Can we know what animals are thinking? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.economist.com/can-we-know-what-animals-are-thinking-83991bc994c4 <comment><USER2> Our biggest problem which has not been solved yet is human inability to ask questions in non-anthropocentric way. For example, when we investigate self- awareness in dolphins we use mirrors (by the way, one recent project failed to replicate the much cited and discussed mirror self-recognition study). We are visual species, dolphins are not, many live in very murky waters with limited visibility.Why are they expected to pass mirror self-recognition test? Can we measure self-recognition without mirrors?

It is even worse with cetacean signals. Their system is nothing like human language; to begin with, it is very fast, it is so fast that dolphins could distinguish separate clicks in a sound that consists of 100s clicks which we perceive as one continuous "squeaky door" sound. Then they have 2 areas in their brain associated with auditory processing (unlike in humans and other mammals that have just one). [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150707082344.htm)

On top of that, small corpus callosum means that two hemispheres are more independent in dolphins than they are in humans. This should have at least some effect on how they "think".Finally, "seeing" world through sound, and being able to make 2 (maybe even more) sounds at once independently only adds to the "alien" complexity of cetacean species.

Anyone who has seen a spectrogram of a dolphin pod vocalizing will testify: they rarely shut up! There is a constant chatter going on, apart from echolocation. It must have some meaning, evolution would not tolerate such waste of energy for nothing.We have been investigating dolphins cognition and communication since 1960s, we still do not know what they "think" or "say" and it could be partially due to our tendency to compare them to us, expecting something similar.

<comment><USER3> Reminds me of a similar test with dogs. By default, they didn't do well at the mirror test, but then scientists wondered whether they were simply more focused on smell rather than sight. So they came up with a smell based version of the same test, which the dogs passed.

[http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the- test...](http://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-dogs-pass-the-test-of- consciousness)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> _" No animals have all the attributes of human minds; but almost all the attributes of human minds are found in some animal or other"_

This was a fun read in general, but I think it's particularly interesting to consider some of its implications in the context of trends in AI (to be clear, the article has nothing to do with AI).

I think the excerpt above is rapidly becoming true for current generation ML/AI systems (I'm leaving aside the question of qualia [0], since we are still unclear how to evaluate that question even for animals).

To the extent the above becomes true, I think it's an interesting contrast to the implied point behind Dijkstra's famous "swimming submarine" analogy:

 _" The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim."_

The submarine "swims", but almost none of that activity could be mapped onto how a human swims. As the structure of ML/AI systems starts to mimic what we believe we know about the neuroscience of the brain, the question of whether machines are "thinking", and what that might mean about thought in general, is very interesting.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

<comment><USER4> The question, to me, is whether machines will ever have consciousness, or whether consciousness is just "what it feels like to have a cortex". We assume that machines will have consciousness some day, but what if we had a machine that could do many things as well as a human, but didn't consider itself "alive"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is closely connected to the question of qualia, and the concept of a "philosophical zombie" [0].

On the one hand, naive human intuition seems to suggest that the "movie playing in your head" would not emerge from _any_ number of transistors and wires connected to each other.

On the other hand, it's not clear how you can argue that what goes on in our own heads is physically any different. So that leads you either to religion, or to the idea that somehow consciousness has to emerge from interactions of matter. And if that's the case, it raises all sorts of ethical questions about the creation of artifacts that might (some day) exhibit consciousness. And, of course, there are already many ethical questions about how we treat animals in the here-and-now.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)

<comment><USER5> Why does consciousness have to emerge? Why can't it be intrinsic?

<comment><USER4> Intrinsic to what? Individual molecules don't have consciousness, a group of them forming a brain does. It has to emerge at some point.

<comment><USER5> How do you know an individual molecule doesn't have consciousness?

<comment><USER6> There's no observable effects to distinguish conscious and unconscious molecule. Having a definition that can't be used for experimental validation is not useful.

<comment><USER5> There's no observable evidence for an internal experience in humans either. Each person just extrapolates that belief from their own consciousness. That is what got us into the silly position that animals don't possess consciousness in the first place.

<comment><USER6> We can talk for hours about consciousness in the sense "what it is like to be bacterium", and it will lead us nowhere, or, better to say, it will lead us all over the place. Ask different philosophers.

On the other hand we can agree that we can sufficiently easily distinguish conscious and unconscious human, dog or other mammal. From here we can study which parts of a brain participate in conscious activities, and maybe generalize it for species further away from us.

<comment><USER5> Part of the problem here is conflating terms.

I define consciousness as the property of having an internal experience.

It would be better to describe someone "unconscious" as unresponsive. You don't know that they are not having an internal experience at that moment in time. Even if they told you later that they weren't having an internal experience, that only tells you that they have no _memory_ an internal experience, it does not prove that no such experience occurred.

I quit pursuing philosophy as an academic matter when I realized that these sorts of conflations are at the root of most philosophical debates. In fact, I'll go ahead and state that the single most contested subject in modern philosophy is the definition of the word "is".

<comment><USER7> Yes, using natural language, even "formal" natural language to philosophise is like using a mallet for brain surgery.

And we don't have anything better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Every day walking though the stables I give the ponies some mints. I am fairly certain judging from their behaviors that when they see me they are thinking 'Mints!'.

One day, when I found the dog looking excitedly down a drain I said 'Rats!'. Now if I say 'Rats?' she goes and looks. I know she is thinking - 'I lost a rat down there once and I'd desperately love to make its acquaintance again'.

