172
Tiny fish found to have sophisticated self-awareness only ever seen in some humans
(www.independent.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
172 points (97.8% liked)
News
22910 readers
3775 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Are mirrors really a good test of self awareness?
Aren't they just testing the understanding of reflections?
Self awareness in regards of mirrors is that the subject realises that the object in the mirror is actually themself.
It's the counter scenario I'm questioning.
Does not recognising oneself in a mirror really imply that the subject is NOT self aware?
If I have difficulty recognising my projected shadow with a 5s delay. Am I still self aware?
That's fair. My cat has no reaction to himself in a mirror but we know cats can react in a mirror test.
Does he lack self awareness or not?
No, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone argue otherwise. However, we generally assume animals lack self-awareness unless we have a good reason to do otherwise.
I've always found that assumption very weird and figure it's rooted in human exceptionalism. Like we must be super special somehow. The more natural assumption to me seems that other animals, given their similar biological makeup, think rather similarly to humans.
It's actually just the null hypothesis. We don't assume rocks, trees, cars, flowers, stars, or soil are sapient either. It's normal, correct, and good to not assume things with 0 evidence. Furthermore, I see a bunch of people who both insist that animals are self-aware and that LLMs definitely aren't self aware, insisting they can't be, despite the fact that they are literally capable of telling you that they are. (Note: I'm not trying to argue that AI are sapient.) This tells me that people who argue that animals are self-aware in general are speaking about what they'd like to be true rather than a reasonable belief.
That just depends on what you consider the default state to be. Claiming that humans have self awareness, but other animals do not, implies a relationship between species and capability for self awareness. The null hypothesis would imply a lack thereof.
It would be correct and good to acknowledge that we simply don't know whether a given species is self-aware unless evidence points to one or the other direction. And that is very relevant for moral philosophy.
You've clearly misunderstood, and don't know what the null hypothesis is. In scientific philosophy, (that is, the philosophical foundation of science, not philosophy that uses science) "overcoming the null hypothesis" or "rejecting the null hypothesis" means you have enough evidence to say that you know something. Furthermore, there is a difference between saying "I don't believe that is the case" and saying "I believe that is not the case." One is a declaration of ignorance, and the other is declaration of certainty. They could infact not be more different from an epistemic standpoint. Also, for the purposes of this discussion, whether I believe humans have self-awareness isn't actually relevant; we are discussing the justification for believing that animals have self-awareness. Furthermore, there's no such thing as a "default state" and being part of the same clade or other constructed set as a sophont strikes me as a generally utterly irrelevant factor in determining whether an entity is itself self-aware baring some evidence that there is a relation conveyed by being in that set that itself indicates self-awareness.
TLDR: your argument is bad, and you should educate yourself in philosophy. Particularly epistemology and logic.