I am from south India where a lot of wild elephants roam the villages and towns. When elephants come to roam the streets most people lock themselves in their homes and alert the forest division authorities. Someone I know once rescued a baby elephant from a trap set for boars. Every year, a herd of elephants stop by his gate and leave presents - mostly bananas and coconuts. They wait for him to come out, make a friendly gesture - folding their trunks in a specific way, and leave peacefully. Our elders tell us that elephants have memory and show gratitude and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time.
Reminds me of that story of the exact opposite where an elephant killed a woman. Then, showed up at her funeral and disrespected her corpse. THEN, brought friends and destroyed her house.
No one really knows why, but the rumor was she was associated with a poaching group. Either way that elephant clearly hated this lady and made it known.
Unlike the animals in the Zoo, the sight of a wild Asian elephant (males especially) with unaltered tusks is very intimidating. People don't dare to go near the wild ones even when they are friendly. The domesticated animals (ones used in temple proceedings) are a different story. They are still majestic but sadly in chains and strappings so people touch and feed them often. Google 'Pampadi Rajan' - name of a domesticated elephant
Elephants are really smart, and also quite emotional. They have been known to grieve, for very long periods of time, upon the death of babies or partners. Most animals get over it, fairly quickly.
The first one involves a group of elephants who formed a circle around their caretaker's home for a couple of days to grieve when he died.
The second one involves an elephant who's shot at his head for poaching, he ran away to where forest rangers camp is, and just laid down to be taken care. The elephant survived.
Animals are complex creatures and see, hear and know more than we think. We should stop acting so boneheaded, IMHO.
I'd happily add birds to the list. I had a budgerigar which lived for ~12 years. She had very personal traits. For example she always sat silent until she saw my eyes open, regardless of the hour. She always knew that I was the one I opened the door and sang very happily, again regardless of the time of the day. She liked to troll me and my parents. She ate the corners of my lecture notes, esp. if I didn't pay attention to her (exam periods), flicked a single CD from the stack, grabbed and threw down, studied how it fell, and chirped at me head sideways, trying to tell "look, I did something".
I could write tons and tons of things where she was very aware of my emotions and responded to it, or communicated with my parents in their own way.
So, I don't think it's limited only to "more complex" animals like dolphins, dogs, and elephants. Cats and birds (oh, look at cockatoos, crows magpies, etc.) are also in that group as well.
Cockatoos raid trash bins and find ways to open even the blocked ones if their strength allows.
Lastly, here's a parrot which trolls its owner and laughs about what it did! Oh boy, it's aware of what it did [0].
It is entirely possible that if elephants could speak and had versatile hands like we do, they would build a developed civilization. They certainly seem very intelligent and deliberate.
A genetic project for the 21st century: try giving them voice and hands. See what happens.
> It is entirely possible that if elephants could speak and had versatile hands like we do, they would build a developed civilization.
How much intelligence is needed? Using a hose is an accomplishment for elephants. People in this thread are amazed that elephants can remember events, even traumatic ones like the death of a child. Has an elephant ever created a structure of any sort?
Rats have like 6 babies every other month. Elephants need like 2 years for a new baby. You get much more attached to offspring when they take a long time and they survive for a few tens of years instead of a few months. Feelings get synchronized with the r/K strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
There was even a situation where they sought revenge. There was one person that was allegedly a retired 70-yo poacher, And a herd stomped them to death. Then at the funeral the elephants marched in and threw the corpse around. Then they singled out and destroyed that person's home. The destruction and collateral damage was surprisingly minimal, so this was an extremely targeted attack.
There are so many implications to this story that are wild to think about.
How did the elephants know generally where this person lived? How did they know specifically which house she lived in? How did they know there was a funeral to crash?
I'd speculate that the answer is scouting, and the idea of elephants scouting for other elephants in a planned attack is so damn cool that I just want to assume that must be the answer in the face of knowing that I'm speculating.
I did say "minimal", not "none". If I see a herd of a dozen elephants coming in a neighborhood, I'm sure expecting more than 1 house demolished with malice and 3 others damaged as collateral.
It's possible that the signal alerting them to where she lived, had also been present in the other homes (smell, visible trails, decorations, etc). Statistically, this a large number of rare events that coincided.
We even think other humans are stupid if they have different values or goals that we don’t relate to. I think humans systematically underestimate animal intelligence because their goals are worldview are radically different.
I remember reading in Nature of a young bull elephant charging a safari vehicle, frightening everyone. Just before he reached them, he dropped to his front knees and dug his tusks into the ground. Then he made rumbling noises similar to laughter and walked off.
> Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal).[10]
> Mary is “left-trunked”—the equivalent of left-handed in humans—so holding the hose made it easier for her to reach her left side. She tended to spray her right side with her trunk, because she preferred to curve her proboscis that way.
I can't believe this line, it's such a ridiculous and bizarre thing it sounds like a joke. The famously singly-appendeged creature can also be left-handed. Come on.
Apparently though, not a joke, elephants really are right or left-"handed." https://dspace.spbu.ru/handle/11701/7138 "Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants." What a hilarious planet.
Lateralisation is extremely common, snails are famously lateralised leading some of their predators to be such (they have jaws curving to one side, to better follow the shell). Snail shells mostly spiral to the right (90% IIRC, about the same as right handedness in humans) but in areas where lateralised predators are very common left-handed snails have a much higher presence, up to 30%.
Why, what makes you think there’s any connection? Molecule handedness doesn’t affect animal handedness, they are completely independent things with completely independent mechanisms, and the materials in between animal and molecule (shell, bone, skin, nerves, vasculature, etc.) don’t have any known handedness. We already know that not everything has that problem.
I think they just see asymmetry as a parent of handednes. Bones and skin and so are not symmetric, as probably anything in the universe (but some specific molecules, atoms and crystals?)
I think it would be overwhelming if we really acknowledged how sentient animals are.
I'm being completely honest here, I believe pigs and cows are just as intelligent as dogs. They're simply limited by their physical bodies and our understanding of their expressions.
But I still won't go vegan.
On an intelligent level I believe it's wrong to inseminate cows so they produce milk, but I still won't stop drinking it. Because I am lazy and comfortable in my ways. And that's what I believe most people are, even if they won't admit to it.
