Proof of Animal Consciousness Thread

I've gone through a number of artifical intelligence courses and the number of problem solving algorithms that require no actual intelligence but work quite well it's kind of surprising. If anyone's interested in this stuff go and read Russell and Norvig's "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach". It's a bigass book but you can just pick the chapters that catch your attention

pattern matching doesn't require intelligence, general intelligence requires something else that we're still missing though. either some clever way of hooking up lots of pattern matchers, or something else entirely.

proof

Dogs will rule the earth in 20 years. We must help them succeed.

  On 12/5/2015 at 6:48 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I have a prediction:

 

Philosophy will become massively important to society in 10-15 years

As we enter the age of automated cars, gene manipulation, solving aging and perhaps ultimately (natural) death

We will see the need to apply humanity's philosophical knowledge to more and more

 

How should we program automated cars to act, when (say) faced with the choice of smashing into a crowd of people OR driving off the road and probably killing the driver? In short: should your car kill you to save 20 people? Would you buy such a car? Would you want OTHER people to buy such a car, knowing that you could be among those 20?

 

When we are faced with these dilemmas, we will then see the importance of all these cheeky little thought experiments that philosophers like to putz around with, like the Trolly Problem. (And anyone wishing to weigh in will need be fluent in these thought experiments?

 

Another name proposed for thought experiments was "intuition pumps"

Which is much better name

People hear the term "thought experiment" and they immediately think of college stoners discussing the Matrix or whatever

Whereas in reality, thought experiments are literally the ONLY tool for learning about certain of our intuitions, our values, our cognitive shortcomings, our misperceptions, etc

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I ve thought about self driving cars and the trolley problem ... like should those vehicles be programmed to bump the fat guy in front of a trolley to save the kids ... taking in account it could calculate the physics and probabilities much better faster and more reliably than a human .., on the other hand, when the cars automobiles were invented, suddenly it came very easy to kill people by accident, by negligence or omission and going by the old laws there would have been a lot of "nice people" doing time ... my understanding is that there wasn't any extyra demand for philosophy, it was resolved politically or by legal adjustments .... I've also thought about the life extension immortality business ... suppose it becomes reality, the treatmentm the pill would cost let's say 1000 dollars a day ... how could you protect the industry against cheap generic pirated equivalents, or Canadian imports

I have an intuitive feeling that dogs and cats are about as conscious as people in their REM sleep phase ... conscious in a way but lacking self awareness ... animals showing self awareness in the mirror test might be as aware as a "lucid dreamer" ...

as a little boy, i got knocked out, suffered a concussion in a rough play at school yard ... I kind of woke up in a class room, sitting at my desk doing class woek without any idea how I came there ... I asked my friend sitting next to me: has something strange happened? he said: no!

did I fuction as zombie for a while? not necessarily, maybe there was consciousness, but it didn't imprint any memory, or the memories got erased at the moment I "woke up" ...

watcing UFC, one can sometimes hear fighters asking their corner men between rounds what the hell happened? they've been tagged and rocked, concussed, but they just keep going through the motions ....

Consciousness is truely a great mystery, like the Big Bang ... one who is not technically dumb but don't see the mystery might indeed be a "p-zombie" him- or herself ....

there have been attempts to use current level scientific concepts, nowadays quantum phenomena and this "integrated information theory" to explain connciousness but I predict there won't be any more succes than with former mchanical, electirical, hydraulic etc theories ... my feeling is that the primitive nativesnatives with their animism and panpsychisms and the Hondoos with their atman and brahmas stuff might be more on the right track ... like science is looking answers in the woemg direction looking outside, when it might be more fruitful to look inside, maybe using psychedelic research methods, meditation and shit...

recently i re-read the book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, for thrills and tripping ... it's a "leftfield" account, but not just cranky bullshit, because there are philosophers like Daniel Dennett who've given it serious consideration .... there is a Wikipedia article on it ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_%28psychology%29

if it's true that dogs were pre-historic lone wolves who for some reason blend in to human society, i don't see them rising or disobey somehow their master, as they took this path, for some mysteriuos reason

  On 1/10/2016 at 11:17 AM, transmisiones ferox said:

if it's true that dogs were pre-historic lone wolves who for some reason blend in to human society, i don't see them rising or disobey somehow their master, as they took this path, for some mysteriuos reason

it might be that the wolves didn't exist as their present form then, some dogs allied wwith the humans, other evolved in to different direction, because there was a new, the most dangerous species of them all ... it was a mutually beneficial deal for the dogs and men ...

the animals people have kept have had an effect on human evolution too, like lactase persistance, that is a recent mutation ...

when people were hunter gatherers or pastoral nomads, dogs' life was better than after the agricultular revolution ..,. then the cats came around .... and probably because dogs remember the better quality of life before agriculture/cats they still have a grudge, they haven't forgiven ...

---

heh last summer I was spending time out with my dogs and talked with woman with her dog, she admired my playful and friendly pit bull mix and told how she had had a dog that was a pit bull mixed with a wolf/dog hybrid ... mixing wolf and pit bull, hmm, - she said it was kind of hard to keep in the city so she gave it away and it lives somewhere in the countryside currently ....

