someguy

you don't need to be such an ass*hole. why you would name me like that? you want to start a verbal war with me? even if i was missing the point, there is no reason to call me out like that unless you wish to pick a fight. if that's what you want, i will defend myself. and i don't think you will enjoy the experience. notice i said as you quoted: first of all i have indeed been with and observed dolphins. it might surprise you to know but i am capable of traveling to other countries. furthermore, i said i got animals. i didn't say i got all the animals that were used in every experiment or observation i have made or used. the main dolphin experiment i used was performed by someone else. thus "i have learned from others who have as well" those tests show that these animals have eyes that can take visual information of many distinguishable objects. you will notice that the animals are all being rewarded with food and penalized when wrong. i don't deny that the animals can see i just deny that they can understand a number implicitly. i cannot see the experiment for myself, but the dolphins counting i referred to was similar to this, they could figure which board had more dots than the other, though the dots were all of different size, therefore they couldn't only judge on area of dots or whatever. dolphins have language, that is certain. so i figured that dolphins could just as easily use language for counting. since for human beings we would not do very well on such a test were we limited to not counting, once the numbers go over 5. parrots can easily be taught to make the appropriate sound for a word when a specific stimulus arises. parrots also vary in range of intelligence. I need to read this article more to comment on it. certainly i am not making anything up as i go. my logic is fallible just like anyone else, i am capable of making mistakes just as anyone else. this fact of counting though i don't think disproves my comment of awareness, even if it shows that what i thought was not exact. but it would change part of what i said and would change my definition of awareness slightly since i had used the example of number comprehension to define the limited ability to know a human being can have without using language. i will look at these tests and results and i'll get back to you. one thing that these results cannot change is that for a human being, we can know a finite number of all numbers up to roughly 5, without needing to count. more than that you need to count. and that is the most central part to my conclusion. these studies will most likely only change my view on dolphins and their ability to count if anything at all. you don't need to be such an ass either, "clearly you're making this up as you go" stfu

I see what you mean, i don't think we are free of emotions. different people free to different degrees, but none of us completely free. I agree that human beings often take offense if they seem stupid in a situation, and they can also feel strong or important if the opposite happens and thus sometimes seek to make others look stupid, so certainly there are emotional connotations with the use of logic. emotions are evolved to be, the emotion of desire to use logic would have needed to come after logic itself. once logic exists it is less necessary for nature to evolve a desire to use it, it can be a desire in itself, as in logically you should use logic. desire can be either emotional or logical depending on the specific situation, in this case i would lean more towards the logical side.

well the way i see it, by definition logic and emotion are different. i don't think emotion drove humans to think, i think evolution did. by my rules chickens are blank minded and we are not. chickens cannot think and we can. it is not still just an emotion, it is inherently different. it is the capacity to know. emotions don't have this feature. thus they are different and require separate names. though they are different in more ways than just that. a dolphin can count, not a chicken. that test i think contradicts your statement. emotions cannot provide the ability to have language. only the ability to possess knowledge can. if you are content with disagreeing that's ok. it's up to you. but if you ask me we do know right now. at least i am convinced i do. i see, so the mere fact that my words would be printed in a magazine would provide more validity? my words would not change due to the location they are printed. if i was a quack all i need to do is get into a magazine so that everybody believes my lies? so then if that is your position, you would agree that our collective belief could easily be skewed could it not? sigmeund freud comes to mind, he has poisoned all of our minds. getting published is not necessarily a mission of truth and proof, but could also be simply a mission of politics. again, freud is a testament to that effect. but i understand your skepticism, i do not blame you or think negatively of you for it. i would wish for all people to be as skeptical as possible. but i think sometimes also, that skepticism needs to be aimed at magazines and common knowledge, and perhaps we could use a little of that. i have been out and got animals i have owned many of many different kinds too many to list here, i have also known animals of the wild. i have learned from others and their experiments as well. I never doubt the results, but i do doubt the conclusions. and i think you would agree that in this area of study there is more room for erred conclusions than in other sciences, at least at this point in its infancy. and that seems to me like a cause, perhaps of many, of your skepticism towards my philosophy. but i have used numerous results of numerous tests and observations to support my conclusion, and my conclusion does predict better than any other philosophy i know of on this subject.

