Posted on 10/07/2016 10:39:24 AM PDT by JimSEA
All great mind reading begins with chocolate. That’s the basis for a classic experiment that tests whether children have something called theory of mind—the ability to attribute desires, intentions, and knowledge to others. When they see someone hide a chocolate bar in a box, then leave the room while a second person sneaks in and hides it elsewhere, they have to guess where the first person will look for the bar. If they guess “in the original box,” they pass the test, and show they understand what’s going on in the first person’s mind—even when it doesn’t match reality.
For years, only humans were thought to have this key cognitive skill of attributing “false belief,” which is believed to underlie deception, empathy, teaching, and perhaps even language. But three species of great apes—chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans—also know when someone holds a false belief, according to a new study published today in Science. The groundbreaking study suggests that this skill likely can be traced back to the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, and may be found in other species.
“Testing the idea that nonhuman [animals] can have minds has been the Rubicon that skeptics have again and again said no nonhuman has ever, or will ever, cross,” says Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “Well, back to the drawing board!”
For nearly 40 years, animal cognition researchers have had mixed results in showing that our close ape relatives—and animals such as monkeys, jays, and crows—understood that their fellows had minds, a talent thought to come in handy in complex societies, where figuring out another’s plans can help animals thrive. Some tests have shown that chimpanzees had some building blocks of theory of mind.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
This is pretty simple.
Years ago I noticed that clients under deep hypnosis were super psychic.
Hypnosis is a process where the logical aspect of consciousness is distracted and a person is left with their emotional child consciousness.
I also noted that many people, especially women< who were psychic had childhood trauma that created an emotional sub-personality that still had the abilities of a child.
I was playing a game with my son when he was in elementry school. we were driving and it was just a game to pass the time.
He surprised me when he his 15 out of 20 3 digit numbers between 0 and 999 on the first guess. His misses were real close or transpositions of the number I was thinking.
What was unusual was that he had a photographic memory which is the logical aspect of consciousness and should not have had the emotional access abilities.
Except that humans aren’t apes nor descended from apes.
Except that humans aren’t apes nor descended from apes.
I,personally,find this easy to believe.I mean...how difficult can it be? "Food"...."territory"...."sex".Seems to me that they have a one-in-three chance of being right!
No, the correct answer is “It’s in my belly. The second person was too late and hid an empty box.”
However, we had a common ancestor some seven million years ago.
I agree.
Notice how “journalists” load propaganda up front in the titles and ledes of their articles.
(It is like the way Lester Holt rigged the so-called debate up front by declaring the Obama economy a roaring success.)
“Now, young blueunicorn6, where do you think the first person will look to find that chocolate bar?”
“What chocolate bar? I never saw a chocolate bar.”
“You never saw the first person put a chocolate bar in the box?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
“The red-haired lady? You didn’t see the red-haired lady put the chocolate bar in the box?”
“You saw somebody with a chocolate bar, Doctor?”
“Yes! Yes! There was a red-haired lady with a chocolate bar!”
“I don’t see anyone. Where is she?”
“How should I know? Maybe she’s......wait a minute. Whose experiment is this, anyway?”
“Well, if you don’t know, then don’t ask me. I’m just here for a chocolate bar.”
Humans are different in kind from animals that have a rudimentary primitive mind, because only humans use reason as the means of knowledge and survival.
Very cute . . . and smart.
We are not apes, great or otherwise.
Human beings have mental powers that include the material mental powers of animals but in addition entail a profoundly different kind of thinking. Human beings think abstractly, and nonhuman animals do not. Human beings have the power to contemplate universals, which are concepts that have no material instantiation. Human beings think about mathematics, literature, art, language, justice, mercy, and an endless library of abstract concepts. Human beings are rational animals.Human rationality is not merely a highly evolved kind of animal perception. Human rationality is qualitatively different -- ontologically different -- from animal perception. Human rationality is different because it is immaterial. Contemplation of universals cannot have material instantiation, because universals themselves are not material and cannot be instantiated in matter.
I stress here the difference between representation and instantiation. Representation is the map of a thing. Instantiation is the thing itself. Universals can be represented in matter -- the words I am writing in this post are representations of concepts -- but universals cannot be instantiated in matter. I cannot put the concepts themselves on a computer screen or on a piece of paper, nor can the concepts exist physically in my brain. Concepts, which are universals, are immaterial.
Nonhuman animals are purely material beings. They have no concepts. They experience hunger and pain. They don't contemplate the injustice of suffering.
A human being is material and immaterial -- a composite being. We have material bodies, and our perceptions and imaginations and appetites are material powers, instantiated in our brains. But our intellect -- our ability to think abstractly -- is a wholly immaterial power, and our will that acts in accordance with our intellect is an immaterial power. Our intellect and our will depend on matter for their ordinary function, in the sense that they depend upon perception and imagination and memory, but they are not themselves made of matter. It is in our ability to think abstractly that we differ from apes. It is a radical difference -- an immeasurable qualitative difference, not a quantitative difference.
We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses…
- Michael Egnor
This is a faulty study.
Everyone knows that when food is involved in any way, animal IQs rise to near-human levels.
Do it with something that doesn’t excite anyone for any reason (like a copy of the NY Slimes), and maybe I’ll pay attention.
She said and I am sure believed that Orangs can read body language, facial expressions and other subtle signs about us even better than we can read each other.
"They know ..." she said many times.
I don’t feel in the least belittled or made less by the fact of my relation to other animals going back to single cell creatures. In fact, the ape neighborhood is better than most.
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