[HN Gopher] Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
___________________________________________________________________
Crows have been shown to understand the concept of zero
Author : digital55
Score : 165 points
Date : 2021-08-10 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| lngnmn2 wrote:
| Is there a website where this kind of bullshit does not reach the
| front page?
|
| 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
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "Animals cannot, in principle, use abstract concepts because it
| requires language and brain centers which never been evolved in
| these branches of evolution."
|
| [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.
| dang wrote:
| Could you please stop breaking the site guidelines so we don't
| have to keep banning you? If you'd make your substantive points
| thoughtfully, we'd appreciate it.
|
| 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...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| elliekelly wrote:
| Unrelated to animals, this really surprised me:
|
| > Moreover, he added, "When you look at the history of
| mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in
| our culture as well." Historical research finds that human
| societies didn't begin to use zero as a number in their
| mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.
| crazygringo wrote:
| There are huge differences between zero as the concept of
| "none" (I had five cows and someone took them all away, how
| many do I have?), zero as a more formal integer value (e.g.
| solution to 2 + 7 - 4 + x = 5), zero as unit placeholder (e.g.
| 101 dalmations), and zero as a real number (on the continuum
| from positive to negative rationals and irrationals).
|
| When people make claims about "zero" they're essentially
| meaningless unless they specify _which meaning of zero they 're
| talking about_.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I really wonder how zero came to be, was it a need to
| homogenize the algebraic tools (we have nice operations and
| want to reify the 'nothing' dead end into something that can
| be kept chugging along) or something else /
| dragontamer wrote:
| The ancient Greeks understood division and reciprocals from
| the perspective of inverting multiplication.
|
| I have to imagine that the multiplicative identity (1) and
| additive identity (0) were also known at that time. They
| really figured out everything else there is to integer-
| based math.
|
| They failed at irrational numbers (like sqrt(2)). But their
| mastery of integers was outstanding. Perhaps 0 wasn't used
| on the number-representation yet, but the concept had to
| have been known.
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| There's a whole book on this history of zero you may enjoy
| called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" that goes
| into the whole story of how it came to be including
| problems and resistance along the way
|
| (mods I promise I'm not here to shill this book but people
| keep wondering about the history and that's a great
| resource that I like XD)
| TriNetra wrote:
| I think most such research don't delve upon ancient India
| wherein use of zero with a proper modern like numerals have
| been extensively observed at least since thousands of years
| [0].
|
| > Hindu units of time are described in Hindu texts ranging from
| microseconds to trillions of years, including cycles of cosmic
| time that repeat general events in Hindu cosmology.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time
| pmdulaney wrote:
| Do the birds and the bees actually _count_? Or is there some more
| innate /intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the
| difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually
| counting them.
|
| Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N,
| starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out.
| They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into
| thinking the blind was actually empty.
| wavefunction wrote:
| But then what is counting? Is it what we (humans, birds and
| bees) use to abstract reality?
| pmdulaney wrote:
| For us humans it is a process of establishing a one-to-one
| relationship between objects and a long-since-memorized
| sequence of words that requires just one member of the
| sequence to be remembered in order to represent the number of
| objects.
| wavefunction wrote:
| I think that's part of it to be sure. However I can readily
| account nine items versus ten items depending on how they
| are organized. We are counting when we are enumerating,
| however that occurs in man, bird or bee it seems to me.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| There's a term for it but I can't easily find it.
|
| https://neurosciencenews.com/neuron-counting-9898/
|
| This article goes into it and mentions "numerical
| distance effect", which looks appropriate but not what I
| remember.
|
| I did learn that people who play first person shooters
| can usually recognize more objects at once instantly; 6
| or 7 instead of a more typical 4 or 5, if I recall
| correctly.
|
| They used number of grapes in a hand to measure.
| ben_w wrote:
| I think 'subitizing' is the word you're searching for:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subitizing
| bobthechef wrote:
| There's a difference between having the concept of number and
| reacting to quantities or having expectations that are unmet.
| There is no need for abstract concepts. All animals (in the
| phylogenetic sense) other than ourselves perceive reality utterly
| concretely. I am not sure how these brain scans are supposed to
| really show otherwise.
|
| Show me an animal that can describe and argue and you will have
| my attention. For now, I only see signalling and expression, but
| no language showing signs of description and argumentation.
| fossuser wrote:
| There was a funny related example of the African Gray parrot Alex
| surprising the trainers by silently counting in his head.
|
| They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger
| parrot to count to two by tapping twice.