i agree. i never meant that it is true because you would not find contradictory evidence. I meant you would not find contradictory evidence because it is true. i am convinced of it at least. my reasoning that arrived to my conclusion is independent of the fact you would not find evidence of the contrary. i found evidence of the fact itself, i feel i have at any rate, it is how i thought the thing in the first place. if you do not believe what i present is evidence, that's ok, you are free to agree with me or not. but i feel that if you have a specific reason why you disagree then i would like to discuss it with you, perhaps you will expose a flaw in my reasoning, something i seek no matter where the idea came from, or perhaps you would find one with yours, this i would seek were i you as well, perhaps you would not, and that's ok too. if you do not have a specific reason as to why to disagree with me, then there is the possibility that you are guilty of the error you believe me to be guilty of, arbitrary belief. if you wish to believe, whether it be in this regard or in matters of religion or anything else, that's ok also, different strokes for different folks. i know i used 'you' but i meant it in the plural sense not directly aimed at you specificly.... stupid english.

not arbitrarily. acting differently than emotion suggests is only capable by few animals. those agreed upon to be intelligent by the majority of scholars who studied the subject. I cannot provide any reference other than myself. i could cite tests that have been done, everything i mentioned as fact is fact, not my conclusions, things like tests, observations, you could verify those, my conclusions are my own. if all we could do to prove anything was cite references nothing new would ever be discovered. i'm not saying nobody else thinks like i do, i'm just saying that i don't know of any. maybe you could find a reference, but i didn't use any to arrive at my conclusion. all the bits and pieces, examples that i mentioned you should be able to verify easily enough. if you don't find my argument convincing. i guess there's not much i can do about that. at this point i'm pretty much tapped out i think. but this way of thought predicts behaviour and predicts the outcome of tests done on psychology of animals. i can't recall which exactly, but i remember reading of results that i could have guessed the outcome. i really don't think you will ever find any tests that have been done that contradict any of my conclusions. but you are free to your opinion and to think of mine as an arbitrary opinion. but i don't think it is, and i welcome any questions or problems you can find with it. i am confident they can be explained, and even predicted.

i think i see what you mean, you are proposing that the dog realises the future connotations that its friend is dead. i'm not sure if that is correct. the dog can be used to experiencing the presence of a friend in a certain place, just like its food in the food dish, and when it is missing, would mope. also if it sees the dead animal it would be disappointed that the animal does not react anymore. the realization that the animal is dead is actually quite advanced. if death was never explained to me i probably would never realize the connotations of death, i wouldn't realize the animal is dead. and children don't they wonder why the animal doesn't move. is it sleeping? will it ever wakeup? recognizing and knowing death as an eternal state, and knowing the difference between sleep and death is advanced even for human beings. i don't think a dog is capable of making that type of advanced assessment. it can detect lack of though. and that can cause moping. i wouldn't use your example to prove that a dog is not self-aware, but i don't think it conclusively shows that it is. there is no part of the behaviour that necessarily requires awareness. if you think of it as not self-aware, all of its actions can still be explained. in order to prove awareness the actions must require awareness without exception.

I disagree, i don't think that is an indication that dogs are self-aware. certianly they can detect a lost being, the absence of a being they were accustomed to finding. but i'm not certain why this would require awareness and yet running to a food dish when the dog hears the sound of food pouring does not. a dog may just as well mope when it goes to its food dish and finds it empty. i don't think that is proof that the dog is self aware. these are emotional responses. i don't think that elephants are self-aware because they miss relatives. there is more. but i think that some of their social behaviour is due to their self-awareness, and some of it is emotional. i think that humans miss their children not just from a logic perspective, but it is emotional, it is in the interest of species from an evolutionary perspective to protect their offspring, and thus we have emotional attachments to them. the honey bee dies when it stings an enemy, it gives up its life for its specie, evolution managed to program these insects to act for the good of the specie at peril of the self. therefore it would not be far fetched to think that nature would or could program beings to be protective of fellow beings and to be emotionally social, not necessarily logically attached. i do think that any self aware animal must exhibit characteristics that it is self aware. just as all human beings do. i can't think of exactly how right now, but i would guess you could even prove a human being is self-aware against their will even if they were trying really hard to hide it. i do think there are levels of awareness in a sense. just like if i only know of my own existence in a limited area i am less aware then if i learned about all physics and the universe. my understand of myself grows deeper as i can compare it in relation to much more. but i don't think an animal can really be partly aware. different degrees of awareness ok. but awareness must be off or on essentially. like there are degrees of motion, but something is either moving or not. i am either asleep and unaware, or aware and remembering dreams, and hearing my environment. i think animals are either essentially sleep walking or they can know. how much they know is another story.

