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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31752 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023

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Animals have been observed engaging in creative innovative behaviors. I'm not sure 'Sapience' is well defined. I agree that no animals appear to possess Redwall levels of human-like intelligence.

I am on the same page regarding grammar.

I'm not sure of what you mean by abstraction. I haven't deep dived or replicated the studies but to my knowledge: Various animals can be taught to use currency. Crows can use vending machines and will even modify vending machine tokens to fit the machine of their own initiative. Many animals can solve puzzles that require them to innovate solutions.

As for 'humans have power over animals, so whatever we say goes' I think that's just a fact. Humans do have power over animals. What we say does go.

It is unpalpable that it also applies to humans. But it does in fact also apply to humans.

Your position is 'Humans have Reason (and some other useful/aesthetic properties), and all value that animals have is derived from our Reason.'

I'm curious. Why do you think Reason justifies doing what we want?

I can clearly see that it enables us to do what we want. But if reason is good because I can feel it / I say so, then that's just our aesthetics asserting themselves again. If reason is good because its powerful, that's just 'the strong do what they will' again.

I'm curious. Why do you think Reason justifies doing what we want?

Because it is only Reason that allows us to even ask the question "what do we even want?" or "what is the moral outcome?" in the first place. Reason actually gives humans the capacity to be moral agents and make decisions. As much as I hate to lean on continental philosophy, Reason is what gives us humans (Kantian/Hegelian) autonomy.

I've observed ChatGPT engaging in "creative innovative behaviors". Except they weren't; they were just the outcome of processes that use so much computation that they are hard to understand on a gut level as mechanistic, so we interpret them as creative and innovative.

Everything that occurs in the brain is also mechanistic. AI is creative. Novel remixes of old data to fit new situations is a form of creation.

There are limits and caveats to that creativity. Including how much of it is data or architecture offloaded from humans, as well as the limits to what it can create in general. ChatGPT continuing to have issues with memory for instance, and lacking the insight or telos to remedy that issue in itself.

You might be skeptical of the generality of a crow's intelligence, or how much of it was informed by humans.

But I don't think it makes sense to be skeptical that it isn't 'merely' mechanistic.

We are too.

There are limits and caveats to that creativity.

There are limits and caveats both for ChatGPT and cows.

But I don't think it makes sense to be skeptical that it isn't 'merely' mechanistic.

The point is that you're happy to treat ChatGPT as not having any rights at all, but it seems to meet your standards as well as animals do, although in a different domain. Why should ChatGPT have no rights, but animals should? Especially if you exclude the answer "because ChatGPT is a machine"?

I don't think I've said animals should have rights in this thread.

I've said that animals are intelligent and I think it's unprincipled to base a human supremacy stance on them not being conscious or creative because they are, but that I think there are more principled human supremacist stances.

If you want to delve into what I actually think about animal rights personally-

I don't like seeing things I parse as capable of suffering doing so.

So insofar as I can recognize suffering and stop it I want to.

I don't think their rights actually matter that much. I was pro-superhappy when reading Three Worlds Collide.

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