|
| Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other
| bird. He yelled out "two" and then after two more taps "four" and
| then "six".
|
| The trainers were just expecting "two" each time.
|
| It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-
| Animals/dp/0393...
|
| The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up
| experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways
| that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
|
| One quick example was testing tool use, the original
| experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use,
| but the monkeys can't pick stuff up that's flat on the ground
| since they're normally in trees (their hands don't have thumbs
| that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool
| raised they were able to grab and use it.
|
| Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great
| video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Even more affecting to me was Alex asking what colour he was:
| https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/11/27/alex-the-parrot-is...
| xwdv wrote:
| He said no such thing he was asking what color a parrot in
| the mirror was.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| We can't know for certain (at least not from that article),
| but there is some evidence that at least a few exceptional
| birds can pass the mirror test, and Alex certainly appears
| to have been an exceptional bird. It's plausible that he
| understood it was his own image.
| outworlder wrote:
| Alex, that's the one who called an apple a "banerry", right? :)
| bsza wrote:
| There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you
| could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer
| with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he
| actually did it is brilliant.
|
| When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his
| trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped
| right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The
| trainer had no idea this was happening. He was fooled by a
| horse.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
| [deleted]
| fossuser wrote:
| And there's that famous computer vision story of a model that
| was supposed to detect tanks in images but actually just
| detected whether or not it was sunny (all the tank pictures
| in the training set were sunny, non tanks overcast).
|
| Children will make similar classification errors when
| learning too.
|
| None of this means that it's not possible they can also learn
| counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about
| experimental design. The book goes into that.
| heretoruinurday wrote:
| The tank story is urban legend.
|
| https://www.gwern.net/Tanks
| symstym wrote:
| You may appreciate this poignant sci-fi short story/video that
| references and expands on the story of Alex:
| https://vimeo.com/195588827
| fossuser wrote:
| Looks like the Ted Chiang short story? Thanks - it's great.
|
| I'd recommend his other stories too if you like that one.
|
| I've also got a bunch of links to other stories I've liked
| here too: https://zalberico.com/about/
| rubyn00bie wrote:
| A dog I live with, not technically mine, can count to at least
| three. She hates waiting in her harness before we go on walks,
| and has learned that I am ready to go after taking three poop
| bags. If I only pull two bags, she won't come downstairs and
| wait by the door. If I pull the third bag, she immediately
| walks down the stairs. I noticed it the other day because I had
| two bags on me; so, she only heard me pull one bag and refused
| to walk downstairs. Then I pulled a second one, still nothing.
| Finally, I pulled the third one and she immediately trotted on
| down. Now that I'm aware of it, I've been paying attention and
| yep... she only ever comes down after hearing a third bag. I've
| been pretty shocked by it to be honest (in a good way)...
| bobthechef wrote:
| This reaction to quantity does not imply the concept of
| number.
| IntrepidWorm wrote:
| Surely it implies an ability to count incrementally, which
| is all OP was implying? The dog does not have to abstract
| the concept of '3' to be able to count- it's still very
| interesting.
| jakear wrote:
| Article seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+
| years ago could _not_ understand numbers and thus counting
| emerged recently many times over in parallel across a variety of
| species [1], but provides nothing to back up this claim ([2] is
| not supported beyond "an expert said).
|
| This is an odd claim --- based on the neural network experiment
| (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection
| problems naturally results in the development of "counting"
| signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings
| have been interacting with their surroundings they've been able
| to count, and any modern slight differences in counting
| infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting
| machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over
| by evolution in many different ways, _but only recently_ (for
| some reason..?)
|
| > The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic
| groups -- primates, insects and birds -- suggests that certain
| numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout
| the animal kingdom.
|
| > Their last common ancestor "was [barely] able to perceive
| anything," Avargues-Weber said, much less count.
| abecedarius wrote:
| This is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of
| animal counting:
|
| > The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a
| single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots.
| Recordings of the crows' brain activity during these tasks
| revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the
| pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other
| numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex.
|
| (I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to
| find this 2/3 of the way down.)
| User23 wrote:
| How do we know this isn't another dead fish result?[1] I'm not
| trying to be dismissive, it's a real question that needs to be
| asked for any brain scan.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's quite a funny application of noise thresholds. I
| wonder how much fMRI machines have improved since?
| xcambar wrote:
| I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much
| (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph.
|
| I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the
| author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news
| itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening
| artificially the article...
|
| Probably a bit of both, as always.