you can fake a 4 dimensional graph on a piece of paper using the same logic as a topographical map faking 3 dimensions. computers are capable of graphing a 4d object, just a moving 3d object. i've often wanted to see a simple example of the faking of a 5 dimensional graph in the same way but i have never been able to find one. if the fifth dimension was acceleration, the faking would look like many of the same 3d object following the same trajectory, or moving the same way, but each would be doing it at a different speed. i think this would be the best way to test your idea. but i don't have the knowhow to create such a graph. i think i just understood what you're getting at. the rate at which objects move inside a body like the gears inside a clock, change velocity in relation to the velocity of the whole system, the whole clock. therefore you're saying that time changes in relation to time, kind of like a double derivative, thus you would require an extra dimension. but i'm not sure you couldn't express it with one variable, since the rate of change of the objects inside the moving body are related to the whole body's motion, like parts of a mechanical system. therefore, you could always describe mathematically the movement of all parts inside the body as proportional to the speed of the body, so then i think that it would be possible to use the same variables. but you would have a formula inside a formula and that would be your double derivative kind of part i think.

agreed, but i think that more neurons does not necessarily indicate more intelligence. memories are made of neurons also, so it would be necessary i think if i'm not mistaken, that a mouse isolated in a dark room since birth, and a mouse that experiences many stimuli, not just music, or even not music at all, but all sorts of smells and touches and visual things, would have a more complex brain structure the same way they discovered. or is what they found known to be different in some way? but they seem to specify young ages, when you could provide an old human being with an equal amount of new experiences, though children like they are talking about are experiencing things for the first time, so they would need to be building new neurons. maybe you could do the same experiment with an adult and get the same results so long as you make sure all of their experiences are brand new.

personally i'm very skeptical of that also. i don't think doing anything or showing anything to an infant can make it smarter. maybe it can make it something else, but to me, smartness is genetic. education is not. but people often say smart when in my opinion they mean knowledgeable. so i guess it would depend on what you define smart to be. but... I guess its possible that in the construction phase of the brain that something about the music causes the brain to grow in a manner that is smartness... but i tend to think not. if it did, why mozart? why not some other music? if it were true... and i had to find a reason why mozart and not contemporary music, i would say it is because there are so many instruments doing different things all at once and listening to that music can help train your mind to concentrate on multiple things at once without effort. but still, i don't think. but do the people that promote this effect claim it is Mozart and only mozart that helps? it seems that learning music was also a factor but i fail to see the difference between learning music or any other language. standard notation, math, any written language seem to require all the same functions, so it would not surprise me that learning many of these at a young age would help you to learn more later on with more ease. but that does not isolate music as a cause. i think if they would have done their experiment with music and chinese, instead of computers and nothing, their findings may have been different. the chinese learners and piano learners i would guess would end up with similar results, perhaps the chinese learners would have even better results due to the complexity of their character based writing system. also there is a natural skew that needs to exist unless your sample group is really really huge.

what does abjuridical or abduridical mean?

certain web sites can rip the files but they record them as a rare filetype. in my opinion the best video player is a korean program called kmplayer. it is a similiar program to winamp. it will play all filetypes, from DVD to realplayer to quicktime to wmv. its the only video player i have installed on my computer and it will play those files recorded from youtube by the websites that rip them.

