The Intelligence of Earthworms
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It seems to me each creature, each species, have their own kind of intelligence. Plantes also seem to me to have an awareness of some kind. They know where the sun is, they know when to sprout, they can find water, they have such complex relationships with everything around them, the microbiome in the soil, other plants, insects.
Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.
Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless.
This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet it follows light: https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructio...
Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy.
You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.
"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
Only for a hyper-inclusive definition of "think" that loses any communicative value.
What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.
As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.
Korzybski, "Manhood of Humanity"
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/25457/25457-pdf.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
IIRC, he meant that plant life binds and manipulates chemicals in the immediate environment; animals move matter over the surface of the earth (at a much higher rate than plants); humans shift information through time via culture (and later writing, et. al.)
One way that I like to think about it is that there's a spectrum of "sophistication". Even within the human population, there's gradation: not everyone is great at critical thinking, forecasting, imagining, reasoning, meta cognition, etc.
When I look to the stars, I wonder what levels exist above the human mind.
Looking "downward", are there "thinking processes" that we could assimilate through technology into our own minds?
You can just say humans and plants think in different ways, or through different mechanisms.
Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.
Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.
The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.
It's pretty thought-provoking, I don't think you'll be disappointed by it.
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This is some pretty strong language.
We all use words to abstract concepts. It's not clear what "thinking" even means from a scientific standpoint. We can be pretty broad on the definition if this is a philosophical discussion.
> suddenly an automatic door is thinking
It is certainly performing an action in response to stimuli. And, given that more electronics are shifting to microcontrollers, a modern automatic door might as well have the machinery required to 'think', or at least, it will have a computer.
There's no evidence that our brain is any different from an automatic door – or more specifically, from an enormous collection of automatic doors.
"specifically" is key here. People want to differentiate between one tree and whole forest. Maybe you don't, but there is a reason why those two words exist. The same is with one door and enormous collection of doors acting as a whole big brain. The same is with intelligence of automatic doors and of humans. They live on continuum like light and dark, but we still have words for light and dark.
Cheers! Thank you.
> I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.
Fair enough. (FWIW, Galileo turned the charlatans' toys into telescopes.)
> We don't know how we get from molecules to thoughts, but saying "therefore thoughts" is a bridge too far. If you start doing that, the words we reserve for discussing the leap from mechanism to self lose their meaning because suddenly an automatic door is thinking, which is just...not...necessary.
Meaning no disrespect, this sounds like a philosophical rather than a scientific objection to me. Which is fine, but I want to ask, necessary for what?
I actually don't know if I think cells are robots or tiny people.
It seems to me that slime molds think, and already must have some kind of "self", but do they count as a person? Or the lowly trichoplax[1], a kind of tribe of cells, is it a person?
Cybernetics has a result that says that any efficient self-regulating system must contain an image of itself to function.
- - - -
[1] > There are no neurons present, but in the absence of a nervous system the animal use short chains of amino acids known as peptides for cell communication, in a way that resembles how animals with neurons use neuropeptides for the same purpose. Individual cells contain and secrete a variety of small peptides, made up of between four and 20 amino acids, which are detected by neighbouring cells. Each peptide can be used individually to send a signal to other cells, but also sequentially or together in different combinations, creating a huge number a different types of signals. This allows for a relatively complex behavior such as crinkling, turning, flattening, and internal churning.
in various traditions
I also think that once we truly understand what intelligence and consciousness is, we'll be able to actually create it.
And what if Wolverine was Lord of the Vampires?
Speculative fiction is still speculative and still fiction.
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan%27s_Canon
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Newton%27s_flaming_laser_swor...
> we don't understand where our consciousness comes from
1. Make something up about whether consciousness is fundamental and run with it.
2. Don't make anything up when you don't need to, because we can answer how plants follow the sun without needing to talk about consciousness, just like we can answer how an automatic door opens for me when I get close without deciding to call it conscious.
> From below: Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?
You're saying "Consciousness isn't solved, therefore we should imagine that these things are conscious."
I'm saying "Consciousness isn't solved and that's irrelevant because we have purely mechanical explanations for these things that don't require imagining that they're conscious."
Because a lightbulb's glow when I push a button or flip a switch _might_ be a sign of the lightbulb's consciousness, but that's 1) not necessary and 2) purely made up and deep into Russell's teapot.
> Reply to above: If consciousness is fundamental, the "purely mechanical" explanation is not purely mechanical.
I've found HackerNews to be broadly allergic to the idea of nonlocal consciousness, and worldviews that are not material reductionism. Nevertheless, I will once again point to the work of Dean Radin, among others, to demonstrate that these are not unfalsifiable claims.
