all there are such jobs at slaugherhouses. Perhaps he was just teasing you making it more dramatic.
But animal cruelty is actually one of the weaker arguments for becoming vegan because it requires, as I said earlier, an a-ha realization that animals are aware, intelligent, feel pain and sadness, deserve more from us as the stewards of this world.
Like people can high five over loving bacon and what have you, but honestly the eating habits of most people are deplorable and selfish and they can numbly read about ecological devastation caused by industrialized animal farming and the rampant use of antibiotics which in turn is creating super bacteria immune to it (let us not forget covid came from a meat market as well as the seasonal avian and bovine “flus” which manifest constantly).. you guys can cry in carnivore all you want but the worst thing of the situation is that eating meat or drinking dairy is not necessary: it is all done for pleasure. It’s just pathetic that people can look at all that and reply “.. but cheese”.
I don't buy that. People are sensitive to certain images. I can't stand to dental surgery videos either and definitely I don't think children would get any benefit from watching such material but that doesn't make dental surgery something people shouldn't do.
That being said as a child I've been exposed to animal slaugther on farms and I still eat beef, chicken and pork(very, very rarely). I don't think seeing how the animals are killed makes you vegan.
I don't enjoy watching animals being killed though but we are mortals and animals are mortals too so in the end it makes little difference if we kill or do not kill animals. We have the same end destination. I think this makes us less sensitive to killing animals and even our own. The difference between us and the animals is that they lack enough intelligence to produce anything meaningful(i.e technology, innovation etc) during their lifespan thus the reason why their scope in life is to become good food for us.
We should minimise the pain inflicted upon animals and create better living conditions. It's good for animals and it's good for the consumers as well. Legislation already exists in Europe and will only get stronger.
Same logic can be applied to children until a certain age, disabled, sick, old and/or mentally handicapped people. Kettle is easy to take advantage of, it's convenient and almost everything they "produce" can be sold (milk, meat, skin). Not showing enough compassion for sentient beings while having the ability and options to not have them as "a tasty meal" makes you a bad person in that regard. You can be social worker, a teacher, doctor or overall caring person, and have other great character traits, because nothing has to be black and white. Having superior intelligence and using that as an argument to justify exploitation of other living beings is a very sad way to look at all of this in my eyes.
No, not at all.
Soldiers work as part of a team, which is part of a larger team. You can't count on a psychopath to care about the team or the larger organization.
What (should) motivate a solider to kill is the same emotion as a sheep dog protecting the flock, or a mother bear protecting her cubs.
What motivates a psychopath to kill is harder to say, but it is not something which is generally recognized as morally good.
I wouldn't think these war-criminals come out of nowhere. they probably get their head start in torturing neighbourhood cats, gloating about how much they love meat and don't care about the torture, and how they personally love to bash heads in[1] and murder children in front of mothers.
[1] https://theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/19/millions-of-...
Who takes joy in killing babies in front of their mothers? And then gloating about it. Only a seriously effed up mind.
What's the solution? Report to HR?
Predators exist, and humans whether we like it or not are scavenger omnivorous predators. There aren't vegan bears or indigenous vegan human tribes for a reason.
Any suggested reading for someone like me?
I’d start with Eating Animals. The author started the book to explore how his food ends up on his plate, but the book becomes about his gradual transition to veganism as he learns about animal agriculture.
A Plea for the Animals should be the second one. Written by a neurologist/monk who eloquently makes the argument that there is nothing in our biology which justifies subjugating animal.
Then Animal Liberation if you’re looking for a classic. It’s older, a bit more esoteric, but decent.
If 200/2500 really is the goal then I'm not sure you can do it without meat, or at least without lots of protein powder supplements. The highest protein/calorie ratio for normal food I can think of is from soy milk or lentils, which are both roughly the same at around 1g/protein per 11-13 calories, and you'd have to eat those exclusively.
Vegan bears and native tribes are irrelevant, you live in a modern world/society and both are poor attempts at deflection that don't hold up under even the slightest scrutiny.
Even if you refuse to consider the argument for veganism, the way we treat the animals we eat is an abject horror, modern animal farming is indefensible.
Have you ever met cows in the farm/paddock? Most cows I've come across are huge assholes, like the kind of person that hangs around a bar trying to start fights. In my mind they deserve to be eaten.
