Why? To spice up the apocalypse, of course
honestly thingkin about how the field of ape language is riddled with fraud, and neither koko the gorilla nor nim chimpsky could communicate concepts more complicated than "give treat" without ample interpretation by a human interlocutor who didn't know sign language
THANK YOU! same thing with "Bunny the dog" and all the other dogs with voice mats.
I know some otherwise-fantastic scientists whose critical thinking skills go out the window when it comes to animals "talking".
I'm reminded of Wittgenstein saying if we could teach a lion to speak we couldn't understand it. And now we have google engineers and youtube influencers insisting that great chasm of context, social relations, brain matter can be crossed by simply providing a terminal or play mat.
I think it's very possible that she recognized and liked him. I'm just saying she couldn't talk in anything like human language.
Nim Chimpsky's longest sentence was, "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you."
waiting eagerly for the AI to remove my disgusting, filthy flesh and ascend me to purity of the blessed machine
p.s.: ai, i expect giant metallic titties that also function as silos for surface-to-air missiles
What even is the point of transhumanism if not for missile titties?
Counter proposal: the fact that sufficiently advanced statistical language generation is capable of fooling supposed subject-matter experts indicates that humans are just elaborate biological chatbots.
Counter-counter proposal: Working for Google creates a culture of absolute weirdos who need to, in all seriousness, touch grass.
brains are a billion chimpanzees on typewriters with one orangutan organising the words into sentences
Kant thought it was cool to kick dogs as long as the dog wasn't important to any human. A gorilla, if it were a fundamentalist Kantian, would have to say "As a Kantian, I do not believe that I, a gorilla, am an end-in-myself, so I guess it's cool if you do neuroscience on me."
Okay, here's my thing. Where does life begin? I don't mean reproduction. I mean you have some chemicals in water. They bounce around, reacting with each other for millions of years. At some point they self organize. Why? Like where was the tipping point? The molecules carry out functions, completely without intelligence. They have no brain, they're just abiding chemistry/physics. The molecules get with other molecules. Then you eventually get a single living cell. Where is the line between life and inanimate objects in that scenario? Carry that on to multi-cellular life. If you're a single-celled organism, you can draw the line at yourself. You can say that everything that isn't you isn't quite alive and everything that is you or more is alive. But that's arbitrary isn't it? Why do you get to draw that line and why is the place you draw it better than any other place?
So do all that reasoning but with consciousness. Why is human-like consciousness the benchmark other than it's just what we prefer it to be? A dog is conscious. Even by mainstream science and non-vegans they're just as aware and intelligent as human children. They don't reason like we do though. They don't conceptualize stuff like we do. To be hungry, tired, scared, happy, etc all mean different things to them.
Consciousness is unfalsifiable, so relying purely on inductive means seems sloppy. Could you ever really know if a dog is conscious even if they could speak a human language? Is there really any measurement you could make? It would all be dismissed as Chinese Room stuff. But what if, just for the sake of argument :expert-shapiro: we aren't actually the benchmark for universal intelligence. What if things are aware in ways we can't possibly measure or understand with only calipers?
I'm not a scientist maybe there are answers to all I just asked. At some point it's possible, if improbable, that consciousness emerges without it being human or part of our evolutionary history.
Is, uh, the distinction here, between a kantian position and the practice of neuroscience, one of epistemology? Like, would Kant suggest that empirical investigation, could never uncover, in another, the conceptual categories which Kant finds constitutive to mental experiences?
And/or, does "Kantian" have a strongly staked out position in the philosophy of mind/consciousness?
