On 08 Apr 2014, at 02:20, LizR wrote:
On 7 April 2014 17:20, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/6/2014 9:14 PM, LizR wrote:
Interesting. That seems like quite a complicated thing in itself. I
don't know if crows would have the abstract idea of counting, or if
they had to do it some other way ("we've had the guy with the hat,
the short one, the one with glasses, the other one with glasses ...
hm, maybe there's some way I could lump those together somehow...
did we have the one with the tweed jacket yet?")
As I recall they tried changing jackets and hats, etc, in order to
make sure it was counting. Of course the crows probably weren't
subvocalizing "one", "two", "three",... like a human would.
Really? Good, that would certainly help to eliminate the idea that
the crows recognised each human individually.
PS Obviously I don't assume they use words for the numbers! (Or
anything of that sort.) But I believe there is an idea that animals
(and people) have a built-in ability to "count automatically" to
some small number in a languge- (and knowledge-of-maths-)
independent way. This wouldn't necessarily indicate general purpose
intelligence though.
Many animals seem to be able to recognize five objects (and less) from
more. Such test have been done on human too, and it seems the same
applies, that is human can recognize directly 5 objects, without
counting or grouping the objects. Above 5, we seem to need to see some
group of less objects and to do some counting. Now, I read above this
a long time ago, so perhaps we know better today.
I heard also about a bird stopping the singing when 17 fellow birds
sing in the forest, but it might only measure some sound intensity.
Some brain anatomy, and brain deficiencies, suggests that numbers have
a particular treatment in the brain, with a large zone dedicated to
them, and different from the zone handling information on letters and
words. Apparently, some people can lose all ability to read and talk,
and can still compute, and vice versa. I ask myself if someone can use
combinators or a universal computing system when loosing their "word
processing" abilities. I guess that is hard to test. They will
probably loose the ability to learn a new universal programming
language.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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