Yes it seems like we can 'count" something like 5 objects without thinking
(e.g. I think we can remember about five digits at a time without effort),
and this apaprently isn't anything special to humans.
However, some plants only flower every 13 or 17 (or another prime number)
of years!
So plants can count higher than animals.
:-)
On 9 April 2014 00:57, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>
> On 08 Apr 2014, at 02:20, LizR wrote:
>
> On 7 April 2014 17:20, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> On 4/6/2014 9:14 PM, LizR wrote:
>>
>> Interesting. That seems like quite a complicated thing in itself. I don't
>> know if crows would have the abstract idea of counting, or if they had to
>> do it some other way ("we've had the guy with the hat, the short one, the
>> one with glasses, the other one with glasses ... hm, maybe there's some way
>> I could lump those together somehow... did we have the one with the tweed
>> jacket yet?")
>>
>> As I recall they tried changing jackets and hats, etc, in order to make
>> sure it was counting. Of course the crows probably weren't subvocalizing
>> "one", "two", "three",... like a human would.
>>
>
> Really? Good, that would certainly help to eliminate the idea that the
> crows recognised each human individually.
>
> PS Obviously I don't assume they use words for the numbers! (Or anything
> of that sort.) But I believe there is an idea that animals (and people)
> have a built-in ability to "count automatically" to some small number in a
> languge- (and knowledge-of-maths-) independent way. This wouldn't
> necessarily indicate general purpose intelligence though.
>
>
> Many animals seem to be able to recognize five objects (and less) from
> more. Such test have been done on human too, and it seems the same applies,
> that is human can recognize directly 5 objects, without counting or
> grouping the objects. Above 5, we seem to need to see some group of less
> objects and to do some counting. Now, I read above this a long time ago, so
> perhaps we know better today.
> I heard also about a bird stopping the singing when 17 fellow birds sing
> in the forest, but it might only measure some sound intensity.
> Some brain anatomy, and brain deficiencies, suggests that numbers have a
> particular treatment in the brain, with a large zone dedicated to them, and
> different from the zone handling information on letters and words.
> Apparently, some people can lose all ability to read and talk, and can
> still compute, and vice versa. I ask myself if someone can use combinators
> or a universal computing system when loosing their "word processing"
> abilities. I guess that is hard to test. They will probably loose the
> ability to learn a new universal programming language.
>
> Bruno
>
>
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>
>
>
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