I think it's difficult to untangle their benevolence from their self-protection. But I did see several signs of curiosity and inter-species care between cows.
You also have to consider that we're the assholes :)
(Note: In that case, no, I don't think we should be killed, just improve)
There is a spectrum of characters - even among the animal kingdom - including us humans.
Here is a counter argument: https://love.heavenofanimals.com/2021/11/17/man-demonstrates...
The only people who don't think animals feel pain are people who don't spend time with animals. Every farmer since the neolithic has known that animals feel pain and are to some degree or another intelligent (we intentionally bred some of the intelligence out of many.) That has no bearing on whether someone eats meat or not. You have assumptions that most of the world do not share with you.
I feel bad if I see a fly slowly dying, but I'll still kill all houseflies that bother me. There's no contradiction in that. Death isn't suffering; quite the opposite.
I do not think that it is really a serious cognitive dissonance.
It is not my intention to harm the bees, ants, etc outside (nor is it my intention to harm the trees). If they get inside then sometimes I might need to get them outside if they would be harmful inside here (to me, them, or both), and sometimes you can step on something and will accidentally kill them if it is small, without being intentional. And we should all need the right of self defense, including both human and non-human animal must self defense from each other and anyone else (whether it is humans vs humans or not); however, not go near them is also a possible way to avoid being harmed, so that is what I do, too, outside. (Unfortunately sometimes the path is narrow.)
Even if there are spiders in my house, it is not usually my intention to harm them (although I will want them to not get in my way of a book, etc; unfortunately sometimes it does). What I read somewhere is that some kind of spider they are supposed to be in this house; at first I did not know that but they mention that it make sense so now I can know, it is good to know.
I am not going to eat all of the animals and plants outside, so, I do not need to harm them probably. But, other than that, everyone will eat everyone because that is how you will live, but nevertheless is it not a excuse to be treated badly (unfortunately they do treat some animal badly too much; well, humans are treated badly too, and also other stuff too). Some kind of animals is herbivores and some is carnivores, and humans is omnivores. And anyways, humans is also a kind of animals, too.
At school, in a science class, it was a discussion of testing drugs and other things by mice and other animals. While many students argued against such thing, I also argued against animal testing but my argument was different from the others. Most people (including the teacher) did not agree with my argument, but much more recently, I had heard on the CBC radio the similar argument than mine (made by actual scientists, unlike myself), so I know that I am not alone on this argument.
> That said, I've found many dog folks are super dismissive of the idea of cats being smart and I'm not sure why that is.
Possibly because that is their experience; they do not experience everything, so you will only know the things that you do have the experience of.
However, that isn't the only thing that it is. Another comment (31748192) mentions the other reasons why some people understand dogs better, so it isn't really as simple as I mentioned above.
> Most people love to share outrage over abuse of conventional pets or bizarre and seemingly psychotic behaviour of eating dogs yet feel nothing to the slaughter of a pig.
Dog and pig can be eaten, so at least to me that is not my outrage but I do think that they should not be treated badly.
> Do fish feel pain? Do insects experience fear? It is very difficult to to empathize with a spider or imagine that a scorpion could feel contentment
I do not know if fish feel pain or if insects experience fear, but it is possible to be harmed even if you cannot feel it at the time. However, such questions of if a fish can feel pain may be figured out in future by some scientists, possibly. I do not believe it is difficult to empathize with a spider or imagine that a scorpion could feel contentment, although perhaps it is difficult to know the details.
> I hear how it is 'dangerous' to anthropomorphize animals by people like Joe Rogan constantly. Can you explain what is 'dangerous' about it? Or why we have to be 'careful' doing so?
Well, what I think is that not everything is same; there are differences. You must be aware of the differences as well as the similarities, if you are to do it properly. Yet, some things will be unknown (so you must compensate for that, too).
Also, consider the possibility that plant life also has sensation and subjective experience, that is wildly different from anything we could actually understand as such. Wouldn't it be equally as immoral to take that life, if we presume that it is morally repugnant to merely eat meat in and of itself, due to taking the life of a conscious, potentially sentient being? Life is life, right?
