Animal "laser beam" vs. human "floodlight" intelligence

[dkomo]

The 4 aspects of 'humaniqueness' that differentiate human and animal thought

http://www.topnews.in/4-aspects-humaniqueness-differentiate-human-and-animal-thought-221184

Washington, Feb 18: A new study at Harvard University has shed light on
the key differences in human and animal cognition.

Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and
organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and
Sciences proposed four key differences in human and animal cognition.

“Animals share many of the building blocks that comprise human thought,
but paradoxically, there is a great cognitive gap between humans and
animals,” said Hauser.

“By looking at key differences in cognitive abilities, we find the
elements of human cognition that are uniquely human. The challenge is to
identify which systems animals and human share, which are unique, and
how these systems interact and interface with one another,” he added.

The four novel components are the ability to combine and recombine
different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new
understanding; to apply the same “rule” or solution to one problem to a
different and new situation; to create and easily understand symbolic
representations of computation and sensory input; and to detach modes of
thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

Hauser said that animals have “laser beam” intelligence, in which a
specific solution is used to solve a specific problem. But these
solutions cannot be applied to new situations or to solve different
kinds of problem.

On the other hand, humans have “floodlight” cognition that permits them
to use thought processes in innovative ways and apply the solution of
one problem to another situation.

“For human beings, these key cognitive abilities may have opened up
other avenues of evolution that other animals have not exploited, and
this evolution of the brain is the foundation upon which cultural
evolution has been built,” said Hauser.

The new work was presented at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. (ANI)


--***@cris.com

[John W Edser]

Hauser said that animals have "laser beam" intelligence, in which a
specific solution is used to solve a specific problem. But these
solutions cannot be applied to new situations or to solve different
kinds of problem.
On the other hand, humans have "floodlight" cognition that permits them
to use thought processes in innovative ways and apply the solution of
one problem to another situation.

JE:-
Animals are much more machine like. They have little to no INDUCTIVE
intelligence.What makes humans unique is their ability to ask general
questions. This remains based 100% on inductive reasoning (inferences from
the specific to the general) from which all deduction (inferences from the
general to the specific) flow. Unfortunatley, modern meta theory
(epistemology) prefers to delete induction. Such a critical deletion is just
an artificial, uncorrected oversimplification providing the equivalent of a
cortical amputation to any understanding of intelligence. This has exactly
the same effect as deleting theory defined constants within oversimplified
mathematical reformulations of theory (these popular oversimplifications are
known as "models") while allowing just an oversimplification to replace the
theory from which an uncorrected oversimplification was made.

Regards,

John Edser
Independent Researcher

***@ozemail.com.au

[John Wilkins]

Post by John W Edser
Animals are much more machine like. They have little to no INDUCTIVE
intelligence

Corvids, other primates, canines and cetaceans all offer
counterexamples. Unless you are saying something like "non-humans don't
have human capacities", which is a trivial observation for some values
of "human capacity", problem solving, learning behaviours, tool use and
manufacture, inductive generalisation (the nut cracking crows in
Attenborough's Life of Birds, for instance) are all opposed to your
claim here. John, this claim is a priori, not based on the last half
century or so of observation.

[Tim Tyler]

Post by dkomo
The 4 aspects of 'humaniqueness' that differentiate human and animal thought
http://www.topnews.in/4-aspects-humaniqueness-differentiate-human-and-animal-thought-221184
Washington, Feb 18: A new study at Harvard University has shed light on
the key differences in human and animal cognition.
Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and
organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and
Sciences proposed four key differences in human and animal cognition.
“Animals share many of the building blocks that comprise human thought,
but paradoxically, there is a great cognitive gap between humans and
animals,” said Hauser.

Not much of a paradox: human brains are gynormous compared to those
of most animals - especially compared to animals of a similar size.

