Agreed, but the observation that others animals have some sort of self-awareness is (historically speaking) relatively new, especially to a popular audience. Tons of ink has been spilled in previous centuries about how we’re unique creatures, first from a god centric POV and then from a enlightenment POV. Of course, the view looks entirely different from a Dharmic perspective (Buddhism, Hinduism, or the like). There are still people in the west who buy that human beings are unique because we’re made in gods image. I’d say if there is something unique about us, it’s our ability to abstract the world (I think it was either Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman who noted that stories are a very human endeavor). Of course, we can’t know if that’s true.
I like that!
Well, the definitions are assumed – but they are pretty easy to understand. A wave is a phenomenon of any sort that goes from a maximum to a minimum (in time, space, or both) in a regular fashion. A sound wave is air pressure that follows that description. A field is a phenomenon that varies from point to point in space (and may vary in time). Air pressure in a concert hall for example can be described as a pressure field.
Of course it would be clumsy to say all that every time, so they say “wave” and “field” instead.
But then you get down to quantum levels and the phenomena that’s being described gets kind of nebulous. An electron wave? Probability field? It’s hard to picture or describe adequately.
Top-hole. Bally Jerry, pranged his kite right in the how’s-your-father; hairy blighter, dicky-birded, feathered back on his sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harpers and caught his can in the Bertie.
They also work GREAT for ice cream portion control.
There is no spoon.
I would call that a hypothesis, one that may or may not be born out by an eventual testable scientific theory.
Of course, but the point is that they definitions assumed by other physicists are not the usual colloquial definitions. And anyone who tries to use the colloquial definitions to understand regimes where they don’t apply will get it wrong. I believe this is what is happening in the linked article. I would be… inordinately surprised if the person who wrote it had ever encountered and understood the Church-Turing thesis; Shannon entropy and other mathematical definitions of information and bits; or the relationships among information theory, probability theory, and Bayesian inference (aka “learning”).
Similarly, if someone like von Neumann (who died in 1957) compared the brain to (or identified it as) a computer, and its operation to algorithms/information processing, I have to assume he did not mean “a computer the way a layperson thinks of the term, with the kinds of architectures human designers use.” After all, over the course of his career, “computers” went from being humans with particular job descriptions to room-sized contraptions with lots of vacuum tubes. He helped create that transition, and envisioned other exotic architectures that to this day have never been implemented AFAIK.
Not yet anyway.
Nova Science Now had this great segment on animal intelligence that suggests to me at least that they’re capable of limited abstraction…
It seems like each time we assume a qualitative difference between us and other animals, it eventually turns out to be merely quantitative. Obviously we can do things no other animal can, but I’m skeptical it’s a fundamental difference. For example, we could postulate aliens able to acomplish feats of thought well beyond us, but Occam’s Razor would suggest first ruling out that they’re merely smarter before we work with the hypothesis that they’re smart in a different way, even though we’d have to be open to the latter possibility.
Just my inexpert 2¢ 
Ah! It’s not surprising that some people are working on this question.
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