if we did teach some rare specimen to use some language, and that if there is a huge mass of animals that understand some language. They could theoretically. I agree with category error, but in our pipedreams, we were asking for a PERSON, weren't we ?
Yeah we were talking about whether they can be person-ized. But how does rote-teaching a large number of dogs to sit, fetch, beg or even 165 commands (which is supposedly how many distinct words a very smart dog can learn) make them "people" any more than they are now?
Memorizing a bunch of words and having been painstakingly trained to do a specific action for each one is only a crude zombie-like imitation of the type of language manipulation skills that we'd be talking about for a reasonable definition of "person" that does not already include dogs. Dogs are already a "person" in the sense that they are sentient beings.
The more rigorous definition of "person", as a being that can conceptualize it's own existence as a member of a society and make decisions appropriately, isn't approachable no matter how many individual words a creature can be taught to memorize. That needs abstract thinking.
Some examples given for animal abstract thinking could be correct, but some of them are easily debunked based on what we know about hard-wired human thinking.
For example, the first example given for "abstract thinking" in dogs, is that dogs can recognize a dog of any breed, so dogs must have some abstract cognitive notion of dog-ness. However, humans have a
specific neural circuit that exists to recognize human faces, and humans who have just that neural circuit damaged have a recognized disability where cannot recognize other despite otherwise being very intelligent and accomplished in other areas of their lives. This proves that the mental task of identifying a fellow human
isn't due to abstract reasoning skills, it's due to custom circuitry that evolved for that single purpose.
Hence, dogs almost certainly also use hard-wired circuits that are designed to recognize fellow dogs, rather than using abstract thought to determine this. There's no reason to believe it's a rational abstract thought process behind the ability, because that specific ability in humans is not determined by rational abstract thought processes.
When humans who've lost the face-recognition subroutine try and recognize a face, they're trying to do it through using abstract reasoning against the flow of
raw sensory data, and they do so
really badly. What this shows is that brains
very rarely deal with raw sensory data, they deal with data in forms that have been manipulated by custom brain circuitry that evolved over millions of years for specific tasks. Teaching a non-language animal human language is like the face-blindness person trying to recognize faces. The animal doesn't lack "intelligence" they lack the custom circuitry that allows even the dumbest humans to do this processing.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14949314 times)