[dkomo]

Post by Tim Tyler

Post by dkomo
The 4 aspects of 'humaniqueness' that differentiate human and animal thought
http://www.topnews.in/4-aspects-humaniqueness-differentiate-human-and-animal-thought-221184
Washington, Feb 18: A new study at Harvard University has shed light on
the key differences in human and animal cognition.
Marc Hauser, professor of psychology, biological anthropology, and
organismic and evolutionary biology in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and
Sciences proposed four key differences in human and animal cognition.
“Animals share many of the building blocks that comprise human thought,
but paradoxically, there is a great cognitive gap between humans and
animals,” said Hauser.

Not much of a paradox: human brains are gynormous compared to those
of most animals - especially compared to animals of a similar size.

Did you mean "enormous" instead of "gynormous"? If so, perhaps you'd
care to explain why dolphins, whales and elephants, whose brains are
larger than ours, aren't more intelligent than we are?

Along the same lines in the "size matters" category, I attempted the
following analogy in another newsgroup in response to a comment made
that there is no great gulf between animal brains and human brains:

"Analogously there is no great gulf between the Intel 8080 which came
out in 1976 and the latest Pentium Core 2 Duo processor. After all,
they are both constructed from MOS transistors, and contain many similar
circuits like registers, multiplexors and instruction decoders. It's
just that the later has three orders of magnitude greater processing
power than the former."

To push the "size matters" analogy further, the feature sizes of the
transistors on the Pentium are much smaller than those of the 8080.
This allows enormously more transistors to be packed onto a chip, which
allows wider data paths and a much greater amount of pipelining and
parallelism, leading to the increased processing power.

In brains, it is not feature sizes but volumes that count. Greater
volumes allow for more neurons, but connectivity increases much faster,
as the square of the number of neurons. So emerges capabilities of
thinking in humans that go far beyond what most animals are capable of.

None of this, however, explains the relative dimwittedness of dolphins,
whales and elephants.


--***@cris.com

[Tim Tyler]

Post by dkomo

Post by Tim Tyler

Post by dkomo
“Animals share many of the building blocks that comprise human thought,
but paradoxically, there is a great cognitive gap between humans and
animals,” said Hauser.

Not much of a paradox: human brains are gynormous compared to those
of most animals - especially compared to animals of a similar size.

Did you mean "enormous" instead of "gynormous"? If so, perhaps you'd
care to explain why dolphins, whales and elephants, whose brains are
larger than ours, aren't more intelligent than we are?

[...]

Post by dkomo
In brains, it is not feature sizes but volumes that count. Greater
volumes allow for more neurons, but connectivity increases much faster,
as the square of the number of neurons. So emerges capabilities of
thinking in humans that go far beyond what most animals are capable of.
None of this, however, explains the relative dimwittedness of dolphins,
whales and elephants.

Dolphins, whales and elephants all seem highly intelligent to me.

However, it is classically thought that you have to adjust
brain size for body size to some extent - when considering the
effect of brain size on intelligence - since so much of the
brain is devoted to sensory-motor processing.

[John W Edser]

Post by John Wilkins

Post by John W Edser
JE:-
Animals are much more machine like. They have little to no INDUCTIVE
intelligence

Corvids, other primates, canines and cetaceans all offer
counterexamples.

JE:-

Hi John,



In all these cases cognition has to be separated from Skinnerian
reinforcement where just chance action has become reinforced providing only
a simulation of cognition. To my knowledge not one single animal model has
ever asked an unprompted question or offered to exchange one artifact for
another. My claim is not that animals only have a zero inductive
intelligence, just that this type of intelligence is nowhere near as
developed within animals as it is developed in humans. Paradoxically, the
proof of this is the popular Post Modern claim that induction remains
invalid. In odder to make such a claim you firstly have to make an induction
(a generalization from the particular).

Post by John Wilkins
Unless you are saying something like "non-humans don't
have human capacities", which is a trivial observation for some values
of "human capacity"...

JE:-
I am not saying that.

Regards

John Edser
Independent Researcher

***@ozemail.com.au