Or a mushroom's running of a maze correctly for that matter?
At T2: Yes it was "feminist leaning" but not outrage or indignation. As yet there is no evidence that humans possess any properties that can not be strictly associated with our biological construction, so differentiating "human" and "man" as you have is sentimental and illogical.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
:symtap:, sacrifice White Privilege: Destroy economic injustice.
At T2: Yes it was "feminist leaning" but not outrage or indignation.
The word I used was oversensitive.
As yet there is no evidence that humans possess any properties that can not be strictly associated with our biological construction, so differentiating "human" and "man" as you have is sentimental and illogical.
The point of this thread is to discover a differentiation, as one is apparently needed. Thus the dichotomy.
Is a chimp's deliberate strategy in catching termites thought?
I'd need to know more about this. I'd think no; it sounds like the chimp is hardwired to just 'know' how to catch termites.
Or a raccoon's opening a latch on a garbage can?
I'd have to say yes if it succeeds quickly or with purposeful fumbling. If some raccoons sometimes end up opening latches, I'd say that's just chance.
An octopus' figuring out how to unscrew a jar?
I'd have to say most certainly yes. There is no other way to explain how an octopus could come across the know-how to open a jar than intelligence.
A rat's running a maze correctly?
Recent scientific research has shown that this is actually not the case. There was a variable which wasn't being controlled, and once scientists realized this, they determined the rat was just using a Pavlovian memory of the sound of running the maze to find the 'goal'. The rat has no deductive capabilities and it has no memory of the layout of the maze. It had only a memory of what scurrying around the maze sounded like, and it would make the same errors over and over to reproduce the first way it found the 'goal'. If the maze is placed in sand, the rat has no chance of finding the 'goal'.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Epic banner by Erasmus of æтђєг.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
Is a chimp's deliberate strategy in catching termites thought?
I'd need to know more about this. I'd think no; it sounds like the chimp is hardwired to just 'know' how to catch termites.
Roughly, a chimp takes a relatively straight twig, strips it of its leaves and branchings, sticks it into a hole in a termite mound, and withdraws it a little bit later to lick off the delicious, nutritious, and none-too-bright social insects that have crawled onto this vegetable interloper.
Quote from Horseshoe_Hermit »
An octopus' figuring out how to unscrew a jar?
I'd have to say most certainly yes. There is no other way to explain how an octopus could come across the know-how to open a jar than intelligence.
So it is instrumentally good to keep octopi alive in a way that is not the case for, say, squid (assuming squid don't themselves show signs of intelligence)?
Quote from Horseshoe_Hermit »
A rat's running a maze correctly?
Recent scientific research has shown that this is actually not the case. There was a variable which wasn't being controlled, and once scientists realized this, they determined the rat was just using a Pavlovian memory of the sound of running the maze to find the 'goal'. The rat has no deductive capabilities and it has no memory of the layout of the maze. It had only a memory of what scurrying around the maze sounded like, and it would make the same errors over and over to reproduce the first way it found the 'goal'. If the maze is placed in sand, the rat has no chance of finding the 'goal'.
Though I was not aware of these details, I would have been surprised had maze running not been Pavlovian in some way. But why is Pavlovian conditioning not intelligence of a sort? The little beastie is still learning, and applying that learning to better its life.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Roughly, a chimp takes a relatively straight twig, strips it of its leaves and branchings, sticks it into a hole in a termite mound, and withdraws it a little bit later to lick off the delicious, nutritious, and none-too-bright social insects that have crawled onto this vegetable interloper.
So it is instrumentally good to keep octopi alive in a way that is not the case for, say, squid (assuming squid don't themselves show signs of intelligence)?
Though I was not aware of these details, I would have been surprised had maze running not been Pavlovian in some way. But why is Pavlovian conditioning not intelligence of a sort? The little beastie is still learning, and applying that learning to better its life.
But the rat does not show evidence that it can deduce or pattern-recognize. It just has a memory for times when it has succeeded. It does not remember failure.
The rat may continually return to the same dead end in its search.
And, later, when repeating the same course, it will repeat the exact same failure. The rat does not seem to have the ability to understand where it is. It just remembers "If I do this, I eventually reach [good thing]"
Mind you, the goal is always food of some kind.
It is Pavlovian conditioning because it is just conditioned to 'want' that which has brought it good results - the food. It does not use memory of failure, meaning, it does not recognize such a concept as failure.
It cannot deduce because of the same reason. A logical search of a maze would not result in making a repeated error.
The octopus example intrigues me. I was not aware an octopus could open a jar. Obviously, just that ability itself is not too valuable, but as I said, I believe this points to some form of intelligence. If we could figure out what that intelligence is, octopi may, in some unforeseeable circumstance in the future, be applied to essentially present another point of view in a new matter.
