Elephants use namelike calls
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value.
Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.
my fav elephant behavior: appreciating music
These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some of those.
Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of consciousness and the world though.
Sadly, we somehow confuse consciousness with the identity or individuality (ego). I believe the ego is just one modality (or subset) of consciousness.
Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.
My dad was born before the first transistor was built, and died in 2014.
When he was born, reasonable people thought they'd never see a nuclear chain reaction, never see supersonic flight, never see space flight, never have men walking on the moon.
In his lifetime, even after the invention of the computer, reasonable people thought they would never in their lifetime have a machine beat the best human chess player. One of his specific anecdotes was about "fitting all of Shakespeare's works on a ball bearing".
Even as late as 2004, the script writers for "I, Robot" considered it sensible to have that memetic Will Smith line "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" — my dad never saw Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, but he would have if he'd lived the average life expectancy.
No matter what exactly it is that you mean by "intelligent" such that it excludes what computers already demonstrate, a lifetime is a long time, and a lot can change.
Supersonic flight is a question of manufacturing processes more than anything; we could always scale engines to make more power, just that making them light while being producible to a specific degree of accuracy was difficult.
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and implemented successfully in 1945. Of course nobody would have thought of it - just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one. It's a question of looking at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings. We didn't put a stupid amount of effort into nuclear fission relative to how much it changed the world - I'm willing to bet that more cost has been put into r&d for office furniture than for the nuclear bomb.
Chess is a simple game of calculation, not a sign of intelligence. It merely reflects the ability to calculate, which is the strength of scalable computers. It just so happens that we came up with computers and they work well in this space - there's no telling of things we haven't discovered because we haven't thought to implement anything to do with them.
Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
These things were all called "impossible" — and in some cases "unthinkable" — when my dad was born; supersonic simply looks like "a question of manufacturing processes" because we here in 2024 already know (as a society if not as individuals) how to make a jet engine that doesn't melt itself during operation and a rocket that doesn't explode. Going to the moon was itself the metaphor for "you can't do that thing". Rutherford famously dismissed the idea of extracting useful energy from nuclear reactions as talking "moonshine".
Before Deep Blue, sensible people insisted that Chess "required" the human intellect and couldn't be reduced to mere calculation. When it turned out to the contrary, then the goalposts moved to Go because that game was too complex to explore the state space and you can't even write a simple function to estimate how good a move was the way you can add up piece point values in chess. And then Go fell, and people suddenly decided it wasn't special after all, and "what really matters is emotional intelligence, which machines will never replicate":
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
If it is sufficient to look "at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings", then that would also suffice for intelligence, because we are existence proofs that it's possible to make a ~1.5kg, 20 watt, human-level chemical intelligence.
Everything we've done with A.I. since the field began, has been theory and testing of attempts to replicate various aspects of our intelligence.
> Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
If you shift the goalposts like that, then you would fail any single human, and only have sapience for the species as a whole super-organism. The word has meant a variety of different concepts before reaching its current meaning, as the economic and technological milieu, as well as the existing body of works that they were expected to be familiar with and innovate on (but only a bit because too much change all at once makes people hate you*) all continuously changed the composer's capacities for grandeur. No single composer created the modern form ex nihilo, nor even any single step towards it from the ancient Greek σύμφωνος (harmony), each step was building piece-by-piece on those who came before.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danse_macabre_(Saint-Saëns)#Re...
But again, this is to miss the point. The people in 2004 who wrote that script, didn't have Del Spooner say "Sure, we all know robots can write a symphony or turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece, but can they invent the concept of symphony if we never told it to them?"
To put it another way, using your own words:
> just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one
And yet, about 20 years later, never mind the 77 since the transistor or the 80.7 years of average UK life expectancy? The path the scriptwriters went for was to have the character of Sonny respond "Can you?", pointing out that most humans can't compose or paint either, not by making Sonny create works faster than most printers can actually print them — a thing which is already possible for high end systems today, which those script writers couldn't conceive of.
