quote:
Originally posted by Thoran:
Hi, it's the wife again. What a great post. I have some to add to that. I have seen footage of squid in separate tanks. #1 squid knew how to uncork a bottle to get the fish out, #2 did not. They were placed in adjacent tanks, and #1 was given a corked bottle to open, which he did, as #2 observed. The same type bottle then was placed in the #2's tank, and it was then able to open the bottle, having learned from watching #1.
That was really something!
I work with dogs, doing many different sports. My dogs know dozens of commands. Jack can discriminate between the words ball and frisbee, and will hunt through the house to find the correct one. He remembers where he last put things much better than I can. I can direct him through an obstical course, and he can discriminate btween 'jump' and 'tunnel' and 'teeter' in seconds.
I think that we as humans put much more emphasis on language and higher thought because it makes us 'better'. We may be more intelligent in some ways, but we are vastly deficient in others. I would have a very difficult time in agility(a dog sport) if the roles were reversed, and I had to run flat out, jumping and weaving and make split second decisions based on a unreliable handler and not trip or knock myself out cold. You could call it reactions, but when an athlete hones his abilities to perfection, say in basketball, we don't watch and say, wow, look how reactive he is. Michael Jorden is a physical genius. He is pretty rough compared to a lemur, or a porpose, or a cat. I would like to see him do what my dogs do.
As far as babies, as someone who spent 10 years working with kids, the thoughts seem to gain complexity as the vocabulary develops. I am not sure how much of that is coincidence. An infant just isn't aware of himself in the way an adult is, that is in relation to others. An infant seems to feel more directly, without associations, where as an adult takes what he feels and anylizes it (sometimes to death)and compares it to what he knows and feels about things. I see the same behavior in dogs, a puppy is much more open and reactive, where in an adult dog, you can gage the response based on the experiences the dog has had. Interesting stuff....
Jen
Thanks Jen and Epona [img]smile.gif[/img] .
Yes I've seen giant squid learning a maze-like structure in order to get a food reward. Not only could they learn a pattern and remember directions, but also could associate shape and colour when they were put in a different environment. It was amazing [img]smile.gif[/img] .
I agree with you that "intelligence" and reasoning ability is used by humans to discriminate us from everything else, in fact a lot of people think that animals aren't independently valuable because they aren't intelligent so should be eaten or used in other ways for our convenience. Though many of those same people think dogs should be not eaten because they pass some threshold of intelligence that makes them worthy of life. I'm not sure how they justify eating pigs then, since I think they are similarly intelligent to dogs, but that's another issue.
I certainly believe that some animals are capable of thinking, though I think that having intelligence and being able to follow commands is not quite the same thing as actually thinking. I saw footage of a chimp working out how to get a banana that was hanging out of reach, by stacking boxes together, in a manner that would not fall over, which I think must have involved some reasoning, though also a lot of animals' "tricks" are a result of trial and error learning, which is does not require as much sophistication of thought as actual reasoning.
It's also interesting your comments on babies' thoughts increasing in complexity as their vocabulary develops. The idea of thinking is somewhat slippery, it's hard to define, but I see it as sort of talking to myself in my head. You hear people who are bilingual saying that they can think in two languages. Thinking seems to be related, if not dependent on, language. So it doesn't surprise me that babies think better when they have more words. Also I've read studies and seen footage of chimps learning "language" - sign language and also pictorial language. With the picture language especially, the chimp could make complex sentences that she had never seen before using the pictures she knew. Perhaps here she was thinking with the pictures in her mind?