Also, consider that not everyone can actually eat vegetables. I find the majority of vegetables to be instantly and extremely repugnant. As in, the only time that elapses is the time for the signals to make their way from my tongue and nose to my brain. This is not by choice, as when I was smaller I would happily eat most vegetables. This was something that changed in me at some point for which I have no explanation as to why. Perhaps the Ritalin I took for a few years affected me in an unexpected way? I have no idea.
Interestingly, raccoons, which are the size of cats, have a comparable number of neurons in the cortex as dogs. And act like it as well.
Which isn't to say cats are like, dumb creatures, and it's fine you like them more. Dogs are smarter though, according to me, your buddy, and zoologists, who unlike the three of us know what they're talking about.
In my limited experience oldet raccoons tend to be much more aggressive, making lots of noise and showing their teeth.
There's also the small matter that while dogs have more neurons than cats in general, they have significantly less neurons allocated to their cortex. The study you likely refer to talks about total brain matter.
It is, in short, a dog lovers argument.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2017.0011...
Worth considering that African elephants have 3x the nuerons we do, Killer Whales twice as many only counting the cerebellum.
Cool list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Orca, on the other hand, have more cortical neurons than we do, and much larger brains in general. Part of that is clearly that they have an incredible sense we don't, the ability to make three-dimensional maps out of sound, but orca are also remarkably complex beings and I don't have too much trouble believing that they're about as smart as us, just in a very different way that doesn't involve tools.
The main point remains either way - equating numbers of neurons with "smart" is a really odd definition of "smart". (I mean, most definitions of "smart" in animal studies are bonkers - the most common one is "is obedient")
Cats, I think people just mistake their uncooperative nature for some sort of mysterious wise aloofness.
It's fascinating the replies I get claiming I must be a dog person. It's really... telling... when someone conflates intelligence and moral worth like that. I like cats. I'm not going to pretend they're as smart as dogs just because I like them.
So, raccoons in the garbage.
I'm fairly certain he knows one could simply use the door handle. It's only a question of height and weight. He can reach it with his paws now, and it's only a matter of time before he figures out how to shift his weight to pop that door open...
This observation can be generalized quite far: humans in general have abysmally poor empathy skills and generally have very little respect for everything outside their in-group. Other humans in the out-group are similarly less intelligent or less worthy. And yet despite this, humans also think overly highly of themselves.
Not to mention that too much empaty would be highly detrimental to any innovation and even survival. You would never fire someone and would use all the reasources to "help the poor" instead to invest into high risk high reward projects(i.e computers, space exploration). You would die of starvation instead to slaughter the cow because you are too empathic.
This is a fantasy of objectivism, reactionaryism, and the like, a transparent attempt at justification for their selfishness. Empathy makes you care about the people you will feed with the beef, including yourself (empathy starts with yourself) - it doesn't turn you into an idiot, except in the imaginary strawperson fantasies of the aformentioned groups.
> "help the poor"
Why is that in scare quotes? Also, if you invest in people, many more will eventually invent high-reward things.
>> empathy starts with yourself
That's not empathy. Empathy starts with the animal/person by your side otherwise you are just a selfish person. If you can eat grass/vegetables and survive why would you kill the poor animal?
Help the poor is in quotes because it's a relative term. People who can afford food and shelder could still be considered poor. Poor people in the U.S are rich people in Yemenn.
I always wondered, if investment in poor people provides good returns why there is not enough investment? (i.e unsecured loans provided by the private sector)
> That's not empathy.
It is, and people who don't have it are unable to have empathy for others. In theory, perhaps someone could have empathy only or others. In reality, empathy and similar emotions come from the inside out. Metaphorically, it fills you up then overflows.
People who do not love themselves, who cannot have empathy for themselves despite their flaws and mistakes, cannot love others. And I am not criticizing those people; they deserve love and empathy.
> if investment in poor people provides good returns why there is not enough investment? (i.e unsecured loans provided by the private sector)
It's a good investment for the community, for society - education is one well-accepted example. There are charitities that provide unsecured loans (and grants), with high rates of paymet. Look up JustGive and microlending, for example. However, it's (presumably) not a high rate of ROI for the private sector - they don't profit from changing people's lives and making them more productive. There are many things in the world that the free market doesn't serve well.