|
| That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great
| tl;dr; ;)
| edgyquant wrote:
| Why do you hate animal cognition ?
| OJFord wrote:
| Pet _peeve_?
| aksss wrote:
| You're doing God's work, sir.
| popctrl wrote:
| The idea that zero was "invented" at a certain time by recent
| humans and not in use until then has always seemed absolutely
| absurd to me. I will admit I haven't read deeply into it, but
| there's just no way people didn't have a concept for "none of a
| thing" until a couple millennia ago.
|
| One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't
| go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is:
| There's no reason to record buying 0 fish or owning 0 acres of
| land. Another justification given is the difficulty children
| experience with 0 - but we don't teach children to start counting
| with 0, so it makes sense that they would get tripped up there.
|
| I guess the argument sometimes seems to be that we didn't have a
| symbol for 0, and that this was somehow more confusing to adopt
| than other symbols? But if that's the case, then isn't claiming
| any culture "invented" zero the same as claiming a culture
| "invented" any concept they came up with a word for?
|
| I'd love to hear all the reasons I am wrong and stupid.
| gugagore wrote:
| I more or less had understood that what was meant by "zero was
| invented" is zero as used in a positional number system. In
| other words, the digit zero, not the quantity zero.
| throwaway192874 wrote:
| There's a book called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea"
| that goes into the history of zero in detail, admittedly I
| haven't finished reading the book myself but got at least
| partway through and it was fascinating to read about it and
| I'll one day finish it :)
|
| What you said about it not being in the numeric system is
| definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but
| also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt
| with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything,
| and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in
| the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with
| religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean
| martincmartin wrote:
| Having a concept of "none of a thing" is one thing. Abstracting
| that to a number is a different thing.
|
| Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have,"
| and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not
| "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one
| with a negation (not), instead of a number.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| What if they're thinking "zero" but just don't have the word
| for it. I.e. what if this is just a linguistic deficit?
|
| Please err on the side of me understanding your question
| well.
| srean wrote:
| Even the question whether one can 'think' of something
| without having a linguistic representation is a topic of
| active debate. My personal take is that its possible,
| predators plan ambush, but do they have a linguistic
| representation ? Its not clear that they do.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I agree with the context that you described. In fact, I'm
| delighted that we agree on that context.
|
| I agree its not clear, though I might lean the other way.
| Who knows.
| srean wrote:
| Hellen Keller's writings may interest you. Her
| recollections from a time when she did not have an
| internal language is very interesting.
|
| Many believe that animals do not have an "I" the self
| reflective "I", that they are not aware of themselves etc
| etc. This runs contrary to my beliefs, I have had several
| conversations/arguments on HN along those lines, but lets
| not dwell on mere beliefs.
|
| What I find interesting is what test/experiment can one
| perform that can demonstrate that a human, who is not
| allowed to communicate linguistically, has the attributes
| mentioned above. If we cannot design such a compelling
| experiment that shows are inability to detect those
| attributes in animal even if those attributes maybe
| present.
|
| We need the restriction of no-linguistic-communication so
| that animals and humans are on the same playing field.
| Hellen Keller, when she did not have language she would
| have been on the same playing field.
|
| My position is that if I cant even prove/demonstrate to
| others that you are sentient in the senses described
| above, how can we even claim that animals aren't
| sentient. We have no way of demonstrating it even if they
| were.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Seems contrived. 'None' is an equally valid answer, and easy
| to conceptualize as a number, eg 'start with three, take away
| two, take away one, now you have none.'
| [deleted]
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I think the thing which came surprisingly late in history
| wasn't having a concept of 'none' but rather of allowing it to
| be considered a number with the same status as 1, 2, 3 and the
| rest.
|
| Indeed some of the ancient Greeks were of the opinion that 1
| was not a number (since numbers were for counting a plurality
| of things).
|
| It's quite the realisation that you can use the usual rules of
| arithmetic for 1 and 0, and not have anything go wrong. (Except
| of course division does go wrong!)
| martincmartin wrote:
| You see this in programming languages too. Many languages
| distinguish between one of something and a collection of
| them, e.g. int x vs vector<int> x. In other languages, like
| Matlab, everything's a vector, and a scalar is just a vector
| of length one.
| burnished wrote:
| Well, its not that they distinguish between one of
| something and a collection, its that one of something is
| different from a collection of things. So, int x is a
| handle to an integer value, whereas an array handle (your
| collection) is a handle to a pointer, which points to the
| start of your data structure and you can get the other
| elements by using an offset etc. etc. My point being that
| they are differentiated because they are different things.