i see what you're getting at. i think here we disagree only in definitions. i would term that as reflex. it is an indication that even for us thinking animals we can have an emotional response such as those i claim to be in control of all animals before even we have time to be aware of them. i have withdrawn my hand from a surface before even knowing whether it was hot or cold, only after my hand was withdrawn could i digest the sense and figure it was hot or cold. what i meant to say was, the fact we know of our emotions the fact we are aware of them, the fact that we therefore attribute them to sensations we can try to describe. this fact may be what makes us think emotions and instinct are different. our awareness of emotions, makes them different. were we not aware (of course we would not be having this conversation in that case) we would not be misled by our definitions of emotion. just like we attribute color, by nature, as an attribute of the world around us, whereas light is colorless, color is an invention of our minds. our perception of light misleads us to arriving at a false conclusion of light. light has color. but that is not so, same thing with all of our senses. i do not claim to know exactly what parts of the brain are responsible for what, i have read books on psychology and the functioning of the brain, but i do not know off hand exactly what all the parts are or exactly what they are responsible for. you can say that anything i say is a cause of whatever part of the brain or whatever chemical that cannot change what i'm saying for example if i say emotions are the cause of something and you then say that no it is because of some x chemical in some y portion of the brain then, it is possible that what we have learned is that x chemical in y part of the brain is emotions. you know what i am saying? we could be saying the same thing, one of the side of behaviour and experience, the other from physical events in the brain. they do not need to contradict. the two things were conditioned response and evolved survival mechanism. the two things you said were separate and different. it would suck if we got so petrified that we couldn't cross the street because we were paralyzed. just ask fainting goats. and if you've never seen a fainting goat i recommend checking it out on youtube. it's hillarious. i have semi-defined knowing in another thread i have linked to. it is implicit knowledge. i linked to it in an earlier post, but the short of it is. the example i showed is with numbers. there is a certain maximum quantity of number, around 3,4,5 that human beings can implicitly understand. we can know 3, or 4, or 5. without counting we can understand these numbers. more than that we need language. this implicit ability to understand is knowing. by virtue of knowing we can define for example 1,2,3,4, and 5. then we can devise +1. and then we can devise a language system to describe any number. but without this implicit knowing, without the ability to know, we cannot make any language of any kind. it is the awareness, the I. I think therefore I am, according to Descartes it is all we can be certain of. we can know. any knowledge you have is due to your ability to know. the fact that you can think and are not just blank minded. so far, barring complexity of programming and of sensors, we have not yet found a reason why a machine could not be programmed to imitate animals exactly. in all of their complexity, personalities and all. all of your responses to danger, certainly we could find difficulty in defining in the programming what danger is, but for such things as evolution, this is not an impossible task, for design it is indeed a difficult task, mark one for evolution and one against creationism. you can fake artificial intelligence on the internet from recording and processing millions of entries, programming it would be near impossible, if the artificial intelligence "evolves" on the internet, the task is simplified. you could indeed teach yourself what was edible through trial and error, thus flavours can grow on you, and people brought up in some countries hate the food of other countries. but if trial and error was the only way, an error could cost you your life. would it follow that animals that don't commit a certain mistake of wanting to taste a certain flavor would pass on their flavor genes to their children and thus eliminate this mistake? amoebas must either be unpoisonable or they just exist where poison isn't, like plants do. because i don't think they have a sense of smell or an equivalent. exactly BBQ and women, we would love these things without ever needing to know of them. which brings up an interesting point because i don't find cow smells delicious until i cook it. therefore i must have been programmed with my delicious sensor after we figured out how to make fire and cook, cooking food must have made humans more likely to survive. if i wasn't capable of knowing, i would never figure out that i should kill an animal and cook it if i were out in the forest. at least i don't think so. maybe fresh carcass might start smelling nice, certainly rotting carcass wouldn't. is it that carcasses naturally smell bad by nature? or is it that they have become bad smelling to us via evoltuion because eating dead carcass causes us to die? smell is not a property of the universe, it is a property of the mind. yes of course i would eat it. in our experiment i am incapable of knowing. i cannot differentiate artificial from natural flavours, artificial from natural foods, i would never even consider it was unhealthy, i would not know the concept of healthy or unhealthy, just hungry, tasty smelling, and full. plants eat and drink though that does not mean they know of it. in our thought experiment you would not know this fact. you would not know of the concept of living, you would not know food gives you this ability, you would not know that poo is the result of eating, you would not be able to figure that one out even. you would not have the ability to know. the only clue you have to feeling is the smell. you know nothing of nutrition, you do not know food is what helps you live. you know nothing in this thought experiment. that said, the hungrier you are the more everything seems yummy, the more full you are the more you don't care for any flavor. you are designed to lower your standards in dire situations, with women too. that way you don't need to be capable of knowing once again. whoever says "i wouldn't F*** you if you were last man" on earth is lying. but if they did not know. what in their genes could make one behave differently than the other for walking off cliffs? wouldn't fear of heights accomplish this task perfectly and simply? i think emotions are these means you refer to. no i do not suggest that not knowing would cause you to fall off of cliffs, because even animals that do not know, even babies that do not know, have fear of heights, and fear of heights demands relief by going in the opposite direction of the heights. thus you do not fall off cliffs and you can pass on your fear of heights gene to your offspring. i do think however that if no animals had fear of heights and inability to survive at heights, like birds and mountain goats and stuff, that yes, they would die, until their specie develops a healthy fear of heights. plato did not even know of gravity. he was one of the smartest men of his era. and he had written language and prior generations of knowledge and discovery to work with. i guarantee that cavemen did not know of gravity. perhaps they understood that many objects tend to move downwards, but we both agree that human beings are capable of knowing. without even language. its most other animals i think cannot. because if one was not capable of knowing they would need to be separate. or else all animals would fall off of cliffs randomly except for humans that can know. i can use emotions as a tool for finding knowledge, but having emotion does not mean i must have knowledge and vice versa. but i need senses for knowledge. or at least i needed to have them at some point in my existence. yes i honestly do. and i honestly belief a fly flies like hell when i'm chasing it and is not aware. and that a plant chases the sunlight and is not aware. that the dragonfly chases the mosquito and the mosquito flies away from the dragonfly and neither are aware. gazelles are like deer. i live where there are many, i've had 12 in my backyard before. they are predictable one hundred percent. the first time they are slightly scared they stop look in the direction of the noise and open their ears and listen. if they are spooked again after that they decide to run. step one try for camouflage, step two forget that just run. this is automatic behaviour. it never fails. then after a while certain smells, certain noises cease to spook them, so long as they dont' cause them to run. if you scare an animal too much the fear will never leave. like phobias. you need to ease your way in slowly. you need to reshape their fear. even if you have a pet deer and you are kind to it and it acts with affection to you. the other deer won't clue in that you are not dangerous to deers. they don't try to figure out if i am a lion or a herbivore. they are not looking to know what i man. nobody explained to them that things that look like lions and sound like lions are dangerous so only stay away from those. animals fear any animal that does not fear them and approaches them. only an animal that is dangerous to you will do that. so, if ever you find an animal that approaches you in the wild, you should fear it. skunks, porcupines won't fear you. other animals also like turtles with adequate defenses will not, there are few exceptions but fearing that which does not fear you is a good tip to go by. and it does not require knowing. i don't think it does since not all lifeforms are aware or can know. i'm not sure why you think that follows. paralith that's exactly right, i do think elephants are self-aware they do display self-aware behaviour. i've seen them search human encampments for missing children. they are smart. they know. people say an elephant never forgets. i think what they really mean is that they know in the first place. i'm not sure why dogs have the ability to grieve. i know depression is sometimes used for giving up, crawling in a hole and dying. i know a dog will feel happy if a person or being is present and alot of them just love to put those beings in their mouths. i can see how missing a presence they were accustomed to can be "noticed" by them, and i don't think they need awareness for that, but i'm not sure why evolution has given them that ability, i agree it does seem counter productive, but i think if danger arose that feeling would quickly dissipate. also a danger with using dogs in examples of animals nature and evolution is that they were bred. they did not evolve naturally, they are capable of "defects" just like humans and cats. i have seen overweight cats, and overweight humans, they can survive. i have never seen an overweight gazelle, they would get eaten first. but still, perhaps other animals would grieve this way and not be self-aware or bred in captivity? i don't know. i can't think of any though. -lucaspa- i don't mean to be rude or dis you or just seem like i'm ignoring you. but your post is long in response to my long one, and i just finished a long response, hopefully your questions could be answered indirectly. maybe if you only posed one or two i could tackle it. you might find in reading the previous posts and the future ones that many of your questions would be answered already.

