Animals

[TheAlphaWolf]

this is a big topic but I thought we'd start with intelligence.
How smart do you think non-human animals are? (broad question, I know... just say anything relating to that) do you think animals can reason? plan ahead? do they have feelings like love, sadness, etc? how much do you think their lives are ruled by instinct?

this is mostly relating to the 3% of animals that have bones, but a small part is also about the 97% of all animals that are invertebrates.

 

[SunPitcher]

heck yes they do! What did you think?

 

[Clint]

to an extent.

 

[scottychaos]

I believe nearly all mammals are almost as smart as humans.
the only difference is they havent developed the ability to speak in a language WE can understand..(and they probably dont care to anyway)
they speak among themselves perfectly clearly all the time.
Dogs
Cats
Primates
Cows
Horses
Dolphins
Whales
etc
have about 75% of our intelligence.
(zero % being a non-living object, like a rock)

IMO Dogs are more intelligent than one year old humans.
anyone who has ever owned a dog knows it can learn dozens of words.
My parents have a dog that can recognize 10 different toys by name, say "Haggis, wheres kong"?
and he goes and gets THAT specific toy..
same with the other 10 toys, each has a name, and he knows them all..
nothing but advanced intelligence can explain that.

some primates can speak to us and make themselves understood.
(koko, sign language, etc.)
there is a lot going on in those brains..

Scot

 

[TheAlphaWolf]

Quote[/b] ]they speak among themselves perfectly clearly all the time

communicate would be a better word... through smell, sight, hearing, taste, touch, and others (probably... can't think of one right now but since many also have other senses, i'm guessing they do)
and speaking of language... in a way we're the retarded ones. THEY are the ones who have to understand us. I know my birds understand me much more than I understand them. I just hear screaming LOL. I think something is smarter if they learn other's language instead of making others learn theirs.

 

[Trapper7]

Scottychaos,I agree with.My dog does the same thing with his toy,whether it's a ball,kong,rope whatever,he knows.It's amazing I think.He also knows hand signals,like sit,stand,down.Anywho,yeah I think they have feelings too,like sadness cause if you have two dogs lets say and one dies,sometimes the one left behind gets very depressed.It doesn't have to be a dog,I've seen it in snakes too.So yeah I think they have feelings.*Trapper7*

 

[TheAlphaWolf]

I think it's obvious that animals reason and think ahead. for example... even a itty bitty jumping spider with a brain the size of a grain of salt thinks ahead and reasons... if something doesn't work, try something else.
sigh... here it comes. I'll try to make it short.
there's a jumping spider that eats other spiders. it goes to a web, slowly makes it's way towards the center, and then starts plucking the spider web so the spider thinks it's cought food. however, sometimes that doesn't work and the pray spider doesn't want to see. Then the jumping spider sees it's not going to work so it gets off of the spider web, looks around to see where to go, and then circles around (many times loosing the sight of the spider web) and ends up above the spider web in a good position so it can jump from there and catch the spider.
now... if that's not reasoning and thinking ahead, what is it?
so if a little tiny miniscule spider with a miniscule brain can do that and much more (meaning that all it's brain isn't dedicated for that purpose only), it's stupid to think others can't think ahead and reason.
If you've ever seen an animal hesitate... that also shows reasoning. they have to ask themselves "should I do it? should I not? why?" ... otherwise there would be no hesitation.

 

[endparenthesis]

I think a lot of people also confuse intelligence with consciousness. From what I've read about the neocortex and how it relates to consciousness... I'm under the impression that mammals (and birds to an extent) could be the only conscious lifeforms on the planet.

Conscious thought takes a great deal of energy, and it doesn't make evolutionary (uh oh, e-word) sense for a creature's body to be gathering all of those extra resources for a trait they do just fine without. It's a very recent evolutionary development, but we myopically have trouble envisioning a life without it.

A computer isn't conscious (yet), but it can be programmed to do some very complex and seemingly intuitive things. It's the same with biological life... the lower lifeforms could be considered biological robots. If you read into artificial intelligence, you find that there are a lot of things we consider 'intelligence', until we figure out how they work, and then it just becomes an algorithm. It's weird how studying AI taught me more about evolution and biology than most things I've read.

Watching things in my backyard actually got a little more interesting after I started asking myself those question. Somehow an ant is a lot more interesting when you picture it as a little self-sustaining procreating networked microbot.

I believe this is also what the debate on what feels pain and what doesn't is lacking. Creatures that don't make conscious choices don't need to feel pain to stay safe... their bodies simply need to automatically cause them to escape. They aren't going to resist. And even if some of them appear to experience pain biologically, how much does it matter if there's "nobody home" to feel it? I'm not advocating abuse whatsoever, but there's no point in going out of your way to protect something for its own sake when it doesn't care either way.

