THE GREAT DEBATE

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AuthorTopic: THE GREAT DEBATE
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Saturday, April 30 2005 12:58 Profile #125
The ape language thing is actually very controversial. I haven't heard about gorillas learning sign language; that seems pretty improbable, since I would be very surprised if any researchers have been able to do the close one-on-one training, which is required for this sort of thing, with such large and dangerous animals as gorillas.

The best thing along these lines that I know about is bonobo monkeys supposedly learning to point to symbols on a desktop. And the problem with that is distinguishing whether they have merely learned to do a certain trick in order to obtain a certain reward, as dogs have been doing for millennia, or whether they have actually gotten the idea that the desktop pictures are abstract symbols that mean things. My wife would know this sort of thing better, but I believe that the consensus in the field at the moment is rather skeptical about the latter interpretation.

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00
Thuryl
...b10010b...
Member # 869
 written Saturday, April 30 2005 13:39 Profile Homepage #126
quote:
Originally written by Student of Trinity:

The ape language thing is actually very controversial. I haven't heard about gorillas learning sign language; that seems pretty improbable, since I would be very surprised if any researchers have been able to do the close one-on-one training, which is required for this sort of thing, with such large and dangerous animals as gorillas.
Koko -- a basic summary. (Follow the link to "Koko (gorilla)"; UBB won't allow me to put parentheses in links.) There's some controversy over whether what she does actually constitutes language, and even if it does her vocabulary is pretty limited. Follow the external links for more information and decide for yourself.

quote:
This is precisely the problem I have: I don't see how we can tell. As far as I can see, any animal could well be 'just' a complicated machine, with reflexive responses to stimuli, and complex instinctive behaviors, but no-one 'there' inside, to actually experience fear, or pain, or anything at all.
Well, if you want to extend your skepticism far enough, maybe consciousness is a unique event that only happened to you, and every other human just acts as if they have consciousness. How similar to you does an animal have to be before you're convinced it's conscious? Which of its properties are important?

[ Saturday, April 30, 2005 13:43: Message edited by: Thuryl ]

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Shock Trooper
Member # 5585
 written Saturday, April 30 2005 14:36 Profile #127
quote:
Originally written by Dolphin:

For that matter my dog dreams at night. Sometimes he wags his tail, kicks his feet, or makes growling or small barking sounds. Is dreaming a sign of consciousness? It certainly isn't instinctually necessary.
All mammals dream, at least all the mammals that they've tested to see if they dream.(I have no idea how they test things to see if they dream, but they are able to do so.) So dreaming isn't neccisarily a sign of conciousness, unless all mammals are concious, which I doubt. I think dreaming is just some side effect of some other brain function, but that's just my opinion and some scientist somewhere probably studied it and knows what really causes dreaming.

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Posts: 258 | Registered: Wednesday, March 9 2005 08:00
PoD person
Shock Trooper
Member # 4445
 written Saturday, April 30 2005 18:01 Profile #128
Research on dreaming (or, rather, REM sleep) has shown that REM-sleep deprivation (as opposed to total sleep deprivation; the test subjects were awakened upon entering the REM phase, but allowed to enter the other two phases) has extremely detrimental effects on the ability to retain information and especially logical processes learned in the preceding day. Also, psychosis is a well-known symptom of sleep deprivation. From these data, it seems to me that dreaming is a necessary sort of "house-cleaning," in which the brain corrects internal inconsistencies and "makes sense of" the day's input.

Also, as an interesting fact, some dolphins, because of the need to surface for air, sleep with only half of their brain at a time.

[ Saturday, April 30, 2005 18:02: Message edited by: PoD person ]
Posts: 293 | Registered: Saturday, May 29 2004 07:00
Student of Trinity
Electric Sheep One
Member # 3431
 written Monday, May 2 2005 07:02 Profile #129
I have half a mind to sleep now myself.

I stand corrected on Koko -- in fact, I had heard about this but forgot. Koko was just a young gorilla, no? Anyway, the ape language thing remains a bit doubtful. Still, it wouldn't feel right at all to eat a gorilla or a chimp, or even a decent-sized monkey. (Though chimpanzees eat little monkeys all the time. Mmmm, monkeys ...)

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It is not enough to discover how things seem to seem. We must discover how things really seem.
Posts: 3335 | Registered: Thursday, September 4 2003 07:00

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