22 ms·

"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans". This sentence. I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I shou

by kirab 3y ago

"an ability previously thought to be unique to humans". This sentence. I’ve read and heard it so many times now, that according to Bayesian statistics, I should correct my assumptions and assume that, in the end, we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans.

timeon 3y ago
My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things. It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.
katzgrau 3y ago
At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.
- zvmaz 3y ago
  > At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max. But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities. At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences. Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans. However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes. Elephants and whales can communicate over vast distances via sound. Bats can see without eyes. Salmons and pigeons can find the point they have born without even trying. A dog can smell history of a place, plus get much more information from a single smell. Humans can do none of these things without tools. Also, in electronics, there are accelerators which are much simpler in transistor count and architecture, but which can do much more than a more complex counterparts. GROQ inference cards and FPGAs come into my mind. So neither capability, nor capacity in numbers is a valid measure for intelligence or capabilities in practice. Just because a bee has less neurons than a chimp doesn't mean it can't have some kind of comparable intelligence when you compare the things they can accomplish. Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
    > You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans. Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment. No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      "comes even close" I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale. They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different. "comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
That is true. There is nothing unique to humans. Everything is a sliding scale. Eagles can 'see' better than humans. No one is is up in arms about how wonderfully unique human eye-sight is, how Eagles are using 'just instincts'. Humans are divine in how complex their sight is, that it could never occur in other animals or machines. Totally impossible that we would ever have a machine that can 'capture images'.
- Ginden 3y ago
  This, but unironically. Humans have the best daylight eyesight in mammals, and only birds of prey come close.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    I picked 'sight'. But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better. Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal. Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down. Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.
    - bee_rider 3y ago
      Does it effectively keep the humans on a pedestal to consider our traits as fundamentally different? I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo
NiloCK 3y ago
The general sentiment is spot on - animals are amazing, complicated, sophisticated, and we will continue to be "humbled" over and over again, but maybe you've gone too far. A few candidate "unique to humans" characteristics: - surgical replacement of defective organs. I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have processes for amputations - especially insects - but I'd be pretty surprised if there are any kidney transplants going on. - written language systems for durable information passing, phonetic alphabet systems. As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us. - haircuts. This one is super plausibly wrong, but I don't think that any animals do this, and its a good example of something that they could do but just don't.
- dwighttk 3y ago
  Wear clothes Write about history no one currently alive has seen Make music Go to space Theorize
  - groestl 3y ago
    > Make music > Theorize Not sure about those.
  - CaptainMarvel 3y ago
    Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells Make music - I know that birds sing, and a quick Google search shows whales and seals seem to make "music" as well Theorize - Depending on what you mean of course (but I agree with you about e.g. scientific hypotheses to be tested), but as an example apparently birds "theorize about the minds of others", again by Google search Writing - Definitely a stretch here (and so I agree with you) but animals do leave chemical markings for others
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - andsoitis 3y ago
      > Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells You show me one outfit, I raise you an entire textile, clothing, and fashion industry allowing us to show our features in displays of status all the way to enabling us to walk in space.
graemep 3y ago
I am surprised anyone thought unique to humans. How is this different from commonly observed behaviour like these: https://www.britannica.com/story/how-other-species-learn https://www.britannica.com/story/how-other-species-learn It does not even need scientific study to see these. Its common enough for causal observation.
est 3y ago
> we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans There is, make fire and cook.
- someuser2345 3y ago
  I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking. Cooking is to apply heat to transform raw ingredients into a different, often edible form. Bees make honey by collecting nectar from flowers, storing it in their honey stomach, and then regurgitating it into honeycomb cells. During this process they add enzymes to the nectar and fan their wings to reduce the water content, transforming it into honey. Bees transform raw material, but not by heating it.