I do not think that there is much difference between the way we and other animals think. We get confused in the same way and even subconscious things like 'infectious yawn' see to pass freely to the horse and the dog and back to me. Some people have a hard time accepting that animals do think and whereas I recognize the easy peril of anthropomorphising subjects - I also suspect a political unwillingness and discomfiture in accepting animal intelligence.

</comment><comment><USER9> While the particularities may be interesting, much of what's said isn't surprising (though for Cartesians, it may be, and the author does throw Descartes' name around a few times). There is a great deal of confusion about this subject and a number of philosophical errors in the comments (w.r.t. language, religion, qualia, zombies, etc). For those who do want some perspective, I recommend starting with Feser's introductory book "Philosophy of Mind" [0] as well as a series of blog posts he's written on the subject (such as [1] and [2], as well as a blog post with a long list of links on the subject and related subjects [3]).

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward- Fes...](https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Beginners-Guide-Edward- Feser/dp/1851684786)

[1] [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls- part-i....](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/04/animal-souls-part-i.html)

[2] [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are- consciou...](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/08/animals-are-conscious-in- other-news-sky.html)

[3] [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem- ro...](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/05/mind-body-problem-roundup.html)

<comment><USER10> Boy there is a lot in Feser's work to unpack. I haven't gotten through all of the links you posted yet, but the crux of his argument (and evidently the argument Thomists make) is that humans are different because we are capable of abstract reasoning and logic whereas animals are not. Do you suppose animals really are not capable of these two mental faculties? Abstraction seems more difficult to dissect but it does not seem too farfetched to imagine that animals are capable of making future plans based on an understanding of cause and effect. Don't you think that implies some level of logical reasoning? I know Feser's views are not necessarily indicative of your own but I would appreciate your opinion

<comment><USER11> Didn't Alex the parrot[0] prove that at least one animal is capable of abstraction? He could identify by type specific objects he'd never seen before and make distinctions based on color or amount.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_\(parrot\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I know what my cat is thinking. He's plotting to sell me to the cat food factory.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think. To claim that animals do not think has no basis outside of our own condescending perspective. If we cannot prove one way or another then I feel my position is the more rational and should be the default position.

<comment><USER14> >I think the more rational position would be that animals do think, as we are animals, and we think.

        *x* can *y*, as *z* is a subset of *x*, and *z* can *y*.

See the issue here?

<comment><USER13> I never said my position was logical, just rational so far as it's based on my limited subjective reasoning.

<comment><USER15> Some animal don't have a nervous system [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sponge) and some have a system that is extremely simple [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planarian) . Saying that they can "think" is extending the concept too much, and will not be a useful concept.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would always recommend _Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?_ by _Frans de Waal_, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart- en...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30192493-are-we-smart-enough-to- know-how-smart-animals-are)

</comment><comment><USER17> What is the question you want to ask? I think this is a bigger question than it presents here. We don't really know what is thoughts actually, what is the actual representation of it. If we don't even know what we trying to study, the conclusion might be pretty useless.

<comment><USER18> Another example: we ask whether animals are 'conscious' or not, or we declare _ex cathedra_ that certain animals _are_ conscious, all the while without being able to explain what consciousness is, or what qualia are, or how these work.

If we could then we'd know if the question made sense.

I like David Deutsch's criterion for assessing claims about these issues: if you can't program it, you haven't understood it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J21QuHrIqXg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's a sci-fi-ish short story in The Mind's I ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mind%27s_I)) about a robot which scuttles around, when stroked it glows, then when it is hurt it mewls and flashes its lights, and so on. It's meant to question whether we can really know what any other animal is thinking (the machine is supposedly programmed like a regular computer, so we know it has no real feelings).

Of course this applies to robots, but not necessarily to animals, where we know they are constructed similarly to ourselves and so likely have feelings similar to ours although there are questions to what degree.

It's actually online here: [https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of- ma...](https://themindi.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/chapter-8-soul-of-mark-iii- beast.html)

<comment><USER20> Basically the animal analog of the turing test?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone who isn't a vegetarian (and who feels guilty eating bacon if I start thinking about it too much), I can't help but to wonder if eating meat will be considered the "barbaric" practice of this generation for future generations. I'm sure previous generations didn't consider their barbaric practices to be such at the time.

<comment><USER22> I find that being a vegetarian for moral reasons is quite delusional.

We, humans, are inflicting much more suffering to flora and fauna by the simple fact of participating in the industrial modern lifestyle. Buying food at the supermarket, using the internet, travelling, AC, and pretty much any activity we can think of.

The underlying problem is that to sustain 7+ billion people we need industrialisation which requires massive amounts of resources (energy, land, minerals, etc). The modern lifestyle doesn't help either.

<comment><USER23> Well except that meat is a much larger factor in global warming than anything else in our diet. You can't just choose to not participate in modern industrial life, but you can easily choose to not eat meat.

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/21/eat- less...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/21/eat-less-meat- vegetarianism-dangerous-global-warming)

<comment><USER24> > You can't just choose to not participate in modern industrial life

Why not? Try to not be part of the throwaway culture, avoid falling for gimmicks and new toys and try to build a environmental Friendly lifestyle. It's not perfect but it's perfectly possible to escape the modern lifestyle to a huge degree

<comment><USER25> Why not? Because while a small number of individuals can make the choice, humanity as a whole can not. We can certainly reduce needless waste, but without industrial food production most of the planet would quickly starve, and that's not an acceptable option. We don't need to like the situation, but there are simply too many people to make non-industrial production of food and other material needs possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> For some reason I am reminded of this section from Sam Harris's _Waking Up_ :

 _See if you can stop thinking for the next sixty seconds. You can notice your breath, or listen to the birds, but do not let your attention be carried away by thought, any thought, even for an instant. Put down this book, and give it a try.

