Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know | Hacker News Reader

Self-Doubting Monkeys Know What They Don’t Know

blogs.discovermagazine.com

32 pointskgarten15 comments

Findings like this surprise us because in us still lingers the superstition that we are somehow the "chosen" species.

So you think humans are not smarter than animals?

We might get "more" of everything - but not get to be distinct in any way.

At the core of humanism and before in theism is the idea that human is special. That human is crown jewel of creation. That everything that is was created to serve human. However for that to be true - human needs to be distinct, special, better - else we are just greedy and are thus not fulfilling our role in the cosmos.

Whats inconvenient is that more that we find out about the world - the more it seems that we are indeed nothing special, that we might have taken some traits to a whole new level, but more in a way like cows bear more milk, or some birds master flying better. So that puts our self serving acts under a big question.

"human needs to be distinct, special, better"

Mission accomplished. Humans are the only ones who actually care about such things, therefor they are distinct and unique. We can change things, animals can not.

To me animals are basically biological robots - no free will, all actions pre-programmed. Yah, some of the smarter animals edge toward non pre-programmed, but just barely. Humans however are in an entirely different category.

Humans can reflect on behavior and decide to change it - but more importantly humans can realize that it may be desirable to change a behavior. Animals can not do this. What they do is what they do, not only can they not change it, they can't even recognize the concept of wanting to change any of their behaviors. (And forcing them to change externally by training doesn't count.)

Yes thats what we assume.

But if you look into Zen philosophy - you will see that this "human condition" is not treated as blessing (or making us better if you will) - instead it is treated as curse. Thus human is encouraged to become more "pre-programmed" or to give in to our pre-programming to achieve happiness and content here and now.

Yes we clearly pride ourselves as being distinct - thus better - however we might in reality be corrupt. We wont solve this issue here in this discussion. However I employ you to keep this possibility in some corner of your conscience, however unlikely it may be.

Humans can reflect on behavior and decide to change it - but more importantly humans can realize that it may be desirable to change a behavior. Animals can not do this.

Cool! You can inhabit the minds of animals. Not only are you distinct and unique, you have this weird super power.

> humans can realize that it may be desirable to change a behavior. Animals can not do this.

Are you sure about that?

I think some humans are biological robots with no free will, all actions pre-programmed. Babies, the severely retarded, people who read horoscopes... particularly the latter.

Humans are animals.

Not really, though at my place, cats run the show.

You don't need to think the human species is chosen, just that it's extremely unusual. It's not superstition to notice the worldwide explosion of human population displacing many many specialized species (e.g., top predators). It's not superstition to notice that even though many species are capable of manipulating their environment in complicated ways (e.g., a million variants on the concept of "nest," some quite sophisticated), only humans have picked various certain low-hanging fruit at all (e.g., fire), and human progress on other low-hanging fruit where other species have made a little progress (like tools/weapons and agriculture) is so far beyond other species it's ridiculous. The existence of an unusual property (or properties) of humans which cause the observed unusual result is not absolutely guaranteed, but expecting that there are such properties is not just superstition.

An interesting idea, but the experiment as described in the article doesn't prove it. If I played this game without knowing what "S", "D" and "?" stand for, I'd just assume that "S" means "few", "D" means "a lot" and "?" means "a moderate amount". No meta-cognitive reasoning seems necessary.

I definitely agree. If given a control panel in a foreign language with three symbols from left to right and then shown a series of graphics representing sparse/denseness I would certainly see identifying the three options as low, middle, high rather than low, unknown, high. So for identifying a conscious uncertainty in primates this experiment is lacking.

So monkeys are shown high density images and low density images and they can press the correct button for a treat. For medium denisty images they can either make an incorrect choice, or press a skip button.

If I wrote a computer program to do the exact same thing it would not prove computers had self-doubt, just that they had a programmed intelligence. Pressing the centre button gets you to a sure treat quicker.

But are they aware that there are things they don't know they don't know?

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