well.. sine comes from the fact that a triangle with a right angle has always the same proportion of length of sides for a given angle, in relation to that angle. they made the radius 1 because by the law of similar triangles, that way you can multiply sin (theta) by the length of the hypotenuse of the triangle you are working with and get the correct proportion of sin (theta) for the angle x theta since 1 multiplied by any number gives that number. i'm not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but if you wanted to do this but a dimension up you would have a kind of right angle prism in a sphere, where the "triangle" would have round sides so as to stay in the circle, and i don't think you can pull any neat mathematical conclusions from that, unless maybe you made a "triangle" and i do use that term extremely too loosely, that has two right angles, i'm not sure off hand if this could be in any way useful, but i'm pretty sure that if it did you could figure it out with the existing "sine.. language" ... (hardy har har har) in some formula so it would be kind of redundant. but that still wouldn't incorporate the 4th dimension like you wanted. but since this celever idea of sine language stems from geometry i don't think you could achieve that since you can't really draw in 4 dimensions, and the 4th dimension doesn't really show nice proportions like the other 3 can, unless you go relativistically speaking i guess, but i think you can use that no other way than by using complex equations so i don't think you could make a nice neat thing like the trigonometric circle can do. the best you can do is just use those functions to make more complex ones. i think the days of simple geometry are long gone and all that is left is more and more complex formulas that can sometimes reduce nicely. actually come to think of it... E=mc^2 is almost exactly what you're talking about, isn't it? technically time isn't really in there, but motion is pretty much time and E gives motion, so.. it's sort of there. a proportion of motion, or energy as a whole, to mass. somewhat frankensteinly a 4d sine function. yet not a sine function at all.