| [deleted]
| excalibur wrote:
| You know nothing, Jon Snow.
| PontifexMinimus wrote:
| My cat certainly knows when there is zero food in his bowl.
| Razengan wrote:
| Is it even possible to _actually_ "count" without using some form
| of language in your head?
| perfmode wrote:
| > This is an odd claim --- based on the neural network
| experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to
| object detection problems naturally results in the development
| of "counting" signals),
| avnigo wrote:
| Reminds me of this fascinating Numberphile video [0] on how
| brains, human or otherwise, count.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1sPBCxlDQQ
| protomikron wrote:
| Thanks, that's an interesting video.
| krylon wrote:
| The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we
| grossly underestimate it.
|
| I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store
| through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of
| potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the
| bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has
| to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that
| there is food inside these shiny bags. When let that sink in, I
| was thoroughly impressed. I knew seagulls are very opportunistic
| eaters, but I did not know they were capable of this degree of
| intelligence and planning.
|
| I wonder how much more there is discover, and how that might
| affect how we view and more importantly treat animals. We might
| have to rethink our relationship with them.
| Gravey wrote:
| I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell
| container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour.
| Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.
| edgyquant wrote:
| I watched a crack head at the park look for something on the
| ground for an hour once. Clearly there is an upper bound for
| human intelligence as well /s
| lhorie wrote:
| It's been reported that younger gulls initially try to open
| clams (the animal clams, not plastic containers) by pecking.
| I believe they learn the dropping-from-a-height tactic from
| observation, and suspect that the pecking at a plastic
| container is merely due to them not having seen it being open
| by a gull before. Also, worth considering that in their
| natural habitat, the only transparent things around
| (jellyfish) are squishy and stingy.
| uhtred wrote:
| I watched a lot of people vote for Donald Trump -- there's
| clearly also an upper bound to human intelligence.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| While this appears to be made in both jest and political
| commentary, I agree that there are bounds to human
| intelligence.
|
| While we as a species have accomplished a lot, those
| accomplishments seem to be sparked/possible by the few of
| us who stop and figure things out or notice something
| interesting. It seems that most of us take most of the
| knowledge we have for granted; Even the most essential
| pieces of our knowledge are passed down, not figured out,
| by the vast majority of us.
|
| Examples: fire, sanitary practices, what to eat (and what
| not to eat), language (and writing)
|
| How I justify these examples:
|
| It took a long time (many generations) to harness fire and
| still more to understand it well enough to use it as we do
| today. We are still pushing the limits of our understanding
| of fire (combustion) in microgravity to better understand
| how it works on Earth.
|
| Sanitary practices are different in different cultures
| despite all of us having the same basic plumbing. Sure, we
| can all "poo in a hole" but even in modern times, we've had
| to re-learn to not make that hole too close to our water
| supply.
|
| Food: There is no way of knowing what mushrooms will kill
| you without someone previously taking a hit for the tribe.
|
| Language seems pretty self-explanatory but... there are
| languages we no longer know and are largely unable to
| decipher because we have stopped passing them down.
| Knowledge encoded in those languages may be lost until
| rediscovered in a new language.
|
| I think the biggest bound to our perceived intelligence is
| the ability to pass it down. When viewed in the scope of
| animal intelligence, we often think animals that have
| learned from other animals are acting more intelligently
| than those that haven't. The problem is, both groups may be
| equally intelligent, one group is just more highly trained.
| open-source-ux wrote:
| " _The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I
| suspect we grossly underestimate it._ "
|
| An example of something that might surprise many people:
| animals can use medicine.
|
| Here is a fascinating podcast that discuss the subject with
| researchers and experts.
|
| Podcast description:
|
| > Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use
| any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs
| largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild
| habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines
| they find in nature.
|
| > We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out
| that we've learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds,
| bugs and beasts.
|
| This podcast is highly recommended - I guarantee you'll come
| away amazed and humbled by the intelligence of animals.
|
| _Do animals use medicine?_ :
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszv77
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| There is mention of this in the book ,,Wild Animals I Have
| Known,, (1898)
| josefx wrote:
| > The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I
| suspect we grossly underestimate it.
|
| It goes both ways, in the past we had Clever Hans[1]. People
| believed Hans could perform simple math, when his cleverness
| was actually watching his owners expression for small changes.
| So any observed intelligence ends up under suspicion of them
| acting on information gained from a much simpler side channel.