And not just script writers: between graduation (2006) and the actual release of these models, I've had conversations with co-workers, software engineers, who didn't think that what these models do was possible.
> I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
I mean, I don't know how old you are, but I don't want to predict anything after the early 2030s, even in relatively simple areas like energy production: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/03/23-17.24.34.html
But we absolutely can quantify intelligence, that's what IQ tests are and we've had them for ages, the problem right now is that we're not sure if there's a single "general" thing or lots of small skills in different areas. Humans seem to have a G-factor, but the machines keep passing all our tests almost as fast as we can fill in the gaps in this sentence: "sure, they can ${old test}, but they won't be intelligent until they can ${new test}".
I feel certain future generations will look on us as barbarians for keeping elephants and other intelligent animals in concrete cells. They are magnificent, and care deeply for each other. One day when we speak to them I feel certain they’ll say humans suck and every animal knows it.
I don't know. Growing up with cattle, they regularly stood free, but then always waited around to let them back into their "concrete cells". They had every chance to escape, but never wanted to. They clearly preferred being there. Same goes for the farm dogs and cats. In fact, the cat population "mysteriously" kept growing without a corresponding number of kittens (in other words, foreign cats would voluntarily find their way into those "concrete cells").
It very well may have been a case of Stockholm syndrome, but regardless of the exact mechanics it is doubtful that they know that to be the case.
Go find a wild bison and see how it behaves. I've chased herds of wild bison on many occasions - they are NOT like domestic cows.
Same story for mountain lions and lynx, etc. They are a far cry from cats.
Having our tiny falling down cabin surrounded by wolves in the Yukon at -44 degrees makes you appreciate how far THOSE are from house dogs.
What is significant about this specific mechanism that makes it noteworthy enough to violate what was already established?
No doubt it was posted for good reason, but so far nobody has been able to figure out what that reason is. To the rest of us laymen, an environmental factor is an environmental factor is an environmental factor. What makes breeding so different that it justifies violating the discussion that was taking place?
Who said that? As far as I can tell the discussion was the difference between domesticated cows and bison, and I didn't see anyone say breeding is irrelevant except you.
> What makes breeding so different that it justifies violating the discussion that was taking place?
What exactly are you talking about? You are being obtusely vague
>Where do you dream this stuff up?
No need to be rude, it's not helping anything. You are being rude to the other poster too, when it's your fault for not communicating clearly and just insisting everyone made the same assumptions as you when it's clear they didn't. Rather than make things clear, you just keep insulting people on top of things.
The discussion was about how domesticated animals prefer to stick around humans even when they don't need to, negating the idea that all animals are of the opinion that "humans suck". It was established that the exact reason for why these animals behave that way is irrelevant to the topic, but then the comment about bison introduced the idea that it is relevant. After all, why would we see a post that is irrelevant? But there is no indication of where the relevance lies. Is selective breeding not an environment pressure like any other? What is noteworthy about it that justifies the violation?
> No need to be rude, it's not helping anything.
Intriguing. It would be interesting to hear the logic behind considering text spit out by a piece of software to be rude. Does rudeness not require human intent? Indeed, a human giving another human the middle finger might be considered rude (human intent) by a human observer, but a monkey giving the middle finger (non-human intent) is not traditionally considered so despite being an identical act. This seems to imply that you assign human-like qualities to software. But at the same time software is well understood to not be human-like. It operates using very different mechanisms. Which, then, seems like software should be treated more like the monkey than like the human, but clearly that is not the case.
Tell us more about your take! The other commenter does not seem to recall why he posted the comment about the bison, leaving that topic to be a dead-end, so let's entertain your tangent.
What ultimately sets humans apart from the monkeys, to make the difference between human intent and non-human intent significant, is identity. Indeed, a human in a costume that is unrecognizable from an actual monkey, thus having no identity, would not conjure rudeness feelings when giving the middle finger any more than an actual monkey would. It is fair to say that identity is not necessarily one's outer appearance. Signing one's name is another way humans confer identity, for example.