what is the difference? isn't it possible that the simple fact of knowing of our emotions and the possibility that due to our ability to know, can disobey our emotions, the fact we are self aware. isn't it possible that those things mislead us into thinking that these two things are separate? what if we could not know? what if you could not know about nutrition? how would you know what to eat? wouldn't you just smell a thing and get hungry and feel like eating it? incidentally that's why i would recommend the diet of eating only foods that do not contain artificial flavours, because artificial flavours can trick you into eating something that is not really food. or rather that is unhealthy. just because you don't die when you eat it i don't think that makes it food, but that's for another day i guess. would you eat bark in nature without knowledge? what if it was full of artificial flavours? perhaps you would get indigestion or something. but wouldn't that be similar to eating mcdonalds? if you knew nothing how would you know not to walk off of cliffs? gravity was not figured out until well into mankind. i mean really no capacity to know, as in you couldn't know from observing someone else plummeting to death. complete blank mindedness. if you could really not know anything what would you do? I would guess you would act on emotions alone. isn't it convenient that all of our emotions and feelings, sex drive, hunger, fear of heights, comfort in warmth, feeling of a full stomach, and many others, are conveniently exactly the types of emotions that would guide us to survival? could it be a coincidence? or is this how nature has designed us, via evolution, to be able to survive? even with the opportunity to be conditioned, for example, not to fear things that have been 'proven' harmless. couldn't it be our self-awareness that is solely responsible for our ability to feel the fear and do it anyways? isn't it possible that our self-awareness and our ability to know are essentially the same thing?

i know what you mean. me too i have seen the same evidence. i have seen animals act and react. but i have also seen flies act when i go to hit them and mosquitos come to bite me. i have seen plants that react to touch. i think you would agree with me that plants do not 'know' they are being touched. the venus flytrap does not 'know' a fly has landed on it. right? yet it closes on the fly. therefore, i think that if plants can act and react to stimulus without knowing of the stimulus and being aware of it, there is an opening for the possibility that other life forms can sense and detect and react without the capicity of 'knowing' what is happening. just acting with a blank mind. though acting in complex ways according to the environment. here is one kind of example. i know it alone is not conclusive, but just an example. i have a parrot that when it is scared flies away. but only when it is scared. we don't need to clip its wings. it doesn't realize it can fly. it doesn't know it can fly. it just reacts as flying when it is scared. a human being would figure it out that when it moves its arms it stays in the air longer and doesn't plummet to its death. the parrot cannot. it knows not of falling, it doesn't realize that anytime it wants it can command flight and go wherever, it will only fly when fear tells it to. you don't need to teach an infant how to swim, you just need to put in the water. it will figure it out. that maybe so, but ya i certainly agree that humans are more complex than most animals at least, most animals more complex than most reptiles, i'm not totally sure but i don't think reptiles can be conditioned so you wouldn't be able to teach them tricks. it seems that way to me. reptiles more advanced than insects, insects more than plants, plants more than cells, cells more than matter. if you imagine what it would be like to be yourself but all alone in the forest since you were a baby. how much would you know? how much would you figure out on your own? we know so much from generations of knowledge, from very rare great men like Newton and Einstein and whatnot, over years and years one learning from a previous one. we even are able to think better because we have designed language. without language and all those things, perhaps it would be difficult to distinguish one of us from a great ape. we are not that different from the ape. years and years of learning thanks to language has separated us. language is powerful, but we are certainly psychologically more advanced than the majority of other animals. there is something about us that is more developed and more complex than most other animals. something that even apes have that other animals do not. what else could it be but the capacity to know?

well i don't know much about amoeba's but i would think that amoebas don't have emotional control, i would guess they are more like random life forms. they don't seem to sense food and seek it, they sort of just bump into it. plus i'm not sure about squirrels, but many animals are born with emotions and also they can have them conditioned. animals begin by fearing many other animals but once they stay around the other animals, get randomly closer and closer and the animal never approaches them, they do not get the sudden rush of fear, and they get conditioned to be able to be closer to the other animals. insects i don't think can do this. maybe some animals can't i'm not sure, i know even chickens can, not sure about cows or squirrels.

