Comment by LionessLover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LionessLover | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who has a basic neuroscience background, your comment is a sequence of empty statements.

> Ah, now we get into a pretty interesting debate: is there a fundamental difference between human cognition and other animals?

Actually, that's not an interesting debate at all, unless you like vacuous debates. You will have to be very - very - specific if you want that "debate" to be grounded in actual science.

> pretty hard to defend the case that horses have commonsense

Given that there is no neuroscience-based knowledge of what "common sense" even means, you are making up your own criteria.

I don't even see what point you are trying to make in your last paragraph.

> (Which is another case for the humans-are-fundamentally-different side of the argument)

Eh.. what? You name some random experiment, don't even say much about it at all, and then try to draw a general conclusion. And of course, as in all your other statements, you refrain from any specifics but remain a "politician", just playing with words that don't mean anything specific.

Thanks for the comment, but let's try to keep this discussion friendly and not ad hominem.

I'd politely disagree that my comment was a sequence of empty statements, but allow me to provide some clarifying details that might help your understanding.

The debate I describe is actually critical. If humans are not fundamentally different, than the field should be able to model more simplistic animals (such as a rat), and slowly build up to a model of human level intelligence. On the other-hand, if there is a fundamental difference between humans and other animals, then simply modeling other animals will not scale, and will leave the field wanting.

I don't think we have to get too specific to debate this. I would point to Winston, Tattersall, Chomsky as three widely respected individuals who present the case that symbolic language (and the uniquely human ability to combine two concepts into a new concept, indefinitely) is the keystone that separates humans from other animals.

In your second criticism, we agree exactly. As you can see in my previous comment, I agree that "commonsense" is an arbitrary term. Here, I was simply providing an example of how debating commonsense is not a useful exercise.

Finally, in my last paragraph I was providing an example of how attempting to use "simple animals" as a basis for modeling human behavior has not effective. The previous commenter said that we haven't reached "lizard level" and pointed to the OpenWorm project. I pointed to a related project, from Brooks, that had a similar mission. It did not work, perhaps, because modeling simple animals (such as a rat or lizard), won't scale to humans. I did not meant to draw a general conclusion (since I said that it is simply another case, not a proof).

As to your final line, let's keep this a lively discussion and not a personal attack.

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