Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in these branches of evolution.
Also counting is an association (pairing) with instances of an abstract concept of a number which requires a language and a culture.
Okay, may be some visual cues, but not zero. Please cut the crap
[citation needed]
Also, bird brains are very different from ours and knowledge of brain centers in mammals cannot be easily transferred to birds.
In another universe, a bird with your attitude could claim that flight requires feathers and thus non-birds cannot in principle fly, because they never evolved feathers.
Every bit of observable behaviour could be explained in terms of habitual behaviour and physical pattern matching, exactly what a trained NN will do - it will perfectly accurately separate patterns which corresponds to different quantities, while posses no notion of any abstract concepts whatsoever.
Animals pattern match, but do not have abstract concepts. Well, enzymes do pattern matching but not counting.
I think this is interesting -- what's stopping us from making that exact assumption? For all we know, higher consciousness and "humanity" is simply an emergent property of lots and lots of rote pattern recognition stacked on top of itself. I think there's an argument to be made that there's no line between "pattern matching" and "abstract concepts" -- it's more of a smooth, emergent gradient.
Just my two cents.
The problem with the way you're posting is that it pushes the forum further in the crap direction which is already the internet default, which we're trying to stave off here—not for moral reasons but simply because it's uninteresting.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Yes, you systematically ban people like me and have narcissistic imposters and bullshitters instead. Millions of them.
This is the consequence of eradication of anonymity and heavy policing to comply with current idiotic pseudo-intellectual narrative of safe spaces or how do you justify it.
The next step would be enforced gender-neutral pronouns or something equally nonsensical.