Animal And Human Consciousness

Questions about Objectivism
21

Well, I think that at least part of the Objectivist epistemology depends on the fact that objective knowledge is gained through an active, reality based process (grasped by a human consciousness). If it were possible to transfer knowledge to someone else, then that would not constitute as an active process for the receiver, which would either invalidate the concept of objectivity or disqualify the “knowledge” in question as objective knowledge, on the grounds that you did not receive it through sensory-perceptual means.

It’s pure science-fiction, but premusably, in the process Hal was describing, the perceptual memory would have to be a part of the “data transfer.” If (and that’s a VERY big if) a scientific discoverry were to be made which enable knowlede-transfers, however, I’m afraid we’d need some new philosophy to go along with it (although it woudl not invalidate the accuracy of Objectivism under the old conext).

EDIT: I also want to add that I’ve read sci-fi which (sort of) talks about this. In Frank Herbert’s Dune Chronicles (mostly the last two books), there are women who can transfer memories and knowledge to one another, although they do it by mystical, unscientific means.

22

Since the dogfood and catbox examples are dead, I won’t belabor those points, except to add that the closest relatives of domestic cats bury their scat: it’s a widespread genetic trait. I dispute the claim that cats are very good at all at identifying intended urinals. They are good at identifying smells and know the look of sand, which largely suffices for getting cats to pee in the right place, barring political protests. If you have some decent experimental evidence that shows that cats can form the concept “cat box”, I’d like to see it.

It seems very obvious that animals do classify objects, and as such, they are abstracting from percepts.

Tell me about this – I don’t know of this obvious evidence. It is true that animals can form some kind of perceptual “similarity” judgment, but that doesn’t mean there are categories. If you can show an example of an animal with actual categories, then I’ll believe.

The animal is quite clearly abstrating and retaining something.

I think that is the crux of it: the ability to remember is not the same as forming a concept.

This is what happens with humans too though. A child doesnt invent concepts out of thin air - it learns its conceptual scheme when it learns its first language, and this scheme preexists its birth.

Well, I beg to differ. A child does invent concepts, although it’s not out of thin air and nobody ever has claimed that concept formation is random. The child will generally classify the world in bizarre ways orthogonally related to the concepts formed by the people around him. Usually they straighten out their conceptual system to conform to that of the rest of the world; if you’d like, I could point you to some work on child language acquisition and especially semantic acquisition (i.e. the concepts that children have).

I doubt that a child can just ‘go learn’ a language, nor can it form the concept ‘table’ on its own, independently of any kind of reenforcement learning or whatever.

Whaddaya mean by “whatever”? Children learn language without any of that stimulus-response reinforcement stuff, or lessons, or whatever. All they require is raw data to be the basis of the induction. That’s not possible for neural nets.

23

Tell me about this – I don’t know of this obvious evidence. It is true that animals can form some kind of perceptual “similarity” judgment, but that doesn’t mean there are categories.

I would say that similarity judgement necessarily involves categorisation - I think that seeing an object ‘as a kind of something’ is largely a similarity judgement (what else could it be?). I identify my television as a television partly because of certain resemblances it has to other televisions that I’ve seen.

If you can show an example of an animal with actual categories, then I’ll believe.I think that is the crux of it: the ability to remember is not the same as forming a concept.

Then what is the difference? What is being remembered here? If a concept is just a bunch of percepts that are retained, then it seems that remembering percepts for the purposes of similarity judgements is necessarily conceptual.

Well, I beg to differ. A child does invent concepts, although it’s not out of thin air and nobody ever has claimed that concept formation is random. The child will generally classify the world in bizarre ways orthogonally related to the concepts formed by the people around him.

This is pretty much the same as neural networks (and other methods of supervised machine learning). The AI forms some classification scheme, and the supervisor checks to see if its formed the right one (see my above example about tanks in forests).

Children learn language without any of that stimulus-response reinforcement stuff, or lessons, or whatever. All they require is raw data to be the basis of the induction. That’s not possible for neural nets.

Yes it is. The technical name term for this is ‘unsupervised learning’ (ie categorising observations without being explicitly guided as to what categorisations to make).