I think acknowledging the simultaneous truths that there is terrible suffering in the world, and that we are meant to perpetuate that suffering, is just maturity and wisdom.
Morality is an artificial instrument of social control that minimizes human wars. Otherwise, all creatures are here to kill and breed.
I beg to differ: all creatures are here to breed. I’ll be surpised to ear about creatures that kill as an end instead of a mean but hey, there’s still to discover.
One in every ten thousand or so human males either kills other human beings for pleasure or would if they could. This may be specific to humans, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that there are serial killers in other species. Or rather, would-be serial killers, because without tool use an animal would have to be a freakish outlier not only in terms of “psychopathy” but also in size and strength to be able to afford expending energy to kill another member of their species for no good reason.
The way a dog behaviorist described it to me was, "A dog can feel jealous, but the dog doesn't _know_ that he/she feels jealous." I don't know if I believe that, but I've been pondering it for the last 20 years.
Dogs are amazing. And human brains/minds are without doubt even more complex than those of dogs. But it is typical for humans to not be aware of the true reasons of behaving or even feeling in the way they do.
When asked about causes of our behavior, we readily make up an explanation, and we believe our own explanations completely whether they are true or false. There is a considerable literature demonstrating in an experimental setting how easily the behavior is controlled by the factors that are not consciously perceived, and how it is rationalized post factum in plausible but arbitrary ways. More informally, many fiction writers show characters, for example falling in love and showing that through their behavior, but refusing to admit that they are in love, even when explicitly confronted with the facts.
Of course one can say that an adult human can at least in principle, sometimes, examine what is going on, while a dog is probably much less capable of such complex analysis and is more like a small child. This seems plausible.
Probably varies dog by dog, same as it varies human by human. Some people are intimately aware of their own jealousy, other need some form of therapy to make it apparent.
And they are able to show insight and planning to get what they want...
Once a friend of our dog came visiting, grabbed his favorite stuffy and happily chewed it in the yard. Which our dog clearly resented.
So he cleaned up the yard and hid all other toys in the house. Usually that's our job - he never bothers to look after his toys.
Then he came out with an old tennis ball, pranced around, played with it, like "Dude, this is the BEST toy EVER invented. An it's mine."
His friend dropped the coveted stuffy and came over to investigate... our dog dropped the ball, grabbed the stuffy and hid it in the house.
His friend was left with a slimy, boring ball.
I really can't think of any other explanation - he knew how to get his stuffy, but also anticipated this trick wouldn't work twice. So the cleanup in advance.
A simpler, somewhat common version is when one dog pretends that there is something interesting outside, so that the other dog would drop the toy and would run to the window hoping to bark at the mailman, while the trickster picks up the left behind toy.
Some dogs actually learn to see through this ruse. It can be very amusing to watch them darting instinctively, then suddenly realizing what is about to happen, returning back to pick up the toy and only then going to the window more leisurely.
I remember a video from a camera someone set up in their home to see what their dog -- who was not allowed on the furniture -- did when they were gone. It may not be surprising that the video depicted the dog rolling around and rubbing itself on all of the furniture.
It's a small wonder whether the dog did that when the owner was home!
maybe someone knows the answer. how are elephants surviving german winters? can they withstand the cold or are they put inside for winter?
that question popped in my mind. thanks
> "So Kaufman and her colleagues started to record the showering on video over the course of a year, testing how Mary reacted to changes in the setup."
It's long for HN and framed in a way that smacks of clickbait. I would have skipped right past that title, but this one works well.
The submitted title is also part of the original title anyway. A lot of publications have a less clickbaity version as a subtitle that is meant to work equally well as a title, and it's pretty common on HN submissions to see people submit that other title because it usually represents the content better. That's pretty clearly what happened here.
Less clickbaity, sure, but it doesn't say elephant. Title was changed after submission. Nobody had any problem with it when it was submitted 3 days ago.
Nobody saw it when it was submitted 3 days ago, most likely because the title smelled of pop sci clickbait and didn't get up votes.
At the time of writing that post has 7 votes and one comment—"This is just so cool". This one has 154 votes and many substantive comments. That's quite the difference.
I don't have a horse in this race but I could imagine a whole litany of reasons for one post doing better over another which have nothing to do with the title. Again, not trying to say one title is better than the other just that the argument given of "this post is doing better; therefore, the title is better" seems fallacious with so many potential confounding variables.
Fair. It's possible it's causal, but yes, not a guarantee.
The context and subtext you're missing is that OP gets on every article that was posted more than once to point to previous postings, identifying the new one as a "dupe". They seem to be of the opinion that each thread should exist exactly once (or, grudgingly, once per year). I responded because in that context they seemed to be implying that OP changed the title to avoid getting flagged as a duplicate, so I was explaining why that is unlikely—the portion of the title they used is just better for this audience.
More generally, to me this is to me a classic example of why their idea of thread purity is wrong: the thread the other day did very poorly, whereas this thread reached a much wider audience. I don't really care why that was, but it's yet more proof that reposts are a good thing when the previous post fails to garner "significant attention". [0]
Ah, I did miss the subtext. I've noticed the [Dupe] comments on many threads and, to be fair, they're warranted most of the time I see them. As in, the same news was submitted multiple times within an hour of each submission and they're all getting a split discussion. It's worth noting that dang will usually combine the threads and leave a comment in the now-empty section with a link to the "winning" thread (heh, full circle, sometimes the agree-ability of the title is what decides the "winner").
Anyway, back to the subtext, I agree that the repost seems to be warranted in this instance given the lack of discussion on the first post and presumably no "second chance" boost.
Animals have to get their enjoyment where they can. It's always fun to watch them play. You can start to think that animals are always optimizing the time they spend being active and are carefully preserving their energy in order to survive, but then you see some birds going sledding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0OjCneVUg) and it's clear that they're just in it for the fun.
This summer I spent an hour watching a pair of magpies harass a fox. The fox was trying to sunbathe, but the magpies kept dive-bombing it, pecking its tail, and landing in front of it then flying away just as the fox went for them, all while making a chattering sound that seemed a lot like laughter.