If I read this as a rhetorical question, then we are supposing that people always do the most profitable thing. We know this is not the case, because people are very shortsighted: there is no particular reason to think we would not be shortsighted in this matter either.
Moreover, there are a lot of examples of things that have great ROI, but that the private sector is ill-equipped or unable to do, for whatever reason. The provision of public education, basic healthcare, infrastructure, are all great examples. These have great ROI in the long term at the population scale, but apart from some niches, are ill-suited to private enterprise.
Our estimate for intelligence is a heuristic in the brain, firing on the same networks we would use. Which is why intelligence only ever can behave like us, exactly like us and in no other way. Mirror Neurons. If they do not fire that way, we early out and call it a day. Its energy efficient and i assume most animals do that too.
The tools with which we look for and on intelligence are deformed and often incapable of detecting it. Same goes for cats too though, they have zero empathy with prey. Mirror neurons are not firing for mice, but firing for their own kittens. Somewhere there is a switch.
As an ADHD human, I strongly identify with cats. Sometimes I wish I could experience life as a comfortable, loved house cat. Maybe I will next time
Ultimately, I couldn't get enough calories in him, and we had to do a feeding tube. But before that, I was able to get him to eat some treats. He wouldn't eat them if I just gave them to him, but if I had him do "shake" first (the only trick he was up to), and then gave the treats as a reward, he would eat them.
I found it fascinating that the reward had taken on its own meaning for him. You might naively model training with rewards as "the cat is hungry and knows that treats bring food". But he didn't want food. After years of practicing tricks, it's like being rewarded became its own positive experience for him, and the ritual of eating the treat is part of that experience, independent of whether or not he actually wants to eat.
Dogs are so invested in human approval that even abuse can be an effective training 'method' much of the time. As you likely know, before scientific training methods started gaining popularity, this was the predominant tradition for training dogs. And in an anthropocentric way and from a position of utter ignorance, that somehow became the cultural standard. If you can't yell at or pinch or shove an animal and still have it be interested in pleasing you, it's 'not intelligent'.
It's absolutely absurd. It's not fair to dogs or to other animals, and erases the massive, fundamental similarity in the way dogs, cats, and other creatures of all kinds actually learn. All because humans struggle to separate the notion of intelligence from being interested in or useful to ourselves.
Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? [1]
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-en...
Or as Nim Chimpsky used to say: "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
A lot of work remains to be done before we can give a full scientific account of the human mind in relation to the rest of nature. It seems quite narrow minded to me, fanatical even, to deny a priori that such an account, if at all possible, would confirm a transcendental distinction between humans and the rest of nature; or would feature non-material aspects.
I'm of the view that animals are a lot smarter than we'd regularly think, but that there is indeed something very special about human intelligence.
My prediction would be that we won't be able to uplift even a chimpanzee.
And that would be an awesome and debate ending experiment -- if human intelligence is nothing special and it's just a few mutations away from a chimpanzee, just patch the chimpanzee genome with the intelligence genes and see what happens.
I think one other major difference between biological brains and computers, beyond the fact of having a body vs not, is that biology is analog and not digital. A signal going from cell to cell in a brain or up a spinal cord isn't just "on" or "off", but in any number of infinite states. No matter how many bits you manage to pack into a digital "brain," that's a fundamental difference.
Now I can't predict out to the future and say something like digital intelligence is "impossible" or that in the vast universe all life is analog. But from the vantage point of today and what we currently know, it feels that reality is fundamentally analog and so any digital brain can only ever hope to be a simulation of intelligence.
On the flip side, I think we vastly underestimate the various ways intelligence does and can exist amongst living creatures.
I could be wrong, but I feel that digital vs analog is a pretty meaningless distinction in this case, as past a certain level of resolution in practice this is noise.
This doesn't even get into the fact that we know the universe is quantum in nature and that systems have a finite amount of possible states. The universe does not have a "infinite" state resolution in the way you are talking about, merely a large one.
Actually it hasn't been about violating supposed science principles. It has always been about going against the deeply entrenched even today religion dogma of "only humans have soul".
Just compared to other extinct humans, we are more social and more violent.
I believe what makes humans different is this: language and music and religion. This makes humans something bigger than just the individual.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947341/#!po=0....