Granted, this is very far-fetch'd and somehwat whimsical, but if it is the case that octopi have genuine intelligence, adding its aiblities to that of other minds would undeniably have the "think tank" effect on the success of some new intellectual endeavour. What is actually contributed is not an issue. But that possibility is worth respecting.
My best example is that of Mr. Braille. He was a blind boy from France. With his particular viewpoint on the world, he was motivated to create 'Braille,' a tactile form of text of which you are probably aware. His own insight into blindness (two guesses how) also may have helped to create a design which was efficient for blind-readers (more efficient than a seeing person trying to design the same thing).
The parallels aren't very clean, but I think I've made myself clear.
A more practical way of thinking about it is this: The octopus already survives in undersea conditions. Perhaps there is a way to use an octopus like the way we use dolphins?
As for the chimp, by that account, it sounds like hereditarily inherited knowledge. One chimp, at some point, had the dull sense of using a tool to catch a termite. The skill must have been used and reused throught generations of chimps, so now every chimp just knows how to do it. There is no synthesis of that method anymore.
That is the distinction I find most important: Intelligence is valuable for its ability to synthesize procedures or information. Memory, pattern-recognition, and the like are all quite quaint, but they can be reproduced by any thinking thing (or even computers). But creativity is the important part.
I do not wish to cut out of the future the possibility that some mind with unique insight is present to use that creativity to make progress.
Any fetus will be a human if allowed to live. With a human, it is surely a much easier matter to qualify what is 'enough' intelligence than our animal tangent. I want to have any and all minds available to make progress at the appropriate time, and that fetus will have one such mind, unless I kill it, in which case, it won't.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Epic banner by Erasmus of æтђєг.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
Squid have been shown to be just as intelligent as octopuses (it's not, contrary to popular belief "octopi"). But all this talk about octupus and chimps and gorillas and dolphins and squid and elephants is sort of besides the point unless you're arguing that aborting, killing and mistreating these other species is just as objectionable as the aborting, killing and mistreating of humans.
As I said earlier, our concept of "human" is primarily a social construction, so it doesn't make sense to try to use bilogical science to determine if abortion is okay. In feudal Japan the spirit wasn't believed to enter a child until 30 days after birth, so it was not murder to kill an baby or fetus prior to that time. We might say that's a really archaic and arbitrary distinction but where we choose to draw the line is equally arbitrary. We must accept that there is no "real" answer to this problem. Instead we should look at the social factors that make the issue important to so many people.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
:symtap:, sacrifice White Privilege: Destroy economic injustice.
Squid have been shown to be just as intelligent as octopuses (it's not, contrary to popular belief "octopi").
Octopi sounds funnier.
Quote from BenGreen »
But all this talk about octupus and chimps and gorillas and dolphins and squid and elephants is sort of besides the point unless you're arguing that aborting, killing and mistreating these other species is just as objectionable as the aborting, killing and mistreating of humans.
That's what I'm trying to find out from Horshoe_Hermit.
Quote from BenGreen »
As I said earlier, our concept of "human" is primarily a social construction, so it doesn't make sense to try to use bilogical science to determine if abortion is okay. In feudal Japan the spirit wasn't believed to enter a child until 30 days after birth, so it was not murder to kill an baby or fetus prior to that time. We might say that's a really archaic and arbitrary distinction but where we choose to draw the line is equally arbitrary.
If you went back to feudal Japan and saw such an infanticide taking place, would you call it wrong?
Quote from BenGreen »
We must accept that there is no "real" answer to this problem. Instead we should look at the social factors that make the issue important to so many people.
Important social factors: Everybody likes sex. Everybody likes babies. Some people like babies in principle but don't want to have one of their own just yet.
If you went back to feudal Japan and saw such an infanticide taking place, would you call it wrong?
Of course, but for me to believe that my conception of "wrong" is objectively more correct than someone elses is false. Feudal Japanese culture functioned very well for many hundreds of years, despite such beliefs as this.
I think the closest we can come to saying that a given social structure is "better" than another is that it is "more optimal," and then I'm not even convinced we can say this without adding that it's only more optimal if we assume a set of bio-ethical beliefs.
Strong societal prohibitions on murder exist because the members of society have reached a near consensus on its immorality. However, members of our society have not come even remotely close to a consensus concerning whether the aborting of a fetus is murder. Because a significant fraction of our society believes that abortion is not murder, it would be immoral to impose that definition on them. Similarly, though a slowly growing fraction of the population believes that the meat industry is immoral, it'd be immoral for them to impose that belief on the significant fraction of the population that disagrees. Simply put, I believe that so long as there is substantive disagreement on the issue of abortion, it should remain legal.
A sensible counter-arguement would be that this would be well and good, but we're talking about the murder of unborn children here! My suggestion that we should just let it continue is complicancy in the crime! Why should we sit down and "get to know" the other side? They're baby killers! Should we forgive serial killers as well?