Some of you will be so distracted by thought as to imagine that you succeeded. In fact, beginning meditators often think that they are able to concentrate on a single object, such as the breath, for minutes at a time, only to report after days or weeks of intensive practice that their attention is now carried away by thought every few seconds. This is actually progress. It takes a certain degree of concentration to even notice how distracted you are. Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought._

The vast majority of us do not even know what _we_ are thinking. I'm not sure there's much correlation with intelligence, either. If this sounds absurd to you, I can only recommend you try out meditation for a while until you see how disconcertingly true it is.

One day I hope the Economist publishes:

 _Can we know what we are thinking?

The inner lives of our species may be a lot richer than science once thought_

<comment><USER27> It is quite shocking to realize that we're not the owners of the thoughts inside our mind, even the thoughts beginning with _" I"_ ( _" I'm stupid", "Oh shit I will be late!", "I hate this fucking job!"_, etc).

We identify with these thoughts, believing we are their originator, but it's the biggest illusion of all.

<comment><USER28> Are you referring to bicameralism?

<comment><USER27> I'm only referring to my own experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What if, on the outside, thinking is a unitary process, similar to (but not the same as) processes in quantum mechanics. When you observe a _result_ (of someone's mental process; e.g. the dog ended up biting you), you could say "oh, I know what you were thinking", but all you know is in fact the _current state_ of their mind, and, just like in a quantum mechanics, that state will persist (the dog will keep trying to bite you) unless you give it (the process) some time to become unitary again. After that, a new observation may yield a different result.

</comment><comment><USER30> Whenever this topic arises, a subset of comments are devoted to differing definitions of 'consciousness'. Here, you can find definitions as diverse as 'only entities capable of language are conscious' and 'any entity that reacts to its environment is conscious'.

This is not very helpful - note that neither of the above definitions tell us anything useful about consciousness; if anything, they are ways to avoid discussing the issues that we don't have answers to.

I think it is more helpful to put aside the definition of consciousness, and begin by regarding 'awareness' as a continuum, though one that displays some significant qualitative differences across its breadth, such as:

Entities that have hard-wired responses to their environment.

Entities that can learn responses.

Entities that have some sort of internal model of their environment.

Entities whose models include themselves.

Entities that are aware of their own models, at least to some degree.

Entities that believe others have the same capability (i.e. having a theory of mind).

Entities that can communicate their models to similarly-capable others.

A continuum is probably simplistic (though still useful), given that recent experiments seem to be showing species capable of a mix of the above responses, depending on circumstances.

The idea of a continuum seems consistent with evolution: To me, it seems unlikely that, for example, language popped into existence, fully-formed, in one species, but there is a gap in the record: there does not seem to be a living species demonstrating the transition to the level of awareness that distinguishes humans from chimpanzees.

</comment><comment><USER18> _> Chaser, a border collie, knows over 1,000 words. She can pull a named toy from a pile of other toys. This shows that she understands that an acoustical pattern stands for a physical object._

I don't think it quite shows this. Collies and human toddlers use words (and are used by words) without understanding what they're doing or what the meaning of language is. The understanding comes later, growing over time as we attempt to explain our behaviour to ourselves. (Including reading what other people have to say about language.)

<comment><USER31> You are confusing different meanings of the word "understanding" here. I am sure you too understand many things intuitively that you don't understand in a reflected way.

<comment><USER18> Here is the sense I mean to convey. When a fridge light comes on, does the fridge 'understand' anything? Does it know anything? No, the process is just automatic.

Objects such as books can _contain_ knowledge without understanding anything because they don't have minds. The design of the fridge embodies knowledge about human needs, for example the need to hand-select food accurately at night. However there is neither understanding nor intuition anywhere inside that cold box about the relationship between the door opening and the light coming on.

Similarly, words, which are a type of meme (the type that can be pronounced) can exploit brains to make copies of themselves, without any understanding of this going on in those same brains.

Btw, none of this implies that animals can't think, or don't have minds, or that we shouldn't honour them. Actually I honour my fridge too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Can't remember who first said: "A sentence is a formatted thought", however there is a lot of evidence how language shapes our thinking. It even includes distinguishing colors.

Maybe we should first find out how we think and then build a theory what thinking is in general.

</comment><comment><USER12> People have bred dogs for all sorts of characteristics. But nobody has tried breeding them for intelligence. There a few individual dogs that have vocabularies of hundreds of words. What could be achieved if people selected for that?

Uplift?

</comment><comment><USER33> While I appreciate your sentiment, perhaps we should limit our discussion to the cognitive abilities of animals, and not get side tracked into a debate about their sentience and the morality of killing them for nutritional needs.

</comment><comment><USER34> Almost any 'wet lab' research neuroscientist will tell you that we know more about what the rats and mice are thinking than any other animal, including their spouse ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> As I was growing up around animals, I had an insight derived from my interactions with a particularly adept cat. She had an affinity with people and made an effort to communicate.

Vocalizations confused me. There isn't enough information in them to encode all of her demonstrated use cases. Maybe I could not hear everything. Wondered about that for a while.

One day, it sort of hit me: Cats, at least, are missing a layer of abstraction. To them, thought is very nearly action. We experience a similar thing when we reach mastery of some manual skill. You just do it, not think about it, then think about doing it, then do it.

Cats do not appear to present a facade like we can and do. They simply present as they are.