  - est 3y ago
    I mean cooking with fire. 100% carbon life (proteins) gets killed by excessive heat
- bee_rider 3y ago
  There are of course some Australian birds that famously spread fire, so partial credit IMO. Also, figuring out how to make fire is pretty hard. I’d argue it isn’t something “humans do” in general. It is one of the earliest examples of something that somebody figured out, (or maybe it was figured out independently in a couple different places) but mostly it is a taught skill. Teaching and long distance running are our special abilities. In both cases other animals might do the thing, but we’re much better at it than they are.
  - est 3y ago
    > There are of course some Australian birds IIRC that's more like a Australian media stunt from one single source, never verified or replicated. There's this one guy trying to explain why there's wild fire and it's not any human's fault, which inadvertently caused a great debate "animals can utilize fire".
CuriouslyC 3y ago
That would be the first step in becoming a brilliant scientist who goes unrecognized in his lifetime.
andsoitis 3y ago
> there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans. It doesn't bother me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
wyclif 3y ago
Didn't Kubrick prophesy this? I'm thinking of the first act of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where one advanced primate learns how to use the femur of a tapir as a tool, then teaches the other primates in his tribe how to use bones as a weapon and how to walk upright (though we are not shown the teaching or knowledge transmission process).
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  No, since those are supposed to be the ancestors of humans.
  - wyclif 3y ago
    But they're still primates, and therefore presumably more similar to chimpanzees than humans in terms of the ability to model and learn behaviour.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      Humans are primates, but we don't presume we're more similar to chimpanzees than to humans.
      - krapp 3y ago
        Humans share 96 - 99% of our genome with chimpanzees. Presumably the difference between human sub-species would be even less.
_acco 3y ago
It’s a common trope that “we are no different from animals,” but this is not true. Of course we are. Far more interesting than the fact that animals “can” ape behavior is how they do - and how that differs from humans. Check out the work of Richard Byrne [1]. Our best theories suggest that the way primates share behavior is through literal parsing and replication of sequences. A chimp is able to watch a fellow chimp complete a complex maneuver to open a nut, and can replicate that sequence. But the sequence can contain odd moves that obviously have no effect, and those moves too will be replicated. This signals a lack of understanding. Primates use an advanced copycat mechanism, which makes innovation very slow. The way humans learn and transfer behavior is vastly different. We watch another complete a task and develop an explanation for how it works. Our reproduction isn’t us following a literal sequence, but using our understanding/mental model to solve the task. For example, if I watch a complex sequence to open a tricky nut, I’ll have developed a model for the physics of the nut, weak points, ways to get leverage, etc. I might memorize and repeat your sequence, but I might also get creative with my own method, knowingly or not. And, of course, we can do this one-shot. It’s the difference between a parrot mirroring words and a person retelling a story they heard. We are super different than animals, and denying that fact will hide important secrets about knowledge and creativity. [1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf
tiborsaas 3y ago
We have nice relatively longer and more distally placed thumbs, it's something :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
calepayson 3y ago
I believe the one truly unique thing humans can do is imitate complex actions with high fidelity. When we evolved this ability it lead to an explosion of behavioral complexity simply because imitated behavior satisfies all the criteria for evolution (s/o Dawkins). We’re not unique in our ability to imitate, but we are unique (for now) in our ability to imitate well enough that imitated behaviors are stable enough to evolve.
somenameforme 3y ago
The "extremely complex" problem solving in this study, for chimps, was putting a ball in a draw, and then closing it. Would you have assumed that training a chimp to do so would be impossible before this study? Or that it would be impossible for other chimps to ape him, so to speak? In other words, is this study actually shifting your assumptions in any way? Or is it just the arguably grandstanding language being used that may be swaying you? So for instance I think it's pretty well known that monkeys in Bali have taught themselves how to steal from tourists and then exchange the goods for treats. [1] And that was entirely self-learned/taught. That, to me, seems somewhat more impressive than putting a ball in a drawer, yet didn't really leave me with any awe beyond what one would normally have when interacting with monkeys. And such things leaves me decidedly unimpressed with chimps and a drawer, and even more cynical about the language used to describe it. [1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-to-the-thug-life-to-steal-valuables-and-sell-them-back-for-food https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-t...