Which is cool. Because we don't really fundamentally understand what it actually is. We have a rough feeling, but any definition we put forth will either also be satisfied by something you both agree is not conscious or not be satisfied by something you both agree is conscious.
So we can't really say if it is emergent or fundamental. And it may even be a property of purely mechanical elements.
Seems you don't really believe in consciousness which is fine. In the end whatever humans think consciousness is can probably also be explained with mechanical explanations.
Then you have things like the Turritopsis dohrnii a jellyfish. They are immortal beings that decide to change between child and adult forever... or just basically once they start starving or get too old they reboot their cells and turn back into a baby jelly. It's a pretty fast process I've read. Although apparently it's really hard to rise them in captivity so studies are somewhat limited.
Then you have planarian flatworms that store their memories outside their brain... I think is similar to how plants function in many regards...
Although plant gnosophysiology is a bit different, their "screams" are a bit too ultrasonic for us, but other animals like mice and stuff can hear them. But yes, look up how plants respond to danger and react or warn other plants. It's really cool stuff.
Heck going even smaller and just imaging cells hunting down food or working together to create an organ, or nerve or something is amazing. It's a bit mind boggling to think of all the tiny things going on in just your fingertip.
I actually take a very mechanistic view of nature, and find it glorious - that mechanical processes at a minuscule scale can result in such a panoply and profusion of form is positively miraculous. Matter seems to want to be alive - what enters organic chemistry rarely leaves it, and life always tends to more forms, more individuals, more diversity - and it’s all just chemistry and physics and entropy at play.
I guess one can find a spiritual beauty in the idea that living matter, thinking matter, is a preferable state of being for matter in this universe. Cosmos, know thyself.
But it seems that the thinking species are creating all the problems on this planet ...
Also, some say that the function of the brain is to stop thinking as soon as possible. We're using it in the wrong way.
Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?
I find the opposite: Knowing how something works just makes me appreciate it more. The fact that an insect can pull off all of these staggeringly complex behaviours (beyond what we can do with kilowatts of GPU power) with a couple of hundred neurons and a power budget of almost nothing, all the while being able to self-reproduce, it's incredible.
Is a rainbow more or less amazing when you understand total internal reflection?
I wonder whether our society will integrate interactions with AIs and nonhuman animals as part of the same process.
Got that that quote from Micheal Crichton's Micro. After reading that book I don't know how many endless hours were spent reading abt the brains of wasps and centipedes and spiders and ants and butterflies :))
We know now that highly complex behaviours can arise from fixed rules. Is there any evidence of learning, judgement or adaptation? If not is there really any thought? I’m not really very much persuaded on either side of the question.
I found it an interesting coincidence to read here about Aristotle's thoughts on animal intelligence, because just a couple days ago I made a note of this passage from Aristotle's "Prior Analytics": "Let A be raven, B intelligent, and C man. A then belongs to no B; for no intelligent thing is a raven. But B is possible for every C; for every man may be intelligent." I'm sure that's not the specific place this author is talking about but it's interesting to see Aristotle's philosophy about animal intelligence creep even into his works on dry formal logic.
A researcher from the University of Washington has a really great blog on corvids I follow (crows, jays, ravens, rooks, magpies, etc)[2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence
[2] https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/
Screw down a baby bird or a cat in a box, give him computerized English tests with prizes and/or punishments like food or electric shock or elevated oxygen level, whatever, 12 hours a day learning and 12 hours for brain to soak in a day’s programming, for couple months.
Exactly above is an animal cruelty, but I bet something to that effect would get him speaking in matters of months to few years.
Another is aside from insects and humans and maybe some birds, not many creatures have multi-generational, continuous societies grounded in one region. Humans have towns, cities, and countries. People have had their entire family history confined to one town or one country with interconnected cities for centuries or even thousands of years. This lets humans develop a common means of communication between others who we see frequently or between those who share a similar background. A lot of animal groups get pretty divided and don't live in large and everlasting packs. There's not much evolutionary pressure for complex language to evolve. We don't even know when humans first developed languages capable of expression of abstract thoughts, but it was probably sometime after we started to organize ourselves and cooperate to form lifelong communities.
The last one is that even if animals had a language, our brains just might not recognize it. For example, to many Europeans, picking up the idea of a tonal language at 40 is pretty tough. They might not even notice the difference in sound. Animals might have some way to distinguish words that we're just not looking at. I think this is one time where the recent ML/AI surge might come in handy. Record thousands of hours of animal sounds and put it through a black box. We've identified some sounds from prairie dogs as carrying meaning, but I don't think we've managed to identify grammar or sentences yet.
Many parrots can speak but it's not really language, it's more contextual. Same with the non-human apes that can "use sign language".
Also your example is not good IMO because there are physiological constraints on animals' ability to speak similarly to humans, like needing a larynx