Given this, a "meow" isn't so much an encoding of thoughts as much as it is a signal to pay attention right now. Like a context tag of sorts. It does also contain some emotional information, urgency, concern, fear, pain.

When the cat chooses to vocalize, what it is doing is making its current context known, and marking that as important.

A meow near the door may sound almost identical to one by the food bowl, for example. In both cases, say there is urgency: I want out, or I need to eat.

We hear the cue to pay attention, and we see the context, may be a tail movement, or a walk or dance, and process the emotion to get a sense of what the cat wanted to communicate to us.

We have a layer or few, where how we present may be contrived, or managed and or very different from our other thoughts and state.

They don't. Thoughts are actions, their lives are stories.

Since that time, I have found my ability to understand cats has improved. When we get it, they will often make more of an investment. The dialog is surprisingly rich.

Other animals seem to do similar things. Body language is significant. How they position themselves, where they do that, dancing, other things all contribute to what can be fairly complex expressions.

They are similar to us. They think their thoughts, they feel a lot of things, they bond, and they often can make plans, and or understand a lot of the world around them.

Much of their thought appears to be spatial, emotional, boundaries, and other necessary things. And when around us, they pick up more, have reasons to do and think more, given we actually do interact with them.

Yes they think. And it's complicated for some animals, less so for others.

I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster.

By faster, I mean their rate of perception seems much quicker than mine. And they have profound capabilities, such as hearing my call amidst so much noise it should not be possible. Maybe their simple nature and speed brings a type of attention we do not generally have.

Dogs and smell. To them, a sequence of smells, for example, is like sights for us on a road trip. We go somewhere special, and the dog rolls in some crap.

Why?

To bring the story back to the pack. And when all the smelling and such is done, the others will know if they too ever go there, or that one member did and stuff happened, such as food, or a hunt.

My take on all this. I remain completely unable to understand insects, for example. They are just too different.

But most common animals? Yeah they think, they make choices, they have preferences, seek comfort, bond with others, all that good stuff beings are into and or need.

Someone would have to make a hell of a case to move me off that understanding.

<comment><USER36> RE: I feel work to better communicate is worth it. When I make investments in animals, they get close, like people do. I can feel the bond, and that little spark that is "them", it's a'll just simpler, smaller, and quite often much faster.

I like the way you put this and I had similar experiences.

If we'd just take some time to get to know those type animals we regard as food, maybe we wouldn't put them in the 'They're just dumb animals' box.

<comment><USER35> Yeah, they aren't dumb. Notable animals, much like notable humans, really are something!

My very close experiences are potent enough to agree.

Heh, cows have besties! I sometimes look at a field and wonder. Their form limits what they can do physically, but socially? It's intriguing.

Whales demonstrate higher order tribal, familial, pair or partner type behavior. Same sort of dynamic.

What is there when one is limited in being able to build and manipulate? Community, emotions, stories, bonds, sharing of experiences. History.

That's a lot!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Unlike Animals, Humans have Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);

<comment><USER25> I've seen examples of all these in nature, even studied and discussed them as part of my undergraduate degree. Humanity is not special in any of these respects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Can we know what humans are thinking?

</comment><comment><USER39> Obligatory:

[https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d...](https://img.ifcdn.com/images/e7aa1c63573be10d2cb7b18edc55b0d56e747675bfd1a7d4e29306e27d2b32d0_1.jpg)

<comment><USER40> I'd disagree and say that animals do in fact "talk" or convey meaning. I have raised multiple dogs and with time your understand their needs: I want to eat, I want to play, I want to show you something (or alert you of something). These are the three things that most dogs will learn to convey to you.

We consider that animals are of a lesser species so that we can take advantage of them without any "legal or moral" consequences. Like we eat animals on a regular basis. We do deadly trial medicines on them. We raise animals against their will (like birds) and cage them.

<comment><USER41> >We raise animals against their will

To be fair, _I_ don't remember being asked either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I find it incredible that in 2017 people still debate if animals can think. You just need to interact with one or more dogs to understand that they think, and in most cases they think much better than humans.

Lately seeing what humans did and still do to planet Earth, and what they do to each other based on completely made up topics like religion or plain material topics like skin color is making me wonder if humans can really think, or we just pretend to.

I stopped eating animals this year, after I finally realized how cruel the entire food industry is, AND how damaging it is to the environment.

If humans pretend to be more intelligent than animals, the minimum thing they can do is looking forward preserving and taking care of fellow animals that were not "gifted" more abilities.

<comment><USER43> I agree with your overall sentiment. But just because there aren't animals on your plate, doesn't mean they weren't killed in bringing food to your plate. For example, published studies show that at least 25 times more sentient animals are killed per kilogram of useable protein when producing industrial wheat and other grain [1].

Not eating animals isn't enough. You have to find ethically sourced food. So ironically, eating meat from animals raised on pasture causes less animal cruelty than eating industrial wheat / grain-based food.

[1]: [https://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal- the...](https://theconversation.com/ordering-the-vegetarian-meal-theres-more- animal-blood-on-your-hands-4659)

<comment><USER44> I think explicitly or implicitly, vegetarians try to not eat sentient beings, but the story is more complicated because there is a scale for that, with plants being at the bottom of the scale, and mice further up the scale, and then cows, and finally humans.

So in this perspective, does the article you linked to really make sense?

<comment><USER45> So sentientism is a thing now? Just because one species thinks a little less than another it makes it okay to eat them?

