What's new
TerraForums Venus Flytrap, Nepenthes, Drosera and more talk

Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!

Animals

  • #21
I'd say that anybody who has a cat or a dog has successfully been trained by them.
 
  • #22
I think animals definely have emotions. All you have to do is watch mama animals with their babies to know that. It goes beyond just instinct. And dogs do react to their humans with affection, jealousy, irritation and curiosity.

I don't know about the lower forms of animal life though. I do think fish feel pain...that's why I hate fishing.
smile_h_32.gif
 
  • #23
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Not sure what consciousness is... people are still trying to figure it out
lol. we don't know what it is but they don't have it!
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]You may even vaguely remember that something was going on in your brain before, but you just weren't there at the time
ok... so basically you think only mammals and birds know they exist? the others are just a bunch of reactions to a bunch of stimuli without doing anything? they're just an object that happens to be made out of cells? as self aware as your liver is that it is a liver?
ok... I'm not sure about rotifers and most arthropods... but fish, reptiles, amphibians, etc? I think they do know they exist. many of them do anyway.
I think that for something to think ahead, it has to have a sense of self. It has to be concious. You have to think what YOU are going to do and where you're going to be at that time... and the spider thinks ahead so I don't see how it can NOT be concious.
and I still don't think you need conciousness to feel pain. You can be sleeping but still feel pain, and I don't think that 97% of all animals live in a mental state of conciousness that can be compared to sleep.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]You can teach the non-human apes to do amazing things (like laundry, making stone tools, making tea, cooking a meal, starting fires(a fav. of orangutans) and many other things people do)
many times you don't have to teach them. They just watch you and learn by themselves.
 
  • #24
Only mammals and birds? What about my favorite Cephalopods like the Octopus, Squid and Cuttlefish? The Octopus has certainly demonstrated the ability to learn and make plans. It can recognize faces from people, develop habits, solve puzzles, and even show curiosity. Stories include an octopus that kept blasting water at an aqarium keeper every time the person walked by, just because it wanted to. I believe that this creature surely has some sort of consiousness. If only it could live long enough to actually have a deeper thought like us humans (they only live for about a year).

Cuttlefish on the other hand have been shown to comunicate with one another useing their amazing ability to change color. They have been seen traveling in packs and violently chainging colors at each other. Sometimes, half of the cuttlefish is one color; trying to talk to another cuttlefish, while the other half is another color; talking to a different cuttlefish. I think that some scientist has gone as far as decifering some of their flashing colors.

But I think that all animals including worms can learn (a worm is made to take a fork in the road. One end leads to something good, while the other is a mild electric shock. it learned to only take the good end). Its just that whe cant find out if advanced movements like the ones performed by the jumping spider is really instinct. Thats why I kinda lean to the idea that insects are just little computers that are able to learn, but with no consiousness.

For sure, larger mammals like elephants, horses, etc. have a conciousness. This may be because they are a bigger more apealing target and need to deal with more obsticles like to walk into the marsh or take the steep hill.

Fishes probably feel pain. I dont know why people think they dont, but if they can feel anything, they can probably feel pain. A lampray on a salmon will cause the salmon to be irritated and stressed, because it can feel it. Also, fishes can probably learn too. Any fish keeper would know that they all rise to the surface when you pass by thinking that you will feed them. Who said goldfish have only a 5 second memory?

So in conclusion, larger animals have a consiousness because they need to plan to live. Smaller animals like bugs rely on instinct because there is no need for inteligence. Then again, none of this can be proved. Zongyi
 
  • #25
[b said:
Quote[/b] (TheAlphaWolf @ Mar. 08 2005,7:52)]I think that for something to think ahead, it has to have a sense of self. It has to be concious. You have to think what YOU are going to do and where you're going to be at that time... and the spider thinks ahead so I don't see how it can NOT be concious.
Try looking at it from the bottom up... if someone designed a machine that had programming sophisticated enough to give it the same behaviors of a fish/amphibian/whatever... if it looked for food and potential mates... if it went to great lengths to avoid harm to itself... etc etc, would you consider it conscious? Even if you could look at the schematic and know for sure it wasn't equipped with the hardware needed to facilitate it? And knowing its behaviors were dictated entirely by a transparent set of rules?

It's easy to respond with, "But they're animals, they aren't synthetic." But what do you say as the gap between them gets smaller and smaller? How will you look at them when the only significant difference is the materials they're constructed from? In fact, one of the most efficient ways to program a robot to do these things is to design it so it learns them just like an animal would (e.g. neural nets).

Even chess programs think ahead. They just have an extremely narrow, specialized focus. It's an algorithm.

