Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? (Frans De Waal)
"what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."
(Werner Heisenberg)
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human can try to imagine the umwelt of other organisms.
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he wanted to understand how a bat feels like a bat. This is indeed beyond our comprehension...
"if a lion could talk, we could not understand them."
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the challenge is to find tests that fit an animal's temperament, interest, anatomy, and sensory capacities.
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chimps face recognition experiment. chimps can identify chimps faces, but not human.
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a creationist's view:
a purposeful creation of uniquely suited for intelligent life, meaning us.....anthropic philosophers sounded as if they thought the word was made for us rather than the other around. Planet earth is at exactly the right distance from the sun, to create right temperature for human life, and its atmosphere level has the ideal level of oxygen level....however, any biologist will turn the causal connection around and note that our species is finely adapted to the planet's circumstances, which explains they they are perfect for us.
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the closer another species is to us, the more anthropomorphism will assist our understanding of this species and the greater the danger will be the danger of anthropodenial.
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Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. while the term, cognition refers to the process of doing this, intelligence refers more to the ability to do it successfully. (page 10~11)
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if learning talents are a product of natural history an mating strategies, the whole notion of universality begins to fall apart.
evidence of inborn learning specializations has been steadily mounting.
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Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.
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