(I am joking. Mostly.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Whatever the thing or force is that is looking out of my eyes and _just knowing_ , it is also looking out through the eyes of animals, to whatever extent possible. Of course this is non-falsifiable.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'm always afraid that if I knew what my cat was thinking I'd be disappointed. Like "I wonder if I can kill and eat him?"

<comment><USER40> Cats and Dogs are very aware of human beings, and no, they are not interested in killing or eating you.

<comment><USER48> As someone who gets chased by a dog at least once a month on my daily commute I'm pretty sure they do want to eat me. Maybe a couple are just trying to herd me but I think you underestimate their prey drive.

<comment><USER49> A lot of cities have a feral cat problem. Very few have a feral dog problem, because a feral dog problem rapidly becomes a feral dog pack problem, and it turns out a pack of feral dogs is pretty good at hunting people.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, I live in a third world and the government regularly clean the place out of "aggressive" dogs. I do have dog packs just near my residence and sometimes it's like 7-8 dogs just in front of entry. But they are not aggressive and only pregnant females will follow humans and peg for food.

If the municipality doesn't clean the area it would be a "real" danger against kids.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> No. They don't. Animals live in the moment and understand causal relationships within time and space. They don't abstract their thoughts and form assemblies or sciences or write histories. Though they understand causal laws better than humans sometimes. Hence you can't teach an animal like you would a human. But you can train an animal. This works on habit, not on abstract thought. Both animals and humans can be trained. Both have habit. Humans live by codes and formulas and religions, all are related to thought,animals don't. Man, through abstract concepts lives in the future and the past, the animal only in the present. Man is led by error, animals don't err. Both animals and man are susceptible to illusion. This is how you trap an animal in the wild. You don't led him into capture by lies or falsehood.

<comment><USER51> This crow really appears to be thinking: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04&app=desktop)

<comment><USER52> Maybe it only appears to be, but in fact it's some animal form of ML. Hard to say I guess.

<comment><USER53> Maybe humans only appear to be thinking but in fact only use some human form of ML?

<comment><USER6> Deep neural networks aren't aware of changes in their own performance, because their cannot remember or compare their own current performance to the one in the past.

Thus humans at least cannot be pure DNN ML algorithm.

RNNs have error propagation thru time, but connections' weight changes aren't represented as neuron activations and therefore aren't accessible to the neural network itself. That is RNNs aren't aware that they learn too.

Thus humans cannot be pure RNN ML algorithm.

Naturally, humans implement some learning algorithm. The question is which algorithms are capable of which sides of thinking.

<comment><USER54> _Deep neural networks aren 't aware of changes in their own performance, because their cannot remember or compare their own current performance to the one in the past._

What are you talking about? Awareness of the changes is the point of such techniques as momentum or early stopping.

<comment><USER6> The part of a system which monitors these changes (well, it mostly monitors single number, performance on a test set) isn't represented in the network itself.

You can train dialogue NLP system as much as you wish, but you'll never get answers to a question "Have you learned this training set already?" which correlate with whether performance on the test set have plateaued.

I wouldn't call it awareness. We are certainly aware that one part of the system monitors another part, the system itself isn't.

<comment><USER54> I'm still not following you. What does the question "have you learned this training set already?" even mean? You measure a training set accuracy, and you compare it against the corresponding test set accuracy. It's trivial to add the code that monitors this correlation to your model. Then you can even have the model make adjustments to the learning process based on what it observes (e.g. deploy more regularization to reduce overfitting, etc).

So, again, what are you talking about?

<comment><USER6> I was trying to show that humans can't be purely relying on certain kinds of ML algorithms because those algorithms can't provide properties which we observe in our thought processes.

> It's trivial to add the code that monitors this correlation to your model.

Yes, but while it's not there we can't say that the model is aware of the process of its own learning. The question serves as an experimental test of system's awareness of the process of its own learning.

All in all, I tried to make poorly defined terms like "awareness" and "the way humans think" a little bit more technical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> No. Animals don't think, because thinking requires language, based on it conceptual thinking and related brain circuitry which animals still didn't evolve.

Signaling systems and elaborate warning cries do not account for a language.

Animals only feel. They have emotions, environmental clues and heuristics, everything but a language and hence no thinking by definition. That is exactly what some call non-verbal,'animal' mind. Emotional states and behavioral patterns and learning from experience only. Look at toddlers to grasp what it means.

<comment><USER56> I find it funny that you're being downvoted to shit for holding an opinion which actually was quite common in the philosophy of mind, and which hasn't been quite yet superseded. Or at least I guess so, because nothing in philosophy ever really is.

The identification of thought (or rather _reason_ ) with language was explicitly advocated by Descartes in part V of the _Discourse on the Method_ , where he suggested a test for distinguishing a perfect automaton from a human being. It's a view more often associated with him, but other early modern thinkers such as Locke, Leibniz and Kant made similar statements.

But in each case they were also more concerned with abstract thought, rather than just the general information processing that all animals do.

<comment><USER55> Exactly. Information processing is information processing, and thinking is a process which is based on a language.

Otherwise it loses all meaning - cells are thinking, tissues are thinking, computers are thinking, bacterias, etc.

People seem to forget that "thinking machines" is still a metaphor which cannot be interpreted literally.

<comment><USER57> Your ongoing mistake is that you are obsessed with a specific word choice "thinking", and not paying any attention to what the word represents.

<comment><USER55> I am using the definition from the times of Descartes. Perhaps I missed the moment when the word "thinking" began to refer to arbitrary cognitive processes.

I will try one more time.

The rules of logic require precise definitions (as best as we currently able to produce) and to follow the rule of substituting equal for equal only. The socially constructed memes cannot be substituted for definitions, no matter what hipsters would write in blog posts.