you misinterpreted what i said. i did not say that mice do not sense and react to danger. i said that they don't 'know'. that's why i said the anti-lock brakes thing. my car responds to wheels skidding. but that does not mean my car 'knows' its wheels are skidding. my car is not capable of knowing. showing that mice react to danger does not assert that they 'know' there is danger. just like my car engaging anti-lock brakes does not show that my car 'knows'. you know what i'm saying? the method of proving that mice 'know' there is danger does not require that the tests have anything to do with danger at all. simply that they show that mice are capable of knowing. sensing and reacting to various stimulus is a fact i cannot deny. i didn't mean to be rude to you. sorry if i offended you.

my point in relation to the purpose of the thread was just what bascule said in his latest post. from that, a new debate emerged. but i don't think that animal rights should be based strictly on their level of awareness. I think that animal rights, just as all things of law should be determined legal or not depending on the repercussions of the actions. i don't think squirrels do make decisions. they just act their emotions are those things that determine action. they do not assess the situation, take into account their emotions and then pursue a course of action, they must always act as their emotions make them. as far as processing information, i guess it would depend on how you define that, but i would say that receiving visual or tactile or sent data and then acting upon it would qualify so i would agree with you on that point. in order to to make a decision, i think you would need knowledge and logic and an awareness in that the animal knows that is feeling an emotion and can choose whether or not to act in accordance with it. squirrels cannot do that. just as plants cannot decide not to follow the light. how do you know they make decisions?

I haven't read the article yet either, but do you count random events? random events are infinite in mathematical complexity are they not? or is this only about shapes of mass? personally i would say that nature has an infinite complexity of events all of which are describable mathematically, and math has infinite potential of complexity it can explain. the only way i see that all mathematical possibilities exist in the natural world is if these things were both finite. certianly at this moment all the possibilities of the universe is finite, since the universe is finite, and in that case the mathematical potential exceeds that. but the universe isn't done yet. suppose we could plot and account for mathematically every single event from the beginning of the universe today. the mathematical explaining of tomorrow does not yet exist yet, but it will. so i guess my answer would have to be that it depends on how infinite the universe really is. will it crunch again and loop around infinitely? was there just one big bang and then it whithers into nothingness? if the latter then the mathematical description of a different universe will never exist i think, if the prior, then there's always tomorrow.

first i think that i have, i don't recall everything i've said in my posts, but at least i am certain i have proven it to myself, as certain as i am capable of, as certain as i can be of anything. secondly i beg to differ that the onus is on me. since i am claiming that something does not exist and you are claiming that something does. if there is no evidence to support that it does, then why would you assume it does? i think it is your philosophy that has made the claim, i have simply said that it isn't so. therefore the onus is on you. if you cannot prove, or show evidence that supports your view, then i see a weak link in your thought, i see opportunity for dogmatic belief, a belief i once partook in. but you said if that is not a claim i don't know what is. you are certain i am wrong. show me why you are certain. or at the very least show me where my logic is flawed. if you can do neither of these, then i think your statement i quoted here was a bit harsh and perhaps premature. I assume you do not believe plants are aware, and you do not believe insects are. reptiles and fish and stuff, i'm not sure what you believe, mammals you seem to believe are. why? what has caused you to ascribe this attribute to all animals? you seem certain they have it. how come? I am certain they do not, and i think that all my reasons for that are either in this thread or the one i left directions for. if you do not find them convincing, I would be interested to know why, in specific terms. perhaps you will help me find a flaw in my logic, perhaps i will help you find a flaw in yours, either way we both win.

time IS a dimension and it does not have any length. I was once trying to find like you things of lesser dimension like one or two or even only three. but the closest thing i could find was waves. it would seem that waves have two dimensions, three if you count time. if you consider a ripple in water caused by a stone, the ripple has length and width but no real thickness, since the water itself is not really the wave, the wave is passing through the water. maybe you could say that time has only one dimension, the way you would say that width has only one, or length has only one or height has only one. but you couldn't really say that it is length because length is a spacial quantity and those can only be measurements in the first three dimensions, not time. i know we talk about a length of time, a long period of time, but that use of "length" has a different definition than length of rope, and when you speak of time the way you did you are using the word length as you would to describe a length of rope, rather than a period of time. and i think you would not say that any of the spacial dimensions have only one dimension, because i think you are looking for examples that exist in our universe as we can observe, right? so you would not speak of just length because you cannot find anything with just length. if that is true then you would also find that you have that same problem when speaking of time because time cannot exist in the absence of 3 spacial dimensions, in the absence of "material" of 3 dimensions, or at least one spacial dimension. time requires that spacial dimensions exist, and more than that it requires, or enables, things in those dimensions to move. were there nothing moving at all, the universe would be just 3 dimensions. Time is motion. motion has no length.

