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DarkCrawler posted:Koko the gorilla understood approximately 1000 signs and 2000 english words. No understanding of grammar or symbolic speech. Somewhere around the level of an older toddler? Even a dog can understand that much, under the right conditions and with the right "teaching" methods. Unsurprisingly, there's usually a lot of questions raised about methodology and such when someone starts making claims about animal intelligence, since a lot of them turn out to be flawed, because of poor experimental controls or because animals can act and think in fundamentally different ways than we expect. It's very difficult to avoid issues like the Clever Hans effect, and people don't always apply proper scientific rigor to experiments on the animal they've been teaching and training for decades. Smudgie Buggler posted:Yes, but does that make them not-people? I think generally we'd be pretty loathe to say a baby isn't a person. And if you are willing to say that, you simply invite the question of at what age a human becomes a person, which in turn invites a ridiculous Sorites paradox. The question here isn't moral person hood, but legal personhood, which is unrelated to species. I think it's pretty self-evident that apes don't qualify for that - they don't have the ability to exercise civil rights, obey human social responsibilities, or understand even the concept of either of those. Just as children don't get full, unrestricted human or legal rights, and the severely mentally ill sometimes don't as well (though that is an incredibly delicate subject for historical reasons), apes can't seriously claim them either.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:25
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McDowell posted:If the animal could talk and express a wish to be allowed out that could be different. But there was Koko's ability to learn sign language, and touch screen devices are quite intuitive... Koko's ability to allegedly learn sign language. The problem with a lot of claims about animal language is that it's the animal researcher interpreting the animals' actions and understanding, and usually doing so with about as much rigor and accuracy as ESP "researchers". Koko's handler and teacher, Patterson, allows very few people access to Koko and graciously takes command of interpreting her signs and what they mean for humans and media, but basically everything I've seen about Koko's supposed sign language reminds me quite a bit of other debunked ape signers, like Kanzi and Washoe. Patterson herself seems to be a fine bullshit artist, and I wouldn't put a lot of faith in her claims. For example, someone once asked Koko in an "interview" if she liked to chat with other people and Koko responded "fine nipple", which Patterson explained as "Nipple rhymes with people, she doesn't sign people per se, she was trying to do a 'sounds like...'", which is grade-A prime bullshit.
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Dec 6, 2014 21:22
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Torka posted:Meh, with their incredibly simple nervous systems insects are pretty much just biological robots. They have no inner life So, what, robots aren't deserving of personhood, even though they are potentially more intelligent than any animal can ever be?
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Dec 7, 2014 02:35
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Torka posted:I meant in the sense of a mindless machine that just takes an input stimulus and spits out the appropriate output. Maybe automaton would have been a better word, if you associate the word robot with some future consciousness-possessing AI we might invent 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.
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Dec 7, 2014 02:57
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Torka posted:Nah, that's dumb. Insects aren't conscious. Define conscious. What if I say a turtle isn't conscious? Or a rat? Or a cat? Or an infant human? What are you going to use as a foundation for disagreeing with me, other than "they're larger, less annoying, and are easier for me to anthropomorphize"? Where are you going to draw the line? What criterion are you going to use to draw that line?
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Dec 7, 2014 03:12
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