|
| [1]https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Yep, given the huge replication crisis for human cognitive
| science and pyschology, I am not sure how reliable these
| studies are.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| The thing about animal intelligence is that it is probably
| significantly different from ours. In studying it, we must
| avoid antromorphization of animals.
|
| Mammals are somewhat close to us, but we have diverged from
| birds over a hundred million years ago and we still struggle
| to understand how a tiny and smooth brain such as corvids
| have can produce such an observably intelligent behavior.
| firebaze wrote:
| Mammals are close to us in the dimensions of reproduction
| and biological ancestry; also, there are countless mammals
| which are (way) less intelligent than corvids.
|
| Corvids may have small brains in terms of volume, but not
| measured by the number of neurons in the areas that
| count[1].
|
| Maybe animal intelligence is not so different to ours, but
| our measure is.
|
| [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255
| xcambar wrote:
| For something radically different, I'd suggest you look at
| octopuses. They're as different from human as can be.
|
| Surely BBC or NPR has a decent documentary on the topic.
| zR0x wrote:
| 90% of communication for humans is body language and sensory
| cues.
|
| It's not hard for me to see how our language faculty convinced
| past humans we were somehow masters of reality beyond other
| creatures.
|
| Past humans did pass on a lot of dumb ideas.
| ducktective wrote:
| I think this is parent's seagull:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMMVKymf9yA
|
| There is another one fancying cold sandwiches:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZZ822Za-nE
| tomjupiter wrote:
| I thought it might be this[0], which surprised me how clearly
| the bird seems to know what it's doing is "wrong" and how it
| tries to act unsuspecting.
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/i69mu1
| /no...
| carabiner wrote:
| I am quite sure that crows could solve leetcode mediums in
| under 30 minutes.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must
| be fundamentally different - it's not a universal notion.
|
| Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished
| every other species that showed intelligence by eating them,
| which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact
| that it's often small birds that shows intelligence is also
| interesting. They're among hardest to hunt.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| A relevant quote by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins that
| always sticks with me regarding the humanity of animals,
| (paraphrased):
|
| > The attitude that animals are basically humans seems much
| healthier than the converse.
|
| From his book https://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles/the-
| western-illusion...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different
| - it's not a universal notion.
|
| Are you referring to hunter gatherers doing a mystical bear
| or eagle dance? Reincarnation as an ant? in those cases, it
| is belief in a non-corporeal spirit-being that underpins the
| other belief. Do you believe in non-corporeal spirit-beings,
| and if you do, aren't you more mystified by people who don't
| believe in them; or vice versa?
|
| Otherwise, I'm skeptical and would love citations?
| burnished wrote:
| Like, judeo-christianity? Western societies viewpoints on
| human intelligence and how it relates to animal
| intelligence for centuries? The notion, typically, is that
| while humans are animals our intelligence is not just
| different in degree but different in kind. I think it comes
| from that bit in the bible where their god places humans as
| above all other life forms, just a guess though.
| fsckboy wrote:
| you're telling me what I know, where I'm asking about the
| commenter's claim that there are cultures that do NOT do
| this
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Descartes considered animals to be little better than
| automata and given his high social position and intellectual
| achievements, and the convenience of this argument for his
| co-religionists, it stuck. Even today (and right here on HN),
| any sort of conjecture on the inner life of animals tends to
| bring out a few finger-waggers condemning 'athropmorphism.'
|
| https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Descartes_versus_Cudwor.
| ..
| aksss wrote:
| That's a bit of hyperbole, isn't it? You _never understood_
| why some [most] cultures assume humans must be fundamentally
| different [than other animals]?? Well, smelting iron ore, and
| a long, long list of other unique accomplishments never
| replicated by any other species on the planet [or known
| universe for that matter] tends to crystalize the observation
| that there is something fundamentally different about this
| singular species. That animals are smarter than human
| cultures have ever generally given them credit for doesn 't
| bridge this enormous gulf. Humans generally think less of
| (underestimate) anything not relevant to their immediate
| existence, including other humans (from other cultures, time
| periods, political parties, etc). Same reason _my_ dog is
| uniquely intelligent, and can even understand English, but
| dogs in general are not intelligent. Maybe this tendency to
| denigrate is an evolved survival skill. Nonetheless, call me
| when the seagulls start splitting atoms.
| belter wrote:
| This one impressed me so much, I never looked at Crows again
| the same way:
|
| "Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?"
