(January 19, 2013 at 8:13 pm)Violet Lilly Blossom Wrote: *yawns* No they don't. No animal has any 'choice-making' ability whatsoever. The biological machine will function as it is designed, or it shall cease to function.
Even should one pretend to entertain that free will exists: *there is no such being as an 'informed' choice.* The brain presumes itself mighty, and will forever be wrong in its knowledge.
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And don't go calling it 'decision-making skills': assuming the same scenario is repeated over and over again, there will be absolutely zero change in the output, results, and actions of the machine. You are not greater than a dog because of a myth... instead you have greater functions than it in certain areas, and it far exceeds yours in others.
If the common dog could communicate adequately with the humans, you would find you were not so different at all. You share a majority of the building blocks that make you with those same dogs you insult. That they can sniff your smelly self coming from a mile away is itself an incredible trait, and one you do not posses. They don't *need* advanced linguistic ability to propagate and succeed in their tiny world, the individually weak humans rely upon this. And this group-strength is what will propel your kind into space.
Even the Silicoid are worms (literally) in the grand scope of the cosmos. Other galaxies are far older with significantly more observant species... and yet for all they like to know: they have yet to exceed the grandios perception of the worm.
The only thing I really have to complain about in your post: "the individually weak humans rely upon this. And this group-strength is what will propel your kind into space." You mean our kind. You're a human, too. Live with it.
In technicality, humanity shares its origins with many other races, way on down to the common germ. DNA is a wonderful thing to read, and we share a common ancestry with, well, everything to an ultimate extent. But the interesting thing is those little deviations; how amazing that the smallest thing can return such a huge difference. We are 1% different from chimps yet the obvious differences are manifold. We are very smiliar...and yet we are not. The average difference between two human beings on a genetic level are microscopic yet we can be at least superficially very different.
However, there IS actually such a thing as informed choice. Human arrogance, the belief they know right and cannot be wrong is a dandy little stereotype except for how blatantly inaccurate it is. After all, how jarring it was to be brought up thinking the earth was a few millenia old, and then to learn that there had been discoveries that put the age much older. The informed decision was made after more study. I had been wrong...and I altered my thinking. Should further information be disseminated and made available to me to show that my current stance is wrong, I shall strive to understand how it shows I am wrong, and I will adapt. I could have chosen to continue to believe, blissfully, arrogantly, that MY views were right, and that there could have been no way I was wrong, except I did not. Because I was informed otherwise. This is the very definition of informed choice. And a dog cannot have informed choice...because it cannot be informed.
s you pointed out, it lacks the ability to communicate, at least with us, and as such it cannot be informed of anything. It can understand simple concepts: Loyalty begets food, ergo loyalty = favorable. Does this same thing apply to me? No. Loyalty to the church I once attended would beget social acceptance which could assist me financially or in other ways. Ergo loyalty = good, right? Yet I left it because I wanted to see what else there was outside of their narrow views, and suffered for it accordingly, something I had known would happen anyway. I was informed of this choice, and I did not simply fall into "do what is best for survival," I did what was best for my learning of the world, even if it pans out to nothing. If, as you put it, the machine kept spitting out the same results, there would be no divergence in human opinion and interaction, yet it changes all the time for any number of reasons. The ability to make an informed choice is a result of biology...but it is there, even if it is just a product of communication.
It WOULD be pretty interesting if animals could communicate, all this considered. If informed consent is just a product of communication and little else...
Gah. I can't keep my thoughts going in a straight line. ABORT ABORT ABORT, EMERGENCY THOUGHT PATTERN TERMINATION!