Interesting, the dog as species choise was because a man as more dangerous and it was the only way to survive to them, seems like, so the dog as the organism has completly loss his ability to conquire the human will, since the wolf is the wild animal and you never, never, should mix him with people, nature bites back,dog is a domestic animal,people choise how to use it

There is hope yet!

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00673/full

  On 1/11/2016 at 12:13 AM, LimpyLoo said:

There is hope yet!http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00673/full

Nice to see some follow up to Varela's work.

It had me searching for old posts as well, because remember having some threads about consciousness. Found one here: http://forum.watmm.com/topic/82146-theories-of-consciousness/

And actually think it would be a shame to start again here, as there were plenty people contributing great ideas in the old one.

only reason people think animals arent the same as us is because they think were special mainly for religious reasons

were animals too and we probably dont even have legitimate self control just biological impulses

w/e

oof "right in the feels".

Photographer captures moment kangaroo cradles dying companion as joey looks on

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/photographer-mother-kangaroo-dying-queensland-australia?CMP=soc_567

"Researchers find birds can theorize about the minds of others, even those they cannot see"

  Quote

The study, "Ravens Attribute Visual Access to Unseen Competitors," was published Feb. 2 in Nature Communications. It found that ravens guarded caches of food against discovery in response to the sounds of other ravens if a nearby peephole was open, even if they did not see another bird. They did not show the same concern when the peephole was closed, despite the auditory cues.

 

The findings shed new light on science's understanding of Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states - including vision - to others, said Cameron Buckner, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Houston. Buckner is an author of the paper, along with Thomas Bugnyar and Stephan A. Reber, cognitive biologists at the University of Vienna.

 

Most Theory of Mind research involving animals has been done with chimpanzees and other species closely tied to humans. But while those studies have suggested that animals are able to understand what others see - giving them an advantage in competing for food, for example - they rely on the test subjects' ability to see another's head or eyes, providing so-called "gaze cues." Skeptics argue that animals in these experiments might be responding only to these surface cues, without any real understanding of what others see.

 

"Thus," the authors write describing the previous state of the research, "it still remains an open question whether any nonhuman animal can attribute the concept 'seeing' without relying on behavioral cues."

 

Buckner, who focuses on animal cognition, said the researchers avoided that concern in this experiment by using only open peepholes and sounds to indicate the presence of a possible competitor, with the ravens never physically able to see another raven in the context of the experiment.

^ that was a cool study

here though i think we have conclusive proof

  On 5/11/2016 at 1:25 PM, very honest said:

^ that was a cool study

 

here though i think we have conclusive proof

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

flol

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

crow instigating a cat fight for its amusement

https://www.instagram.com/p/BKt3cW5AsFU/

A gopher covering a Limp Bizkit tune would be conclusive proof IMO ymmv byob

proof? poof.

You want proof? I'll give you proof

*grabs genitals through pants and wiggles them tauntingly*

Cum bak Unteleportedman, we miss u

  On 1/9/2016 at 8:06 PM, Dorian Mode said:

 

  On 12/5/2015 at 6:48 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I have a prediction:

 

Philosophy will become massively important to society in 10-15 years

As we enter the age of automated cars, gene manipulation, solving aging and perhaps ultimately (natural) death

We will see the need to apply humanity's philosophical knowledge to more and more

 

How should we program automated cars to act, when (say) faced with the choice of smashing into a crowd of people OR driving off the road and probably killing the driver? In short: should your car kill you to save 20 people? Would you buy such a car? Would you want OTHER people to buy such a car, knowing that you could be among those 20?

 

When we are faced with these dilemmas, we will then see the importance of all these cheeky little thought experiments that philosophers like to putz around with, like the Trolly Problem. (And anyone wishing to weigh in will need be fluent in these thought experiments?

 

Another name proposed for thought experiments was "intuition pumps"

Which is much better name

People hear the term "thought experiment" and they immediately think of college stoners discussing the Matrix or whatever

Whereas in reality, thought experiments are literally the ONLY tool for learning about certain of our intuitions, our values, our cognitive shortcomings, our misperceptions, etc

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I ve thought about self driving cars and the trolley problem ... like should those vehicles be programmed to bump the fat guy in  front of a trolley to save the kids ...  taking in account it could calculate the physics and probabilities much better faster and more reliably  than a human .., on the other hand, when the cars automobiles were invented, suddenly it came very easy to kill people by accident, by negligence or omission and going by the old laws there would have been a lot of "nice people" doing time ... my understanding is that there wasn't any extyra demand for philosophy, it was resolved politically or by legal adjustments .... I've also thought about the life extension immortality business ... suppose it becomes reality, the treatmentm the pill would cost let's say 1000 dollars a day ... how could you  protect the industry against cheap generic pirated equivalents, or Canadian imports

 

I think it's pretty simple - they will do what we tell them to do, or what their training data suggests they should do.  There isn't some objective answer that an ultimate intelligence could discover.

Yes, but what should we tell them to do?

You say "what their training data suggests they SHOULD do"...you need to have an aim/goal/values to have a "should"...and they (aims etc) won't just magically appear...they need to be put there by humans

So again, we're back to WHAT goals/aims/values should be picked, and we're back to the need for philosophy and ethics and all that