Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:

Hobbes' Choice wrote:I have spoken my last.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent".....Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Wanker. You ought to heed this yourslef.
Choke on a sprout!

Hobbes. You blundered into a topic outside of your expertise and made a fool of yourself. Cloaking your ignorance behind a veil of incivility will only serve to make you look even more foolish. Next time I suggest you acquaint yourself with a few facts to accompany your stridently expressed opinions.

Hobbes' Choice wrote:

Dubious wrote: Not ONE article I ever read says what you said. The opposite is true. Cannibalism is extremely rare among crows.

Care to cite that?

Why ask me. Can't you google it yourself and learn in the process? And what does it really matter what ANYONE says since you're the kind who will ONLY acknowledge their 'opinion' and no other!

Anyways, you asked for citations. Here are three mentioning cannibalism as essentially non-existent within general information about crows. But even these are only incidental to having read many more articles about crows that never mention cannibalism as being one of the common traits you describe. What's rarely been observed in crow behavior hardly seems worth mentioning in these write-ups.

http://www.crows.net/mjw.html
http://www.mi-reporter.com/news/255359471.html
https://corvidresearch.wordpress.com/20 ... heir-dead/

So what's the source of your information? That you saw a crow or two eating another crow which would be unusual but not beyond possibility? It's quite reasonable to think that among creatures as intelligent as crows there are anomalies consisting of the Jeffrey Dahmer type. To generalize the exception would make the assumption that everyone with a freezer is storing human body parts for future consumption.

I'm not really into birds as much as Leo but something you ironically mentioned makes them super interesting "Cleverness, and with such a small brain!". YES! The ratio of size to intelligence is truly amazing in birds. Maybe this is the biological equivalent of "Spooky action at a distance"? It also begs the question whether dinosaurs were really as stupid as they're made out to be. It also endorses the conclusion that the human brain, considering its size, may actually be a function of the Law of Diminishing returns.

You've been most helpful in providing an example!

Dubious. You mention brain size in your post and relate it to intelligence. Whilst brain size is generally relevant to intelligence there are two other factors which are seen to be of even greater relevance. The first is brain structural complexity which is very high in birds and especially high in the corvids and parrots. This refers to the different types of brain structures and how they work together to orchestrate cognition. Since this is a science which is still in its infancy in the case of human neuroscience it is unsurprising that very little is known about how birds actually think, let alone what they might think. The second important factor in overall intelligence is brain/body mass ratio and according to this metric corvids rank second only to humans in the animal world, ahead of both the cetaceans and great apes.

I think it's not unreasonable to assume that many of the dinosaurs may have been quite a bit smarter than they're generally given credit for, although their cognition may not have been as centrally processed as it is in the modern era. The bigger herbivores are suspected to have had sub-brains to co-ordinate their huge body mass. However the carnivores could well have been at least as smart as many of the modern era, especially those which had evolved socially interactive behaviour, such as the velociraptors, a branch of which may well have split off to lead to the evolution of modern birds.

The modern octopodes are also a highly intelligent order of cephalapod molluscs which make use of decentralised cognition, although almost nothing is known of how such cognitive systems operate.

Obvious Leo wrote:How do birds know what time of year to build their nests if they have no sense of time? Do they learn that from humans too?

Obvoiusly, Leo, birds do not have a printed calendar that tells them it is time to build their nests nor do they require a timepiece to tell/remind them of time. These activities are not referred to as "time" but rather their "instinct" on the collective level, i.e. all the same species of birds act as a collective unit which has been passed on far longer than our own "time" activities. When breeding time arrives, often in spring time, (Nature's variable clock dependent on the weather/seasonal variations), then that collective moves accordingly to that species needs.

This is hu'man observations that we have named in our language, "time", but not subject to needing a name but rather an awareness of changes that are the basis of the Natural world.

Why do you make a distinction between changes in the physical world and the passage of time?

"Time is what clocks measure".....Albert Einstein.