I've heard theories that they do this as revenge for stolen eggs, or to chase foxes away from their nests, but this was in an open patch of ground far from where they nest and it really looked to me that they were just teasing it for fun.
Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].
Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.
Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
In my hometown, sometimes birds (I think they may have been crows) swoop across real close to cars along a straight stretch of highway. I've had to slow down sometimes thinking I might hit one.
I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".
One of favourite examples of this sort of thrill seeking animal behaviour is this gibbon pulling the ears of a young tiger
https://youtu.be/SHXo-BpE8T8
That's a cool video but I'm not 100% convinced that crow is "having fun". It looks equally plausible that the crow is trying to break open the object, possibly in search of food.
Of course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.
Humour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is.
It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
I once dated someone who couldn't consider hypotheticals or how they could be used as a reasoning tool. Disagreements were the most frustrating thing ever because I couldn't play devils advocate or steelman. She thought I was agreeing with her intermittently to make her mad. She had no concept of walking in someone else's shoes or arguing a position you don't actually hold. It blew my mind.
(Human) Humor is a far broader spectrum than you describe here too. It can range from "ROFTL because someone accidentally stepped in poop" to deeply layered liguistic jokes like you describe.
> One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility
All humor? (Honest question)
I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.
It's difficult to reason about intelligence in this context.
Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.
Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.
Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.
Anectodally elephants do things like hiding and revaling objects for no apparent reason other than comical effect. One could build elaborate evolutionary fitness reasons for this, but I mean...
I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
> Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits
I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.
Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.
Play has a purpose, it hones reflexes, teaches youth about concealment, traps, ambushes, what their bodies can do, whether running away works in a scenario or fighting is better.
It also shows who is best to lead a fight. Play much like curiosity, makes you able to navigate your environment. It very much has extreme usefulness.
That’s not the point. Evolutionary pressure doesn’t care if something is or isn’t useful per see. It’s all situational anyway.
To simplify a lot, either you have offsprings and your genes spread or you don’t and they don’t. Evolution is not a purposeful process towards fitness. It’s a reification of the results of the way genes are passed, how they and the environment affect individual characteristics and how an individual fitness to their current environment impacts their chance to mate.
That's not accurate at all. Evolution does care if something is useful, if it aids in reproduction. Learning how to fight, protect, run, hunt, tricks, all of these (such as ambushes, hiding, etc) helps both prey and predator survive in the wild.
Play hones reflexes. Its entire purpose is to train young animals on tactics, and on how to use their body, and on their local environment.
Put another way, if you aren't trained to use your body, you're more likely to die. The same goes with not learning tactics. Or what the local environment is like.
If you don't know what a tree is, if you don't know what a hole in the ground is, what a hill is, how well grass hides you or not, you are at a major disadvantage, if you're hunting, OR if you're hunted!
There can be other mechanisms to learn things, but play is one of them, and having children teach each other, lets the adult protect, and gather food to feed. It also ensures that youth is trained up on the current environment, not one that the parent recalls from youth.
> Evolution does care if something is useful, if it aids in reproduction.
Evolution is an abstraction subsuming other mechanisms. It doesn’t care about usefulness. That’s a finalist bias. Individuals reproduce or they don’t.
The rest of your post is pure conjecture. You can’t work backward saying: this thing is useful therefore it’s evolved. That doesn’t make sense especially for complex behaviour.
Sure, maybe, but if you tried you could come up with a similar explanation for literally any behavior or emotion. It might be true, but it isn’t falsifiable.
there is this study that shows bumblebees exhibit behaviour that looks a lot like what we would call playing, seems to serve no purpose except being enjoyable.
My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)
We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves. We cannot detect it directly. If there were consciousness in the world that was significantly different to our own then we likely would be ignorant of it.
We do know that human consciousness has something to do with the networks of neurons in our brains. We know this because we can poke specific parts of it and manipulate specific aspects of our consciousness: we can observe a fairly direct correspondence between conscious experience and biological substrate.
To play devil's advocate: have a look at the way plants in a forest communicate with each other - even across different species! That's a complex network, in which individual plants could be analogized to neurons.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
> We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
> It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
> The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
The fact that it's possible for me to be aware of anything at all is interesting though, and definitional of conciousness. It's possible the roomba's also experience things, but we generally assume that they don't.
This is entirely separate from whether one's perceptions are an accurate representation of reality, or whether one's experiences correspond to the parts of the brain that respond to things.
> The fact that it's possible for me to be aware of anything at all is interesting though, and definitional of conciousness.
"it's possible for me to be aware of anything" <--- restating your premise. Not evidence that your premise is true. Your definition of consciousness is circular.
Everything in philosophy (and life in general) is grounded in base beliefs that are assumed rather than justified with reason.
If you don't believe that you have experiences of any kind then there is indeed no point in us discussing things further.
If you do believe that you have experiences of some kind, then I can tell you that I am taking to be definitional of consciousness - that when I say "conciousness", that's what I mean - and we can start from there.
Consider the slime molds, which have no brain, specifically Physarum polycephalum and Dictyostelium discoideum (you'll forgive me for conflating them a bit in this brief comment):
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
Why do they have to have brains? Is it impossible that another structure could serve a similar purpose? Like, how long did it take us to figure out what brains are for?
They don't need to have "brains" in the sense that humans do, ie. discrete neurons and axons, but they do need to have "neural networks" - networks of nonlinear operators with a training mechanism. I'm aware of zero evidence that trees perform computation on a larger-than-single-cell basis.
You cannot direct growth at the scale of a single cell. There are many computations (based on hormonal gradients and other mechanisms) that occur at the scale of larger structures, such as leaves or branches. Of course, those mechanicisms are not going to create consciousness.
So my brother was in a zoo somewhere in Europe (I forget which one) and he was watching the penguins. The enclosure had various levels and one penquin was throwing stones at a fellow penguin down below. It would throw a stone and then hide behind the ledge and the penguin it was taunting would look up to try to find out what was going on.
Humans are fundamentally not that different from other animals really. Any emotion you have, they have. It's a Victorian era misconception that humans are somehow a unique species with all these wonderful properties and animals are dumb.
Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.