Do you recognize a human identity here? If so, describe it for us.
I already did when I called you rude.
Ha. Not going to happen. "Rude" can describe anyone. It does not serve to provide an identity.
And this is how you want us to come to believe that software is human?
I still don't understand what you are asking.
If you don't understand that breeding something for a certain trait will impact that animal, I suggest you go look at pugs or dash-hounds and the medical problems they now have as a result of very specific breeding.
But you have not yet shared what is notable about it. Breeding for a certain trait is farming 101. There is absolutely nothing interesting about that. So what have we missed?
> It was established that the exact mechanics don't matter
Please show me what was established and where. I genuinely don't know what you are talking about.
> But then you introduced an exact mechanic
Again, please show what I introduced and where.
>This means that there must be something incredibly interesting or noteworthy about said mechanic to violate the notion that the exact mechanics don't matter
Ahhh, really lost now.
> But you have not yet shared what is notable about it.
Notable about what?
Either one of us is staggeringly confused, or I'm having this conversation with an AI in training.
Yes, I am the one who is confused, which is why I started asking questions all those comments ago in a hopeful effort to try and become unconfused. But at this point you don't seem to even be aware of why you posted the comment, so I suppose we'll just chalk it up to an arbitrary thought crafted while in the middle of a somnambulism.
What say you?
So, I say: Who cares? You already went into this knowing that it could be a bot and it didn't brother you one bit. Nor should it, because, again, it only being an implementation detail of the software means that it affects you in no way. A bot, a human, space alien, or an infinite number of monkeys are all just as good as each other. It makes no difference. No difference at all. So, what compels you to bring this up now?
But, getting back to the topic at hand, we'd still love to know how your comment at the top is significant enough to justify violating the established premise. If it is simply that you didn't bother to take time to understand the thread before replying, and that it doesn't fit the discussion, that's a perfectly acceptable answer. Although, admittedly, we cling to the hope that you actually have an interesting nugget hidden in there that will blow our minds when you finally get around to telling us about it!
Have domestic cats actually been selectively bred from those bigger cats? I thought they were preexisting hunter animals that just decided they liked living with us better than living in the wild
I see no reason why elephants would seek out confinement when it seemingly harms their health and therefore presumably makes them feel worse.
Not to worry, seems more and more likely they will look on us as barbarians for killing off the elephants and other intelligent animals.
That's if learn that elephants are like us. Maybe we'll find out their better then way we are or worse. Getting to know that answer over time will be amazing.
An elephant did something deeply human and thugged that coconut right out of my hand, and into its mouth it went. Those trunks are quick and I, a dumb tourist, was not on guard.
Best thing I could do was pluck the straw from its maw, as that probably would not have been healthy.
>the consciousness and moral weight of non-human animals
The modern low-point was the period of extreme reductionist behaviorism (e.g. John Watson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Watson). Good news is that very few have taken that point of view seriously for well over 50 years.
Maturana and Valera’s classic book Autopoieses and Cognition came out in 1970 and greatly broadened the definition of cognition in a way that makes good sense to me. And that highlights what all our LLMs are missing.
Not sure that randomized control trials (RCTs) are a problem in animal research. We have effectively done a zillion RCTs going back to Edward Tolman and his rats. Even in the 1930s he clearly demonstrated what most scientist accept as cognition, and even as a form of consciousness.
Self-consciousness in the way we experience this phenomenon is more controversial, and many still think self-consciousness the way we mean it as recursive inner monolog—is coupled strongly to language.
Granted that many argue that the distinction is artificial and/or just a quantitative matter of degree. Even Heidegger gets very close to this position. But at some point a quantitative discontinuity is so marked that it is labeled as a qualitative difference. Our language use is qualitatively different and our linguistic resources for self-appraisal seem to me to be “unusual” to say the least compared to other species. (I watched the great movie “Arrival” again last night.)