Specifically clocks measure the speed at which changes in a physical system take place and in my view to equate the rate of change in a physical system with the speed at which time passes is a perfectly natural and intuitive thing to do, which is why all species do it. How we measure such a rate of change is not germane to the point, but the truly insightful truth which Einstein gave to the world is that time does not pass at a constant speed and this is a truth which runs counter to our intuition. In General Relativity Einstein showed us that the speed at which time passes is determined by gravity. We tend to automatically assume that time must pass at the same speed for everybody but in fact this intuitive assumption is false and has many times been empirically demonstrated to be false. We have good reason to be grateful for the fact that this assumption is false because it is the fact that time passes more quickly at our heads than it does at our feet which holds us to the surface of the earth.

Obvious Leo wrote:Why do you make a distinction between changes in the physical world and the passage of time?

It is without doubt hu'mans are the sole species who speaks about time relative to how we measure it, talk about it and run our lives by the very measurement we ourselves have devised. Is there any proof any other life we share this planet with shows a concern with time as hu'mans do?

Obvious Leo wrote:Specifically clocks measure the speed at which changes in a physical system take place and in my view to equate the rate of change in a physical system with the speed at which time passes is a perfectly natural and intuitive thing to do, which is why all species do it. How we measure such a rate of change is not germane to the point, but the truly insightful truth which Einstein gave to the world is that time does not pass at a constant speed and this is a truth which runs counter to our intuition. In General Relativity Einstein showed us that the speed at which time passes is determined by gravity.

Obvious Leo wrote:We tend to automatically assume that time must pass at the same speed for everybody but in fact this intuitive assumption is false and has many times been empirically demonstrated to be false.

If this is Truth and not merely a Fact based upon observational testings, then does this not reaffirm what I have been attempting to convey to you throughout these posts? If Albert's observations do conclude that time does not pass the same for everybody, why wouldn't that same proposition not include every other form of life? Each and every life has their own measurement of life according to it's necessity. That necessity has never included a device created by any other life form other than our ability to make timepieces that we have come to rely on down that demonstrates our life/ability down to a fractional second.

Why is that? Other life has survived far, far longer than hu'manity, being (arguably) the youngest life on the planet. Life has the ability to live in the "Now", a state of mind that does not dwell in the past or fret about the future as our species constantly battles with. Living in the Now is the most natural way to live.

Obvious Leo wrote:We have good reason to be grateful for the fact that this assumption is false because it is the fact that time passes more quickly at our heads than it does at our feet which holds us to the surface of the earth.

Grateful you say? Why the insistence and reliance in our time keeping devices? If "time passes more quickly at our heads than it does at our feet", who is to say what time is?

mtmynd1 wrote: It is without doubt hu'mans are the sole species who speaks about time relative to how we measure it, talk about it and run our lives by the very measurement we ourselves have devised.

This is a completely useless statement because the human ability to measure time in the way we now do is a very recent development in human history. Prior to the invention of clocks we measured time in exactly the same way as any other animal does, namely by observing the natural changes in our external environment.

mtmynd1 wrote:If this is Truth and not merely a Fact based upon observational testings,

Truth is not relevant to the philosophical discourse since inductive reasoning from observational data is all that a human mind is capable of doing.

mtmynd1 wrote:If Albert's observations do conclude that time does not pass the same for everybody, why wouldn't that same proposition not include every other form of life?

It does.

mtmynd1 wrote: Living in the Now is the most natural way to live.

It's also the only possible way to live since the past no longer exists and the future is yet to exist. The nature of mind is such that data from past events can be recalled and used to make probabilistic predictions about future events. Therefore the evolution of mind was a mandated outcome of the evolutionary process because such an ability inevitably confers survival value on the host organism. This also means that minds must have an evolutionary trajectory of their own and must invariably evolve from the simple to the complex. This is not rocket science, and it's something which any biology student would be expected to understand, but it is nevertheless of interest to philosophers because it effectively means that our physical bodies are little more than vessels which have evolved to house our minds.

mtmynd1 wrote: If "time passes more quickly at our heads than it does at our feet", who is to say what time is?

Physics is clearly not your gig. What Einstein showed in General Relativity is that time and gravity are two different ways of expressing the same physical phenomenon, namely the rate of change in physical processes. This is not a trivial unification of concepts.