[lngnmn]

No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve.

Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language.

Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.

[_dps]

Unless you use an extremely narrow definition of "thinking" (yours is not commonly accepted among animal researchers, and is IMO too tautological to be useful), this is clearly disproven by decades of animal cognition research.

Animals can form future-oriented plans, engage in risk management activities, can remember inventories of items stored in safekeeping locations, develop "cultural" dialects to their vocalization patterns, and much more. You can find a good start on the current state of the research here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition

[lngnmn]

Definition of thinking, like definition of sex, or any other biological trait cannot be broadened. That would yield nonsense.

Thinking implies language. Without language it is feeling. Period.

Learning from experience, map making and even planning, as one might see in case of machine learning and other branches of AI, does not require thinking. It is a lower level of activity, relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.

[csomar]

You are being downvoted because you are making strong claims without having anything to back it up. You are free to have your own definitions of things but people like to have the same. This helps in carrying on a useful conversation.

[roceasta]

Yes. To be fair I think most people here want animals to be able to think (and for other humans to think that animals can think) because they want animals to be protected from humans.

[_dps]

Google gives me the following two definitions for "think":

1. have a particular opinion, belief, or idea about someone or something.

2. direct one's mind toward someone or something; use one's mind actively to form connected ideas

Neither seems to mention language as a pre-requisite. In any case, you seem to have strong beliefs contrary to my understanding of animal research, so I will not bother you further.

Have a good day.

[lngnmn]

Google 'belief' and 'idea' too.

[dTal]

Why don't you just call what you are talking about "language", instead of contradicting what literally everyone else means by "thinking"?

[yulker]

Is this the clinical or technically precise definition of what thinking is? Or is it your own definition?

[EliRivers]

Thinking implies language.

Just plain incorrect. I will now present as much evidence for my statement as you presented for yours:

As you can see, it's a pretty ineffective technique and since you're starting from the overwhelming minority position, you're going to have to do a lot better.

Everything I'm saying here comes across as passive-aggressive childish bullshit, but in this case it's also true.

[Simon_says]

A lot of my thinking is pictorial. Are you saying I'm not thinking?

[lngnmn]

Yes, it is another kind of activity.

To ask "what animals are thinking" is exactly the same as to ask "what a self-driving car or a smartphone are thinking".

[Simon_says]

You're coming to this discussion with an unjustified assertion that thinking is very narrowly defined and then circularly showing that other kinds of things that neurons can do are not "thinking" because they don't fit the definition.

In the huge space of all possible kinds of cognition, humans have only ever occupied the tiniest sliver. There's modes of thought out there that we can't conceive of.

[psyc]

To ask "what is this mammal thinking" is self-evidently closer to asking "what is that mammal thinking" than it is to "what is that computer thinking".

[srtjstjsj]

Those are good questions with unknown answers. Another good question is "what people are thinking?"

[sgt101]

If a man is robbed of language by some misadventure, then is she robbed of thought?

[eighthnate]

> relative to abstract reasoning, like pattern recognition.

You mean like the patterns the puffer fish creates to attract mates?

https://youtu.be/yaPmYYWsixU

[srtjstjsj]

Can wind think?

https://www.google.com/search?q=sand+dune&source=lnms&tbm=is...

[eighthnate]

Does wind recognize the pattern? You are missing the part where the female fish see the pattern and decide whether to mate with the fish...

[eighthnate]

> Animals don't think, because thinking requires language and abstract brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve.

Animals certainly can think. And they have limited language, certainly not as complex as ours, but they are capable of communicating with each other.

Just because humans are much smarter doesn't mean animals don't think.

> Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.

Toddlers certainly think, though not on the same level as older children and adults. And certainly many animals like chimps, pigs and crows can think better than toddlers.

> Animals only feel.

If animals only felt and couldn't think, how can they think to use tools?

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-cro...

https://youtu.be/DDmCxUncIyc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals

https://youtu.be/5Cp7_In7f88

[EliRivers]

AH, you again. I think I recall you went off on a long thread about this not so long ago. You posit (without proof) that if a creature has no language, it cannot think, because only the parts of the brain that deal with language are capable of thinking.

There is a large amount of experimental evidence showing some animals planning for the future, imagining what other creatures will do based on what they have seen, making tools, saving tools for the future to deal with predicted future situations, solving puzzles they've never seen before (did they learn to solve puzzles they've never seen before from experience?), beating humans in gestalt tests, communicating via sign language (how about those animals? They communicate via sign language; do they think?), and various other things that by any sensible definition are the product of mental processes everyone else here considers "thought".