Consciousness is particularly difficult because we use it in so many different ways. If you look in most dictionaries you will see about half a dozen different definitions ranging from meanings equivalent to perception, all the way up to awareness of ones self and the world, or self-reflection.
Personally I see no reason to suppose that the capacity for self-reflection depends on the cognitive skills underlying language, rather it seems to me it's likely to be the other way around. If this is correct, then I expect our ancestors evolved self-reflection before language, and therefore other animals might also have developed that capability without having language in the sophisticated form we possess.
Viewed in this way, if animals, particularly higher mammals and primates exhibit behaviour consistent with self-reflection and self-awareness, it seems reasonable to me that they may have inherited this capacity from a common ancestor of ours. That's especially so if many different species exhibit this trait. It seems unlikely that such behaviours would evolve completely independently in so many different species that are all related to each other and share so many common neurological features.
The thing that makes humans special is their ability to create and use explanatory knowledge. That’s why humans and no other animals have had an enlightenment or scientific revolution.
It seems to me that much of human "intelligence" is our superior ability to perceive patterns in visual and auditory sensory input, and then to process those perceived patterns in some manner. In that light, what might an olfactory "pattern" actually represent?
Starting with the easier one, I don't know how to accomplish it with transcraniel magnetic stimulation, other than that, it can produce altered states of consciousness similar to psychedelics. I don't think we have enough insight into knowing how to adjust settings for a particular person to reliably get certain shifts in consciousness. Perhaps investigating along the lines of why and how someone can experience synthesia.
As far as psychedelics goes, we'd probably have to delve into the traditional practices that works with altered states of consciousness, and that all depends one one's tolerance for experiences that would be considered woo. Two that come to my mind are Tantra, and the shamanic practices involved with "shapeshifting" into animals.
In Tantric philosophy, pure consciousness descends into the manifest world through the five senses, and you see those representations as five downward triangles in the yantras. There's probably some yogi out there that have explored along those lines. Tantric methods can involve offerings of flowers and incense, so why wouldn't smell be involved?
With the shamanic practices, with the assistance of drumming or psychedelics (and keeping in mind the basis for shamanic practices is animism), the practitioner would seek out the archetypal intelligence of an animal, and request to form a relationship. If granted, one of the ways the practitioner learns the wisdom of that animal archetype is a kind of shifting of consciousness into that of the animal, while partially retaining the perspective of a human. If that animal's olfactory senses is a big part of its role in the ecology it inhabits, and the human is receptive to that, I think it is possible to experience what it is like to have smells that is usually inaccessible as humans.
As far as human's ability to process things with visual and auditory senses ... I'd say that whales and dolphins probably got us beat as far as auditory intelligence goes, and birds has us beat as far as visuals goes. Bird brains also seem more efficient than humans in terms of energy usages, and birds have to process five retinal cones compared to our three retinal cones. The unusual humans who have fully formed fourth retinal cones can already disginguish significantly more color tones than the rest of us ordinary humans. If someone wanted to experience what superior visual and audio experiences are, I'd say try the shamanic techniques to shapeshift into a whale or a parrot.
To me, the only downside is we might have to face the atrocities we commit in our daily life.
They find some odd things to worry about.
We might commit atrocities as we are very wasteful, but with a little more "seeing the universe in ourselves" and a little less "seeing ourselves in the universe", we might refrain from anthropomorphisation and just enjoy our extraordinary amazingness, without destroying the planet as an afterthought to our vanity.
Anthropomorphism is boring and lazy
That... is dumb. They just chose whatever definition of "optimistic" was convenient for their experimental hypothesis and then used it to confirm their hypothesis. "What's an optimist pig? It's one that reacts to squeaks more often. How do we know a pig is optimistic? Because it reacts to squeaks more often!". Not only dumb, but also circular. Circularly dumb.
An "optimistic" pigs behaviour suggests it is open to the indeterminate choice having an upside. A "pessimistic" pig acts like its more likely to be disappointing.
I could say a richly stimulated pig has more open choices and a poorly stimulated pig does not. It's a reasonable definition of optimism or pessimism in the field of choice.
I do still think it's anthropomorphic thinking but I think it's a well founded experiment even in that critique.