Hacker News Reader

Comment by dorongrinstein | Hacker News Reader

Do people not have dogs? They have more emotional intelligence than most humans and love, fear, play, plan, think, reason and communicate well. This is true for many animals. I'd say that most animals are just like human in terms of consciousness but less advanced in thinking and communicating (without debating about whales, dolphins, octopuses etc.)

View on HN

As all the discussion about AI has shown, what we even mean by intelligence in humans is a huge and ongoing debate.

IIRC, canine emotional intelligence has been tested, and dogs have the emotional intelligence of a 14 year old human.

Just don't take my word for it as I've not been able to find an actual citation.

Less advanced in symbolic thinking and communicating. There are other forms of thinking (like fast tactical thinking, some predators are conceivably better at this than most humans) and communicating (emotional communication; if we could quantify that I would bet on elephants).

Orcas are better at communicating than humans are, their languages more directly resembles telepathy than the “encode thoughts into grunts that then need to be decoded” that we have. They are essentially beaming waveform pictures to each other

That is a very narrow definition of better it seems.

Good luck landing on the moon with that way of communicating.

Symbolic communication is much more precise.

Just like people thinking low-code or diagram based software development should be better. It isn’t an it was tried multiple times already.

I have a dog and I know it is dreaming and having all kinds of emotions and wants. It can communicate with me in its own way and of course has needs for being close and attention. I got it from silly people who could not take care of it well and it was a lot of work to gain its trust so we could be real companions.

But my dog for sure is not pondering mysteries of the universe and is most likely not aware it is going to die one day and is not going to have existential dread thinking about it.

We are made from the same things and share a lot - but at the same time we are so much different that it cannot be just "humans are just the same as animals".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com