May

4

The Doctor Is In. And He’s an Orangutan.

For the first time, researchers have seen a wild animal treat an open wound with a medicinal plant. After getting injured—probably in a brawl with another male—a wild Sumatran orangutan chewed the stems and leaves of a vine humans use to treat wounds and ailments such as dysentery, diabetes and malaria. The orangutan then repeatedly smeared the makeshift salve on an open gash on its cheek until it was fully covered. After the treatment, scientists saw no signs of infection. The wound closed within five days. And it healed within a month.

Jeffrey Hirsch is enthusiastic:

This is awesome! An good friend of mine spent several years in Borneo working with Orangutans under Birute Galdikas’ program. They are super crafty and smart. Don’t doubt this.

Humbert H. writes:

And nobody can explain how they know to do this in these situations. There is obviously a lot of learning apes can acquire from others, but this? There is also no way the current understanding of how genetic information is passed on that can explain this. There is something very mysterious about the mind and animals doing non-obvious things is the best example, this is not a simple biological phenomenon.

Asindu Drileba comments:

One of the things I hear in the AI research community in the pursuit of of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is people thinking of intelligence as something hierarchical like height.

In The Singularity is Near Raymond Kurzweil makes a plot of Computers approaching AGI. He puts insects at the bottom and manuals later then humans at the top. You often hear some people say that "We haven't yet reached dog level AI, so we can't say we can reach human level AI soon." That statement makes the assumption that A humans intelligence is more than that of a dog. But it has been reported in some cases a dog's sense of smell can be 100,000 more acute than that of a human being! And not just that it can tell time just by smelling what's around. Another example is also how birds can sense magnetic fields and use them like a compass.

Anyway my point is that just by the (limited) way humans perceive reality we have access to some secrets we can't pass to animals. My suspicion is that animals also have their own secrets that they cannot pass to us.

Humbert H. adds:

They have recently discovered that some insects are self-aware. The test that's used for animals is that they recognize their reflection in the mirror as themselves judging by their reaction. Usually only dolphins, apes, and some corvids (crows) pass the test.

But more importantly, what I meant was that animals seem to "know" how to do things that no current scientific understanding can explain. This means we don't understand basic things about animal (and human) mind. AI is a machine function: an algorithm using some data provides some outputs in response to inputs. A mind is like that too, except we really don't understand the nature of self-awareness, nor do we understand how animals just "know" things. Sometimes they call it "instinct" but there is no real science behind that word. And in this case it's not even that, apes have no "instinct" to cure wounds with specific processed plant material.

Jeff Watson writes:

Here is an interview with cognitive psychologist, Donald Hoffman. Some find him brilliant, some a flake. His ideas are unconventional to say the least, but the questions that come to mind out of his interview will break one’s brain. Many moments in the video, I pause and ask myself how this applies to markets.

Stefan Jovanovich gets philosophical:

The wheel of time turns on the axle of our self-awareness: Transcendentalism.


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  1. Edward Lam on May 5, 2024 2:57 pm

    @Humbert - I agree with what you say about human and animal and insect cognition.

    In biology there is increasing evidence that some form of ‘awareness’ is also present in single cells.

    I speculate therefore that one of the differences for the moment between human cognition and ‘AI’ cognition is that the models are different and probably not equivalent. AI only creates ‘intelligence’ when the parts are together and there is a neural network. In human brains, neurons firing and wiring together is part of what creates intelligence (’neural network’ model), but individual neurons also have ‘intelligence’, independently, without the network. This is one way of thinking about why, for the moment AI requires so much more voltage and power to create the equivalent results that brains can do with so much less power. Penrose, for example, speculates that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon. The neural network model might therefore be a dead as regards consciousness (or as you say, it may lead to a different form).

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