I think that largely depends on how you look at it. As with any topic, Greek philosophers had widely different opinions across schools of thought and generations. Many highlighted rational thinking as the line between humans and animals, while still thinking animals intelligent and emotional. I do agree with your point on Darwin, but why that point works is exactly because his work contrasted with the rest of his peers. His work was also far from being widely accepted at first, and was met with heavy skepticism on many, if not most fronts. It was only later that this became a widely accepted part of science.
OK, I think I see what you meant: Not that the "misnomer" arose in the Victorian era, but that the Victorian era was the last era in which you would expect to encounter this "misnomer".
As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.
Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".
This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."
Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.
Thanks for denomering my misnomer misconception. Joking aside, I appreciate you correcting me, I'm not a native speaker, so these small issues pop up here and there, and it helps when you point them out.
it's a common error even of native speakers, and I hadn't the faintest clue it mightn't be your first language. I am barely conversant in one, so consider me shamed.
In elephant point of view, hose and shower are definitely sophisticated (=advanced) tools. While they may experience it regularly, they usually dont operate them. Like humans with airplanes.
What kind of bike commute are we talking, 20 minute casual flat land plain clothes upright Dutch bike commute or 20 mile uphill lycra sports SF $10K carbon fiber bike commute? If you sweat/stink profusely for the former you should probably see a doctor or like, slow down a bit. If it's the latter, it's a sports exercise, not a commute and you should shower / change before work.
I am from south India where a lot of wild elephants roam the villages and towns. When elephants come to roam the streets most people lock themselves in their homes and alert the forest division authorities. Someone I know once rescued a baby elephant from a trap set for boars. Every year, a herd of elephants stop by his gate and leave presents - mostly bananas and coconuts. They wait for him to come out, make a friendly gesture - folding their trunks in a specific way, and leave peacefully. Our elders tell us that elephants have memory and show gratitude and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time.
Reminds me of that story of the exact opposite where an elephant killed a woman. Then, showed up at her funeral and disrespected her corpse. THEN, brought friends and destroyed her house.
No one really knows why, but the rumor was she was associated with a poaching group. Either way that elephant clearly hated this lady and made it known.
https://www.fox26houston.com/news/elephant-kills-indian-woma...
...and they can hold a grudge so be respectful all the time.
It's like a 6000 lb raven.
Thank god elephants can't fly.
Lovely story, and I think that is true for a lot of animals. I grew up around horses and saw very similar traits.
What a heartwarming story!
Do you think it would be safe for him to approach that group and to touch them in a friendly way?
I'm curious about their temperament regarding persons with whom that have some history.
Unlike the animals in the Zoo, the sight of a wild Asian elephant (males especially) with unaltered tusks is very intimidating. People don't dare to go near the wild ones even when they are friendly. The domesticated animals (ones used in temple proceedings) are a different story. They are still majestic but sadly in chains and strappings so people touch and feed them often. Google 'Pampadi Rajan' - name of a domesticated elephant
Can recommend watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shc9aOdWJ-g
I wonder if there is a difference in this regard between Asian elephants and African elephants.
i remember seeing tiktoks where elephants show intelligent behavior so I am glad that tiktok is of some use.
> Anchali figured out she could interrupt her colleague’s showers by picking the hose up with her trunk and kinking it to stop the water flow.
The old tricks are the best tricks. Now wait for them to point the nozzle at their face and release.
And in 3 generations, elephants will be producing sexy carwash videos for each other on Only Pachyderms.
Only ‘Fants
This is as good a spot as any to inform the crowd that female elephants have shockingly human-like breasts. Go ahead and look it up.
Well, this is going to be my new ice-breaker at the next party I don't want to be at.
Why is it shocking?
Thank you.
Elephants are really smart, and also quite emotional. They have been known to grieve, for very long periods of time, upon the death of babies or partners. Most animals get over it, fairly quickly.
I love two stories about elephants.
The first one involves a group of elephants who formed a circle around their caretaker's home for a couple of days to grieve when he died.
The second one involves an elephant who's shot at his head for poaching, he ran away to where forest rangers camp is, and just laid down to be taken care. The elephant survived.
Animals are complex creatures and see, hear and know more than we think. We should stop acting so boneheaded, IMHO.
Those are wonderful stories, thanks for sharing them.
I wonder though if generalizing to most/all animals really makes sense here.
I get the sense that these kinds of stories are mostly limited to highly social and fairly intelligent animals like elephants, dolphins, and dogs.
Maybe other primates as well, although IIUC they're more likely to be spiteful to some people than are e.g. dogs and elephants.
I'd happily add birds to the list. I had a budgerigar which lived for ~12 years. She had very personal traits. For example she always sat silent until she saw my eyes open, regardless of the hour. She always knew that I was the one I opened the door and sang very happily, again regardless of the time of the day. She liked to troll me and my parents. She ate the corners of my lecture notes, esp. if I didn't pay attention to her (exam periods), flicked a single CD from the stack, grabbed and threw down, studied how it fell, and chirped at me head sideways, trying to tell "look, I did something".
I could write tons and tons of things where she was very aware of my emotions and responded to it, or communicated with my parents in their own way.
So, I don't think it's limited only to "more complex" animals like dolphins, dogs, and elephants. Cats and birds (oh, look at cockatoos, crows magpies, etc.) are also in that group as well.
Cockatoos raid trash bins and find ways to open even the blocked ones if their strength allows.
Lastly, here's a parrot which trolls its owner and laughs about what it did! Oh boy, it's aware of what it did [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLNSaQCDl8E
> I wonder though if generalizing to most/all animals really makes sense here.
What's the downside to just assuming all animals are intelligent and treating them as such?
I think it's less about a general truth and more about a general capacity for this behavior.
Add cats to the list as well.
From my experience, you can add sparrows, pigeons, and other birds to this list.
And if you include things I've read on Facebook, even jumping spiders.
It is entirely possible that if elephants could speak and had versatile hands like we do, they would build a developed civilization. They certainly seem very intelligent and deliberate.
A genetic project for the 21st century: try giving them voice and hands. See what happens.
This is a plot point in one of my favorite sci-fi series: Schlock Mercenary.
Elephants are one of the races that have been "uplifted" to sophistry. Some (Neophants) have been engineered further and now have hands.