It seems that as far as you are concerned, "thinking" is defined as something to do with language. Everyone else is using a different definition. If you clearly explained your definition of "thinking", perhaps this will turn out to all be a misunderstanding and you're actually saying something completely different.

Simply stating over and over that without language there is no thought does not help your case, as everyone else here considers that to be trivially falsifiable by the animals they see doing things that must be the product of thought.

[sddfd]

It's quite convenient to think that, because we eat animals.

I'm not a vegetarian, I enjoy steak and pork chops a lot.

But I think animals, especially cows and pigs, are more conscious of their existence than we like to think.

I tend to agree that speech plays a central role in how our thoughts are organized, but I think the importance of being able to articulate oneself /with language/ as a measure of consciousness and intelligence is generally overestimated.

[tpeo]

I don't see how it would be "convenient", since it doesn't seem necessary that an animal be conscious for us to require ourselves to not harm it out of a moral concern.

Babies are either unconscious or have a very low degree of consciousness, but infanticide is still morally abhorrent.

[sddfd]

I agree that there is a moral aspect to eating sentient being, whether they are conscious or not.

Your argument, however, is mixing the aspects of consciousness, and cannibalism in the form of infanticide. To me, that doesn't seem to be fair.

[tpeo]

Hey, I didn't say anything about eating the baby! You're the one thinking about it. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.

What do you find unfair about the example?

[tpeo]

I find it funny that you're being downvoted to shit for holding an opinion which actually was quite common in the philosophy of mind, and which hasn't been quite yet superseded. Or at least I guess so, because nothing in philosophy ever really is.

The identification of thought (or rather reason) with language was explicitly advocated by Descartes in part V of the Discourse on the Method, where he suggested a test for distinguishing a perfect automaton from a human being. It's a view more often associated with him, but other early modern thinkers such as Locke, Leibniz and Kant made similar statements.

But in each case they were also more concerned with abstract thought, rather than just the general information processing that all animals do.

[_dps]

No one would have objected to a comment like: "One school of philosophy holds that thinking is inherently linguistic, so in that sense animals probably can't think."

People are objecting to the unsubstantiated, doctrinaire, insistence on this very narrow definition to the exclusion of all others, including the ones used by people who research animal cognition for a living.

I don't see why anyone should exclusively care what Descartes has to say about it when we have an additional 400 years of science after his death that suggests he didn't have the whole picture.

[weirdstuff]

I'm not really biased one way or the other on the upthread conversation, however I think you'll find the Descartes' thinking continues to underlie a great deal of what we call modern science (or more precisely: our defining interpretation of universal phenomenon) and many of the applications that come with that.

You can find great nuggets in modern work just as you can find great nuggets in older work, too. It's not that disposable!

[tpeo]

Why should they object to it, though? If an unsubstantiated claim can't be said to be anything other than an opinion, then it's just his opinion. Plus, it doesn't really matter whether he was being "doctrinaire" or not, because nothing was actually being imposed of me. I'm not being forced to subscribe to this view, I'm not being threatened (e.g. with getting a low grade, being fired, being burned at the stake). And I doubt he would have insisted in his view, too, if it weren't for the response it caused.

Furthermore, I don't believe anyone should exclusively care about Descartes' thought on the matter, whether in the light of contemporary science or not. I just tallied my thoughts as they came, really. But I do believe that there's a way to reply to comments which maximizes the likelihood of there being at least some degree of mutual understanding and which minimizes the likelihood of conflict, and that is to have a charitable, unassuming reading of the comment in question, and to not take offense. And that people should either have that, or not to discuss at all. Else, they might as well talk to the wind.

The whole exchange of comments we have in mind, for instance, was to little or no benefit to everyone involved, being little else than comments of "uh huh" and "nuh huh" back and forth.

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

OP literally started their comment with "No." and followed it up with 3–4 blanket assertions.

Slatestarcodex has a comment policy (http://slatestarcodex.com/comments/) that I think is very relevant here too because I think that's how people implicitly judge most comments—"If you make a comment here, it had better be either true and necessary, true and kind, or kind and necessary."

OP's statement was not 100% true so it should at least have been necessary / relevant AND kind / humbly put. It wasn't kind.

[tpeo]

I didn't say he was kind.

I am good to people who are good.

I am also good to people who are not good.

Because Virtue is goodness.

