[extropy-chat] Crows Invent Machine

[Ian Goddard]

Regarding this most amazing report:

http://www.pbs.org/lifeofbirds/brain/

*****************************************************
"Carrion crows and humans line up patiently, waiting
for the traffic to halt.

When the lights change, the birds hop in front of the
cars and place walnuts, which they picked from the
adjoining trees, on the road. After the lights turn
green again, the birds fly away and vehicles drive
over the nuts, cracking them open. Finally, when it's
time to cross again, the crows join the pedestrians
and pick up their meal.

If the cars miss the nuts, the birds sometimes hop
back and put them somewhere else on the road. Or they
sit on electricity wires and drop them in front of
vehicles.

[...] The crows in Japan have only been cracking nuts
this way since about 1990. They have since been seen
doing it in California."
*****************************************************


let me propose this

ARGUMENT: the example above constitutes the use and
*invention* of a machine by crows. The machine is a
function M that accepts the input of a properly placed
nut n that is then processed by the weight of rolling
automobile tires into the target output M(n) of a
cracked-open nut. Crows not only use this machine but
they invented it assuming that the invention of
machine X need only constitute its original conception
and comprehension followed by physical proof that
input y does in fact yield the target output X(y). I
believe the crows have satisfied those criteria of
machine invention. 

The proposition of invention may seem a stretch given
that the crows did not manufacture any cogs in their
nut-cracking machine. However, the crow's intentional
manipulation of physical objects (nuts) into a proper
physical relationship with automobile traffic
*transforms* a set of entities (road, people, and
cars) into cogs in a nut-cracking machine. When a
human builds a machine they do the same: by physical
manipulation they *transform* one set of objects into
a set of objects that produce a target output.

In fact, the raw and stunning intellectual power of
the action of crows reported above is that in one fell
swoop, the human driver is transformed into a cog in a
nut-cracking machine. So the crows have physically
built a nut-cracking machine that subordinates humans
to mechanical cogs. But a beautiful feature of this
ingenious machine is that it does not interfere with
the driver's own target output of transportation, in
fact drivers can enjoy knowing that they're both
getting where they want to go AND helping to feed
hungry birds. As for the automobiles, the crow's
manipulation transforms them from being cogs in one
machine into cogs in two machines, the first of human
intention that outputs transportation for humans and
the second of crow intention that outputs cracked nuts
for crows. ~Ian  


http://IanGoddard.net

"No proposition can make a statement about itself,
because a propositional sign cannot be contained in
itself (that is the whole of the 'theory of types')."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein   

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