Check out the notes below the following two comics for some of the musings that make these stories so compelling to me:
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-16
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2014-05-07
> It is entirely possible that if elephants could speak and had versatile hands like we do, they would build a developed civilization.
How much intelligence is needed? Using a hose is an accomplishment for elephants. People in this thread are amazed that elephants can remember events, even traumatic ones like the death of a child. Has an elephant ever created a structure of any sort?
> if elephants could speak
I don't think they'd have much to say ...
The hands would be crushed.
You need to watch Babar. That's the blueprint for intelligent elephants.
Maybe they could have fingers on their trunk. It is already strongly innervated and very sensitive.
Rats have like 6 babies every other month. Elephants need like 2 years for a new baby. You get much more attached to offspring when they take a long time and they survive for a few tens of years instead of a few months. Feelings get synchronized with the r/K strategy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
There was even a situation where they sought revenge. There was one person that was allegedly a retired 70-yo poacher, And a herd stomped them to death. Then at the funeral the elephants marched in and threw the corpse around. Then they singled out and destroyed that person's home. The destruction and collateral damage was surprisingly minimal, so this was an extremely targeted attack.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/toi-original/watc...
So yeah, elephants truly never forget. And some will make it their life mission to right the wrongs.
There are so many implications to this story that are wild to think about.
How did the elephants know generally where this person lived? How did they know specifically which house she lived in? How did they know there was a funeral to crash?
I'd speculate that the answer is scouting, and the idea of elephants scouting for other elephants in a planned attack is so damn cool that I just want to assume that must be the answer in the face of knowing that I'm speculating.
It says in the article right there that they also destroyed other houses.
I call bs.
They probably intercepted communications between those other houses and the target, and determined they should also pay the price.
If Monkey Hitman can be a TV show, then so can Mafia Elephants.
I did say "minimal", not "none". If I see a herd of a dozen elephants coming in a neighborhood, I'm sure expecting more than 1 house demolished with malice and 3 others damaged as collateral.
It's possible that the signal alerting them to where she lived, had also been present in the other homes (smell, visible trails, decorations, etc). Statistically, this a large number of rare events that coincided.
A herd of elephants is aggressive. They trample an old woman who can run away as fast.
People hide, but for the burial, they come out of their houses, make noise, alerting the elephants.
Elephants get aggressive again. People run away. Elephants trample what they left behind.
Them, Elephants also trample the village.
Seems like a pretty likely scenario?
Stuff happens!
I bet we are underestimating and misunderstanding animal intelligence by a lot. Animals are not lesser humans, they have other worlds.
We even think other humans are stupid if they have different values or goals that we don’t relate to. I think humans systematically underestimate animal intelligence because their goals are worldview are radically different.
I remember reading in Nature of a young bull elephant charging a safari vehicle, frightening everyone. Just before he reached them, he dropped to his front knees and dug his tusks into the ground. Then he made rumbling noises similar to laughter and walked off.
I've been waiting almost 4 hours to somehow bring up musth.
That sounds like musth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth
> Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal).[10]
Wild.
> Mary is “left-trunked”—the equivalent of left-handed in humans—so holding the hose made it easier for her to reach her left side. She tended to spray her right side with her trunk, because she preferred to curve her proboscis that way.
I can't believe this line, it's such a ridiculous and bizarre thing it sounds like a joke. The famously singly-appendeged creature can also be left-handed. Come on.
Apparently though, not a joke, elephants really are right or left-"handed." https://dspace.spbu.ru/handle/11701/7138 "Context-dependent lateralization of trunk movements in wild Asian elephants." What a hilarious planet.
Lateralisation is extremely common, snails are famously lateralised leading some of their predators to be such (they have jaws curving to one side, to better follow the shell). Snail shells mostly spiral to the right (90% IIRC, about the same as right handedness in humans) but in areas where lateralised predators are very common left-handed snails have a much higher presence, up to 30%.
Molecules have a handed-ness. everything from there on up is doomed to have that problem somewhere.
Why, what makes you think there’s any connection? Molecule handedness doesn’t affect animal handedness, they are completely independent things with completely independent mechanisms, and the materials in between animal and molecule (shell, bone, skin, nerves, vasculature, etc.) don’t have any known handedness. We already know that not everything has that problem.
I think they just see asymmetry as a parent of handednes. Bones and skin and so are not symmetric, as probably anything in the universe (but some specific molecules, atoms and crystals?)
It goes deeper than that. Fundamental forces have chirality. This was a little controversial when first discovered.
Mammoth remains can be identified as right or left trunked by the shine on one of their tusks. Gotta hang that trunk up somewhere
Dude. Even dogs get jealous of other dogs. How are we still in a time where we think animals don't have an inner life?
I think it would be overwhelming if we really acknowledged how sentient animals are.
I'm being completely honest here, I believe pigs and cows are just as intelligent as dogs. They're simply limited by their physical bodies and our understanding of their expressions.
But I still won't go vegan.
On an intelligent level I believe it's wrong to inseminate cows so they produce milk, but I still won't stop drinking it. Because I am lazy and comfortable in my ways. And that's what I believe most people are, even if they won't admit to it.
I think acknowledging the simultaneous truths that there is terrible suffering in the world, and that we are meant to perpetuate that suffering, is just maturity and wisdom.
Morality is an artificial instrument of social control that minimizes human wars. Otherwise, all creatures are here to kill and breed.
I beg to differ: all creatures are here to breed. I’ll be surpised to ear about creatures that kill as an end instead of a mean but hey, there’s still to discover.
One in every ten thousand or so human males either kills other human beings for pleasure or would if they could. This may be specific to humans, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to find that there are serial killers in other species. Or rather, would-be serial killers, because without tool use an animal would have to be a freakish outlier not only in terms of “psychopathy” but also in size and strength to be able to afford expending energy to kill another member of their species for no good reason.
The way a dog behaviorist described it to me was, "A dog can feel jealous, but the dog doesn't _know_ that he/she feels jealous." I don't know if I believe that, but I've been pondering it for the last 20 years.
Dogs are amazing. And human brains/minds are without doubt even more complex than those of dogs. But it is typical for humans to not be aware of the true reasons of behaving or even feeling in the way they do.