With all the things you said in the evolution thread I'm a little surprised that you feel such an energy-draining feature (especially for tiny tiny bodies) so unnecessary to survival for many creatures is so universal. I think maybe we're just giving different meanings to different terms?

What I meant by not knowing what consciousness is... I know the dictionary definition, I know what I think it is, but it still has a level of perpetual undefinable mystique to it (there's at least one school of philosophy devoted entirely to it). There's a lot we don't understand about the brain, but so far the neocortex appears to be integral if not essential to self-awareness (the cortex is involved too, but in a much more primal way).

I just feel this gray area we're talking about exists a little bit higher up the evolutionary tree than other people seem to, and I only feel that way because that's what the evidence has suggested to me so far.

I feel a lot of the assumptions people make about some lifeforms comes from anthropomorphization rather than evidence. I think it's interesting that even as machines get much more intelligent than animals in the future, we'll still automatically see them as lifeless hunks of metal and plastic... not because they're inferior but because we won't be inclined to anthropomorphize them. Until they start looking and acting like us anyway... program a machine to scream and cry when you dent it and I guarantee some people will start freaking out about it.

I don't know where the conscious/not-conscious line is drawn exactly (not that there's a hard and fast line), but it seems to me that a cold-blooded creature's body would be much stingier with its resources. I wish I could point to a source on just how much energy higher brain functions draw from the body, but I can't seem to find one right now.

You should really read some Ray Kurzweil or Marvin Minsky books or something... I think they'd be right up your alley.
 
  • #26
spiders also learn when making their webs. It has been shown that if a pray item is put on the same spot on the web, the spider will change the shape of the web by strenghtening the areas around it... that's very complex if you ask me. after all, they take down their web every day and make a new one. They have to remember where it has been catching the pray (and some level of countin has to be there) and then make adjustments as needed. That' can't be instinct.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Who said goldfish have only a 5 second memory?
people who want to justify keeping them in tiny little fish bowls.
They don't have a 5 second memory span and they do learn.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Psychologist Dr Phil Gee claims his research on goldfish explodes the myth
that they have a three second memory span - he reckons they remember for at
least three months.

Dr Gee, of Plymouth University, trained goldfish to collect food at certain
times of day.

He said: "We taught them to press a lever in their bowl to get food.

"Any time they hit the lever they got some food dispensed into the bowl.

"Once they got the hang of it we narrowed it down so it dispensed food for
just one hour a day.

"The fish worked out that if they hit the lever around that time they would
get some food."
 
  • #27
[b said:
Quote[/b] (Zongyi_Yang @ Mar. 08 2005,9:06)]Only mammals and birds? What about my favorite Cephalopods like the Octopus, Squid and Cuttlefish?
Cephalopods are amazing, I'm very interested in them too. I was thinking about them when I was posting but I wasn't sure what to say about them. I don't know where they stand... does anyone know of any serious studies on their brains? Like whales and dolphins, they live in an alien environment (compared to ours) that puts them on paths of development that are hard for us to understand.

There are a lot of gray areas here... and I never claimed to have the answers, only that there are questions people aren't asking themselves that they should be.
 
  • #28
I dont know, but isn't all of the spiders web spinning skills instinct? They know how to do it the second they are born. If building a complex web can be done on instinct, I dont think why straitening and putting prey in places cant be instinct too. I dont like to think that memory can define consiousness because a computer has alot of memory yet no consiousness. Spiders may have memory, and I think they use instinct to extract bits and pieces to remember where they put their food.

"They don't have a 5 second memory span and they do learn." Totally agreed ;) . Zongyi
 
  • #29
I dont know of any studies on cephalopod brains, but I do know that an octopus has more lobes in one area than a human to contral all of its eight arms
biggrin.gif
. Zongyi
 
  • #30
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]if someone designed a machine that had programming sophisticated enough to give it the same behaviors of a fish/amphibian/whatever... if it looked for food and potential mates... if it went to great lengths to avoid harm to itself... etc etc, would you consider it conscious?
I don't know... it depends.
hmm.... ok... so what's the difference between "concious" animals and animals who aren't "concious"? I bet you could make a super-complex computer that could interact just like a human does. would it be concious?
a chess playing computer isn't concious. it has no sense of self, because ... it's hard to put this into words... it doesn't plan ahead for IT. the spider knows IT is going to be above the spiderweb and be able to pounce on the spider.
another question... what IS a sense of self? is it knowing you exist? is it thinking about yourself as separate from your body (like humans do... this is me, that's my brain, that's my body. You don't think you are your brain.)? is it realizing that those hands you see are yours?
I don't know...
 
