all quotes from Cherry Cola:
Meta cognition is thinking or feeling about your thoughts or feelings, that's a skill which only humans possess no? :O
Not sure, but tend to disagree. theres evidence, for me, to support metacognition in dolphins for example or gorillas (not sure if those were gorillas...). but not definitive: since I can't become a dolphin - I may never know. so this discussion is of pure academic nature. which I'm by the way fine with.
Anyway it's interesting the way you say abstract thinking is just another word for sentience. I wouldn't say it is precisely, but sentience requires abstract thinking when you think about it.
yeah that's the way I meant it... but up to a certain degree of abstractness I suspect it automatically follows.
I find it odd how it's said that animals can't think abstractly.
I had and I still have a problem with that.
Gorillas can learn a language. languages are indirect abstract constructs. hence I believe animals can think very abstractly. I do not believe sentience is what makes us special, rather, tried to argue from Brontosaurie's perspective to point out problems in Brontosaurie's statement. so I'd like to redirect your post, to which I obviously mostly agree, towards Brontosaurie
Animals just have much fewer abstractions than humans by far. An animal will orient itself by putting things into abstract categories just like humans, abstract categories such as prey, predator, rival, mate, alpha, my child, other child, food, danger, nice, bad etc. Humans use far more categories;
yep, with the time they have to chew and contemplate they probably have a lot more.
moreover, the categories that humans use are stored in a complex morphology intricately woven together by meta and subcategories (a morphology suited for metacognitive analysis).
I'm not sure about if this is so different in animals. It's just that when they have less categories to begin with, the subcategories will be less still, yet not knowing much about the world, is something completely different from introspection. I believe we learn complex logic from language constructs initially, while the animal is left to invent logic for itself from observation, but that does not hinder sentience.
on a side note - maybe they even lack the facilities (dedicated brain area developed evolutionary to bond herds) to pattern-match enough different words transmitted(e.g. spoken) by their species to develop language constructs.
Still there is no principal difference that lets us say that humans think abstractly whereas animals don't. Even if we use a really primitive animal as an example there's still gonna be abstract thinking going on, it's just going to use fewer abstract categories to orient itself. A Deer may have a bunch categories for prey and danger, but for something primitive like a mosquito these are going to be lumped into far fewer. There are only as many categories as there are possible reactions to them. A mosquito doesn't need many categories for prey or danger because it responds more or less the same to all of them. It probably has like 2-3 categories which are like "potential danger" "danger" "very danger" and depending on which is triggered it will fly away at a certain distance or speed.
so true, I've been observing timelapses of some caterpillars and other insects with amazing insights....
The point is these are still abstract categories and they are still used cognitively, ie even the mosquito thinks in terms of abstractions!
from neural networks, I deduced that convergence points must be those abstract categories which means that abstract- is per definition the way any sufficiently interconnected nervous systhem thinks. mind you this is all conjecture... I can't even become an insect and see for myself...
A deer is much more capable abstractor. A human, however, is a wastly superior one.
and this is exactly what my definition of 'thinking' above is based on.
I think some new term is needed to define the kind of abstract thinking enabled by the neocortex alone for us to be able to say that "humans do this and animals don't".
true, this would clear up conversations a lot. but this underdog opinion of ours is not very popular so such a word will not be invented and widespread for a long time. I however object that this kind of abstract thinking necessarily has todo with our version of the neocortex. rather the training we give our young brains through bombardment of speech constructs. We literally have too many unnecessary abstract categories only usefull for pattern matching semi-formal languages.
oh yes, always =) .... =\ .... =( .... hahaha
idokaiho said:
I vote for "Jesus abstractions" because religion really sets us apart from those lowly unsophisticated creatures without God in their lives.
religion is based on organisation which needs communication. some individual animals might believe in a god or gods, they are simply incapable of telling us. they are certainly not capable in following a religion because they won't understand the transmission. Some probably believe we are the gods. seeing as how we punish and reward them, and make magic happen, conjure huge metallic obedient creatures and posess some of them. if not gods then at least demons.
) if animals, especially our close evolutionary relatives, have shown some propensity for this.