 

[TheAlphaWolf]

so what IS conciousness again?
lol

Quote[/b] ] Creatures that don't make conscious choices don't need to feel pain to stay safe... their bodies simply need to automatically cause them to escape. They aren't going to resist.

so you don't think that ANY other animal besides mammals and birds is concious so they don't feel pain or suffer? that they're just reacting to stimuli?
so what IS pain and suffering anyway? isn't that exactly what it is? reacting to stimuli? the nerves send out impulses that tell the brain to make that thing hurt so you stop doing what you're doing. Pain is the way you know to stop doing something... I think ALL animals feel pain. I don't think they need conciousness for that.

 

[endparenthesis]

Not sure what consciousness is... people are still trying to figure it out.

Self-awareness?

Have you ever been asleep, and you suddenly wake up, or go from not dreaming to dreaming, or whatever... and when it happens you think to yourself, "Wait, here I am, but where was I a second ago?" You literally weren't aware you existed until that point. You may even vaguely remember that something was going on in your brain before, but you just weren't there at the time. To me, that's the difference between being conscious and not.

I'm in the middle of a couple books on the subject. I wish I was finished with them so I'd have some help wording things better.

And, yeah, that's another problem... definition of pain. It's one of those words with a lot of baggage. There's nerve impulses, and there's psychological experience. In my mind, pain refers to the psychological experience. Nerve impulses are just... nerve impulses. When you say the word "pain", most people imagine something far beyond stimuli.

 

[TunaSurprise]

Well none of them are AS smart as us, otherwise we wouldn't be exactly at the top of the food chain now would we?

 

[superimposedhope]

We are at the top of the food chain? I can think of a few animals I don't care to be around however I don't think they really care if I'm around cause they know they could eat me.

I have to say this: Any animal that can masturbate is deffinately intelligent. Not being weird or gross, I'm just sayin cause that takes quite abit of advanced thought process. Like, primates and dolphins both do it besides humans.

Joe

 

[endparenthesis]

By the way, functions like pattern recognition, motor control, processing information from the senses (which requires tossing out massive amounts of data to quickly narrow down what's relevant at the moment), etc. all fit under the umbrella of "intelligence". They don't require consciousness.

And if you don't think simply looking around is an intelligence-driven process, you should know that it would take tens or even hundreds of millions of today's computers working in parallel (and requiring much more power) to perform the processing our brains do just on the input coming from our eyes in real time, and that's not even including the fusing of those two images into a single view in stereo to determine distances. Good thing we're analog and not digital, huh.

I don't know the ratios at the moment, but I believe much more of the human brain is devoted to these other functions than to consciousness.

 

[Trapper7]

I didn't know that primates and dolphins masterbate

I thought they just had sex,LOL.*Trapper7*

 

[superimposedhope]

yeah, strangely enough they do. Actually I've seen footage of a human being "raped" by a dolphin. I don't know that it is exactly rape but the person was trying to get away and you know what the dolphin was tryin to get.

Primates "tug it" and dolphins rub against coral, rocks, people, any hard surface I guess so long as it isn't rough.

Joe

 

[superimposedhope]

I seen a show about T8imber Wolves and how they have these maps in their head and they can just run and know exactly where they are going at all times and if they haven't been there before they log it into the map and next time they will know. It was actually alot more complicated than that. It was really cool, I had no idea of just how intelligent and compass-like they are.

Joe

 

[Alvin Meister]

Isn't it immoral to have debate whether or not certain animals can feel pain, whilst still inficting it on the off chance they can't feel it?

There's a big debate whether fish can feel pain. I don't see why they shouldn't, but people still spear them!

 

[Clint]

of course fish can feel pain.

 

[SunPitcher]

animals are smarter than us by far. They just dont have the tools to show it. (i.e. apposable thumbs)

 

[ktulu]

Quote[/b] (SunPitcher @ Mar. 08 2005,3:49)]animals are smarter than us by far. They just dont have the tools to show it. (i.e. apposable thumbs)

primates have apposable thumbs, chimps use tools and transmit culture.

Personally the more i study non-human primates the more intellegent i find them to be. Some chimps have even been taught to read simple words and sentances and spell them correctly. 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). Also it has been shown that chimpanzees have the mental capabilities to process and use some complex forms of speach however they lack the anatomical structure (issues with the hyoid bone and vocal chords) so i would say a great many of the animals out there have a good deal of intellegence, however i am not familar with the ones that are not primates.