Proposed New Paradigm in Animal Cogition -- From Observation and Experimentation to Making Contact

[jordan179]

I was watching a Nova special on corvids, and it mentioned that the meaning of over 250 distinct calls in one species of crow had been deciphered. And I got to thinking about the implications of this, combined with our recent discoveries of syntactical language in prairie dogs and natural sign language in bonobos. I concluded that we should make

Comments

[polaris93]

We've had practice at getting to know true non-human sapience, though not in a controlled fashion. Those who live with cats, dogs, or other animals frequently come to regard them as people, be it odd ones, many of which have their own languages (cats, some birds), are inventive and curious (ever had a cat happily take apart a record-player to see how it works?), care for one another (you can even see this in ants; when an ant is injured, other ants will do what they can to help the injured one and soothe the pain), and otherwise display traits that strongly suggest sapience. Some cats and dogs are very, very good at sussing out what the human beings around them are thinking and planning (start thinking "Time to go to the vet" and you'll see what I mean). All of which is excellent practice for getting to know creatures of other species -- even aliens. This isn't the sort of controlled experiment that is carried out in laboratories, and it deals with many non-repeatable incidents, but has to be approached like learning to be a

[jordan179]

Agreed about even cats and dogs, and they probably aren't even sapient, just high-level sentient. I think that exceptionally smart cats and dogs may have "flashes of sapience" the way that humans have flashes of genius. I've seen my smartest cat, Sekhmet, do some awesomely-intelligent things, and also some incredibly-stupid things, depending on her stress level (when stressed she tends to act first and think second, which doesn't always work so well for her).

You're probably right about my spelling error.

[polaris93]

They're sapient, all right -- not all of them (and we've all know human beings who aren't, haven't we?), but the potential is solidly there in both species. They figure things out -- often more than we'd like -- and act on it in surprisingly intelligent ways. You see it most as they age, when wisdom comes to the fore, e.g., the family cat in my youth who figured out how to fish for a gopher that was otherwise proving to be too quick for her arthritic shoulders and arms to grab (the one who bit off a long blade of grass and held it so the tip dangled in the gopher's hole, luring him out). We really should start with the animals we have as pets and work animals, dropping assumptions about just how intelligent they are and using an anthropologist's techniques for getting to know them personally and discover what cultures they may have when we allow them to have them (human-pet and human-work animal cultures also).

[ext_1279885]

If cats were actually sapient, they'd rebel against humans for humiliating them with those stupid lolcats.

[korgmeister]

That's presuming they find the lolcats humiliating. I'd suspect they're carrying on their ancient tradition of just not giving a fuck.

[tara_li]

"(when stressed she tends to act first and think second, which doesn't always work so well for her)."

Ok, you've just proven your cat is pretty much human right there.