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I think dogs can't understand us primarily because they can't "understand" pretty much anything. As long as a species are capable of thought and have concepts like goal-seeking behavior, I doubt any intelligence gap actually causes the problem you are describing.
Asking if ants can understand humans is like asking if rocks can understand us. It's not a matter of scale, it's a category error. But asking if humans can understand God is just a question of knowledge. God could explain himself to us, we can't explain ourselves to ants.
You can't explain yourself to ants primarily because you don't know how to speak pheromone and therefore have never once tried.
I can't explain myself to ants because they do not have notions at all. Nothing can be explained to ants. No one can do it. None of the possible combinations of pheromones will ever lead to any "ant understanding".
Not the case w/ humans and language.
How do you model the ability of ants to farm aphids? What is your definition of "Notion"? What is your definition of "Understanding"?
It is probably not impossible to get an ant colony to have a substantially predictive model of a human. But it's going to be at least as difficult as getting Doom to run on biological cells.
Ants can already understand you as a threat. I'll agree that getting them to understand you as a human understands a human would probably be very difficult. But if you had pheremones, you could make them understand you as any sort of notion that an ant can communicate with pheremones.
You can construct more complex notions. You can transmit isomorphisms that are present in your brain to their brains.
They can clearly adapt such that they synchronize with external features. Therefore you can communicate with them. You can transmit telos to them. You can program them.
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I think dogs understand very concretely, and very short causal chains (say 2-3 steps). It can understand “I find thing, my human gives me a treat.” Or “when human makes that one noise, he wants me to sit, and gets angry if I don’t.” But I’ve never met a dog who could reason more than a 2-3 step solution. A dog won’t fetch a bunch of sticks to make a raft or a bridge.
Humans probably have a much larger causal chain understanding, but even then, it’s not infinite. We can reason causes and build machines, but beyond a certain complexity, it’s too much for the median human to understand.
A dog couldn’t trap you in your home because it’s simply not smart enough to understand or anticipate the moves you’d make to get away. It thinks “I go out the front door for my walk, so if I block the front door human can’t leave.” But it can’t anticipate side doors. It can’t anticipate you bribing them with a treat, it can’t understand what a key is. So you can easily leave.
Humans, with an IQ of 115 or so, are in the same situation with a true AGI. We know how we think, we know what we’d do, but the AGI will be so much smarter that it will be able to work around whatever “controls” we stick in its brain.
Dogs can't build rafts, but they can do pathfinding to places they have been before. People forget that this requires running back-propagation of rewards over a very long statespace.
A reminder that Bees can watch another bee doing a complex task that takes a long time to learn and then replicate it. fucking bees.
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