by kirab 3y ago

timeon 3y ago

My assumption is that difference is not that something is missing but just in complexity of things. It is strange that people put other mammals in same category with birds for example. Thinking that humans are separate kingdom. I'm closer to pig than pig is to chicken.

katzgrau 3y ago

At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? As a species we definitely have some narcissistic tendencies.

zvmaz 3y ago
> At some point, can’t we just admit to ourselves that we operate from a human-centric worldview and that clouds pretty much all of our thinking on what makes humans special (if anything)? I think this is true. The evidence being our ruthless exploitation of our fellow animals without any regard to their interests, suffering, etc.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

There aren’t many fundamental unique differences between an 8086 and a M3 Max. But the differences in scale are so vast that it opens massively different capabilities. At some point, quantitative differences are so large they become qualitative differences. Although both can hold matrices in memory and do math operations, the M3 Max can hold so much more and run math operations so fast that LLM inference becomes possible making it seem “intelligent” on a whole different level than an 8086 even though they are at some fundamental level very similar.

bayindirh 3y ago
You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans. However they can sense electromagnetic fields and can sense whether a flower they're interested have pollen or not without looking at it with their eyes. Elephants and whales can communicate over vast distances via sound. Bats can see without eyes. Salmons and pigeons can find the point they have born without even trying. A dog can smell history of a place, plus get much more information from a single smell. Humans can do none of these things without tools. Also, in electronics, there are accelerators which are much simpler in transistor count and architecture, but which can do much more than a more complex counterparts. GROQ inference cards and FPGAs come into my mind. So neither capability, nor capacity in numbers is a valid measure for intelligence or capabilities in practice. Just because a bee has less neurons than a chimp doesn't mean it can't have some kind of comparable intelligence when you compare the things they can accomplish. Oh, also crows understand and exploit physical phenomena and can manipulate things with tools to get what they want.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans. Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment. No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    "comes even close" I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale. They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different. "comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago

That is true. There is nothing unique to humans. Everything is a sliding scale. Eagles can 'see' better than humans. No one is is up in arms about how wonderfully unique human eye-sight is, how Eagles are using 'just instincts'. Humans are divine in how complex their sight is, that it could never occur in other animals or machines. Totally impossible that we would ever have a machine that can 'capture images'.

Ginden 3y ago
This, but unironically. Humans have the best daylight eyesight in mammals, and only birds of prey come close.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I picked 'sight'. But there is laundry list of features that some animal does better. Humans on whole do everything 'ok'. Humans have a lot of features, and for each feature they aren't the 'best', but on aggregate they do them all together on average better. They are one animal that combine total features better than any single animal. Guess my point, is when it comes to 'mind' people are still thinking humans are divinely 'exceptional'. But really, it is one more 'feature' that the human animal does best, but that does not mean other animals don't have the same feature, but scaled down. Seems like people complaining that 'bees' aren't intelligent are just trying to keep humans propped up on a pedestal. When really, it is one more feature that is scaled.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    Does it effectively keep the humans on a pedestal to consider our traits as fundamentally different? I think it is all on a continuum, humans are animals. But putting us on that continuum makes all the animals look like absolute garbage, intelligence-wise. If we want to put humans in the game, we’re going to be absolutely dunking on, like, every animal in terms of ability to abstract and teach concepts. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo

NiloCK 3y ago

The general sentiment is spot on - animals are amazing, complicated, sophisticated, and we will continue to be "humbled" over and over again, but maybe you've gone too far. A few candidate "unique to humans" characteristics: - surgical replacement of defective organs. I wouldn't be surprised if some animals have processes for amputations - especially insects - but I'd be pretty surprised if there are any kidney transplants going on. - written language systems for durable information passing, phonetic alphabet systems. As far as I know, a phonetic alphabet was invented only once among humans, which makes it a rarity even for us. - haircuts. This one is super plausibly wrong, but I don't think that any animals do this, and its a good example of something that they could do but just don't.

dwighttk 3y ago
Wear clothes Write about history no one currently alive has seen Make music Go to space Theorize
- groestl 3y ago
  > Make music > Theorize Not sure about those.
- CaptainMarvel 3y ago
  Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells Make music - I know that birds sing, and a quick Google search shows whales and seals seem to make "music" as well Theorize - Depending on what you mean of course (but I agree with you about e.g. scientific hypotheses to be tested), but as an example apparently birds "theorize about the minds of others", again by Google search Writing - Definitely a stretch here (and so I agree with you) but animals do leave chemical markings for others
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    > Wear clothes - I know that hermit crabs wear shells You show me one outfit, I raise you an entire textile, clothing, and fashion industry allowing us to show our features in displays of status all the way to enabling us to walk in space.

graemep 3y ago

I am surprised anyone thought unique to humans. How is this different from commonly observed behaviour like these: https://www.britannica.com/story/how-other-species-learn https://www.britannica.com/story/how-other-species-learn It does not even need scientific study to see these. Its common enough for causal observation.

est 3y ago

> we will find out that there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans There is, make fire and cook.

