You missed my entire discussion, it seems.
I explicitly said these points:
1. Animals have and can communicate emotions. Still doesn't make them "conscious", see next point.
2. Emotions are just another layer of "danger/pack" instincts. These may be way more complex than "fight or flight" in the most simplistic way. Still proves nothing about "consciousness".
3. Human geniuses are born as human babies. The latter clearly don't express their potential to reach the former achievements until many years later, though. Yet they have it from birth.
4. On the other hand, penguins DON'T have the potential of flying like an eagle, so a penguin growing up isn't going to "unleash its eagle potential", because it doesn't have it to begin with.
5. Thus, the potential for "consciousness" can only be measured by observing the "entire life" of a test subject, simply because it's usually only expressed much later in that subject's life.
6. I'm going by "species", because it's easier than to go by individual specimens, and also because I don't consider "consciousness" to be an isolated feature, but rather a subset of society.
How shall I express this? I know:
WHOOSH!
You don't have a discussion. You keep dismissing everything we're saying, even when videos and articles are provided to you.
If animals aren't conscious when they communicate, what are they, then - unconscious? Dead? I get the impression that you've gone through life never interacting with anything non-human, and it's a very sad existence to contemplate.
Why do you keep harping on penguins wanting to be eagles?
Antarctic penguins have never even seen an eagle, because you don't find eagles in that part of the world. Penguins are very well adapted to their environments, or at least they were before climate change started melting the ice literally under their feet.
No doubt it would be handy for them to be able to fly at times. BBC Earth has some excellent documentaries (please don't dismiss those; I think David Attenborough just might know more than you), though I found it heartbreaking to watch the Gentoo penguin desperately trying to outswim some whales that decided it was lunch (the whales won), and a mother penguin who abandoned her chick when both of them were blown into an ice crevasse and the mother was unable to get both of them back to the top. Flight would have been so handy at those times, but penguins simply aren't able to fly. They may have the illusion of flight when they jump into and out of the ocean, but they use their flippers to balance, climb, and propel themselves along on land and in the water. Sometimes they use their flippers to smack another penguin or some other animal.
How did they explain "die" to her, though?
Are we sure it wasn't synonymous to "sleep" or "rest", especially since WE often use it in similar euphemisms?
Also, you missed my point: Not to COMBINE signs one after another, but to CREATE a combo sign.
Though I may find it hard to translate this task into sign language (which IS using combos of separate signs all the time), so I dunno.
Human parents have a distressing tendency to lie to their children, often because they underestimate their child's ability to understand. There would be no point in a scientist lying to her subject, because it would invalidate the project.
So would you mind terribly much to take your condescension and STUFF IT?
Thanks.
Do I look like an AI expert to you?
Though, I did provide a practical test: Force a CHESS-and-CHECKERS computer to invent "checkers played via chess pieces", just like humans do when having only the set of chess.
This way, you can see that it's capable of "abstractly" viewing the pieces - a "knight" is suddenly a "checker", and a "chess king" is suddenly a "checkers king" with a very different move set.
Practically speaking, I don't see how you could play checkers with chess pieces, unless the chess pieces were all flat on top and stackable the way checkers are. How do you "king" someone if you're using chess pieces that can't sit on top of each other without falling?
Given how my "litmus test" boils down to "inventing abstract concepts", it's NOT a matter of complexity, but of capability.
Hence the difference between a baby Einstein (that will eventually grow into an adult Einstein) and a baby penguin (that will NEVER grow into an adult eagle).
The former is based on "intelligence", while the latter is based on "flight", but both are judging the test subject by its "end game" capability, not by its current state.
Still carrying on about baby Einstein and penguins wanting to be birds they've never seen.
Examples, please? VERIFIABLE ones.
Note: Inventing TOOLS isn't "abstract".
But playing chess-checkers like in the pic above - now, THAT is clearly "abstract".
Again, how do they stack? How can you "king" a chess piece?
It seems like a two-directional lane, though.
Anyways.
I said examples, as in videos or articles that I can watch/read myself and then judge how much I want to trust their honesty. YOUR WORD isn't a VERIFIABLE source, sorry to tell you.
Specifically, though:
-Are we talking about the concepts of left/right, or of those physical directions? How was it proved in the experiment?
-More like humans think they understand what was said as being a joke. Examples needed.
-That may be "situational awareness", but I already said that even microbes can "read the environment", which this is precisely an example of.
-Examples? How do they lie in the first place?
-Physical concepts, not abstract concepts. Unless you can show documented verifiable examples. We clearly have different thresholds for what constitutes "intelligence" beyond "awareness".
-Again, sign language. They also can be easily fooled by moving their "orientation points" aside, so they simply have good photographic memory, not a concept of an abstract map.
It's not unusual for my cat to lie to me. She tells me she's hungry, I check her dish, and find it full. Conclusion: She's not hungry. She either wants a treat or she wants attention, likely both. I tell her to finish what's in her dish before I give her more.
I've also caught her frantically gobbling down the dry food before asking me for canned food - she thinks that if I see an empty dish, I'm going to give her more canned food.
I guess I'm the one who needs to explain that "abstract" explicitly means "not a physical entity", lol.
Abstract means something that we "can't see or touch, but we still know it's there" - basically, it's "extra-physical existence" of sorts (don't confuse it with "supernatural", it's a different idea).
So, no - tools aren't abstract, even maps aren't abstract, and any language has a ton of words for non-abstract physical objects.
None of which is the threshold of "true sapience" that we CAN observe in humans and CAN'T observe in any other entity, biological or not.
This is literally how a SCIENTIST should approach the topic, so it's quite funny to see how some of you get defensive about "why are you making it so hard to include non-humans".
Well, because SCIENTIFICALLY we simply had never OBSERVED a single non-human being capable of "true human sapience (or sentience, whichever is MORE complex)", ya know.
It's just how it IS, lol.
What kind of maps are you talking about? Ones printed on paper? GPS? The map up in the night sky (assuming it's not cloudy or too much light pollution to actually see it)? Or the map of my apartment that's in my head and muscle memory so I can navigate around on the days when my eyes are reluctant to work properly, or when I opt not to turn the lights on because electricity is insanely expensive here and every bit I don't use helps keep the bills down?
Bees also can do it in a way. Are THEY sapient?
Again, maps are physical, and I never said that animals CAN'T have good memory about the physical world around them - so your example isn't arguing against my actual point.
Which is that only humans can define something that ISN'T physical (or based on physical) in the first place - and also only humans can detach a concept from an object (chess-checkers).
Though the latter is more a test for AI, not for animals, because we lack verifiable ways to communicate CONCEPTS to/from animals to begin with.
Speaking of Koko and the likes - I'm yet to see any tangible proof that her language had "abstract" words that were not rooted in physicality ("death" is borderline, and quite arguably).
Because I never argued against animals understanding PHYSICAL concepts, but only NON-PHYSICAL.
Something tells me you didn't bother reading the material about Koko that was posted here.