Thinking, as in "I think" or "I am" or how Descartes put it "I think therefore I am", is based on a language. Language is required for thinking _and abstract thinking and reasoning_. Language comes before the notion of "I". Before any abstractions.

Argumentation is quite straightforward. Human languages has been _evolved_ together with related brain centers and this process took alot of time. There is a fundamental gap between association of sounds or cries with some sensory patterns and ability to say "I am". How long it took? Some primates are capable of learning very rudimentary sign language after years of rigorous training, but they are incapable of developing of (or even grasping) the notion of "I" on their own. Now you might see the gap.

I would argue that language comes prior to abstract reasoning and abstract thinking, and that they have been evolved together in a mutually recursive relationship. Think of the mutual recursion of #'eval and #"apply as the best example of mutual recursion I know.

Thinking, I would say, started with a primitive, rudimentary language and then related brain circuitry has been selected by evolution. Social evolution and biological evolution together.

One could see the very process of emergence of self-awareness and self- consciousness in babies as a gradual process parallel (or rather based on) language acquisition. The fundamental difference is, of course, that all necessary brain centers are already developed and encoded in DNA (but they are still has to be trained).

This line of arguments is for justifying and supporting the postulates of Descartes about fundamental difference between a human and an animal (creationist nonsense aside). To put it another way - there is not a single scientifically proven contradictions with his definitions.

I would spare you from a lecture on basic linguistics - there are much better figures in the field. The only reference I would like to make is to the postulate of Chomsky, that language acquisition is a process, similar to growing of an organ. So, the story about Evolution is applicable to a capacity as it is applicable to any organ or a subsystem.

So, thinking in its classic definition is the capacity based on a language. It is implemented in corresponding brain centers and related circuitry and is impossible as ability without underlying lower level machinery which takes long and unique path to evolve.

As far as we know, no species went to the same evolutionary pathway which humans did to evolve even a rudimentary natural language in linguistic sense (uniform, rule-governed, arbitrary composition).

So, animals cannot think the way humans do.

BTW, in this chain of reasoning I have demonstrated the kind of thinking no animal is capable of and, hopefully, why it is so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Auditing GitHub users' SSH key quality - <AUTHOR> https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/auditing-github-users-keys <comment><USER2> Maybe GitHub themselves should just stop accepting keys of a certain length. For example <2048 RSA keys (and <256 ECDSA keys). They could also check against the Debian set.

As the article says, GitHub could be being proactive rather than reactive here. They don't "have" to, but they could.

<comment><USER3> According to a 2009 blog post[1]:

> Thanks to our new servers, known bad keys[2] from Debian and Ubuntu are now > blacklisted. We estimate that about 1000 keys in our database were impacted > by this. If you get authentication errors using keys that worked a day ago, > please double-check that they are not on our blacklist. If they are, you > should ensure your software is updated and generate new keys. We've got a > guide to help you out with this.

[1] [https://github.com/blog/500-state-of-the-hub-rackspace- day-0](https://github.com/blog/500-state-of-the-hub-rackspace-day-0)

[2] [https://github.com/blog/63-ssh-keys-generated-on-debian- ubun...](https://github.com/blog/63-ssh-keys-generated-on-debian-ubuntu- compromised)

<comment><USER4> Woah, this new article says a lot of weak-Debian keys were found. Does this mean Github had a regression in their blacklisting since 2009? Or maybe they didn't blacklist enough originally?

<comment><USER5> Actually the facts are not incompatible here. There are two questions: Are weak Debian keys accepted in the web app? Are weak Debian keys accepted by their SSH.

The answers were yes and no. It's the same for most systems right now. You can put a weak Debian key in authorised keys, but you won't be able to login anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Seeing a key with substring of "Tyr" as the username and that substring of my key matching scared me a bit.

If you want to check how many bits your key is, use

ssh-keygen -l -f ~/.ssh/your_key.pub

(It wasn't mine, while it is an older key, mine is larger than 768 thankfully)

Edit: look at timdorr's example for a better visual.

<comment><USER7> Most people will want to run this verbatim:

      ssh-keygen -l -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

You'll get an output like so:

      ⚡~ $ ssh-keygen -l -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
      2048 f6:2d:94:54:c0:96:18:64:24:fb:c2:ad:ed:6a:1d:68  firstname.lastname@example.com (RSA)

<comment><USER8> how much safe are we, with a 2048 bits key?

is this something we should be upgrading (like to 4096) in the near future?

<comment><USER9> Not much point in upgrading from 2048 bit RSA to 4096 bit RSA. Instead, you should plan to upgrade to ed25519 keys when your client and servers support them - faster and better security than RSA.

<comment><USER10> Does anybody have a good (and easy!) guide how to do that on my Mac or Linux machine (client and server) ?

<comment><USER9> If you have experience with RSA key pairs, using ed25519 key pairs is easy. To generate a key pair just run: ssh-keygen -t ed25519

As with RSA, this command generates a public and private key file. Put the public key in the authorized_keys file on the server side.

You'll need OpenSSH 6.4 on both the server and the client side. If you have an older version, I would not recommend upgrading outside of your operating system's normal upgrade channel because then you'll be responsible for security updates. Instead I would wait until your operating system has it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How does one even go about _getting_ a 256-bit key? You have to do it on purpose somehow, or it has to be _seriously_ old, in which case you're likely aware somehow that that's a terrible idea.

Is there outdated ssh keygen software out there that still generates sub-768 keys?