  • #31
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]I dont know, but isn't all of the spiders web spinning skills instinct? They know how to do it the second they are born.
yeah, spinning a web is instinct, but they have to learn where the most flies are cought, remember it, and then build a new web to fit the situation.
instincts can be overriden. I think spiders have a blueprint of how to make a web, but they don't always build it like that, so... i guess what I'm trying to say here is that it's not ALL instinct. the instinct to build a web is there, but it's not instinct to build it the way they're building it at the moment.
(lol... i'm I making sense?)
PS.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]I dont know of any studies on cephalopod brains, but I do know that an octopus has more lobes in one area than a human to contral all of its eight arms .
I remember reading somewhere that their arms have their own "brains" somehow... kind of like a king. a king controls the land, but it has people lower than them to control other things.
I don't really remember what it said though :p
 
  • #32
And thats something that we will probably never know. It could be all preprogrammed instinct, like a very adaptable computer, or it could also not be. Unless we can go into a spiders brain, we would never know.

The thing I would like to know is that if most animals have a conciousness, wouldn't they develop speach by now, and for the whales, monkies, cuttlefish, etc that do communicate, why havn't they built up something artificial (other than monkies, but it doesn't help them survive much). If hands and thumbs are an excuse, couln't they have at least learned war, nest building, etc.? I've seen tribes of monkies fight each other on tv, but I dont see them useing spears or anything like that. I dont see dolphins building dens out of leaves. If monkies do have a consciousness, they must know that useing a stick to poke is safer than useing their hands. So can we say that we are the only conscious ones on earth? Zongyi
 
  • #33
many animlas make artificial structures. bees, termites, orangutans, beavers, birds that make nests, caddisfly larvae, prairy dogs, etc.
who says that conciousness makes you want to make wars, nest building, etc? you can be aware of yourself but not want to do that...
the thought processes we have isn't the only type of thought processes there are.

on a kind of unrelated subject that doesn't really have anything to do with what we're talking about, plants can feel and yet they don't have nerves. They respond to touch, know where up and down is, wrap themselves around things, etc.... yet they don't have nerve cells or inner ears. who knows.. maybe they even feel pain just in a different way that we do.
because what are nerves but just a way for two parts of the body to communicate with each other? plants obviously do that. you touch a VFT's trigger hair and the hair doesn't move, the trap does.
 
  • #34
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]I bet you could make a super-complex computer that could interact just like a human does. would it be concious?
Good question. A lot of people are hoping to find the answer to it someday. I have a feeling this issue is going to be this century's hit to the human ego (evolution being last century's hit). Expect at least as much controversy and resistance.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]a chess playing computer isn't concious. it has no sense of self, because ... it's hard to put this into words... it doesn't plan ahead for IT. the spider knows IT is going to be above the spiderweb and be able to pounce on the spider.
Does the spider have to be aware of itself in order to have a goal? If instinct is providing the goal (survival), and the spider is drawing from an arsenal of behaviors in order to accomplish that goal, and using a selection process to determine which behavior is most useful at any given point... then isn't the chess program kind of doing the same thing? Even though it is much less advanced.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]another question... what IS a sense of self? is it knowing you exist? is it thinking about yourself as separate from your body (like humans do... this is me, that's my brain, that's my body. You don't think you are your brain.)? is it realizing that those hands you see are yours?
I think it's the thing behind your eyes looking out... that's the best way I can think of to describe how I see it. It's not just existing, but being. Why or how consciousness exists is in the top 5 of my list of the most interesting questions in life.
smile.gif


And like Zongyi said, there's unfortunately no such thing as proof of consciousness. Consciousness is a solely internal, subjective experience, as it stands.

[b said:
Quote[/b] ]The thing I would like to know is that if most animals have a conciousness, wouldn't they develop speach by now, and for the whales, monkies, cuttlefish, etc that do communicate, why havn't they built up something artificial (other than monkies, but it doesn't help them survive much). If hands and thumbs are an excuse, couln't they have at least learned war, nest building, etc.?
Somewhere in the evolution thread I was rambling (I ramble a lot) about why I think this is. Learning progresses exponentially. New information is assimilated based on old information. So the more you already know, the faster you can learn new things. I think the main reason human society is so much more advanced than animal societies is the fact that we're so much better at retaining and transferring information. Each of us has a library of information in our heads that took thousands of lifetimes to acquire, so in a way we're living as if we've lived thousands of lives, whereas even the smartest animals are living as if they've lived two, three, five lives maybe.