People should be thought as being free to speak their mind in whatever way it suits them. Not because they should, but because they will. And when the time comes, it's up to me whether to make an issue of it or not. And in so far as I know, I'd rather not.

[AsyncAwait]

It has nothing to do with being kind. It has a lot do do with contributing to the discussion with something useful. Just asserting things without any evidence is not useful and thus downvoted to make more room for more useful comments nearer where people would see them, that's all.

[lngnmn]

Exactly. Information processing is information processing, and thinking is a process which is based on a language.

Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc.

People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.

[tpeo]

Honestly, I don't think it's such of an issue. If there's a real difference between the kind of information processing that occurs within a cell from that which occurs within the brain, it doesn't really matter what it is called.

Of course, the language within any field matters to the practitioners in that field. Things can be as easy or as hard to understand as the strictness and clarity of the language in that field allows it. But what do I mean is that, if any expression in a field ever fell in to such a degree of obscurity as to be said to have "lost all meaning", whatever it described still might be independently rediscovered later on. So meaning isn't something that needs to be formulated into a categorical imperative, or otherwise we might lose it forever. Striving towards clarity and towards a discriminating usage of words is a practical rule, not a moral one.

Plus, arguing definitions is never a sound choice.

[gus_massa]

I'll post an article that is not a serious technical discussion, but I hope you enjoy it anyway because it has a very different perspective. It's a nice story and it is reposted every other year in HN. http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152131 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549320 )

[srtjstjsj]

Your ongoing mistake is that you are obsessed with a specific word choice "thinking", and not paying any attention to what the word represents.

[lngnmn]

I am using the definition from the times of Descartes. Perhaps I missed the moment when the word "thinking" began to refer to arbitrary cognitive processes.

I will try one more time.

The rules of logic require precise definitions (as best as we currently able to produce) and to follow the rule of substituting equal for equal only. The socially constructed memes cannot be substituted for definitions, no matter what hipsters would write in blog posts.

Thinking, as in "I think" or "I am" or how Descartes put it "I think therefore I am", is based on a language. Language is required for thinking and abstract thinking and reasoning. Language comes before the notion of "I". Before any abstractions.

Argumentation is quite straightforward. Human languages has been evolved together with related brain centers and this process took alot of time. There is a fundamental gap between association of sounds or cries with some sensory patterns and ability to say "I am". How long it took? Some primates are capable of learning very rudimentary sign language after years of rigorous training, but they are incapable of developing of (or even grasping) the notion of "I" on their own. Now you might see the gap.

I would argue that language comes prior to abstract reasoning and abstract thinking, and that they have been evolved together in a mutually recursive relationship. Think of the mutual recursion of #'eval and #"apply as the best example of mutual recursion I know.

Thinking, I would say, started with a primitive, rudimentary language and then related brain circuitry has been selected by evolution. Social evolution and biological evolution together.

One could see the very process of emergence of self-awareness and self-consciousness in babies as a gradual process parallel (or rather based on) language acquisition. The fundamental difference is, of course, that all necessary brain centers are already developed and encoded in DNA (but they are still has to be trained).

This line of arguments is for justifying and supporting the postulates of Descartes about fundamental difference between a human and an animal (creationist nonsense aside). To put it another way - there is not a single scientifically proven contradictions with his definitions.

I would spare you from a lecture on basic linguistics - there are much better figures in the field. The only reference I would like to make is to the postulate of Chomsky, that language acquisition is a process, similar to growing of an organ. So, the story about Evolution is applicable to a capacity as it is applicable to any organ or a subsystem.

So, thinking in its classic definition is the capacity based on a language. It is implemented in corresponding brain centers and related circuitry and is impossible as ability without underlying lower level machinery which takes long and unique path to evolve.

As far as we know, no species went to the same evolutionary pathway which humans did to evolve even a rudimentary natural language in linguistic sense (uniform, rule-governed, arbitrary composition).

So, animals cannot think the way humans do.

BTW, in this chain of reasoning I have demonstrated the kind of thinking no animal is capable of and, hopefully, why it is so.

[oh_sigh]

Why does thinking require language? Besides for you defining it as such.

Ancient Inuits may have said flying requires feathers.

[wetpaws]

I believe you never had a cat and did not have a chance to see them expressing complex abstract ideas like "let me out to the patio right now or else".

[coldtea]

Citation needed.

[lngnmn]

Philosophy 101.

[coldtea]

More like Tautology 101: Circular Reasoning.