When asked about causes of our behavior, we readily make up an explanation, and we believe our own explanations completely whether they are true or false. There is a considerable literature demonstrating in an experimental setting how easily the behavior is controlled by the factors that are not consciously perceived, and how it is rationalized post factum in plausible but arbitrary ways. More informally, many fiction writers show characters, for example falling in love and showing that through their behavior, but refusing to admit that they are in love, even when explicitly confronted with the facts.
Of course one can say that an adult human can at least in principle, sometimes, examine what is going on, while a dog is probably much less capable of such complex analysis and is more like a small child. This seems plausible.
Probably varies dog by dog, same as it varies human by human. Some people are intimately aware of their own jealousy, other need some form of therapy to make it apparent.
I'd argue that a) it takes years for humans to develop the ability to be aware of their own jealousy, and b) some of us don't ever get there.
And they are able to show insight and planning to get what they want...
Once a friend of our dog came visiting, grabbed his favorite stuffy and happily chewed it in the yard. Which our dog clearly resented.
So he cleaned up the yard and hid all other toys in the house. Usually that's our job - he never bothers to look after his toys.
Then he came out with an old tennis ball, pranced around, played with it, like "Dude, this is the BEST toy EVER invented. An it's mine."
His friend dropped the coveted stuffy and came over to investigate... our dog dropped the ball, grabbed the stuffy and hid it in the house.
His friend was left with a slimy, boring ball.
I really can't think of any other explanation - he knew how to get his stuffy, but also anticipated this trick wouldn't work twice. So the cleanup in advance.
That is a rare level of cunning!
A simpler, somewhat common version is when one dog pretends that there is something interesting outside, so that the other dog would drop the toy and would run to the window hoping to bark at the mailman, while the trickster picks up the left behind toy.
Some dogs actually learn to see through this ruse. It can be very amusing to watch them darting instinctively, then suddenly realizing what is about to happen, returning back to pick up the toy and only then going to the window more leisurely.
Yes, that was clever.
But he showed real intelligence by never doing anything like this in front of us ever again. ;)
I remember a video from a camera someone set up in their home to see what their dog -- who was not allowed on the furniture -- did when they were gone. It may not be surprising that the video depicted the dog rolling around and rubbing itself on all of the furniture.
It's a small wonder whether the dog did that when the owner was home!
maybe someone knows the answer. how are elephants surviving german winters? can they withstand the cold or are they put inside for winter? that question popped in my mind. thanks
They are taken inside. Watching a lot of German zoo TV
> "So Kaufman and her colleagues started to record the showering on video over the course of a year, testing how Mary reacted to changes in the setup."
Just leave her alone.
What was wrong with the title "Elephant learned to use a hose as a shower. Then her rival sought revenge"? Too similar to other submissions?
It's long for HN and framed in a way that smacks of clickbait. I would have skipped right past that title, but this one works well.
The submitted title is also part of the original title anyway. A lot of publications have a less clickbaity version as a subtitle that is meant to work equally well as a title, and it's pretty common on HN submissions to see people submit that other title because it usually represents the content better. That's pretty clearly what happened here.
Less clickbaity, sure, but it doesn't say elephant. Title was changed after submission. Nobody had any problem with it when it was submitted 3 days ago.
Nobody saw it when it was submitted 3 days ago, most likely because the title smelled of pop sci clickbait and didn't get up votes.
At the time of writing that post has 7 votes and one comment—"This is just so cool". This one has 154 votes and many substantive comments. That's quite the difference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42089532
I don't have a horse in this race but I could imagine a whole litany of reasons for one post doing better over another which have nothing to do with the title. Again, not trying to say one title is better than the other just that the argument given of "this post is doing better; therefore, the title is better" seems fallacious with so many potential confounding variables.
Fair. It's possible it's causal, but yes, not a guarantee.
The context and subtext you're missing is that OP gets on every article that was posted more than once to point to previous postings, identifying the new one as a "dupe". They seem to be of the opinion that each thread should exist exactly once (or, grudgingly, once per year). I responded because in that context they seemed to be implying that OP changed the title to avoid getting flagged as a duplicate, so I was explaining why that is unlikely—the portion of the title they used is just better for this audience.
More generally, to me this is to me a classic example of why their idea of thread purity is wrong: the thread the other day did very poorly, whereas this thread reached a much wider audience. I don't really care why that was, but it's yet more proof that reposts are a good thing when the previous post fails to garner "significant attention". [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Ah, I did miss the subtext. I've noticed the [Dupe] comments on many threads and, to be fair, they're warranted most of the time I see them. As in, the same news was submitted multiple times within an hour of each submission and they're all getting a split discussion. It's worth noting that dang will usually combine the threads and leave a comment in the now-empty section with a link to the "winning" thread (heh, full circle, sometimes the agree-ability of the title is what decides the "winner").
Anyway, back to the subtext, I agree that the repost seems to be warranted in this instance given the lack of discussion on the first post and presumably no "second chance" boost.
I wonder whether they feel some kind of enjoyment from these kinds of actions
Animals have to get their enjoyment where they can. It's always fun to watch them play. You can start to think that animals are always optimizing the time they spend being active and are carefully preserving their energy in order to survive, but then you see some birds going sledding (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0OjCneVUg) and it's clear that they're just in it for the fun.
This summer I spent an hour watching a pair of magpies harass a fox. The fox was trying to sunbathe, but the magpies kept dive-bombing it, pecking its tail, and landing in front of it then flying away just as the fox went for them, all while making a chattering sound that seemed a lot like laughter. I've heard theories that they do this as revenge for stolen eggs, or to chase foxes away from their nests, but this was in an open patch of ground far from where they nest and it really looked to me that they were just teasing it for fun.
They may know that particular fox.
Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].
Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.
Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
[0]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...
> Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.
They are both corvids (members of the family Corvidae) along with ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays and others. Most corvids are fairly smart.
In my hometown, sometimes birds (I think they may have been crows) swoop across real close to cars along a straight stretch of highway. I've had to slow down sometimes thinking I might hit one.
I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".
One of favourite examples of this sort of thrill seeking animal behaviour is this gibbon pulling the ears of a young tiger https://youtu.be/SHXo-BpE8T8
That is fascinating! The laps he runs around the young tigers! Thanks for the link.
