|
^^^^^^ Teaching them to understand basic instructions like "retrieve blue block from left box" is one of the things research into this thing focused on, and has to my knowledge been reasonably successful. Miltank posted:How good are apes at sign language? They're able to express emotional wants (like wanting to play a favorite game with a specific researcher), empathy and recognizing emotions through facial expression (asking why a researcher looks sad), future planning (wanting a specific thing the next day but not today), and abstract thinking and imagination (they can ask for things they've never see before like a green ball when they've only ever seen red balls). They'll never be on the level of humans and it's not well understood how much they themselves understand and how much is just them responding to learned patterns. But there is undeniably some level of communication going on. Who What Now fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Dec 5, 2014 |
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 17:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:05 |
|
|
Miltank posted:We should breed a monkey butler race that is totally obsessed with getting us beer and making our houses clean. One outta two. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayabukiya_Tavern quote:The tavern's owner, Kaoru Otsuka, owns two pet macaque monkeys who are currently employed to work at the location.[4] The first monkey, twelve-year-old "Yat-chan", is dressed in a shirt and shorts while he takes customers' drink orders and delivers them to the diners' tables.[4] The restaurant's owner, Otsuka, reported that he never initially taught the monkeys; Yat-chan first learned from watching him work. Otsuka said, "It all started one day when I gave him a hot towel out of curiosity and he brought the towel to the customer."[1] The younger macaque, named Fuku-chan, is currently four years old and has the main duty of bringing the attendees hot towels to clean their hands before ordering drinks.[5] Fuku-chan has only two years of experience, while Yat-chan has been reportedly performing the job for a longer time.[5]
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 18:44
|
|
|
We already have a de facto tiered personhood system, though. The severely mentally handicapped or underdeveloped have all sorts of rights stripped from them. They cannot enter contracts, they do not have the freedom to be without contracts, they can't vote, they can't be employed, they don't have power of attorney over themselves, ect, ect. It's a tad late to be worrying about the slippery slope of denying certain rights to the mentally unfit when we've been doing it for decades.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 19:23
|
|
|
disheveled posted:That's actually part of my point. The severely mentally handicapped, children, the senile, are all cases at the margins in personhood, at least from a philosophical standpoint, and so we're already making arguments about the extent of their human rights. I don't see adding non-human animals to the mix as just tacking on a few more marginal cases; I see it as changing the definition that ensures we think of the handicapped, children, and the senile as people first and disability/age/whatever second. Personhood as a philosophical concept and as its colloquially used is waaaaaaaaay different than personhood as a legal concept. I believe most people are discussing it as the latter and not the former, or at least I am.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2014 20:06
|
|
|
Main Paineframe posted:What, and animals don't count as a "machine that just takes an input stimulus and spits out the appropriate output"? The point I'm making is that "well, that thing isn't really alive/thinking/conscious", by itself, is no better than "well, it doesn't have a soul so it doesn't count as a human" in that it's entirely subjective and based on your own perceptions, rather than actually drawing a firm line based on actual observable cognitive criteria. Hell, five hundred years ago the Pope had to explicitly declare that Native Americans were persons with souls (not that the conquistadors listened), because there was literally disagreement about it. Making sweeping declarations about entire families of animals based on your personal feelings about those groups is almost as bad. No, it isn't, because animals aren't worth as much as humans. But you know what us pretty hosed up? Comparing the slaughter of natives to saying that a cow doesn't have all the same rights as a person.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2014 04:41
|
|
|
Fojar38 posted:This claim is unfalsifiable because we don't know what art is. For all we know the elephant was just flailing paint at random because it made the "flail around in a particular way = get rewarded" calculation in its brain, rather than any sort of attempt at self expression. Well, more the "follow directions as given by the trainer = don't get beaten" calculation in its brain.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 14:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 04:05 |
|
|
Mata posted:Whether or not elephant art is "true art", or if animal pain is "real pain" don't seem like important questions here. Whether or not something is art is pretty drat important to determining if an animal is capable of producing art. Beyond that I'm not sure what you're getting at because my only point was that elephant painting is an abhorrent practice that involves abusing an animal.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2014 15:26
|
|