someuser2345 3y ago
I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > I agree about fire, but I'm pretty sure you can count bees making honey as cooking. Cooking is to apply heat to transform raw ingredients into a different, often edible form. Bees make honey by collecting nectar from flowers, storing it in their honey stomach, and then regurgitating it into honeycomb cells. During this process they add enzymes to the nectar and fan their wings to reduce the water content, transforming it into honey. Bees transform raw material, but not by heating it.
- est 3y ago
  I mean cooking with fire. 100% carbon life (proteins) gets killed by excessive heat
bee_rider 3y ago
There are of course some Australian birds that famously spread fire, so partial credit IMO. Also, figuring out how to make fire is pretty hard. I’d argue it isn’t something “humans do” in general. It is one of the earliest examples of something that somebody figured out, (or maybe it was figured out independently in a couple different places) but mostly it is a taught skill. Teaching and long distance running are our special abilities. In both cases other animals might do the thing, but we’re much better at it than they are.
- est 3y ago
  > There are of course some Australian birds IIRC that's more like a Australian media stunt from one single source, never verified or replicated. There's this one guy trying to explain why there's wild fire and it's not any human's fault, which inadvertently caused a great debate "animals can utilize fire".

CuriouslyC 3y ago

That would be the first step in becoming a brilliant scientist who goes unrecognized in his lifetime.

andsoitis 3y ago

> there is not a single thing that’s unique to humans. It doesn't bother me. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

wyclif 3y ago

Didn't Kubrick prophesy this? I'm thinking of the first act of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where one advanced primate learns how to use the femur of a tapir as a tool, then teaches the other primates in his tribe how to use bones as a weapon and how to walk upright (though we are not shown the teaching or knowledge transmission process).

wizzwizz4 3y ago
No, since those are supposed to be the ancestors of humans.
- wyclif 3y ago
  But they're still primates, and therefore presumably more similar to chimpanzees than humans in terms of the ability to model and learn behaviour.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    Humans are primates, but we don't presume we're more similar to chimpanzees than to humans.
    - krapp 3y ago
      Humans share 96 - 99% of our genome with chimpanzees. Presumably the difference between human sub-species would be even less.

_acco 3y ago

It’s a common trope that “we are no different from animals,” but this is not true. Of course we are. Far more interesting than the fact that animals “can” ape behavior is how they do - and how that differs from humans. Check out the work of Richard Byrne [1]. Our best theories suggest that the way primates share behavior is through literal parsing and replication of sequences. A chimp is able to watch a fellow chimp complete a complex maneuver to open a nut, and can replicate that sequence. But the sequence can contain odd moves that obviously have no effect, and those moves too will be replicated. This signals a lack of understanding. Primates use an advanced copycat mechanism, which makes innovation very slow. The way humans learn and transfer behavior is vastly different. We watch another complete a task and develop an explanation for how it works. Our reproduction isn’t us following a literal sequence, but using our understanding/mental model to solve the task. For example, if I watch a complex sequence to open a tricky nut, I’ll have developed a model for the physics of the nut, weak points, ways to get leverage, etc. I might memorize and repeat your sequence, but I might also get creative with my own method, knowingly or not. And, of course, we can do this one-shot. It’s the difference between a parrot mirroring words and a person retelling a story they heard. We are super different than animals, and denying that fact will hide important secrets about knowledge and creativity. [1] https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/Readings/Byrne-99.pdf

tiborsaas 3y ago

We have nice relatively longer and more distally placed thumbs, it's something :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

calepayson 3y ago

I believe the one truly unique thing humans can do is imitate complex actions with high fidelity. When we evolved this ability it lead to an explosion of behavioral complexity simply because imitated behavior satisfies all the criteria for evolution (s/o Dawkins). We’re not unique in our ability to imitate, but we are unique (for now) in our ability to imitate well enough that imitated behaviors are stable enough to evolve.

somenameforme 3y ago

The "extremely complex" problem solving in this study, for chimps, was putting a ball in a draw, and then closing it. Would you have assumed that training a chimp to do so would be impossible before this study? Or that it would be impossible for other chimps to ape him, so to speak? In other words, is this study actually shifting your assumptions in any way? Or is it just the arguably grandstanding language being used that may be swaying you? So for instance I think it's pretty well known that monkeys in Bali have taught themselves how to steal from tourists and then exchange the goods for treats. [1] And that was entirely self-learned/taught. That, to me, seems somewhat more impressive than putting a ball in a drawer, yet didn't really leave me with any awe beyond what one would normally have when interacting with monkeys. And such things leaves me decidedly unimpressed with chimps and a drawer, and even more cynical about the language used to describe it. [1] - https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-to-the-thug-life-to-steal-valuables-and-sell-them-back-for-food https://www.sciencealert.com/how-wild-monkeys-in-bali-took-t...