|
| https://youtu.be/cbSu2PXOTOc
| ajuc wrote:
| They are smart but TBH that crow already did all the sub-
| puzzles independently, he knew what the possible moves are
| just had to execute them in some order.
| belter wrote:
| I dont think a Dog could do the connecting of the several
| tasks. What about this one?
|
| "Smart Crow uses cars to crack nuts in Akita, Japan near
| Senshu Park"
|
| https://youtu.be/NenEdSuL7QU
| ajuc wrote:
| I'm pretty sure some dogs could do this (if the tasks
| were changed to suit their natural range of motions and
| interactions with environment). When you teach a dog 4
| tricks and try to teach him 5th he will randomly repeat
| the previous 4 in different combinations trying to get
| the treat. At least some dogs, others don't care much and
| if the first thing isn't working they give up.
|
| My parents had a dog that was very smart and pretty
| aggressive to our cat. He had a dog kennel in a small
| section of backyard enclosed with high fence. Near the
| fence there was a small cherry tree where our cat liked
| to climb.
|
| Cat wouldn't climb the tree when the dog was outside of
| his part of backyard, so the dog not only learnt to open
| the gate to the rest of the backyard (lifting a wire loop
| over the fence and pulling it just right), but also to
| shut it slightly to fool the cat. He would lie there
| pretending the gate is still closed, not reacting to the
| cat. Cat would climb the tree and then the dog would stop
| pretending, open the gate, go under the tree and bark at
| the cat till we come and free him. If we weren't home
| that could take hours - neighbors weren't too pleased.
|
| Other example is dogs burying and re-burying treats when
| they see each other watching them bury it. That requires
| at least rudimentary theory of mind.
|
| As for crows - I've personally seen them doing this trick
| (on a parking lot not on a pedestrian crossing, but same
| thing - they understood where the traffic is just right
| to be used for nut-cracking).
|
| They are also huge assholes to other animals, bullying
| them in very creative ways.
|
| I don't doubt crows are smart, just don't think that
| experiment was that impressive.
| ummonk wrote:
| To be fair, that's how most of us approach puzzle games.
| "Okay I've learnt the individual tricks, now let me just
| try piecing them together in the order that they become
| available."
| dasil003 wrote:
| One time when my daughter was 2 years old, riding on my wife's
| back in an Ergo baby carrier while we were walking up the
| Brighton Pier eating an apple, a seagull came stealthily
| hovering in from behind on the strong winds and took a bite out
| of the apple from my daughter's dangling arm before any of us
| could react.
| bobthechef wrote:
| > Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a
| degree) how an automatic door works
|
| I'm not sure I see that, that is, the "understanding" part. I
| mean, this is not some new kind of behavior, even if everyone
| here reacts with surprise. Anyone with a pet dog or cat knows
| the various mischief they can get into. Many of us have been at
| the beach and watched seagulls do all sorts of interesting
| stuff. Animals aren't "dumb" and I don't know anyone who would
| say that they are. What people do object to is the unwarranted
| inference that because they display what looks like clever
| behavior then this must entail capacity for abstract thought
| with concepts. I don't see how abstraction is necessary in
| these examples at all. Language in the fullest sense
| demonstrates the existence of abstract thought. Non-human
| language does not appear to show any sign of descriptive and
| argumentative function, only signalling and expression (in the
| Popperian sense).
| lhorie wrote:
| Seagulls eat clams. They break the shells by dropping them onto
| rocks from a height. They're able to learn to steal food from
| other birds when they see a chance, and conversely, to regulate
| from which height to drop clams of different sizes.
|
| All of these require planning and risk assessment abilities.
| Being able to take a bag of potato chips away from human-
| infested buildings and opening it is not really that far
| outside the scope of their adaptations.
|
| Still, crafty little bastards they are indeed.
| solaxun wrote:
| A few years back I was walking along the SF bay down in the
| marina with a friend when suddenly I heard a "clunk" and felt
| a splash of water on my legs. Initially I thought some drunk
| idiot threw a beer bottle out the window of their car, but a
| few seconds later a Seagull swooped down, grabbed a clam it
| had dropped from who knows how high up, and fly off with
| lunch. I had no idea they did that, I just stood there
| dumbfounded for a few seconds.
| agumonkey wrote:
| crows do team work to figure out machines
|
| monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks
|
| (vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face
| recognition)
|
| beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels
| that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things
| but they just coast.
| zestyping wrote:
| I have been training the crows in my neighbourhood to solve
| puzzles. They visit me every day now.