monkeys will figure things out. I can;t say for every kind of monkey but certainly some monkeys will. it's more than just fooled multiple times. you can fool a human being multiple times. the point is that the animal will never figure it out. it will never learn from observation. it must be emotionally conditioned in order for its behaviour to change from a certain stimuli. that's why you need treats or some reward system in order to train dogs. either you hurt them when they do something bad so that they associate negative emotion with a specific stimulus or you need to use reward so that they associate positive emotion with a certain stimulus. I am not certain that there is no animal smarter than human beings on this planet. dolphins for one are at least a contender.

yes you can. it is for one necessary in order for evolution to be able to have given us emotions. second a mouse never works anything out. there is a saying fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me. well you can fool a mouse as many times as you want and it will never figure out it is being fooled, it will only be conditioned to longer act that way, and i'm not even sure if that will happen with a mouse. i can know that humans are self-aware, I can know that dolphins are and that monkeys are. I don't understand how you could agree with my posts and still be so certain what i'm saying is wrong. what is it that i said that you are certain is false? (appart from the conclusion obviously) if i began thinking like you do, just like the majority of the world thinks, wouldn't i need to be definite to have my changed so differently from what the large majority of people think? wasn't i specific? my reply was long because just a short reply is not specific at all. i could have just said matter of factly my position, but what would have been the point in that? I could say the same thing to you on this subject. anyways i think i have supported it. in this thread and in the other. i have never seen proof that what i'm saying is wrong, and yet you clearly are telling me i'm just making things up, not even close to accurate, yet you have no proof of the contrary do you? if i am not mistaken you have only popular belief and tradition supporting your position. how are you so sure i am wrong? somewhere along the evolutionary line you need to say that beings with locomotion are not self aware, the venus flytrap closes on its prey when it sense it. but does the plant know the fly is there? the plant is self aware? i can't believe you would think that. so must animals be because they move? I don't think you would agree since you must also agree, i think, that flies are not self aware. so where do you draw the line, and why? my guess is you draw the line at animals with brains because they have brains. yet you would also admit that you know not what about a brain causes self-awareness. obviously nobody really knows exactly the physical functionning of the brain in sufficient detail to ascertain whether or not an animal is self aware or not. however, if you look at behaviour you can know. what behaviour would you propose is unique to self aware beings? it would need to be something that flies do not possess nor plants, and it would need to require more than mere conditioning of emotions. certainly human beings behave in unique ways as compared to insects and plants and that cannot be explained by mere conditioning of emotions.

In my opinion what really we need to do is merge all the countries together. we can have different laws, but that's it, everything else is the same. offensive weapons should be illegal except for one world army that can be called upon. sure if the us wants to send aid in the form of food supplies, or possibly even perhaps knowledge/propaganda, but i don't know about that one, that's ok but anything else is not for the US to say. sure we can sit here and say that clearly it is wrong that saddam hussein led the country in a dictatorship and clearly dictatorships are wrong, but it is not for anyone else to say. jsut like it is not for bin laden and his crew to try to make us convert to islam because clearly our way of life is wrong. basically, if you believe the us was justified in invading iraq then you must also believe the islamist terrorists were right in destroying the World Trade Center. the only way you can only believe in one of those statements is by saying that the american way is right and the islamist way is wrong, and that's what wars are made of, and puts the terrorist and americans on the same level except for how much money they have, how much land they have and how many people belong to their belief system. you could even try to justify to me why the US way is right and the Islamist way is wrong, even if i agreed with you (just for the record i think they are both wrong) that would not give the US the authority to decide what is right and what is wrong and then act upon it. i guess then in short is that my opinion is that it is the moral responsibility of the US, even by its own morals, is to leave other countries do whatever they want unless it directly puts the US at risk. and that's why the whole thing of nuclear arms happened, even though the US had no evidence. but then politricks is the american way, this type of thing is common in their history. that's why i think only the world army should have offensive weapons. defense should never take place on enemy territory unless a third impartial party can be proven to that it is necessary. Karl Marx once said something to the effect of: in every war both parties are always fighting for freedom. so then isn't freedom such a stupid reason for war, unless of course it is on your land. score one for saddam hussein and negative one for bush and company.