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LurkerFAQs ( 06.29.2011-09.11.2012 ), Active DB, DB1, DB2, DB3, DB4, DB5, DB6, DB7, DB8, DB9, DB10, DB11, DB12, Clear
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TopicAnyone else ever find it weird how little control you have over your body?
metroid composite
10/04/11 10:44:00 AM
#61:


Liquid Wind posted...
animals can't build things like video cameras because they don't have the physical requirements to work with materials at a high level or in the case of ocean creatures, don't have access to many resources at all. you dump a random person in the middle of the wild and they'll be living mostly like an animal. we are not inherently super intelligent, we lucked into a lot of it. given the same brain and more animal like hands that aren't skilled enough to build and work with tools, you have just a pretty smart animal, but nothing like what we are

Ok, animals can't build video cameras. But animals can surely use video cameras that already exist built by humans.

Kind of like how people have trained apes to use a simple internet system.

And yet, still no documentaries made for apes about humans.


The truth is that humans just learn faster. You can teach a one-year-old to put toys in a box; it takes roughly one hour--that's how fast they can pick up on the concept. You could teach it to a dog and it might take days.

For another example, show a picture of a toy to a kid, they can bring you that toy. Generally speaking dogs can't correlate a 2D picture with a 3D object. (With the exception of one or two unusually smart dogs). The problem gets even harder if the size of the object in the 2D image doesn't match up with the size of the 3D object. (Again, there are a small number of dogs who can do it, but it's very, very rare).

All of this is the bare-minimum required to watch a documentary and associate "That thing on the TV screen is actually an elephant, even though it's 2D and looks small on the TV." Most animals literally can't get that far--can't get to the level of a 3-year-old human pointing at a TV screen and thinking "That's an Elephant."

So yes, other animals won't be making documentaries about us any time soon; even if we made special video-cameras designed just for their appendages. Even if we removed the normal expectations of a documentary (i.e. no narrator). The concept of creating pictures that represent something to educate others of your kind is just way too complex for the level of cognitive development that non-human animals tend to reach.

--
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