On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 3:18 PM, Kerim Aydin <[email protected]> wrote: > I think that there's a past precedent or two it's important to consider > whom you can communicate to as part of "communication". For example, > code or slang (AGAINT) is only communication if the "Reasonable Agoran" > (or if things have to be really clear like rule changes, the Moron > in a Hurry) could understand it. omd might understand Lilly, but I'll > bet I'd have trouble...
But we *do* allow communication to use Agoran slang and terminology that would not be understandable to people who have not spent some time understanding Agora's ruleset and customs, not to mention communication in English which would not be understandable to the large percentage of the world that does not speak English without spending years learning the language. Similarly, we should allow communication using dogs' body language which is not understandable without spending some time understanding dogs. (Note that a translation service would be applicable in the cases of both English and dogs.) I also think ais523's distinction is too rigid: > So what about with dogs? I'd say that even though an average dog is much > more intelligent than the average plant, the way in which dogs > communicate with at least humans is reasonably primitive; the > communication doesn't acquire meaning throughout any sort of structured > language, but instead through observation of the context. > So I'd say that Lilly's communication is not capable of communicating > anything that's outside the experience of the human or other entity e's > communicating with. There's something lacking in this sort of > communication that seems to fail to meet the standard of R869; you can > potentially have independent thoughts, but you can't communicate them > until someone else has the same thought. It is true that a human has much greater ability to convey an arbitrary, previously unexperienced combination of ideas using words than a dog, but it's not like humans are perfect on this front either - it would be very difficult for me to put into words everything I feel during strongly emotional experiences and discussions, and a lot of our communication of these ideas ends up happening via body language, similar to dogs. It would be better communication if it weren't body language, e.g. if a psychic organism directly copied the feeling to another's brain, or an AI dumped its emotional state to disk, but we can't do that. Also, of course, we are much better at understanding all ideas when we have already experienced the same or similar. So it's a spectrum, not black and white. And I think relegating "complex enough to convey ideas via combining smaller ideas" to dolphins is uncharitable to the range of concepts that dogs can combine between various types of body language and pre-established codes (analogous to human languages). (I'm not saying that dogs are magically as intelligent as dolphins, just criticizing the judge's characterization.) And I think it's too much to read into "freely originating and communicating independent thoughts and ideas". Or perhaps too little - if the ability to express previously unexpressed ideas (the ROBOT9000 rule?) is the core of the question, then it can easily be satisfied by a computer program which can express very complicated and previously unheard of concepts, albeit limited to a specific domain. For an example, look at the theorems that any automatic proof system can come up with. Then again, I'm not sure what the exact standard should be... I just think a dog probably satisfies it.
