A chimp can think how to get a banana when it sees the banana, or is hungry and remembers where bananas are, or some such. Whereas I can lie there and ponder something as remote as Mars colonization, like all day long! Maybe that’s because, when a chimpanzee’s quite advanced mind sees the banana, it tries to predict the world where it gets the banana and uses all it’s world-modeling power to come up with a coherent prediction of it. But it’s stable only for as long as there’s some stimulus related to banana, once there’s no such stimulus the loop becomes unstable—the upper layers of the model trying to predict the world where the chimp gets the banana, but the lower levels report back that, well, no banana around, so after a while it dies out.
What’s the evidence for this claim? As best I can tell we don’t have any strong reason to believe chimps don’t sit around daydreaming about bananas when they are not otherwise occupied.
Yeah that’s a great question. In my reasoning absence of evidence is the evidence of absence, but admittedly a weak one. Theoretically I imagine you can run an experiment to test this, something like—present a chimpanzee with a very difficult but solvable task, let it have maybe one go to figure out how things work, then take the task away. Then let it have another try after some time, repeat (eta: with new chimpanzees or tasks), measure success as a function of time. I’m not saying it’s a great experiment design, just that “spends resting hours on solving problems” is an externally observable quality. If there’s any real evidence they do, I’ll be the first to admit that part is not correct, and it was just a guess to begin with.
What’s the evidence for this claim? As best I can tell we don’t have any strong reason to believe chimps don’t sit around daydreaming about bananas when they are not otherwise occupied.
Yeah that’s a great question. In my reasoning absence of evidence is the evidence of absence, but admittedly a weak one. Theoretically I imagine you can run an experiment to test this, something like—present a chimpanzee with a very difficult but solvable task, let it have maybe one go to figure out how things work, then take the task away. Then let it have another try after some time, repeat (eta: with new chimpanzees or tasks), measure success as a function of time. I’m not saying it’s a great experiment design, just that “spends resting hours on solving problems” is an externally observable quality. If there’s any real evidence they do, I’ll be the first to admit that part is not correct, and it was just a guess to begin with.