<comment><USER12> And where do the odd numbers come from? 1023 bits? 799 bits??

<comment><AUTHOR> So this one is kinda fun.

IIRC PuTTYGen had a bug in it for a very long time that you would ask for a 1024 key, and it would subtract a bit off it. You can see the same with 2047 keys in the data that I will be publishing on the next post.

<comment><USER13> Some people use slightly odd key-sizes on purpose, in the hope of buying a little extra time in case something like the Debian OpenSSL bug happens again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> At least Github were "kind" enough to strip the comments from the public keys they publish without permission. I would've been even more upset if they were leaking things like username@workdomain....

<comment><USER15> But the keys are public...

<comment><USER14> That's my point. They shouldn't be. I never gave Github permission to publish my keys. The "public" part in the key is merely there to distinguish it from the "private"-part ("never share this with anyone"). It should signify "share this with people whose machine you want to access", not "share this with the whole world".

From a healthy paranoid point of view: you don't share your public key unless you have to. Sure, there are no known attacks on strong RSA keys _today_ , but that doesn't mean there will never be. Why take that risk with, literally, thousands of keys and people's security? It's rude at the very least.

Of course, you should never use your Github keys for anything else, but that's beside the point entirely.

As for the comments: key comments are useful but often contain information that can identify a person (e-mail address, username@machine etc). Publishing that would have been even worse.

<comment><USER16> > Why take that risk with, literally, thousands of keys and people's security?

I would say it encourages scrutiny. The assumption of public keys is that they are _public_ , if any part of your security architecture relies on a public key being private then it would seem flawed, flaws that should be exposed.

And if them being public induces extra paranoia, such as using separate keys only for github then all the better.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

<comment><USER4> > if any part of your security architecture relies on a public key being > private then it would seem flawed

What about your privacy architecture? Can the public key be derived from a packet capture of SSH? My quick session with Wireshark and layman's protocol/crypto understanding says probably not. But it seems possible that while the crypto may be designed such that the public key may be public without endangering the cryptography, there are still privacy reasons (being able to identify people by unique public key) to not share it any more widely than it needs to be.

For example, it seems like I have read that PGP public keys can be read in the clear, which allows metadata graphs to be built by passive interceptors. Maybe SSH doesn't have that issue though.

<comment><USER17> Actually, it looks like the public key can be derived from a packet capture of SSH. See [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4252#section-7](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4252#section-7)

<comment><USER16> AIUI A SSH session first performs a DH key exchange and authenticates the server. Only over that already-encrypted session will the client offer its public keys.

That means the public key will not be leaked to outside observers. Combine with server-specific keys to avoid potential "try logging into my server" social engineering.

This means only the server will ever learn your public key, but it has to know that already anyway.

So publishing your public key does not leak any privacy bits.

<comment><USER17> You're right, my bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Now you can also test several attacks on them, compare them to a larger database to see if you have common divisors, check for low primes, check for bad primes (fermat factorization)...

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, this is what I will be trying next.

<comment><USER19> It would be interesting to see, what's the public key that's used by the largest number of accounts? I wonder if some people, instead of generating their own, use a public/private pair they downloaded from the internet somewhere, not realizing the vulnerability.

<comment><USER18> I don't think that would happen since you would not find such a result googling for "how to get a pgp key".

Makes me want to do a parody webpage explaining how to setup PGP by just copy/pasting one

<comment><USER20> Maybe it doesn't happen directly but through downloading some preconfigured Linux VM with the private/public key already set up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Rachel talked about Github and public keys a while ago (saw on HN): [https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/04/07/ssh/](https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/04/07/ssh/)

<comment><USER3> Comments here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508235](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508235)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Especially the guy with commit access to PyCrypto should reconsider his position in the project..

</comment><comment><USER23> Kudos to Github for not charging him with "Unauthorized Access of a Computer"

<comment><USER24> Given their customer base, that sort of response would have kicked off a shit- storm. ISTM that any "responsible disclosure" ought to at least rate a T-shirt. (If GH don't want to pony up the T-shirt, that's fine, but they can't send customer notifications before the researcher publishes.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not saying that I didnt get anything for it what so ever, The peer of mine did manage to send over some swag as a thanks, I now have [http://i.imgur.com/d2f7mcD.png](http://i.imgur.com/d2f7mcD.png) on my work desk :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> that [https://github.com/anybody.keys](https://github.com/anybody.keys) feature, how on earth did OP find this?

<comment><USER26> Its a documented feature [1].

[1]: [https://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/](https://developer.github.com/v3/users/keys/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In the mean time, Bitbucket still doesn't accept ECDSA keys:

[https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4222/no-support- for-...](https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issue/4222/no-support-for-ecdsa- keys)

</comment><comment><USER28> What is the easiest way to manage SSH keys?

I can't remember where half of mine have been saved. I should really revoke everything and start again, as I use it for accessing my VPS too.

How do you revoke all keys on Ubuntu and OS X?

<comment> semi-extrinsic There is no concept of revoking ssh keys, so you have to remove them from the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file on every server you have access to, and delete the public keys at every service you've uploaded them to.

For a revoking mechanism to be possible you would need a trusted third party (like a certificate authority) to verify the keys for each and every connection you make.

<comment><USER29> For managing large infrastructure, it's possible with semi-recent openSSH (5.4+ I think?) to validate and revoke keys[1] by signing them with a different key which the server (or client) trusts.

[1] [http://www.lorier.net/docs/ssh-ca](http://www.lorier.net/docs/ssh-ca)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > 210 | ssh-ed25519 AAAAC

Does this mean GitHub finally supports Ed25519?