That's a cool video but I'm not 100% convinced that crow is "having fun". It looks equally plausible that the crow is trying to break open the object, possibly in search of food.
Of course, animals are conscious and enjoy things and feel pain too. Just less intelligent and with less language ability than humans. Chimps and dogs certainly understand humour. I wouldn't be surprised if elephants do too, being social creatures.
I think it is also important to note here that apparently not all humans understand humor either or understand it differently or something.
Humour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is.
It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.
I once dated someone who couldn't consider hypotheticals or how they could be used as a reasoning tool. Disagreements were the most frustrating thing ever because I couldn't play devils advocate or steelman. She thought I was agreeing with her intermittently to make her mad. She had no concept of walking in someone else's shoes or arguing a position you don't actually hold. It blew my mind.
So you were playing games with her instead of developing a solution together?
Yeah. I don't blame her for getting mad.
No, I was trying to explain things. It was difficult to get to solutions because I couldn't get her to see different points of view.
Experience gained, I suppose.
(Human) Humor is a far broader spectrum than you describe here too. It can range from "ROFTL because someone accidentally stepped in poop" to deeply layered liguistic jokes like you describe.
One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility. Puns work that way.
So if you're not able to make the right mental context switch at the right moment, you won't get the joke.
> One aspect of humor depends on cognitive flexibility
All humor? (Honest question)
I was under the presumption that e.g. slapstick or schadenfreude humor doesn't need linguistics, and is therefore seen in many animals. Animals that don't have any form of language but do have rather intricate social systems or even ranks and caste systems. but do have humor. E.g. where breaking or pushing those systems is the humor.
E.g. "boss gorilla slips on a banana peel haha".
Just because you don’t understand the Germans’ humour doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist ;)
It's difficult to reason about intelligence in this context.
Human intelligence is defined by behavior we humans value. Intelligence tests are geared to measuring these aspects.
Intelligence tests devised by animals would look totally different - and it's quite thinkable humans wouldn't do too well taking them.
Wouldn't assume that animals have less language ability than we humans, unless we totally figured out what other species are really talking about. Unless we do this is just an assumption.
Anectodally elephants do things like hiding and revaling objects for no apparent reason other than comical effect. One could build elaborate evolutionary fitness reasons for this, but I mean...
Elephants that make other elephants laugh get laid more often.
There's an interesting article by David Graeber on how we characterize play and fun among animals: https://davidgraeber.org/articles/whats-the-point-if-we-cant....
I can't say that I've understood it all, but he appears to criticize scientists for not thinking about play seriously, and instead reducing most aspects of animal behavior to things like survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
> fun [...] survival, fitness, and evolutionary pressure.
This has to be both right? Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits, but the immediate reward for play must be fun.
> Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits
I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.
Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.
Play has a purpose, it hones reflexes, teaches youth about concealment, traps, ambushes, what their bodies can do, whether running away works in a scenario or fighting is better.
It also shows who is best to lead a fight. Play much like curiosity, makes you able to navigate your environment. It very much has extreme usefulness.
That’s not the point. Evolutionary pressure doesn’t care if something is or isn’t useful per see. It’s all situational anyway.
To simplify a lot, either you have offsprings and your genes spread or you don’t and they don’t. Evolution is not a purposeful process towards fitness. It’s a reification of the results of the way genes are passed, how they and the environment affect individual characteristics and how an individual fitness to their current environment impacts their chance to mate.
That's not accurate at all. Evolution does care if something is useful, if it aids in reproduction. Learning how to fight, protect, run, hunt, tricks, all of these (such as ambushes, hiding, etc) helps both prey and predator survive in the wild.
Play hones reflexes. Its entire purpose is to train young animals on tactics, and on how to use their body, and on their local environment.
Put another way, if you aren't trained to use your body, you're more likely to die. The same goes with not learning tactics. Or what the local environment is like.
If you don't know what a tree is, if you don't know what a hole in the ground is, what a hill is, how well grass hides you or not, you are at a major disadvantage, if you're hunting, OR if you're hunted!
There can be other mechanisms to learn things, but play is one of them, and having children teach each other, lets the adult protect, and gather food to feed. It also ensures that youth is trained up on the current environment, not one that the parent recalls from youth.
> Evolution does care if something is useful, if it aids in reproduction.
Evolution is an abstraction subsuming other mechanisms. It doesn’t care about usefulness. That’s a finalist bias. Individuals reproduce or they don’t.
The rest of your post is pure conjecture. You can’t work backward saying: this thing is useful therefore it’s evolved. That doesn’t make sense especially for complex behaviour.
Sure, maybe, but if you tried you could come up with a similar explanation for literally any behavior or emotion. It might be true, but it isn’t falsifiable.
It's literally the current mainstream theory. I think you need more pickles on your sandwich to claim otherwise.
The idea that everything has an evolutionary function is really popular and it's complete pseudoscience.
Or it could be an unintended consequence...
there is this study that shows bumblebees exhibit behaviour that looks a lot like what we would call playing, seems to serve no purpose except being enjoyable.
My sorta crank belief is that we are massively underestimating the intelligence and consciousness of animals (and possibly even plants?)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000334722...
Plants do not have consciousness. Reacting to stimuli does not require conscious processing.
Like, I'm all for "we're underestimating animal brains" but they do have to have brains.
We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves. We cannot detect it directly. If there were consciousness in the world that was significantly different to our own then we likely would be ignorant of it.
We do know that human consciousness has something to do with the networks of neurons in our brains. We know this because we can poke specific parts of it and manipulate specific aspects of our consciousness: we can observe a fairly direct correspondence between conscious experience and biological substrate.
To play devil's advocate: have a look at the way plants in a forest communicate with each other - even across different species! That's a complex network, in which individual plants could be analogized to neurons.
Do I think forests are conscious in the same way that we are? No. I do think "consciousness" is not a binary, and that we have poor tools and insufficiently-developed models for understanding it.
> We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves.
I don't have evidence I have consciousness. You assume you have it, but if you didn't what would really change? It's a made up word and the semantic value of the sentence "I have consciousness" is something like "I am special". Can you define consciousness in an objective way such that, were I to not have consciousness anything would be different for me?
It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
> It's the secular word for "soul", but at least the religious people have some ideas about what their woowoo nonsense terminology means.