|
| One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve
| a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because
| I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles
| online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're
| referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm
| super curious!
|
| Thanks!
| mikestew wrote:
| Yes, adding a +1 to sibling comment: do tell about your
| puzzles. We've got some crows that just get bitchy if their
| bird bath gets dry, I'd like a more positive interaction if
| possible. :-)
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| What are the puzzles? How did you entice them to start?
| UI_at_80x24 wrote:
| To expand on your mention of crows.
|
| Not only do crows learn to recognize PEOPLE by their FACES,
| they teach their offspring to avoid/mistrust those same
| people. Those offspring teach their offspring. So the
| "grandchild" of the original bird learns to avoid a specific
| person. *(Note the documentary I watched with this revelation
| didn't follow any further generations. We don't know how many
| generations are taught this lesson.)
|
| Think about that for a minute. I don't recognize the people
| that live 2 houses away from me, these birds teach their
| young that SPECIFIC humans are dangerous.
|
| This isn't the study I watched, but it's close.
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-
| holding...
| samatman wrote:
| > _Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of
| zero._
|
| No they didn't.
|
| All human cultures I'm aware of have, at least, the concepts of
| none, one, two, three, and many. They all understand that none is
| exactly one less than one, and most of them (but not all!)
| understand that there's no natural limit to the counting numbers,
| and have a way of expressing some amount of those numbers.
|
| But zero is a human invention. It comes from India (probably,
| might be China) and is probably related to the abacus: but the
| abacus came to the West without the zero, which followed it
| later.
|
| Zero is both a symbol for null and a placeholder used for writing
| numbers modulus the radix. This is a conceptually powerful force
| multiplier, making all arithmetic operations dramatically easier.
|
| It also lets us make up a "name" for any integer we want. We can
| just add more zeroes; when this gets awkward we can start
| counting the zeroes using exponential notation, and when that
| becomes inconvenient we can develop | notation, which gets us
| further than we really need for any practical purpose.
|
| It should be obvious that crows neither know about this nor care.
| It's interesting and cool that they understand none, but so did
| the Ancient Greeks, who had no idea about zero and could have
| gotten much further in mathematics if they did.
| NoOneNew wrote:
| I watched a thing about how Koko the guerrilla didnt really
| understand sign language. They showed extended, unedited clips
| of koko fumbling and just brute forcing a whole series of signs
| until she got a treat. A lot of her "understanding", along with
| other apes undergoing the same treatment, were all heavy
| interpretations of the "researchers". She never actually
| learned a real version of sign language either. It was made up
| by "researchers" who never learned sign language either.
| Honestly, when you watch the videos, it feels like watching the
| unedited videos of those tv psychics who fumble at cold
| readings. Cherry picking editing does wonders as "scientific
| proof".
|
| Moral of the story, after reading this article, I agree with
| you. This isnt as groundbreaking or interesting as it seems.
| I'm pretty sure they're finding patterns that dont exist and
| are over rationalizing. Of course an animal would have the
| concept of none, a little, a bit more and a lot, especially
| when applied to the idea of scavenging for food. Appling the
| idea of mathematical concepts to them, with little support just
| feels like a cheap attempt for grant money. Which, surprise
| surprise, was the same sham pulled with Koko.
|
| That and some of these tests they talk about, either they're
| shit at describing them or even I would fail to prove I could
| count or do arithmetic.
| musingsole wrote:
| > They showed extended, unedited clips of koko fumbling and
| just brute forcing a whole series of signs until she got a
| treat.
|
| ...what do you think human children are doing for the first
| ~4 years of their life?
|
| Also, different learning methods are used by the subject
| depending on their mood -- most importantly frustration --
| and other context. Brute force learning tends to be the last
| stage before they're so frustrated they give up or become
| aggressive. It's also a common exploratory tactic.
|
| Teaching human sign language over a variant organically
| developed by the subject and team would have what advantage,
| exactly? It may be nominally more interesting to know a
| gorilla could adopt a purely human communication system --
| very interesting. But it's also such a corner case of
| studying communication and particularly interspecies
| communication that to call it out as a problem is nothing
| more useful than a nitpick.
|
| We're coming from an age where all animals were by default
| assumed to be a sort of squishy -- sometimes tasty --
| automaton. We have a long way to go in unlearning that
| particular arrogance. Assuming that intelligence can only be
| demonstrated in the purely human terms you seem to be looking
| for is just another vestige of that same arrogance.
| taeric wrote:
| I think you are grossly underestimating how well kids can
| pick up sign language. Two year olds can easily pick up
| some basic sign use.