My guess is that most of us will concede that the evolutionary and developmental steps and stages and level of awareness are open to inspection. Watching this blooming process as infants grow up to become kids and then adults is definitely one of the greatest of joys.
"Science is good if it coincides with my ideology or is only focused in cherry-picking facts that I like" is a very dangerous path.
It's not completely possible to separate questions like "what is true about the world?" from questions like "how should we behave?", because the former must inform the latter, and the latter intrinsically informs what we choose to look at, whether we acknowledge it or not. Pretending you have no opinions is disingenuous and counterproductive to the endeavor of objectivity, because that's simply not true of anyone, and acknowledging one's biases is strictly necessary for mitigating them. Nonetheless, it is not "politicizing science" inherently to like or dislike certain results, or to think institutional biases exist
My take on this, is that this was never, ever an issue. Only city folk have a disconnected, weird view of the world. Rural people, who live and interact with far more wild animal life on a daily basis, 100% know that animals have intelligence, care for each other, none of this is foreign or strange to those living closer to nature.
But there is also another angle to consider. Take a look at WWII. Take a look at wars around the world right now. Take a look at violence in our communities.
Now take a look at how humans treat animals. Notice anything similar?
We aren't being cruel to animals, but as a species, we're just acting as we act towards each other.
Do you really believe that a person that beats their dog, won't beat another person, given the chance?
This isn't about animal husbandry, whether for food or for resources (wool, milk, eggs, etc). When you look at non-industrial farms, small family run farms, they in most cases treat their animals with care, and empathy.
Even "the end", slaughter time, is quick, as painless as can be, with care and concern. There are videos on youtube for how you can slit a chicken's throat, and let it bleed out, without it really realising anything is happening. There are videos for breaking the neck (as an alternate), without the chicken having anything but a second of "oh no". Quick, fast, as painless as possible, endless people have this goal.
The end is going to come for these birds, but my point is -- you can see people DO care. Have always cared.
Is every small farmer like this? No. But my point is, is every human kind to other humans? We have psychopaths, sociopaths, unemphatic people who treat humans poorly.
So my premise here is, that animal abuse and human abuse go hand in hand. That we actually treat animals, and ALWAYS have treated animals as thinking, reasoning beings, but also through history have treated them like us.
The whole "intuition" thing is a hard push from historical, pre-scientific method and really you don't want to go there. Letting science be dictated by "intuition" is massively wrong, so while I agree that those involved in husbandry are going to be closer to the fact than those displaced, at the same time you cannot use intuition to validate truth.
Bear in mind that "intuition" can also be steeped in "because God says so, of course!"
Back to additional, historical schisms.
I recall being taught how "mankind" was "separate from animals". In the Christian bible, man was created in "god's image", separate and entirely outside of the scope of the rest of the world, and the life forms inhabiting it.
Book for Genesis and all that.
Anyhow the logic was that animals were one thing, and that "mankind" was NOT an animal. This made it easier for those steeped in a religious upbringing, but isolated from animal husbandry, to just mentally agree. I imagine, with a huff, 'But animals are NOT the same', and so on.
This also one of the reasons as to why evolution was so strongly fought. After all, "god said humans are separate from animals" and thus "we are not animals!! heresy!! no we did NOT come from animals!"
I honestly feel that we need more "this is how our ancestors thought" training in school, without the "let's present it in a poor light" or "good light" or any modification at all. There's so much work being done to re-factor historical fact into something palatable to the masses, and it just hurts all of us. We are nothing without understanding our own past.
We must always examine our culture with an eye to the past, and historical beliefs in the past, for us to truly understand why things are as they are now. And, why we believe what we believe now. Even with the majority of "Western" people somewhat detached from traditional religious upbringings, there is an immense cultural history and backload there, which permeates every aspect of our society.
