Are Animals Sentient?

[samlad]

Intelligence has nothing to do with thinking.
Yes there are many arguments of thinking such as Gardiners theory of thinking / musical emotional movement etc, And teh G theory

Thinking is in a completly seperate area. Mental models, spatial reasoning Dual systems in deductive reasoning
all require a big brain cell with all parts of teh brain working like in humans. Animals do not have this. Even monkeys who are our closets relatives do not have this capactity. Funnily enough, though on a much simpler scale it is rats who have a more simelar brain structure as we do

I would tend to disagree that intellegence is not linked to thinking. Surely animals can apply something they have learned to a particular situation? For example, chimps are very intuitive and can use their environment to adapt to different situations. I watched a nature program where a chimp couldn't get into a coconut, but used a range of methods to open it. First of all, he smashed it with some flint to no avail. Then he took it up a tree and dropped it from a height onto a rock, again to no avail. Eventually, he worked out that if he placed it on a jagged rock and smashed it with another rock with all his force, it would eventually split. What was also interesting is that chimps learn vicariously (learning by watching someone else), and learned that this was the best method to open the coconut and all followed suit, bypassing the other methods.

[Doozer]

They still arent really thinking Sam. They are just reacting.
By that logic you can say that if you out a spider in a maze it will eventually find its way out. Not by thinking but by trying everything untill something works.

Chimps do everything in a group and have evolved to copy other chimps. Its not a reasoning issue its just eons of eveolutionary theroy

[samlad]

They still arent really thinking Sam. They are just reacting.
By that logic you can say that if you out a spider in a maze it will eventually find its way out. Not by thinking but by trying everything untill something works.

Chimps do everything in a group and have evolved to copy other chimps. Its not a reasoning issue its just eons of eveolutionary theroy

It's the vicarious learning that questions this for me. The other chimps watched until their mate found the best solution, thus bypassing the non-effective methods. They must have thought to be able to know that this was the way to open the coconut.

[Doozer]

Again a parrot can copy speech, but its till not capable of rational thought

[samlad]

Again a parrot can copy speech, but its till not capable of rational thought

Yes, but would a parrot wean out useless parts of a conversation and get straight to the point?

[Mousey]

Look, humans are the only animals on the Earth that can think.

A chimp might have extremely high animal intelligence and be able to use simple tools, but he's not going to sit down and turn out "War and Peace" over an afternoon, or carve "David" out of a banana tree, or realise that in any right triangle the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two other sides.

Right!

[nicegirlsarenice]

Intelligence has nothing to do with thinking.

Congratulations, you've made my first sig on these boards ever.

Yes there are many arguments of thinking such as Gardiners theory of thinking / musical emotional movement etc, And teh G theory

Even monkeys who are our closets relatives do not have this capactity. Funnily enough, though on a much simpler scale it is rats who have a more simelar brain structure as we do

Are you somehow trying to imply that rats have a brain structure that's more similar to ours than apes/monkeys do? That is totally WRONG in every way.

[magicalman9357]

Maybe the animals are all much more intelligent than humans. How do we really know other than scientific theories and concepts?

[samlad]

Look, humans are the only animals on the Earth that can think.

A chimp might have extremely high animal intelligence and be able to use simple tools, but he's not going to sit down and turn out "War and Peace" over an afternoon, or carve "David" out of a banana tree, or realise that in any right triangle the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the lengths of the two other sides.

Right!

Haha! Yes, but you're not considering different levels of thinking.

[Westsidex]

Again a parrot can copy speech, but its till not capable of rational thought

Whats in the parrot so that gives it the ability to copy speech? A dictionary stuck in his ass?

Westside.