| musingsole wrote:
| Ok...2 instead of 4.
|
| I think you are grossly missing the point.
| taeric wrote:
| Apologies, I went fast on my post. My point was to
| tighten your numbers to strengthen your point.
|
| As it is, I feel lied to when folks say that it takes
| kids 4 or more years to get language.
| caddemon wrote:
| How does that strengthen his point? Koko stumbled around
| frequently, well after the learning period was advertised
| as done. Kids stumble around less than was claimed, as
| you mention.
| taeric wrote:
| I didn't say it makes it a strong point. But deceitful
| numbers greatly weaken it.
|
| That is, with how off the idea that 4 year old can't take
| language is, I didn't make it to the argument. And I am
| sympathetic to the idea that animals can pick up on
| language.
| musingsole wrote:
| The time window of learning ISN'T THE POINT.
|
| You're asking an animal to internalize a system of
| communication quite literally designed from the ground up
| for different hardware. It's like asking why does my
| Oculus headset take so long to communicate over ZigBee.
| What would be magical is that it did it at all. Lamenting
| how long it took to bend the Oculus hardware into some
| contorted SDR would be stupid.
| caddemon wrote:
| I'm not lamenting how long it took, I'm lamenting that
| the claims were exaggerated to begin with, because Koko
| never stopped stumbling like that.
| taeric wrote:
| My point is you shouldn't fudge auxiliary data in making
| a point. I don't know if I can believe your actual
| argument due to that.
|
| Consider, my dog can fumble around trying to make me
| happy with really good emotional understanding of my
| reactions and basic mimicry. I wouldn't claim that is a
| usage of language, though. From the counters here, there
| is an argument that if my dog was dextrous with his arms
| and hands, he could pass off similar results.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Why do you believe these sources, and your off-the-cuff
| analysis, and not the original research? Think of it from
| other readers perspectives: On one hand is the author of the
| article and the researchers, on the other is a commenter on
| HN. I'm not saying the parent comment is wrong, but we need
| some evidence.
| caddemon wrote:
| Koko appeared much, much more in the media and pop sci
| publications than the actual scientific literature. There
| are also a number of researchers who questioned Koko in the
| literature, including people that tried to replicate with
| their own animals. There is really no way to make an
| argument from authority here, because Koko is a
| controversial topic among the "authorities".
|
| The OP is right that Koko stumbled around a lot, even after
| the signs had supposedly been "mastered". This article
| presents one of the more bizarre results of that:
| https://slate.com/technology/2018/06/koko-the-ape-
| obituaries...
|
| We probably are underrating animal intelligence, and
| whether Koko understood language is largely dependent on
| what one considers to qualify as "language" - there
| definitely were some impressive displays of intelligence at
| times. But through an unbiased lens I think it's also
| pretty clear the researchers were constantly making the
| most charitable possible interpretation of Koko's signs.
|
| As far as the GP comment, it is well documented that zero
| as a mathematical concept was developed surprisingly late,
| while the concept of "nothing" existed prior to any formal
| notion of integers at all. The Quanta article is conflating
| "nothing" with "zero", although perhaps the original
| research makes the distinction more clear.
| samatman wrote:
| I would be a little kinder to the researchers than that:
| crows and other animals understanding the concept of none is
| interesting and plausibly true.
|
| My quibble is conflating this with zero, which is a much more
| powerful and advanced concept. Greeks, Romans, early medieval
| Europeans, none of them had the concept of zero, and they
| suffered for it.
|
| And what you've said about Koko the gorilla is true as far as
| I understand it. It was a media stunt, more Clever Hans than
| Mister Ed. It would be pretty cool if it wasn't, but I'd have
| to see some replication and I don't expect to.
| the-dude wrote:
| I have always assumed one of our cats could count. Our cats got
| the desert plates at the end of our meal.
|
| One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept
| waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there
| were none left.
|
| But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table,
| always seemed to know when he had them all.
| Finnucane wrote:
| If I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look
| at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought
| they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative
| quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).
| jaclaz wrote:
| It depends on cats, I have had a few in the past and
| currently have one that always tries to convince me when I
| get home that for _some reasons_ my wife forgot to feed her.
|
| Clearly she has clear the negative concept of "not enough".
| srean wrote:
| My dog just does a protest sit-in when I do that. He wouldnt
| move till he gets his due number (two). I can fool him by
| splitting a treat into two, so seems he is counting rather
| than going by mass.
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