Comment by georgemcbay

Cows also grieve their young yet we keep them permanently (forcibly) impregnated and take their young away to be slaughtered every few months just so we can drink their breast milk in our coffee. I can’t take seriously people who get emotional over stories like this then eat dairy products.

Almost certainly our linguistic abilities (and through them, planning skills) are vastly greater than those of all other animals, but that is a matter of degree, not of category. The one thing in which we are categorically different from all other animals is that we learned to control and make fire... and quite possibly the linguistic abilities followed from that rather than the other way around[0]. Until the 20th century basically all of the advantages that technology bestowed upon our species directly flowed from our use of fire. Maybe our species should have been called "homo ignis"; the fire ape.

Obviously the cetaceans will never have that benefit, even if by some other objective measures they turned out to be as intelligent as humans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catching_Fire:_How_Cooking_Mad...

> Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal

There are hard-asses on both ends. We are different from other animals. To me, that results in us having more moral agency for our actions. It also means recognising that we share this world with other beings, including billions of people, a tool-wielding sapience categorically distinct within the ecosystem.

We should start from the default assumption that other animals have a lived experience not unlike our own until proven otherwise.

Mammal brains are similar between species. Show me why they wont behave like ours. Most say who say animals can't grieve are in the same boat with those who used to say human babies don't feel pain.

Every time we look deeper, we find we humans are less special in any given quality. Yes, humans seem unique in our level of language and knowledge passing. For now; until we discover something else.

Here is a studying on rats. They grieve. Brain, chemical, and social activity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12244160/

It's like that time when they "discovered" that babies can feel pain.

> Blows my mind that so many people just have this hardened internalized idea that we're somehow significantly different than any other animal.

But we are significantly different, and there's always a danger of anthropomorphizing other species to explain behavior that we assume we understand because it reminds us of how we feel about things. That's why the paper calls for more study of "post-mortem attentive responses" in animal behavior to gain more insight into their cognitive capabilities.

I know the point you’re making is half facetious—do you feel like LLMs are specifically getting better at planning?

I am surprised not enough people are talking about the philosophical implications of these inventions. AI is the biggest attack on religion/human-centralism since Newton and Darwin.

Life is inheritly expansive and colonialist. The trees war the grass for the light by throwing shade. So people have these little plot-armor, little stories justifying endless expansion- having three kids, who consume thanks to modern industrialized society energy and nutrients like a medieval village and do the same. Without these "Im-good" self-repairing stories, people would stop having kids and wither and die. To demand people to be rational there, is to start a death cult.

These whales sing songs about how sharks have no souls and the metal fish dwellng on the surface mauled there ancestors.

Do LLMs grieve?

"People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species – and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture."

— Daniel Dennett

https://now.tufts.edu/2020/09/02/our-brains-our-selves

"One of the problems with defining consciousness is that it’s several different things—and it means different things to different people. There is a sense of consciousness in which starfish are conscious. Worms are conscious. Even trees, even bacteria are conscious. But there’s one dividing line between the amoeba and the professor in the consciousness department, which really marks off a huge difference: language.

It’s language that enables us to ask ourselves questions and reflect on our own experience. Frogs notice all kinds of things in their world, but I don’t think they can notice their noticings. I don’t think they can dwell on them. That whole sort of stairway of curiosity that we have built-in doesn’t exist for any species but us, and that makes a huge difference. Human consciousness is to animal consciousness roughly as language is to bird song. Birdsong communicates, but not much."

"Consciousness is not a part of the brain. It’s what brains can do. Particularly it’s what human brains can do when they are mature and well-designed, and a lot of that design is not innate. It’s not in your genes—in the same way German or English isn’t in your genes. Many of the features of consciousness are things that basically get installed culturally and at mother’s knee. It’s part of your rearing, your upbringing, your learning languages. It’s what you learn language in, and you learn a lot of consciousness, too."

"A lot of species have elements of culture. Chimpanzees have some grooming rituals and the like. But only one species has explosively cumulative culture, and that’s us. Of course, that depends on our having language. All of technology and civilization, art, science, religion, all these are the fruits of human culture."

“I think that one of the hardest tasks a human mind can face is reserving judgment about a conviction that has always seemed to you obvious and thinking about how maybe that might not be right"