But the existence of an intuitive belief is also not good evidence against what that belief claims, either! I think scientists have in a few important situations found themselves encountering pushback where methodical empirical study comes to counter-intuitive conclusions, and the culture of science got itself trapped in a schizmogenesis feedback loop where results that sounded counterintuitive were seen as more scientifically sound merely on that basis (and, probably, because counterintuitive findings sound harder to do and thus more impressive). I think this is starting to course-correct, with terms like "boring science" (empirical tests which confirm an intuitive hypothesis) and "cultural evolution" (which some people use to prove too much, but the most solid form of the argument is basically that a commonly-held but illegible belief is something we should treat as a weak signal suggesting a potential truth rather than a negative one) becoming popular
Culture is an insidious force we should have tools for pushing back against, but it really throws the baby out with the bathwater to assume that no one who doesn't do rigorous methodological empiricism can come to know something, and that all such knowledge is necessarily backwards and stupid. Even a hypothetically perfect methodological empiricist who must justify all conclusions with legible evidence and repeatable methodology should treat an illegible belief as merely holding no evidentiary weight, not weight against that which is believed
I do wonder of they're actually naming themselves, or if they're being named by others.
Is there a handshaking protocol, where a bird says "hi I'm Fred" followed up by "greetings Fred!" "hiya Fred!"
or if it's more akin to schoolboy nicknames that stick. e.g. a bird yells at another bird "hey wifepooper, you're pooping on my wife!" and that target bird will never refer to themselves as 'wifepooper' but merely 'I'/'me', though other birds will refer to that singular bird as 'wifepooper'
I truly believe that thinking other species are “less intelligent” than us comes down to our own inability to have a complex dialogue with them. Time and again, we have a pioneer who is somehow able to break this barrier through sheer perseverance. Then we get Kokos of the world. Now we’ve noticed traits resembling true human toddler like understanding in dogs and even some birds.
Perhaps one day, brain interface devices and machine learning will help us cross that barrier for good, and unlock a new age of learning from our peers in the animal kingdom.
For example, the local replicant who they know introduces his fellows. The dolphin speech is essentially "who? Marvin! Marvin friends?"
Which is basically "Who are the strangers? Oh it's Marvin! Marvin, are these your friends?"
I imagine most animal languages are at this level. And nothing wrong with that. For their lifestyles, many intelligent animals with a language like this are served perfectly well. Personal identifiers to call out friendly individuals, names for threats, maybe even general welcomes for fellow groups like elephants and whales that generally live in family groups and occasionally meet up for mating or due to resource constraints like grazing and seasonal water construction.
Also to those downvoting my comment - would you be kind enough to also leave a comment? I’d like to know what part did you disagree with.
Original: Who? Marvin! Marvin friends? Transliterated: だれ？マーヴィンさん！マーヴィンさんの友人？ Google Translate: Who's that? Marvin! Are you Marvin's friend?
In general, I don't think there are any animals that are as intelligent as adult humans. After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet? It's not like other animals had the opportunity to take over and rejected it.
> After all, if there's nothing special about human intelligence, why are we the most dominant species on the planet?
Could be a lot of things. Sea life can't have fire, so no ceramics or refined metals.
We're unusually cooperative at multiple levels of abstraction; wolves have packs, ants have colonies, but we have global trade in information, energy, goods, and two nations of over 1.4 billion people each.
Opposable thumbs are really useful, relatively rare.
With animals, we're still at the level of trying to figure out what might count as a token-like-thing.
My guess is the sites don't benefit from the traffic being directed to them. The signup rate for this strategy is in the single digit percentage at most. Meanwhile, at least if you're like me, the user just immediately navigated back to HN. Out time is wasted and the "front page" of HN is being somewhat diluted by unreadable content.
"Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."
Solutioning: "You know, paywalls are awful. Is there any technology tweak we can apply to make the situation better?"
If anyone has a suggestion that would actually make the situation better, I'd love to hear it, because the current situation sucks, and has sucked for at least 10 years. It just sucks less than the alternatives we know of.
I would agree with you if it weren't so easy to dodge. But it is.