As you can see, if we accept the assumption that fetuses are people and so are entitled to all the rights that everyone else has, the notion that we allow abortions to continue sound insane. Ironically, this is a phenomenon that peace acitivists have been struggling with for decades. How can people not leap from their homes, screaming into the streets, tearing their hair out, demanding total disarmament, when thousands of murders are being committed in their name? How can we live with ourselves if we don't completely dismantle the factories churning out the weapons of mass death? The torment and anguish people must face in the face of percieved injustice is enough to drive people mad. It's not surprising that people have blown up abortion clinics or murdered the doctors who work there - despite the blatant contradictions this brings up. Similarly, it's not surprising that environmentalists, seeing the descruction of the earth as a brutal terracyde and an attack on the lives of the unborn future, spike trees and destroy lumber mills - again, despite the evident contradictions.
The crucial question is, "how can we move on? How can we create a place of dialogue and understanding?" In the past (and present) we've answered the first question by assuming that the second's answer is "we can't." We've "moved on" by dismissing the opposition as an intractable and irrational beast, and then trying to shove through legislation that benefits us regardless of the woe it brings to others. Meanwhile, those whose sole interests are power have used people driven by their ethical beliefs to amass ever greater power.
Important social factors: Everybody likes sex. Everybody likes babies.
I personally know people that hate babies and recognize them as a "necessary evil." I think that more important social factors are more specific demographic data. Who gets abortions? Why? How does economic prosperity or effective social supports affect the number of abortions in a community? Are there correlations between communities with high drug use and those with high rates of abortions? Are their correlations as regards to religion, ethnicity, economic class, unemployment, quality of education, etc?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
:symtap:, sacrifice White Privilege: Destroy economic injustice.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
At T2: Yes it was "feminist leaning" but not outrage or indignation. As yet there is no evidence that humans possess any properties that can not be strictly associated with our biological construction, so differentiating "human" and "man" as you have is sentimental and illogical.
The word I used was oversensitive.
The point of this thread is to discover a differentiation, as one is apparently needed. Thus the dichotomy.
Is a chimp's deliberate strategy in catching termites thought?
I'd need to know more about this. I'd think no; it sounds like the chimp is hardwired to just 'know' how to catch termites.
Or a raccoon's opening a latch on a garbage can?
I'd have to say yes if it succeeds quickly or with purposeful fumbling. If some raccoons sometimes end up opening latches, I'd say that's just chance.
An octopus' figuring out how to unscrew a jar?
I'd have to say most certainly yes. There is no other way to explain how an octopus could come across the know-how to open a jar than intelligence.
A rat's running a maze correctly?
Recent scientific research has shown that this is actually not the case. There was a variable which wasn't being controlled, and once scientists realized this, they determined the rat was just using a Pavlovian memory of the sound of running the maze to find the 'goal'. The rat has no deductive capabilities and it has no memory of the layout of the maze. It had only a memory of what scurrying around the maze sounded like, and it would make the same errors over and over to reproduce the first way it found the 'goal'. If the maze is placed in sand, the rat has no chance of finding the 'goal'.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
Roughly, a chimp takes a relatively straight twig, strips it of its leaves and branchings, sticks it into a hole in a termite mound, and withdraws it a little bit later to lick off the delicious, nutritious, and none-too-bright social insects that have crawled onto this vegetable interloper.
So it is instrumentally good to keep octopi alive in a way that is not the case for, say, squid (assuming squid don't themselves show signs of intelligence)?
Though I was not aware of these details, I would have been surprised had maze running not been Pavlovian in some way. But why is Pavlovian conditioning not intelligence of a sort? The little beastie is still learning, and applying that learning to better its life.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
But the rat does not show evidence that it can deduce or pattern-recognize. It just has a memory for times when it has succeeded. It does not remember failure.
The rat may continually return to the same dead end in its search.
And, later, when repeating the same course, it will repeat the exact same failure. The rat does not seem to have the ability to understand where it is. It just remembers "If I do this, I eventually reach [good thing]"
Mind you, the goal is always food of some kind.
It is Pavlovian conditioning because it is just conditioned to 'want' that which has brought it good results - the food. It does not use memory of failure, meaning, it does not recognize such a concept as failure.
It cannot deduce because of the same reason. A logical search of a maze would not result in making a repeated error.
The octopus example intrigues me. I was not aware an octopus could open a jar. Obviously, just that ability itself is not too valuable, but as I said, I believe this points to some form of intelligence. If we could figure out what that intelligence is, octopi may, in some unforeseeable circumstance in the future, be applied to essentially present another point of view in a new matter.
