What sets us apart from the animals?

Or is that we don’t give the animals enough credit in terms of intelligence? Maybe animals CAN think to our level, we just can’t detect it, and possibly they can’t detect our intelligence. Perhaps every animal thinks it is most intelligent, without even realizing the intelligence of other species.

Thoughts?

Most animals show no ability to reason (save some of the primates, maybe Dolphins/Whales (i.e. I can’t remember on the latter ones)).

Reasoning is fairly easy to detect, it usually manifests itself in the ability to plan ahead given different situations and is quite easy to distinguish from either evolutionary hard wiring [1] or pattern recognition hardware [2].

There’s plenty of scientific work on the area out there. We are by far the best at a lot of skills that are collectively termed as intelligence (deception, language formation, reasoning). The point is if other animals do have these skills, why don’t they use them for evolutionary advantage?


[1] Such as nest building as a way to house a bird’s young.

[2] By pattern recognition i mean that many animals are able to figure out ways to ‘get’ stuff, but this is usually done by pattern recognition. There’s some famous experiments by some guy who’s name I have forgotten that were done on Pigeons, the learnt to press buttons in order to get food. However when the food was dropped randomly the pigeons would start adopting bizarre behaviours like jerking their heads in a particular way, and the reason was because the pigeons had recieved food while doing this manouver once, and so thought this was a pattern. They would then repeat it until the food came, hence reinforcing some basic belief that this was the reason the food popped out. Rituals like rain dances arose for the same reasons.

it’s because they can’t – animals don’t have the option to develop these skills any further then their immediate survival depends on. to answer your question, TheHairyGuy, the main difference between man and beast is free will. the development of reason is a result of man’s free will, but animals (even computers) can develop this if they are given enough cues from the enviornment. only man chooses to develop this regardless of the environment.

p.s. – another footnoted post! i had to reply… :wink:

Man is an animal. The reason we are so much better at the skills we regard as intelligence is that we are adapted to an environment which requires them; I doubt any of us here could survive as well in a forest as a gorilla, for example.
Aside from this, our main advantage is the depth and complexity of our language enabling us more abstract thought than other mammals with language of some sort, such as some primates, wolves and dolphins.

Animals aren’t clever but actually realise it.

so are you saying that language skills are the cause for the development of reason? so someone with a limited vocabularly has limited reason, and vice versa? that’s a little base. rational thought can be developed without language skills, and can be communicated using other means – i.e. sign language or simple sounds. the faculty of reason comes before, not after, language. language is only a result of being human, it is not the leading factor.

Reasoning gets in the way of living.

We are but animals.

Trix, I think that it is fair to say that language and the categorisation and development of abstract ideals of things involved in it are vital for what we regard as advanced thought. I would say that sign language is fully capable of showing abstract concepts- the medium of language is not important, it only has to be able to convey ideals. As for simple sounds (the grunts and facial expressions used by animals maybe) they tend to be highly contextual and emotive and so do not develop thought to the same extent.

Working through the posts in order,

Interestingly enough there is what is known as the “animal” objection to the psychological criterion for personal identity.

Apart from that brief aside, trix, what do you mean they can’t? If they had a different environment they’d suddenly be Einstien? I’m not sure what you mean.

GD, man may be an animal, but a person is not, two different things, man (homo sapiens, whatever you want to call it) has developed the ability to foster the existence of a person inside him, that is the key difference between a person and an animal (sounds circular maybe but it’s not). (that’s what I meant by my first comment, I don’t buy the animal objection to PI).

Metavoid, lol, very true.

Trix, to a point, but it seems that language is a necessary condition for culture (to be able to develop ideas), otherwise we’d only have a small advantage over other species. Not that I’m disagrreeing with you, essentially I am agreeing with you, but language is a necessary precondition for an advence civilisation and so, (I think) advanced intelligence. Sign language and simple sounds are languages to an extent (that’s how all languages must start off after all). One of the most interesting facts I’ve ever heard about language is that a child will pick up a language (their first anyway) independantly on how often it is spoken to them (up to a point obviously). That is a child to whom it is spoken all the time every day will pick it up at virtually the same rate as someone who is barely spoken to at all. this suggests that language is somehow part of our evolutionary makleup (this is all still very cutting edge psychology/philosophy so I’ve not seen all the ways it’s been interpreted).

Sedm, yeah, it does a lot, but that’s why life is fun.

GD, just realised I’ve just said many of the same things as you in response to trix, sorry. For the most part. I don’t agree with you that an advanced language couldn’t be made out of grunts (there could be a greater role of body language in it for example).

Heh, I suppose you could develop some sort of binary system with grunts that was capable of conveyting abstract ideals…

Maybe it wan`t just a flippant point. We hold reasoning ability as our prime evolutionary advantage, but most organisms do very well (better than us perhaps?) without it - and when we do apply reason, it is often applied poorly. Our ability to reason may well contribute to our lack of success in living (and may even be our downfall).

I`m sure goldfish would think they are the most highly evolved creatures on the planet - they have a perfect life, in tank, ith regular food, and sex.

We are but goldfish.

The only Thing seperating a person from AI or a computer is that humans are not built with a purpose or a thing to do.
That is the only indeepth seperation at this time.

I believe the term AI is used the wrong way. While most call it Artificial Intelligence, I think it should be more appropriately called, Applied Intelligence. As we are transferring a human process of intelligence into another form, kind of like training a child, but this child can only handle tasks it has been trained to deal with. The problem so far is that we don’t know how to train it to learn it’s self from trial and error.

i agree about the applied part, but Artificial or applied intelligent or sintient artificial living things will or should have the ability to learn for themselves. It is sci-fi that makes us think that they will have built in purposes which is a kick back to robots designed for one purpose.