Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway.

• yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Well, curiosity comes in different stripes. Investigating your environment is one thing. Asking second-order questions is quite another.

  “Can I have food?” vs “What is food?” or “Why am I hungry?”

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  • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    “Why are we here?”

    “One of life’s great mysteries isn’t it? Why are we here? I mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence? Or is there really a God, watching everything. You know, with a plan for us and stuff. I don’t know man, but it keeps me up at night.”

    “What? I mean why are we here, in this box canyon in the middle of nowhere?”

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    • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      if you wake up in a compound, catered to your every need by weird alien captors, “why am I here?” is a pretty obvious question.

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      • Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        You ask the aliens why you are there, meaning the cell they imprisoned you, and they tell you how their species created humans and what humans purpose is. You immediately go catatonic by the revelation.

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    • Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Oh man, RvB reference in the wild after all these years. Warms my heart.

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  • Tonava@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    To be fair a lot of people don’t ask the latter questions either

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  • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    They already understand the second order questions though. Why would they ask the humans?

    They know what’s outside their enclosures, they know they’re there because the humans want them there, they know strange humans like to see and interact with them through the glass. They just don’t care, so long as they have their tribe around with things to do and they get tasty food

    Animals understand existence better than humans do. They understand life and death better than we to. Our higher intelligence makes second order questions complicated because we put ourselves through mental gymnastics

    We should be asking apes about the meaning of life, not the other way around

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    • yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      No, they don’t. Second-order questions aren’t just the prosaic things any intelligent creature would ask, such as “why am I here?” or “what do you want from me?”

      but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”

      Animals (and, indeed, most humans) don’t ask second-order questions at all because that requires abstraction, which is the sort of reasoning that requires enormous amounts of education and curiosity.

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      • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        but also the more esoteric, “what sort of creature are you?” And “what sort of creature am I?”

        I agree, but that is the kind of question they do think about. Koko was “a wonderful gorilla person” in her own words

        There’s a dog that uses one of those word button mats that thinks small dogs are cats, dogs are dogs, and that she’s a human (or that her owner is also a dog, she’s convinced she’s the same as her owner and always gets confused when it’s explained otherwise)

        They don’t ask, because they already know what they think. They aren’t confused about where they stand in the world, it’s learning human categorization that confuses them

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• treadful@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I have no idea if they’re curious about the world around them. But that’s also not the question at hand.

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  • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It is the question at hand. It’s a question about the mental process of animals

    The question isn’t are they curious - we know they are. The question is why they don’t ask humans questions when you teach them how to speak

    The answer is - it’s because you’re not speaking gorilla, the gorilla is learning a foreign language, which it learned by being motivated by food.

    Animal languages have a different grammar to human languages. When they ask questions, they often do it by making statements to be agreed with or corrected. They might even disagree, and assert the statement again in reply

    You have to meet animals halfway… Well, really like 10% of the way since they’re the ones learning to speak to us in our languages

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    • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      These people aruginf against the intelligence of animals would fit right in with people who encounter savages on their voyages.

      That label was based on cultural differences and these fools are too ignorant to see they are making the same mistake across the difference in species.

      It’s quite fascinating. Maybe if we give them treats they can be trained to recognize their superiority only exists in their mushy little brains.

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      • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Lol right? It’s crazy how far on a limb they go, despite interacting with dogs

        How often do we talk about how dogs want this or that, how they’re thinking of doing something “bad”, how they look so guilty they tell on themselves

        But yeah, nothing going on up there. It’s all projection, they’re just dumb animals and humans are super extra special

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