<comment> glass- I've been using an Ed25519 key on github for about 6 months now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd be interested in the script used to scrape the GitHub public key endpoint? I assume it just throttled back to stay under the GitHub API rate limit?

</comment><comment><USER32> I still use a 1024-bit DSA key I generated ~10 years ago. How bad is that? Should I replace it with a 2048-bit RSA key?

<comment><USER18> > We go on to consider Diffie-Hellman with 768- and 1024-bit groups. A small > number of fixed or standardized groups are in use by millions of TLS, SSH, > and VPN servers. Perform- ing precomputations on a few of these groups would > allow a passive eavesdropper to decrypt a large fraction of Internet > traffic. In the 1024-bit case, we estimate that such com- putations are > plausible given nation-state resources, and a close reading of published NSA > leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having > achieved such a break. We conclude that moving to stronger key exchange > methods should be a priority for the Internet community.

From: [https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward- secrecy.pdf](https://weakdh.org/imperfect-forward-secrecy.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good article. Very detailed and thoughtful!

</comment><comment><USER4> Pitting two well-known security principles (or at least watered-down versions) against each other: "security by obscurity is evil" and "defense in depth". Which trumps here? Should the public keys be printed in every phone book, just because it says "public" in the name? Or should they be kept semi-secret, since publishing them could lead to them being factored offline?

<comment><USER34> Defense in depth doesn't conflict with "security by obscurity is evil": Defense in depth is that I keep my private key secured with a passphrase, on an encrypted volume, and that I take measures to protect against applications having access to it unless they require it. It's the layer of physical security where I don't leave my laptop where it's easily accessed, and everything else that goes into securing a workstation.

Defense in depth recommends having multiple layers of security, such that a breach of a single layer doesn't constitute a full breach. There's no requirement (and in fact I'd argue there's no solid recommendation) for including obscurity as one or more of the layers.

<comment><USER35> The parent may not have used the best terminology, but the point still stands: your "defense in depth" example utterly fails to protect your private key if your public key is widely-available and easily-factorable.

If I didn't have my public key on GitHub, it's unlikely that even that could fall into an attacker's hands. Not that I would _rely_ on that assumption, but it would reduce my attack surface.

<comment><USER34> If you think there's a chance that public RSA (lets not even get started on ed25519) keys of reasonable size are easily-factorable, there's a lot of groups out there who'd love to make you rich or lock you up.

<comment><USER36> > If you think there's a chance that public RSA (lets not even get started on > ed25519) keys of reasonable size are easily-factorable, there's a lot of > groups out there who'd love to make you rich or lock you up.

I think that's more accurate if you replace "think" with "can actually practically demonstrate".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, all the "it's called a public key for a reason!" people: when are you going to submit a patch for OpenSSH allowing unauthenticated users to query arbitrary users' public keys, and maybe a list of users while you're at it? You vehemently support one particular operator of an SSH server doing it, citing good security practice, so why not do it everywhere?

Edit: to be fair, there is the difference that GitHub has already added it and probably didn't have to write C code to do it. So maybe this feature should be requested for things like, say, cPanel, and users' $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys should be world-readable by default. Still, maybe it's worth doing in OpenSSH so everyone can get the huge benefits of this currently only enjoyed by GitHub's users.

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a very grave error. If this caused damage to open source projects then I could see a class action suit against GitHub.

1\. Duty of care - should never have accepted keys provably weak.

2\. Poorly communicated that username.keys was available, thus many users may have thought their keys weren't at risk.

3\. No countermeasures from crawlers mass collecting keys. (Not they they should even need to do this - they should just have done #1 in the first place!)

This isn't a game man, GitHub hosts a ton of the world's open source code and they're supposed to be experts in cryptography and security. Russian mobsters, NATO spooks, bitcoin drug cartels, and even high school script kiddies are all constantly trying shit and it impacts us _all_ not just the people with weak keys. If python core gets backdoored _I_ get backdoored, no matter how careful I am with the software I install.

<comment><USER18> Instead of downvoting, let's educate people a bit more:

1\. Picking a small key is all on the user. It's like choosing the single letter 'a' as a password. If you want to do so why not?

2\. The key you give to github is a "public" key. It is made to be public so this should be irrelevant.

3\. There is 'almost' no known countermeasures against mass crawls of public keys. Look at the recent attacks: [https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/872-About- the-supposed-facto...](https://blog.hboeck.de/archives/872-About-the-supposed- factoring-of-a-4096-bit-RSA-key.html)

What they could do: check against databases of public keys to see if your key is weakened by such attacks.

<comment><USER14> I strongly disagree with #2. Your public key should NOT be public, especially without your explicit consent. Specifically because, at least theoretically, it could be used to derive your private key. From a parandoid point of view that's just Bad.

This is one of the reasons why should use different key pairs for different purposes.

<comment><USER38> I strongly disagree with you. So do many, many people who upload their public PGP keys to keyservers. The whole point is that anybody, anywhere can have my public key without knowing my private key. If you can derive the private key from your public key, then you have a really bad keypair (by algorithm or by keysize).

<comment><USER39> Yes, but communication is the whole point of PGP. I didn't upload my PGP key to a keyserver, I uploaded SSH keys to GitHub so that I could check out my own code--code which is in a private repo.

I can't think of any reason that my SSH keys should be publicly avaiable. GitHub offers private repos so I can't understand why keys are all public by default.

<comment><USER18> It is because there is absolutely no reason they shouldn't be public. You can generate as many ssh key as you want and if they are long enough they are secure.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>