The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me. I can't explain what it is, but it seems different to anything else I observe in the world.
> The fact that I experience anything at all (as opposed to being an unthinking being as we assume robots or machines to be) seems like something to me.
The roomba robot doesn't experience, it just goes through its routine. You're more sophisticated (a robot made out of meat), so the behaviors and internal state are more sophisticated. Your "experience" is just one of many illusions you are prone too. You can go look up some of them that it's possible for you to be aware of, they're pretty crazy.
The statement I quoted is just another wording of "of course I have consciousness!".
The fact that it's possible for me to be aware of anything at all is interesting though, and definitional of conciousness. It's possible the roomba's also experience things, but we generally assume that they don't.
This is entirely separate from whether one's perceptions are an accurate representation of reality, or whether one's experiences correspond to the parts of the brain that respond to things.
> The fact that it's possible for me to be aware of anything at all is interesting though, and definitional of conciousness.
"it's possible for me to be aware of anything" <--- restating your premise. Not evidence that your premise is true. Your definition of consciousness is circular.
Everything in philosophy (and life in general) is grounded in base beliefs that are assumed rather than justified with reason.
If you don't believe that you have experiences of any kind then there is indeed no point in us discussing things further.
If you do believe that you have experiences of some kind, then I can tell you that I am taking to be definitional of consciousness - that when I say "conciousness", that's what I mean - and we can start from there.
Consider the slime molds, which have no brain, specifically Physarum polycephalum and Dictyostelium discoideum (you'll forgive me for conflating them a bit in this brief comment):
It can solve mazes. [0]
"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]
They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]
And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09668
Water also can solve mazes. That doesn't mean it's conscious any more than slime molds are.
Maybe we're not all that stupid.
Why do they have to have brains? Is it impossible that another structure could serve a similar purpose? Like, how long did it take us to figure out what brains are for?
They don't need to have "brains" in the sense that humans do, ie. discrete neurons and axons, but they do need to have "neural networks" - networks of nonlinear operators with a training mechanism. I'm aware of zero evidence that trees perform computation on a larger-than-single-cell basis.
You cannot direct growth at the scale of a single cell. There are many computations (based on hormonal gradients and other mechanisms) that occur at the scale of larger structures, such as leaves or branches. Of course, those mechanicisms are not going to create consciousness.
A fair point!
Well,
https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-weve-si...
Calling this a "scream" is violence against the English language.
When a log crackles as it burns, those crackles do not correspond to an experience of suffering.
So my brother was in a zoo somewhere in Europe (I forget which one) and he was watching the penguins. The enclosure had various levels and one penquin was throwing stones at a fellow penguin down below. It would throw a stone and then hide behind the ledge and the penguin it was taunting would look up to try to find out what was going on.
How do penguins throw?
The deeper darker question is what will they do to get a stone to throw: https://www.penguinworld.com/features/prostitution.html
i can guarantee you horses can and do annoy people for fun
Humans are fundamentally not that different from other animals really. Any emotion you have, they have. It's a Victorian era misconception that humans are somehow a unique species with all these wonderful properties and animals are dumb.
> Victorian era misnomer
Isn't this exactly the opposite? Read Aristotle or Aquinas and they have all kinds of definitions about why humans are fundamentally different in nature than animals; and Darwin, whose work made it much more palpable to believe that humans were just another kind of animal, did his work smack in the middle of the Victorian era.
I think that largely depends on how you look at it. As with any topic, Greek philosophers had widely different opinions across schools of thought and generations. Many highlighted rational thinking as the line between humans and animals, while still thinking animals intelligent and emotional. I do agree with your point on Darwin, but why that point works is exactly because his work contrasted with the rest of his peers. His work was also far from being widely accepted at first, and was met with heavy skepticism on many, if not most fronts. It was only later that this became a widely accepted part of science.
OK, I think I see what you meant: Not that the "misnomer" arose in the Victorian era, but that the Victorian era was the last era in which you would expect to encounter this "misnomer".
As a counterpoint, I recommend reading Everlasting Man, by G. K. Chesterton. If humans are just animals, they're the most bizarre animal we've ever seen.
Jeremy Bentham popularized animal rights before the Victorian era. His well-known line was "The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?".
This was at the same time part of an argument against (human) slavery. "The French have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason a human being should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day come to be recognised that the number of the legs ..."
Quite apart from the suffering being a supposition (essentially based on the "duck test"), this leaves unaddressed the question of why the ability to suffer should confer rights. Elsewhere he makes the point that adult animals have more morality than similarly aged humans (toddlers), which is at least in the same ballpark as the idea of rights. But I don't think we even know why we grant creatures rights.
Ancient romans were already conscious about not killing species off to not make them extinct.
a misnomer is a failure in naming ie peanuts, koala bear, etc. I think you mean misconception.
Thanks for denomering my misnomer misconception. Joking aside, I appreciate you correcting me, I'm not a native speaker, so these small issues pop up here and there, and it helps when you point them out.
it's a common error even of native speakers, and I hadn't the faintest clue it mightn't be your first language. I am barely conversant in one, so consider me shamed.
Since when is using a hose as a shower considered "sophisticated tool use"?
Sophisticated is a synonym of advanced.
In elephant point of view, hose and shower are definitely sophisticated (=advanced) tools. While they may experience it regularly, they usually dont operate them. Like humans with airplanes.
When it’s an elephant doing so. It would not be sophisticated for a human.
For a human, it could be considered a developmental milestone.
That's a good point. For a sufficiently young human it would be considered sophisticated.
Would it be considered more advanced if it was using it as a password cracking tool? ;)
For HN it is, as most tech guys /coders don't even shower after they arrived somewhere from their bike commute.
What kind of bike commute are we talking, 20 minute casual flat land plain clothes upright Dutch bike commute or 20 mile uphill lycra sports SF $10K carbon fiber bike commute? If you sweat/stink profusely for the former you should probably see a doctor or like, slow down a bit. If it's the latter, it's a sports exercise, not a commute and you should shower / change before work.
By "average animal" standards, it's quite sophisticated.
And these day - clicky headlines suggesting advanced intelligence in charismatic animals are great for paying the bills.