I love to spend time in my garden looking at all the different creatures: all insects, for example, seem to have a very intricate behavior. Recently I noticed how bees, not being able to drink nectar from comfrey flowers due to their elongated form, would pierce a hole in the flower's petals in order to reach the nectar.
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.
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.
It turns out that the bio-molecular machinery that neurons use to do their thing is also present throughout all cells. In other words, all life thinks. Brains are just concentrations of thinking tissue.
I don’t understand the problem with being inclusive a bit. Plants could be aware, so could be all life of all the Kingdom, we kill them and we eat them for own survival.
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.
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.)
I agree with your insinuation that there is utility in having a language for describing the brain processes or their functions in humans that is different from the other living beings.
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?
> Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?
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.
"Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem." - Wendell Johnson (Semanticist)
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 an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it. But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism. 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.
> But I still say that using the word "thinking" for non-macro-scale biomechanical processes is charlatanism.
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.
> 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.
> It's an excellent presentation, and I'm grateful that you shared it and agree that people should watch it.
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.
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.
Is there an option where we don't act like consciousness is solved when it's convenient for our argument?
> 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.
I think the problem with both of your arguments is that neither of you will be able to actually define consciousness in a way that is satisfactory to the other party.
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.
If consciousness is non-local or non-mechanical then it has a lot of very weird rules about physical and chemical things that can be done to brains to alter it.
"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."
"
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.
Yeah I agree with you. There is a lot of interesting stuff the more you study it. Like Physarum polycephalum, a slime that solves mazes despite not having a nervous system and is used to create better road networks. I really hope in the future we combine bio-tech as things like this already use their form of A* and pathing system. Once plants & slime are used to create logic gates and truth tables start to take off I see that as being the cleanest tech around.
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 also spend a lot of time watching nature - just yesterday I was marvelling at ants carrying grass seeds to their nest, each carrying the seed the same way around, so that the burrs don’t snag on anything - pretty much the same behaviour as Darwin notes with his worms and leaves. It fascinates me that something with such a limited little mind can still figure out something like “carry from this end”.
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.
> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.
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?
> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.
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 find it fascinating that just a few centuries ago, most philosophers and scientists considered that humans were the only "intelligent" species. Today's research consists of diverse animal species where it is so common to see how even the smallest of species like Zebrafish or fuit-flies possess extremely complex neuronal networks which process external stimuli ranging from visual, audio or social cues and produce very specific ("intelligent") responses. This was thought to be absent in non-human species to a greater degree in the past but now we have so much evidence to disprove that.
It's quite fascinating that as we are making AIs which are smarter than humans in 'narrow' applications, we are also becoming more aware of existing lifeforms that are already smarter than us in 'narrow' fields of their own, e.g. a squirrel's memory for food stashes.
I wonder whether our society will integrate interactions with AIs and nonhuman animals as part of the same process.
Minute creatures swarm around us, objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away, a lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree —E. O. WILSON
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 :))
I’m not sure. Leaf pulling could be reflexive, there’s no thought involved in my hand flinching in response to a sudden pain. The fact that the worms ignored lights when busy with some activity is interesting, but if that is always the case then is there early any judgement involved?
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.
Currently reading "1493" - which is about the effects of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals after the discovery of the Americas - and was fascinated to find out that earthworms are an invasives species in North America, which mostly didn't have any since the last ice age.
TL/DR: Darwin eventually came to believe earthworms have some amount of intelligence because they drag leaves in certain specific ways, including leaves not native to their environment.
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.
I know it was said over 2000 years ago, but ravens are quite intelligent. Raking up there with primates and estimated to be similar to a 3-4 year old human. Birds get a bad rap with terms like "bird brained", but it's rarely true, even for those that people consider pests like pigeons[1].
A researcher from the University of Washington has a really great blog on corvids I follow (crows, jays, ravens, rooks, magpies, etc)[2].
I wonder why there aren’t more examples of speaking animals.
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.
This is just my own personal theory, but one reason is that we just scoop animals up, put them in a room, and expect to try finding speech patterns. What would happen if a flock of hyperintelligent pigeons found some human babies and locked them up in a room until it's time for snacks and games? There probably wouldn't be much language observed aside from a few repeated sounds.
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.
I think the brain needs something special to be able to understand language properly. Perhaps this is one of the things humans are particularly (well, extremely) good at relative to our general intelligence.
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
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.