Granted, this is very far-fetch'd and somehwat whimsical, but if it is the case that octopi have genuine intelligence, adding its aiblities to that of other minds would undeniably have the "think tank" effect on the success of some new intellectual endeavour. What is actually contributed is not an issue. But that possibility is worth respecting.
My best example is that of Mr. Braille. He was a blind boy from France. With his particular viewpoint on the world, he was motivated to create 'Braille,' a tactile form of text of which you are probably aware. His own insight into blindness (two guesses how) also may have helped to create a design which was efficient for blind-readers (more efficient than a seeing person trying to design the same thing).
The parallels aren't very clean, but I think I've made myself clear.
A more practical way of thinking about it is this: The octopus already survives in undersea conditions. Perhaps there is a way to use an octopus like the way we use dolphins?
As for the chimp, by that account, it sounds like hereditarily inherited knowledge. One chimp, at some point, had the dull sense of using a tool to catch a termite. The skill must have been used and reused throught generations of chimps, so now every chimp just knows how to do it. There is no synthesis of that method anymore.
That is the distinction I find most important: Intelligence is valuable for its ability to synthesize procedures or information. Memory, pattern-recognition, and the like are all quite quaint, but they can be reproduced by any thinking thing (or even computers). But creativity is the important part.
I do not wish to cut out of the future the possibility that some mind with unique insight is present to use that creativity to make progress.
Any fetus will be a human if allowed to live. With a human, it is surely a much easier matter to qualify what is 'enough' intelligence than our animal tangent. I want to have any and all minds available to make progress at the appropriate time, and that fetus will have one such mind, unless I kill it, in which case, it won't.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
As I said earlier, our concept of "human" is primarily a social construction, so it doesn't make sense to try to use bilogical science to determine if abortion is okay. In feudal Japan the spirit wasn't believed to enter a child until 30 days after birth, so it was not murder to kill an baby or fetus prior to that time. We might say that's a really archaic and arbitrary distinction but where we choose to draw the line is equally arbitrary. We must accept that there is no "real" answer to this problem. Instead we should look at the social factors that make the issue important to so many people.
Octopi sounds funnier.
That's what I'm trying to find out from Horshoe_Hermit.
If you went back to feudal Japan and saw such an infanticide taking place, would you call it wrong?
Important social factors: Everybody likes sex. Everybody likes babies. Some people like babies in principle but don't want to have one of their own just yet.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I think the closest we can come to saying that a given social structure is "better" than another is that it is "more optimal," and then I'm not even convinced we can say this without adding that it's only more optimal if we assume a set of bio-ethical beliefs.
Strong societal prohibitions on murder exist because the members of society have reached a near consensus on its immorality. However, members of our society have not come even remotely close to a consensus concerning whether the aborting of a fetus is murder. Because a significant fraction of our society believes that abortion is not murder, it would be immoral to impose that definition on them. Similarly, though a slowly growing fraction of the population believes that the meat industry is immoral, it'd be immoral for them to impose that belief on the significant fraction of the population that disagrees. Simply put, I believe that so long as there is substantive disagreement on the issue of abortion, it should remain legal.
A sensible counter-arguement would be that this would be well and good, but we're talking about the murder of unborn children here! My suggestion that we should just let it continue is complicancy in the crime! Why should we sit down and "get to know" the other side? They're baby killers! Should we forgive serial killers as well?
As you can see, if we accept the assumption that fetuses are people and so are entitled to all the rights that everyone else has, the notion that we allow abortions to continue sound insane. Ironically, this is a phenomenon that peace acitivists have been struggling with for decades. How can people not leap from their homes, screaming into the streets, tearing their hair out, demanding total disarmament, when thousands of murders are being committed in their name? How can we live with ourselves if we don't completely dismantle the factories churning out the weapons of mass death? The torment and anguish people must face in the face of percieved injustice is enough to drive people mad. It's not surprising that people have blown up abortion clinics or murdered the doctors who work there - despite the blatant contradictions this brings up. Similarly, it's not surprising that environmentalists, seeing the descruction of the earth as a brutal terracyde and an attack on the lives of the unborn future, spike trees and destroy lumber mills - again, despite the evident contradictions.
The crucial question is, "how can we move on? How can we create a place of dialogue and understanding?" In the past (and present) we've answered the first question by assuming that the second's answer is "we can't." We've "moved on" by dismissing the opposition as an intractable and irrational beast, and then trying to shove through legislation that benefits us regardless of the woe it brings to others. Meanwhile, those whose sole interests are power have used people driven by their ethical beliefs to amass ever greater power.
I personally know people that hate babies and recognize them as a "necessary evil." I think that more important social factors are more specific demographic data. Who gets abortions? Why? How does economic prosperity or effective social supports affect the number of abortions in a community? Are there correlations between communities with high drug use and those with high rates of abortions? Are their correlations as regards to religion, ethnicity, economic class, unemployment, quality of education, etc?