When things grow exponentially, the curve at first is almost flat, then very gradually slopes upward more and more, and accelerates until it's almost vertical. I'm not sure how to describe it best, but what I'm trying to say is, when you're in the slow part of the slope, seemingly tiny achievements take a great deal of time and work. So for a chimp, going from a hand to a spear might be an advancement proportional to a human going from seacraft to spacecraft. If that makes any sense... probably not.  
confused.gif


Maybe dolphins and whales think this whole tool-building thing is silly... why try to manipulate your environment when it will provide everything you need it you know how to take advantage of it?
smile.gif
 
  • #35
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Does the spider have to be aware of itself in order to have a goal? If instinct is providing the goal (survival), and the spider is drawing from an arsenal of behaviors in order to accomplish that goal, and using a selection process to determine which behavior is most useful at any given point... then isn't the chess program kind of doing the same thing?
isn't that what WE'RE doing? (except not everything is for survival... it's also for happiness/pleasure/other good feelings... which could be a kind of mental survival :p)
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]It's not just existing, but being.
lol.... ok, fine. I'll stop asking. we'll just go in circles. lol
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]When things grow exponentially, the curve at first is almost flat, then very gradually slopes upward more and more, and accelerates until it's almost vertical.
my US. history teacher said something today about our knowledge about the world doubling every year? I know exactly what you mean.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Maybe dolphins and whales think this whole tool-building thing is silly... why try to manipulate your environment when it will provide everything you need it you know how to take advantage of it?
heck, there are different ways of thinking with humans too. and we are all the same species! although sometimes you can't understand how those idiots out there are the same species as you! LOL
smile_n_32.gif

freedom fries... wow!
 
  • #36
Well, consiousness (i can never spell that) in my opinion will involve some greed, jelosy or a sence of unfairness. If one is to be aware of itself, it must know that it is treated unfairly. This, again in my opinion, will result in wars. Wars may be the best example of animal inteligience because the one with the most sophisticated tool wins (otherwise, the one with more soldiers). So consiousness develops, self understanding starts, jealosy starts, war starts, and then scientific achievements starts. Since no other animal has activly engaged in a technological war, it can be argued that they dont have a consience. But then again, I am only being a greedy resorce grabbing human like we all are, other animals might be smart enough to think otherwise
smile_n_32.gif
.

I agree with you endparenthesis about your idea of that slope thing (kinda hard to say it all over again
biggrin.gif
). Perhaps if we left earth, something will emerge from the shadows over time to fill in the nitch.

I also agree that inteligence is based on a need. Dolphins can live perfictly well without a consiousness or tools, so why get it. Why havn't tigers ruled the world? Perhaps animals that have some sort of defence will never get a consiousness or a high level of inteligence because there is no need. Humans that came down from the trees were defenceless aganinst one ton cats, so we used consiousness as a defence to get higher levels of technology that can defend us.

But if a high level of inteligence almost garentees imortality for a species, why hasn't all of the creatures on earth developed the way we did? Even without the need for tools, isn't evolution's goal to perserve a gene? Our race is practically undestructable now, but no other animal has taken our path. Zongyi
 
  • #37
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]isn't that what WE'RE doing?
Possibly.
smile.gif


[b said:
Quote[/b] ]lol.... ok, fine. I'll stop asking. we'll just go in circles.  lol
I just doesn't lend itself to words, or I'm just not eloquent enough to attempt it, or I don't understand it enough in the first place.
smile.gif


There are whole books written just in trying to define it.
 
  • #38
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Well, consiousness (i can never spell that) in my opinion will involve some greed, jelosy or a sence of unfairness.
hey, animals have that too :p
yet I still disagree. I think you can have consciousness (I was spelling it wrong too! lol. Just checked with spellchecker) without greed, jealousy, and a sense of unfairness. I think they came separately.
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Dolphins can live perfictly well without a consiousness or tools, so why get it.
they do have conciousness.
 
  • #39
[b said:
Quote[/b] ]Perhaps if we left earth, something will emerge from the shadows over time to fill in the nitch.
I hope it's cephalopods.
smile.gif


[b said:
Quote[/b] ]But if a high level of inteligence almost garentees imortality for a species, why hasn't all of the creatures on earth developed the way we did? Even without the need for tools, isn't evolution's goal to perserve a gene? Our race is practically undestructable now, but no other animal has taken our path.
Evolution doesn't produce what's best, it produces what's good enough.

And I think we've become a 'force' that animals are adapting too, but we're moving too fast. I think we'd see a lot of them evolving in response rather than being wiped out completely if humans were progressing much more slowly.

My uncle once told me that animals just have to evolve if they want to share the planet with us. I remember thinking, "Well, I hope you don't mind being lonely... nothing is 'fit' enough to withstand what we're doing, maybe not even us."
 
  • #40
Oh, and with the artificial tools like beehives and dams, I can also argue that its instinct
smile_n_32.gif
. Zongyi

Edit, im going to sleep now
 
Back
Top